A SAMPLE STATE.
PRES. H. S. DE FOREST, TALLADEGA, ALA.
Our Southern States are so much alike, our work, its difficulties, its successes, its necessities are so similar, that a view of one part of the Southern Field will stand for all. Burke’s study motto, “From one learn all,” I think is applicable to the question before us. If, therefore, for the few minutes I am before you, I shall speak of one State only, and of the work of the Association in that State, it is not because it is more important than in neighboring States, nor because the work is more hopeful, but because for a few months I have been learning something there of our need and of our opportunities.
On that map, you see Georgia facing east to the sunrise, and northward toward New England. Behind Georgia, with its back close to Mississippi, where flows the Yazoo river, is the State of Alabama, in which about half of the population is colored. Ten years ago there were 475,510 colored men there, when our entire population was not quite one million. If we now look at the field, its condition is, perhaps, what you might expect. Bear in mind that there were no free schools there until after the reconstruction; that our New England ideas are exotics and grow there with difficulty; that twenty years ago, these colored men were all slaves and it was a crime to teach them; and you are prepared to believe such facts as these. Of our black population of nearly 500,000 there are 168,000 of school age; and now you ask how many after seventeen years of freedom are cared for. Recent statistics show that of this number there were 54,000 enrolled as pupils and 40,000 in actual attendance. You see a company of black youth on the street, and there is about one in three of them on the road to school, and about one in four who will enter the school-house. School-houses with us are not as numerous as at the West. On that grand and growing frontier, the white painted school-house anticipates the coming of the settler, and often the first building put up is a hall for learning. You may go through that dark State of Alabama, and travel far and wide, and not see a public school-house. Alphabetically Alabama leads the van of the States. She does not, however, in letters. The entire school year is about eighty-two days, and the teachers are paid upon an average $22.65 a month. We have never come to the taxing of property for education. Nothing but the poll tax of our State goes for our free schools, and the black man’s head-tax goes for the colored schools, and the white man’s head-tax for the white schools. You are prepared to believe, then, that our appropriation for each pupil is only $1.06. That is about two cents a week per pupil.
It is evident, then, that education is at a low ebb in that dark State of Alabama; and such as we have, bear in mind, is the growth of the last twenty years. It is an infusion of Northern ideas and Northern civilization; and these first friends of learning must be its friends still. Just now I remember calling but a few weeks since at an important point where two railroads cross each other, where iron and coal lie side by side, where different forms of industry,—blast furnaces and machine shops—are going up, and it is a place of great prospective importance that we ought at once to occupy. I called upon the county superintendent of education, a rebel colonel, I think six feet and more in height. He seemed to look down upon me. I am sure he did when I announced myself from Talladega. He at once branded me with “N.T.”—that means a Negro Teacher, with two g’s in the word Negro. I asked him concerning the education of the black man in that growing town. He said he knew very little of it; he paid out ninety dollars of public money for a teacher, but he knew nothing more. Said he, “We don’t think much of nigger education here.” It almost took my breath away. I said to him there might be others in the town who had different views of negro education, and asked him if there was not some friend of liberty with whom I might speak; and he replied, “We have not much of the nigger about us;” and I went out. Now it is very evident, my friends, that the work of education, so imperative, must be carried forward by Northern consecration still.
Well, if you now turn from our intellectual need to our industrial wants, I can show you a State whose mines and hills are full of treasure, where forest trees grow in rank luxuriance, where our cotton fields are sufficient to wrap half America in their folds. And yet our homes are mean and miserable, and dark and dirty, and there is physical want and physical poverty and physical distress. You tell me the black man is indolent. I say yes, but he is among a lazy generation. You tell me the black man is thriftless, and I say yes, but he is among a shiftless race. It is true that the industrial idea of those Southern States must be carried forward, and we must do it.
But the wants that I have referred to thus far are not our most serious need. We come to manhood, to morality, to Christian virtue, and there, brethren, we are just where you might suspect. Bear in mind, it is but a few years since slavery, the sum and the mother of villainies, was sustained by the law and defended by the pulpit. The piety and the morality of the colored people have been strangely divorced. As was said here yesterday, we are not opposed by skepticism. I grant it; we can subscribe to the whole catechism and take it in bodily, with one exception, and that exception is the Ten Commandments.
Now, “from one,” as Burke said, “learn all.” Let me tell you two or three facts that in my mind stand for a great deal. Recently a Doctor of Divinity, a foremost man in the Southern Presbyterian church, told me that near the city where he lives he has a plantation where he often spends a few days at a time, and preaches. That minister, like others, wants his Aaron and Hur about him. There is a church established there, and on his right hand was a colored minister, and on the left a deacon. That minister had three living wives. That deacon was a butcher, and lately there were dug up out of his barnyard the skins of fifteen cattle that he had stolen.
The facts concerning Southern churches are not well recognized, I suspect, at the North. A recent letter from one of our most trusted young men, told me that where he was working this summer as a teacher there are two colored churches, and that a woman, excluded from one of them on the Lord’s day because of her gross immorality, was on the next Sabbath received into the other church without a letter; and this represents the type of Southern black piety.
Brethren, I have come to believe that the seventy-three Congregational churches that you have planted there stand like light-houses in the midst of surrounding darkness. And another fact means much to my mind. When the census agents were with us, and our young men were arranged in the parlor for convenience, the officers asked them their fathers’ names. Some of the young men blushed as they gave them, and others handed them in on bits of paper. Young men of high character, students in our theological seminary, were born out of wedlock. They blushed at the infamy, and their blushing was because of Anglo-Saxon blood that was wickedly in their veins. I tell you, brethren, if you should reverse the course of the Queen of the South, and instead of going to the North you should go to the South, you would say with her, though in a different sense, that the half had not been told. It is fair to believe, then, that the Christian work of the South is most imperative, and I am glad to turn from the wants of the field to something of our undertakings. * * * * * *
Is it strange, then, that those of us who are allowed once more to face the front, and go personally into the conflict hand to hand, are looking Northward for supplies? I can remember, when we stood there in hours of need, how the Northern people did not withhold munitions of war or what was necessary for our comfort. We are engaged in the same warfare, and we need a large supply of munitions.
It is not seven days since, at New Haven, under the elms that shade Yale College, I saw light-bearers in martial array passing through the streets, and, when the band struck up the music that I heard once on the tented field at the South, my heart grew large. When I saw the marshaling of soldiers as in battle array, I thought of what I had seen at Cold Harbor, at Drury’s Bluff, at Richmond, and at Petersburg. They went on in the mimicry of war with mounted men, and my heart was full. But soon came a noble battalion of black men, side by side, step by step with their brethren, looking as grand as any of them, with their lighted torches going on towards the front. I saw there a parable. There is Alabama and the South, there is the Dark Continent with a sixth of the population of the globe, 186,000,000 waiting for the Gospel. Now, then, shall we fill those torches with oil and light them? We have men ready to be trained to go there, and, believe me, they will not only bless Africa, but do a large part in saving America.
Do you remember, my friends, that the oldest monuments we have, the most ancient coins that come down to us, represent the negro kneeling before his captor, with his hands clasped in petition, yet wearing shackles, and there kneeling in prayer to an enemy? That is the old picture of Africa that has come down through the sun-burnt ages. How is it to-day? Thank God, in our country the scene has changed. The black man is not kneeling before his captor. He stands erect with us, and with us he stands close to the ballot box. Those shackles are broken—do I say broken? No, they were cut asunder by the red sword of war, but still they lie at his feet. Those hands are not clasped now, but open, and they are extended, not to his captor, but to his old-time friends and liberators, to Christian men and women of the North. He holds in one hand a spelling-book and a Bible, and he stretches it out to us and says, “Come and teach me.” Brethren, it is blessed to hear that call. It is blessed to have a share in that work.