PROVIDENTIAL CALLS.
BY REV. M. E. STRIEBY, D. D.
It is just a third of a century since the American Missionary Association was organized. That period has been crowded with stirring events, working marked changes at the time in the opinions and history of mankind, and pregnant with other and far-reaching consequences. In no respect has this been more true than in regard to the races for whose benefit the Association was mainly formed. Thirty-three years ago slavery ruled in America with the iron hand, and with the purpose and prospect of enlarged sway; now the slaves are free, and the far-reaching consequences of that event are but beginning to be realized. Thirty-three years ago tropical Africa was almost as much unknown as in the days of Herodotus and Ptolemy; now its great central lakes have been traced and mapped, the great mystery of the Nile sources has been solved, and Stanley has traversed the continent from Zanzibar to the mouth of the Congo. The far-reaching consequences of these discoveries to commerce and to Christian civilization we have not yet begun to realize.
The American Missionary Association was called into existence to take some humble part in these events. The wisdom of its existence was recognized at the outset by the few only; by the many—even of good men—it was regarded with indifference or hostility. We that took part in those stirring times find it difficult now to recall their intense earnestness—the inexorable control exercised by slavery over the pulpit, the press and the forum, the unbounded anxiety of conservative people to avoid or to crush the agitation, and their utter impatience with those who persisted in it. On the 7th of March, 1850, Daniel Webster made his famous speech in support of the Fugitive Slave Law, and it is humiliating to recall the fulsome eulogies of that speech that came from pulpits and theological seminaries, as well as from politicians and merchants, and it arouses anew a sense of indignation to think of the intimidation attempted toward those who opposed that infamous law. But there were men in all the churches and in both political parties who were fully aroused to the guilt and danger of slavery—who felt that the hour had come when, through all opposition and danger, they must press for its overthrow. Among these persistent agitators were not only such stalwart leaders as John Quincy Adams and William Lloyd Garrison, but a large number who may be represented by our late and honored brother, Rev. Simeon S. Jocelyn, who, though one of the gentlest, most amiable and most cautious of men, yet possessed a conscience so unclouded, and a sympathy with the slave so strong, that no fear of consequences could deter him.
Such God-fearing men had no commission merely to denounce and destroy. Their call was to aid in spreading a Gospel untinctured with the guilt of slavery, polygamy or caste prejudice. They strove earnestly to induce the most honored and loved of missionary boards, with which they had heretofore co-operated, to throw off all responsibility for slavery and its attendant vices. In this they were unsuccessful, and as they could neither cease to labor and contribute for missions, nor work with societies which they believed to be chargeable with that responsibility, they could do no otherwise than form one that should be free from it. In this way, and from this motive, the American Missionary Association came into existence. It was formed in no spirit of captiousness or fault-finding; not for discussion, but for work in the Master’s vineyard. Hence it soon established missions abroad—in Africa, Siam and among the recently emancipated slaves in the West Indies; at home—among the white population of the West, the Indians, and, even at that early date, among the Chinese in California, the refugees from slavery in Canada, and in the Slave States themselves.
Among the dark memories of those early days were the infidel tendencies in the anti-slavery ranks. The reformers were so goaded by the indifference and opposition of the orthodox churches that some of them retaliated with bitter denunciations against Christianity itself. From the outset the American Missionary Association took decided ground against this tendency and in favor of evangelical religion, and this not vaguely nor without temptation to swerve. At the convention in Albany in which the Association was organized, an influential Unitarian suggested the probable sympathy and aid of that wealthy denomination if the platform could be made sufficiently broad and “liberal” to admit of co-operation. Its response was given in its constitution, which required “Evangelical sentiments” as a condition of membership; and that there might be no mistake as to what it meant by “evangelical,” a star note was appended giving its explicit definition—a creed as commendable for its brevity as its sound orthodoxy. The elder Dr. Tyng once said: “I love the American Missionary Association because it is true to Christ as well as to the slave.”
Thus launched, and with this flag at its mast-head, the Association responded to its first call, and sped on its way, till from the terrific storm-cloud of war there sounded forth its second call. That next providential call was to the work among the Freedmen. It was so recent, and the response is so fresh in mind, that a brief rehearsal will suffice. Abraham Lincoln voiced the sentiment of the North when he said that the war was carried on to save the Union. God revealed His own purpose to be not that only, but also to free the slave. It was not two months after the first cannon shot fell on Fort Sumter till the escaping slaves found their way to Fort Monroe, and the force of circumstances, in spite of all reluctance, compelled their recognition as free men. Those escaping fugitives began their march from Egypt to Canaan. A few scattered bands headed the column, but soon its numbers swelled till the proclamation of emancipation, like the words of God to Moses at the banks of the Red Sea, said to four and a half millions of people, “Go forward.” When the sea opened to them and closed upon the armies of their oppressors, they were free; but they were, and are still, in the wilderness. Yet two lines of spontaneous enthusiasm broke forth—that of the ex-slaves for learning, and that of the North to supply it.
In that day there was no longer a question as to the need of the American Missionary Association, or of the wisdom of its existence. It was complimented with having “builded wiser than it knew.” Churches and individuals chose it as their channel for reaching this new field of patriotic and Christian labor. The Boston Council of Congregational Churches of 1865 recognized it as having been providentially raised up for the hour, and voted a call to the churches to give it $250,000 for the year. The Association promptly met this new responsibility, and organized the necessary measures for collecting funds at home and abroad, and with so much success that when the year was ended its treasury had received a little more than the great sum named. It has since moved forward with larger resources and a larger work. Its income for the fourteen years from its organization till the war began averaged $40,810.57 per annum; for the fourteen years since the war, $279,269.18 per annum.
A third call comes to the Association—the call of this hour. The early enthusiasm in the Freedmen work subsided. This new call springs from no sudden revival of that enthusiasm, but rather from that “sober second thought” that follows the reaction from it, and which comes from the pressure of hard, stern facts. I cannot, therefore, explain the present aspect of affairs without reverting to the cause of that decline of interest. The zeal of Christian people slackened when they found the work among the Freedmen could not all be finished in fifteen or twenty years. This was the general expectation at the outset, strange as it may seem—nay, amusing, if the mistake were not so serious. The orthodox and well-ordered Christian man has no doubt of the need of perpetual help for the West, and he cheerfully aids it through the accredited channels, the Bible, Tract, Sunday-school, Education, College and Church Building Societies, and especially the honored Home Missionary Board; though those Western settlers have behind them the culture of more than a thousand years, with the personal education of New England homes, schools and churches, and also the business training among the shrewd and thrifty people. But these Negroes, who have behind them only untold ages of barbarism and oppression, and whose homes are huts, whose schools are few, whose ministers are ignorant, who have no capital and no business training—when these people loom up before this good Christian man, he is amazed and discouraged if a few years, a few books and a few teachers do not end all responsibility for them. His creed in regard to them is as brief as his patience, and may be given in the words of the poet:
“They need but little here below,
Nor need that little long.”
In like manner the well-ordered citizen lost his enthusiasm for the Freedmen. He had been so long under the strain of anxiety about the war that he was weary of it and of everything that reminded him of it. Then there followed a succession of events in regard to the Freedmen that played upon his hopes and fears till he was doubly weary of them.
First came the accession of Andrew Johnson to the Presidency on the death of President Lincoln. Bright hopes arose. Lincoln was too mild; but the stalwart war-Governor of Tennessee, the unflinching Union man, the Moses of the colored people, as he styled himself, he would do what Lincoln’s amiability would have left undone. What a Providential ordering it was; the silver lining on the black cloud of the assassination. But alas, how soon the change! This Moses led the colored people not to Canaan, but delivered them over to the murderous bands of the Ku Klux; and the North, who again found the whole affair lying at loose ends, was very much discouraged. Then General Grant was elected, and hope again sprang up. The soldier-President would take care of the Freedmen. He did; but the troops stationed at the State houses of Columbia and New Orleans became at length an intolerable vexation to the South and an utter weariness to the again discouraged North. President Hayes brought again “the era of good feeling.” The troops were removed. There was a time of quiet for the colored people. Wade Hampton and Lamar pledged the reciprocal good will of the South. I believe that these leaders were sincere, but they little understood the import of their pledge, or the mighty power that slumbered in the elements beneath their feet, “We now witness the upheaval of that power, the sweeping away of those pledges like the chaff of the summer threshing-floor, the crushing again of the Negro, his relief by flight to Kansas, and the symbols of Southern methods and purposes revealed in the Chisholm murder and the Yazoo tragedy.”
These facts, this serious aspect of affairs, and the palpable inefficiency of temporary remedies, are awakening the North to a fresh sense of responsibility and to the use of thorough remedies. One evidence of this is found in the turning tide of political affairs. A still more ominous one is foreshadowed in the enthusiasm gathered around the flag of the Union. In 1872 Charles Sumner—zealous Union man as he was—moved in the Senate that the names of victories in our civil war should not be inscribed on our national regimental flags, and in the decline of public interest those flags lay neglected in the cases where they were deposited. But a few weeks since the State of Connecticut removed her flags from the State Arsenal to the new Capitol in Hartford, when, lo, ten thousand veteran survivors and one hundred thousand spectators, making the grandest popular demonstration ever witnessed in the State, assembled to bear those flags with honor to their new resting place. I believe in the power of the ballot, and I revere the flag, but I want to raise my humble voice in warning against expecting too much from elections, and against the terrible effects of an appeal to arms. Has not the nation awaited with anxiety many times for election returns only to be disappointed in the permanent effects, and have we not felt enough of the dread evils of war to stand aghast at the thought of its renewal? Let me use the words of Paul and say, “Behold, I show you a more excellent way.”
I present three pictures:
The first shows a gathering of colored people peacefully assembled to promote their political welfare. But see that rush of armed men, the brief unequal struggle, and the flight of those who met only to exercise a constitutional right. In the background of the picture is a jail broken open and the venerable Judge Chisholm and his little son clinging to his knees, and his heroic daughter endeavoring to shield her father, all butchered in cold blood. In that background is another scene. That strong man, the leader of Ku Klux bands, whose hands are dyed with the blood of innocent colored men, and who could show the medal which the grateful South had given him, is himself murdered in open day, because he dared to announce himself not as a Republican, but as an independent candidate for office. The worst of all is that there is no legal remedy for these crimes. The National Government cannot reach them with punishment, and the State governments will not. They can only be tried in Southern courts and before Southern juries, and these have acquitted the murderer of the Chisholm father and children and refuse to try Barksdale for the Yazoo murder. Thus does the South make itself solid, and wipe out in blood the least traces of dissent from its supremacy. The North is moved by all this—indignant, determined, and well it may be; for what now avails the four years of war and the fourteen years of attempt at justice and conciliation?
But I show you another picture. It carries us back a few years. The Legislature of South Carolina is in session. Its members are mostly black men. They have generally no property and pay no taxes, yet they have taxed that already impoverished State to the verge of destruction, not for public improvement, but to lavish it upon themselves, in suppers, wines, personal perquisites, in jobs and in railroad schemes. No more scandalous or reckless plundering of a public treasury has ever been practiced in America, and that is saying a great deal. Why is this little handful of mock legislators allowed to do this? Why do not the people rush in upon them and hurl them from the places they so dishonor? Why? Simply because there stands as a guard a file of United States soldiers—not themselves sufficient in numbers to be formidable, but representing the National Government, and to touch them is to touch it. The South is indignant, determined, and do you wonder? The troops are now gone, the black legislators are dispersed and white taxpayers are in their places; and rising above all other considerations is the purpose of these taxpayers that, at whatever cost, and by whatever needed methods, be it by tissue ballots or by shotguns, those irresponsible plunderers shall never come back again into power. You blame them; but I fear you would do the same yourselves under like provocation. If the General Government, by means of a bloody war, should subdue the Western States, and then enfranchise in any one State enough Indians to outvote the whites, and those Indians should re-enact the plunderings of the Columbia Legislature, how long would the West bear it? I suspect that very quickly every Indian would be converted into a good Indian; but it would be in the Western sense—he would be a dead Indian. Brethren of the North, make the case your own. Put yourself in your Southern brother’s place, and judge him by your own impulses. What, then, is the true remedy for this great evil? To answer this we must honestly consider what the real evil is. These South Carolina taxpayers do not crush these black voters because they are black. They would do the same to the “poor whites” if they, having the numerical force, should enact the same wrongs. Nor is it because they are Republicans. It would be the same if they called themselves Democrats and did the same things. The trouble, therefore, is not with the man’s color or party, but with the man himself—with his ignorance, his degradation and his facility in being used as the tool of designing men. The remedy, then, is not to change his color or his party, but his character. All other remedies are delusive, and it is a national folly and crime to tamper longer with them. We have tried them; and to try them over again will be but to swing like a pendulum between the soldiers in front of the State house and the bulldozers at the elections. It is a shame and a grievous wrong to leave matters as they are. It is a wrong to the blacks to compel them to suffer in the South or flee to Kansas. It is unfair to the South to put them to the dreadful alternative of suffering or doing such great wrongs. It is a shame for an enlightened nation to keep itself thus embroiled, to the hindrance of its prosperity and the jeopardy of its peace.
Let me show you my third picture, which presents “the more excellent way.” In the foreground is a school-house and near by is a church. Around and in the distance are pleasant little homes and well cultivated lands. These are the instruments for working the needed change; they will make the Freedman intelligent, virtuous and industrious; will give him property and responsible interest in the welfare of the State. But you say this is a long process. Admitted; but what if there is no other? A slave can be changed into a freeman in an hour, but to change him into an intelligent man will take years; to transform millions of ignorant, cringing and penniless men into intelligent and responsible citizens and Christians will require generations. The acorn favorably planted will germinate into an oak in a few days, and though small, it is a real oak; but it will be many years before its broad branching arms will give wide shelter, or its girth and strength of stem will yield heavy timber. A few such plants started in good soil and carefully tended will come forward rapidly, but the wide growth on arid plains or in cold swamps will long remain dwarfs. The rapid progress of some of these colored people under adequate training shows what can be done; the backwardness of the mass shows what must be done. Here is the call to this Association to bear its part in this great work in America. It is no light task and no short work. The North is once more aroused to its magnitude as well as its necessity, and in that great effort the better portion of the South is ready to join us. God forbid that any delusive scheme or guilty indifference should hinder its steady progress.
The wide Atlantic rolls between America and Africa, but a strange connecting wire links the two together. The battery at yonder end was charged with the dreadful electricity that arose from burning villages, slaughtered people and captured slaves. The sounds that swept along that wire were the wails of the “middle passage.” The delivery at this end was the toil, the tears, and the blood of the slave plantation. That connection is now broken. Does God mean to establish no other? Yes, the battery is to be placed in America, charged with the light of its learning and religion; the hum of the wires will be the song of the returning heralds of salvation, and the delivery will be the breaking forth of Gospel light in benighted Africa. Such a change is worthy of God’s wonder-working grace, and, thanks to His name, it has begun.
Converging lines of providential purpose have met. In 1856 Burton and Speke began the first movement in the great line of modern discovery in tropical Africa; in 1858 they first sighted Lake Tanganyika. In 1860 Speke and Giant set out on the second expedition from Zanzibar; in 1862 they caught their first glimpse of the Victoria Nyanza. Thence onward moved the heroic procession—Sir Samuel Baker, Winwood Reade, Col. Gordon, Livingstone and others, till last of all Stanley emerged at the mouth of the Congo in August, 1877. A marked line of American convergence also began in 1856 with the first shedding of blood in the struggle with the slave power in Kansas. John Brown’s raid came in 1859. The rebellion began in 1861; the slaves were proclaimed free in 1863, and their education began almost with the war. Other societies have their own coincidences in this great work, but this Association having the distinction of opening the first school among the Freedmen, it is a matter of special interest with us that about one month after Stanley reached the mouth of the Congo, we sent out our first company of colored missionaries to Africa, all of whom had been born in slavery, were educated since emancipation, and, moved by the love of Christ and of their fatherland, had gone thither to preach the Gospel. This is to us the beginning of the other part of the great work to which this Association is called, for Africa and for America.
We have the appliances for the work in our schools, our theological departments and in our churches; in our experiences in tropical Africa of the terrible death-rate of white missionaries, and in the comparatively good health of the colored. Moreover, our decks are cleared for action by the removal of the debt that has so long hampered us. We can now handle our sails and our guns. May the winds of heaven waft us on our course! Then again we see a way of relief from the retrenchment enforced upon us by the debt and the hard times. Buildings were needed—some to be enlarged, others to be newly erected—but all such claims had to be sternly denied, much as it cost us to deny; but now, in the good providence of God, the generous benefaction of Mrs. Stone comes to our relief to supply just such buildings. The return of prosperity to the country encourages us to hope that the added expense in sustaining the enlarged work will be met. That return of prosperity—shall it be a curse or blessing? Shall it be the mad rush of muddy waters urged on by avarice and ambition, and bearing on its turbulent surface only reckless adventure, wild speculation, extravagant personal expenditure, unscrupulous public plunderings, ending at last and again in the dead sea of stagnation, bankruptcy, and, worst of all, in the wrecking of character, imprisonment, insanity, or suicide? Shall it not rather be consecrated, that it may be sanctified and perpetuated—like the beneficent waters of the Nile carried out into channels of benevolence, purified as it is quietly borne along and broken in smaller rills, bearing everywhere over this sin-parched earth the streams of salvation, making it to bloom with the beauty and fragrance of holiness and to bear fruit to the glory of God? Christian people ought to begin with the rising tide of this prosperity to enlarge the streams of their benevolence, lest, before they are aware, they be swept into the irresistible current. Especially do we ask the friends of this cause to recognize this auspicious era and plan to meet in some adequate measure the vast work before us.
The hour and the call have come. The nation is re-awakened to its great duty to the late slaves; they are themselves awaking to the glorious opening for them as citizens and Christians in America, and they are enthusiastic to aid in redeeming the land of their fathers. The possibilities of African regeneration are enkindling the hearts of Christians in Germany, in Great Britain and in America. God’s providence is opening the way and sending His commands along the lines. Well may it be said to the Church of Christ in America as Mordecai said to Esther, “Who knoweth whether thou art not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?”