Part 9

This, as it appears to me, is what you and others like you are trying to do for the negroes. Your annual reports show that your Association is doing successfully, and on a very broad scale, this most necessary work. I do not particularize; your Secretaries have covered all that ground.

You are raising up in these schools men and women who, in the years to come, can, will and must teach the children of their people. Hundreds of them are doing it now. I say must; for Christianized education must, by its instinctive and divine impulses, perpetuate itself and diffuse itself. Christian education, whether in Christian or heathen lands, is the most aggressive and formative influence that is now shaping the destiny of the human race. When you send out from Nashville, from Berea, from Atlanta and New Orleans young men and women who are both educated and religious, you send into the very masses of these untaught millions those who must teach what they have learned both from books and from Christ. Again I say must, for the spirit that is in an educated Christian man or woman is, as the old Methodist preacher used to say, “a fire in the bones,” and it will blaze out.

The author of the Declaration of Independence wrote, it is said, in 1782, this prediction: “Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free; nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government.”

It does not surprise me that Mr. Jefferson made both of these predictions. As to the first, there was at that time in Virginia and other Southern States a strong party that favored the emancipation of the slaves. As to the second prediction, he had studied French philosophy more than he had studied Christianity. If this country were pagan Rome, or infidel France, the first prediction would have failed—they would not have been set free by the will of men. Had they been set free, the second prediction would have been fulfilled, for in a pagan or infidel country, the two races could not be equally free “and live in the same government.” They would not have been set free had this not been a Christian country; as it is a Christian country, the two races, equally free before the law, can live in the same government and the problem of their citizenship can be solved.

But this problem cannot be solved by legislation alone. Time has proved the truth of the weighty words delivered at your anniversary in 1875, by that venerable and great man who was taken to heaven last winter. At that time the Rev. Dr. Leonard Bacon wrote these words: “I come to this conclusion, legislation on the part of the national government is no longer to be invoked in aid of fundamental reconstruction. Attempts by Congress to employ force for the abolition of prejudices and antipathies in social intercourse do not help the cause in which the American Missionary Association is at work. I used the word force, because law enforced is force, and law not enforced is not law. The more completely our cause can be henceforth disentangled from all connection with political parties and agitators, the better for its progress. Doubtless there will be more legislation by the several States, especially in behalf of the great interest of public schools for all, before the consummation that we hope for shall have been attained; but the legislation, must be the effect and not the cause of that fundamental reconstruction which we desire to work for. It will exhibit and record, more than it can inspire or control, the progress of reformed opinions and better sentiments among the people.”

When the law gives equal opportunity and guarantees equal rights to all (and this it must do to be worthy of respect), it has done all it can do. Foundation work means character-building, and this goes on in individuals. Law has its educative force; but to lift up a race whether white, yellow, black, or red, there must be character-building in individual men and women, and to do this work right we must have the church and the school-house. And these two must work together and not against each other. This sort of foundation work you are trying to do and others are trying to do. It has not failed; it cannot fail; it has life in itself.

Mr. Jefferson’s second prediction will fail—it is failing now. These two races are both equally free, and they are living together in the same government with less and less difficulty and misunderstanding each year. Disturbances here and there, conflicts, acts of violence there have been, there are, and there will be for a time. The wonder is not that there was a period of disorder in the Southern States after the war. The true wonder is that there is now so little of it, and that between 1865 and 1870 the South did not rush into final and utter chaos. There was never in any country such a state of things—so provocative of universal and remediless anarchy. What is it that saved us? Not the troops; not acts of Congress. Christian schools and the church of God. It was the Protestant religion that dominated the majority—both of the negroes and the Southern white people. I grant you that the conservative influences that the churches in the South brought out of the war have been greatly aided by the work done by your society and others like it; but it is also true that, but for the work the church in the South did before your coming, you could have done next to nothing, by this time, in the experiment. As to this whole subject, full of difficulties as those know best who have personal relations to it, there is just one platform on which Christian people can stand. Our problem with these millions of negroes in our midst can be happily solved—not by force of any sort from without the States where they live; no more can it be solved by repression within those States. It can be worked out only on the basis of the Ten Commandments and of the Sermon on the Mount. On this platform we can work out any problem whatsoever—whether personal, social, political, national or ethnical—that Providence brings before us. On any lower or narrower platform we will fail, and always fail. We have learned—you of the North and we of the South—many things in the last ten years. Among other valuable discoveries, we have learned that the people of neither section are either all good or bad. As to this race question, we of the South have learned, and we are learning, that we can’t manage our problem by any mere repressive system; you have learned, and are learning, that it can’t be solved by any sort of force from without, whether force of law, force of troops, or force of denunciation. Such knowledge is precious; alas! that it cost us so much.

May I quote at this place one other paragraph from the words of Dr. Leonard Bacon? It is at the close of a letter dated “New Haven, October 22, 1875,” and is in these words: “May I be allowed to say one word concerning the future of this society? That word is conciliation—conciliation by meekness, by love, by patient continuance in well-doing. The field is wide open for schools and for the preaching of the Gospel, two great forces operating as one for fundamental reconstruction. In both these lines of effort the work of the society must be more and more a work of conciliation—conciliation of the South to the North and to the restored and beneficent Union; conciliation of races to each other, white to black and black to white; conciliation of contending sects oppressed with traditional bigotries to the simplicity of the truth as it is in Jesus.” Thomas Jefferson was not a prophet: Leonard Bacon was. And, thank God! so much has been done by this Association to incarnate the truth that was in his great thoughts and to fulfill his hopes and predictions as to its own future. But this work of “fundamental reconstruction” is a slow process, suggests the impatient one. That is true; character-building, whether in a man or in a nation or in a race, is always a slow process. And it must be slower in a nation or in a race than in a man. There was never any great work done in the uplifting or training of a race in a day or in a year. It takes generations. How slowly our own race has risen out of its original savagery; how unfit we still are to fulfill our mission to the world. We have small cause for boasting when white men’s votes—sometimes enough of them to turn the scale in great elections—can be bought cheap in the open streets. Lifting up a nation or a race is a slow process; wherefore the greatest necessity for zeal, for wisdom, and for patience in our work. Whenever a great and necessary work that requires a long time and much labor is to be done, we should begin at once and do our best.

You find more sympathy and more of the spirit of co-operation among Southern people than you found ten years ago. I rejoice in this change of feeling in the South, and it is easy to understand it. Time, the healer, has done his blessed work. Grace has overcome, and the grave has buried much of bitter feeling on both sides. You have learned your work better, and we have learned more perfectly its value. A good deal of your work I have seen; I believe it is good. I have looked into your school methods; they are yielding happy results. I have considered “examination papers” from some of your schools; they would have done credit to any school for any race. I have listened to speeches and essays from colored youth at your commencements; there was the evidence of sound culture and true religion in them. When I heard them I “thanked God and took courage.”

It is often asked, “Why don’t the South do more in this work of educating and lifting up the negroes?” Sometimes the question has been asked angrily—perhaps because ignorantly.

I believe the South can do more than it is doing—certainly more than it has done. But I think it likely that we have done as much as any other people in like circumstances would have done. History does not record of any people such vast, rapid and radical changes of opinion and sentiment on subjects that had been fiercely fought over on hundreds of bloody fields, as has taken place in the South during the last fifteen years on the questions that grow out of the negro’s emancipation and enfranchisement. But the Southern States have done more than most people suppose. There are nearly one million negro children in our public schools in the South.

In speaking of what the South has done and has not done in the work of educating the negroes, let it be remembered that the white people of the South have not been on beds of roses since 1865. The war and its consequences made the South poor beyond conception by those who have not had our experience. It left the North rich. The majority of our people have had a sharp struggle to live; most of them have been unable to educate their own children.

Let me tell you of a man I talked with last summer. I went with my family and a little party on what we might call a camp-fishing expedition. As we approached the place where we proposed to spend a few days in recreation, my attention was attracted by a white woman pulling fodder in a little field near a cabin. That night her husband came to our camp, offering such welcome as he could. We had a long talk together. He had been a Confederate soldier, and he had on his body the marks of seven bullet wounds. He never owned a slave, he had fought for what he had been taught to believe were the rights of the States. He is a laborer on the farm of the man who owned the land where he lived. He gets $140 a year, cabin rent, a few acres tended by his wife and little girls, and the privilege of his winter wood. He said his employer is one of the kindest of men, and does for him all he can do. The landlord himself has small margins of profit. The poor fellow has five children, the eldest a bright girl, aged fourteen. She looked dwarfed and older than her years; she had been nurse and drudge for the little ones. These children came to our camp by invitation, and the oldest promised to come one afternoon and show my own children how to fish. I had my heart set on her coming; I wanted my children to know more about such people. She did not come at the time appointed, but that night she came to tell us why. Her cotton dress was wet with the dew and her little hands were fodder-stained. She said to me: “I am sorry I could not come; mother and I had so much fodder to take up that we have just got through.” This child and I had much talk together. I asked her: “Daughter, can you read?” Her face brightened as she said: “Yes, sir; a little.” “Can you write?” The brown eyes sought the ground as she answered: “No, sir.” “If I will send you some books, will you try to teach your little sisters to read?” The glad look in her eyes I shall never forget, as she answered: “Yes, sir; I will try.” We sent her a good supply and it made them all glad. They are not beggars; the father would not take money for a fine bunch of fish he sent, with his compliments, to my wife, and when he found that we had left some money for little services by the children he flushed and could hardly be persuaded to let them keep it.

Some people call these “white trash.” I declare to you I never heard a Southern white man or woman use the expression in speaking of such persons.

Mr. President, there are tens of thousands of white people in the South as poor as my friend of the fishing camp. If you can help them, in Christ’s name do it.

As to our higher schools, some of our best colleges have died since 1865; others are dying now. Such a death is a loss, not to the South only, but to the whole country. Yours have grown rich. I do not envy you; I rejoice in your strong and well-furnished institutions. But you should be patient toward us, and, I am not ashamed to say, you should help us as God gives you opportunity. Men and brethren, it is time to have done with 1860–65. Said a Brooklyn man to me last year who, unsolicited, had helped two Southern schools: “I think my friends here approve what I have done; but if any should ask, ‘Why did you not give this money to your own people?’ my answer is: ‘They also are my people—we are one people.’” On that platform we can become a Christian nation strong enough to bless the world.

Northern money has done much to “develop the South” during the last decade in pushing railroads and other great industrial enterprises. It is all welcome, and ten times as much. But I do not question that each $100 invested in Christian education in the South since the war has done more to develop it in every best sense than each $1,000 placed in railroads and factories. But enough on these lines of thought.

I must say a word or two as to the relations of your work to Africa. The first atlas I ever saw made a desert of sand cover all the wonderful lands that Livingstone, Stanley, and others have discovered, and they printed across the map of Africa 28,000,000, with an interrogation point to indicate a guess as to the population. Now we are studying the maps of interior Africa, and they tell us of great nations and a population that may reach 200,000,000! Can any man who believes in the Bible, or in God, doubt for one moment that Providence is in the history of the negroes in the United States? Can we doubt that these millions of negroes, now committed to us as the wards of the Christian church, must, some day, attempt and accomplish the evangelization of Africa?

I rejoice that your Association has its eye and heart upon Africa. I saw two photographs in the chapel of Fisk University last May that stirred my soul; they were the faces of two missionaries who had gone from that great Christian school to Africa. One Sunday evening I preached in the chapel. A youth from your Mendi Mission, a native of Africa, getting ready to be a missionary, sang for us in his home language a familiar Sunday-school song, “I Have a Father in the Promised Land.” Some day they will be singing Christian songs in every village of the Dark Continent. How the thought of the Divine fatherhood and of the brotherhood of the eternal Son has changed Europe and made America. Some day these thoughts will change Africa. What we call civilization can’t do it; the gospel of Jesus Christ can. The Christian negroes are getting ready for their work, and you and others working in the same fields, are helping them to get ready. The missionary fire is beginning to burn in their hearts. When they go forth, bearing the sacred symbol of our Lord’s love to men, every Christian man and woman in our land should help them. That movement—and it is coming—will, at no distant day give your colonization and missionary societies all they can do. Was there ever a greater need or a more hopeful field, a greater duty or a brighter promise of success? Mr. President, you may be sure that from thousands of Christian hearts all over the South the prayer goes up, “God bless the work of the American Missionary Association, with all others who are preaching the gospel to the poor.”

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FROM ADDRESS OF GENERAL CLINTON B. FISK.

The American Missionary Association is one of those societies that has long been near my heart, having a large place in it. From its very beginning I watched its growth, but had no idea in the years before that I should ever have such intimate relations with it. Being in the South at the close of the war with the care of two or three millions of colored people thrown on my hands, I naturally looked about to see what was being done for schools and what for Christian culture. I found the American Missionary Association on the skirmish line. They were gathering up the broken fetters of the slaves, selling them for old iron and putting the money into spelling-books and Bibles, building school-houses and sending self-sacrificing, earnest Christian men and women to the South to teach these people; and I naturally fell very much in love with them.

I got a letter a day or two since. It was written by the Mayor of one of the chief cities of the South to myself. I picked this out of a large bundle of correspondence of the same sort. He addresses me and says: “You will doubtless be surprised at receiving a letter from me. In 1865 I was Mayor of this city, which position I now occupy. In that memorable year 1865, through your instrumentality and by order of Major-General George H. Thomas, I was suspended from office. But that is a matter of the past, and for one I favor letting ‘bygones be bygones.’ The charge against me was using my official position for the oppression of the colored people and opposing their education. However true that might have been at the time, certainly such a charge cannot be made against me now. Immediately after the close of the war and upon the restoration of civil law, I was chosen one of the School Commissioners of this district, and gave active aid, amidst much opposition, in the establishment of Public Schools. I have labored earnestly in the cause ever since, and I am proud to inform you that my efforts have in a measure been crowned with success. We have now a splendid school system and a magnificent school building for the whites. We wish now to do as much for the colored people. There is much opposition in every locality in the city to the establishment of a colored school in their midst. Yet, notwithstanding this opposition, I have proffered to sell a lot of my own for the purpose on very reasonable terms.”

Now, that is a great change to come about in seventeen years. So I simply sat down and wrote him a letter which he could use as “substance of doctrine.” I said: “My dear Mr. Mayor, go on to perfection. Do the same thing for the colored people you do for the white people, and blot ‘colored’ and ‘white’ out of your memory. Make a school for the children. It is not easy to send them to the same school; I know all about that.” The colored boy is perhaps more opposed to associating with the white boy in the school than the white boy is to associating with the colored boy. It takes a long time to overcome those strong prejudices on the part of the colored people.

Just after the establishment of Fisk school, which commenced in such a halo of glory under the auspices of this Association, there came into my headquarters in Nashville an old Irish woman, bringing her two little boys with her, and she said, “Misther Gineral Fisk, ’ave you heny hobjection to my sinding these little chaps to your nigger school?” I said, “Not at all, if the ‘niggers’ haven’t any objection.” But it will take a long time before they will drift into one school. I am glad that all of ours are open. How singular it would look to write over the portals of all our schools in the South, “White children admitted here!” Let us do all we can for the education of both races. That particular class to which my friend Haygood made such admirable reference, those poor white people of the South, appeals to us as scarcely any other interest in the South does to-day. Let us remember them. I am glad, sir [addressing Dr. Haygood], that you are going to be in a position to help a great many colored young men and women to become teachers.

Now, my friend Dr. Haygood is a wonderfully modest sort of a man. They chose him only a few weeks ago to be a bishop in his church. And they did a good thing. Nearly all that great conference of Southern Methodists voted for this man to take the highest place in their church, notwithstanding all his grand utterances, his earnest words, on many a Northern platform. They indorsed him and said, “Come up higher!” He took over night to think about it, and wrote them a letter declining to take such place as that. He said, “God has called me to be an educator, and an educator I will be.” To a man who turns his back upon a bishopric of the church and then accepts the Secretaryship of a fund to promote the education of the colored people, we can all give the right hand of fellowship. Now, let us all go out of this meeting with a new covenant of love and service for the Master.

It has well been said that the world itself is a musical instrument not yet fully strung; but when every coast shall be peopled by the lovers of our Lord Jesus Christ; when every mountain barrier shall be overcome; when every abyss shall be spanned, for the uninterrupted progress of the King’s highway of holiness, and the people of the earth shall flock together, as in the prophetic vision, to the mountain of the Lord’s house; then this world shall give its sound in harmony with the infinite intelligence, and angels and men shall shout together, “Hallelujah, the Lord God Omnipotent reigneth.” Between that glad day and us there are years of toil and travail. But there shall come the triumph. Truth is marching on, steadily—slowly, sometimes, through the centuries, but ever marching on, as resistless as the tides, whose each succeeding billow washes further up the sands. It may be

“ ... weary watching, wave on wave; And yet the tide heaves onward. We climb like corals, grave on grave, But pave a path that’s sunward. We’re beaten back in many a fray; Yet newer strength we borrow; And where the vanguard rests to-day, The rear shall camp to-morrow.”

Let us go forth, with our faces to the stars, and do something each day of our lives to bring the world nearer to Christ, who died for it.

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FROM ADDRESS OF REV. A. J. F. BEHRENDS, D.D.