REVIEW AND OUTLOOK.
A Paper read at the National Council at St. Louis, Nov. 13th.
BY REV. M. E. STRIEBY, D. D.
I intend, without preface, to review the work of the American Missionary Association for the last three years, and to give an outlook on its future duties.
I. The Review.
1. We have paid our great debt. This had clung to us for years, like the shirt of Nessus, scorching while it clung. At the last Council we were enabled to announce that we had rent away about one third of the hateful garment, during the next two years we tore off the remainder, and since then we have walked forth, financially, “Clad in raiment pure and white,” as becometh saints who should “Owe no man anything.” It may happen to us in the future that our books will sometimes show a balance on the wrong side; but we hope never again to be beguiled into putting on one of the large, iron-clad garments we had so long and sadly worn.
2. We have received the munificent gift of $150,000 from Mrs. Stone. Not long since, our elder and honored sister, the American Board, had laid on her table a loaf so large that there was danger that it might be like the “Cake of barley bread” which the Midianite saw in his dream, that “tumbled into the host and came unto a tent and smote it that it fell, and overturned it that the tent lay along.” But with the whole church, we rejoice that the loaf has been to the Board, by its great wisdom and God’s blessing, not as the cake of the Midianite, but as his dream, an augury of victory and enlargement! Our gift, great as it was, is only as one of “the crumbs that fall from the Master’s table,” most gratefully received and all needed at once, with no danger of surfeit. Our children are not only hungry—they are crowded into close quarters, and some of them have to be turned out of doors. At the Atlanta University, with accommodations for only 40 girls, 62 are packed in. At Tougaloo, barracks of slabs are erected, and outbuildings and garrets are turned into dormitories, and still the pupils come, so that the teachers inquire if they may put three in a bed and twelve in one large room. Our reply is: “Take all that you can accommodate consistently with good health and morals, and send the rest away.” These are specimens, perhaps the most striking, but from nearly every school comes the call for more room. Never before have we had such overcrowding; never before have we been obliged to turn away so many. Mrs. Stone’s great gift will meet the want in five of our larger institutions and no more; and that only for shelter, while the increased number will make an enlarged call for bread. Mrs. Stone provides the homes: who will furnish the endowments for more teachers and the scholarships for more pupils?
3. We are just completing the Tillotson Institute, Austin, Texas, with its large and commodious building and beautiful campus of eight acres, near the capitol—an outpost in that vast State of the Southwest; thus extending our permanent institutions from Hampton Roads, Va., to the banks of the Colorado, Texas, and supplying eight of the largest Southern States with schools of higher grade, each of which sends out annually its score or fifty well-trained teachers.
4. It is a matter of much gratification to us that while we have been paying our debt and extending our lines, we have been able to maintain, and even to enlarge, the work already in hand among the Freedmen. Three years ago our teaching force in the South numbered 150; now there are 200. Then our pupils were 5,404; now 8,052.
One illustration of the usefulness of these schools is seen in the great army of scholars taught in them and by their pupils. We believe, from a safe estimate, that half a million of names have been enrolled, in the aggregate, in our schools and the schools of our pupils, since this Council last met, and still the cry is for more teachers. This roll-call of the school-room gives no idea of the added work in the Sunday-school, the temperance cause, the prayer meeting and in the homes of the people. As to the kind of work done in our schools, and Theological departments, I point to the modest and gentlemanly Second Assistant Moderator of this National Council.
Our church work has grown slowly, but steadily and safely. Three years ago our churches in the South numbered 59, now there are 73. When we began our labors among the Freedmen there was not one Congregational church in the old South. The famous Central Church in Charleston, S. C., was not really Congregational, and that in Liberty Co., Ga., had become Presbyterian. It is said that the soil in the South is not congenial to our churches. It must be admitted that they will not flourish in the same soil with slavery, nor where its roots still live; but as the introduction of clover kills ill weeds, root and branch, and not only yields a good harvest in mowing time, but also enriches the ground for all other crops, so the planting of Congregational churches in the South will help to destroy the roots of slavery, give a good crop for the Master, and enrich the field for all other churches. We are confident that our clover-sowing in the South is coming to be regarded by both whites and blacks not as supplanting others, but enriching all.
5. The flow of Chinamen to the Pacific coast is not increasing, but the work we are doing among those now there is as hopeful as any we are attempting. Many are turning from idol worship and giving evidence of genuine conversion. Such men as Jee Gam, so intelligent, so modest, so pious, are proof that the work is not superficial; and the eagerness of those converts as well as their teachers to extend the effort to the Chinese in the mines, and even to carry the Gospel to China, is proof of a missionary spirit as well as of genuine piety.
6. The new movement for the education of Indian youth in schools at the East, begun three years ago at Hampton by Capt. Pratt, deserves encouragement, not as superseding the schools among the tribes, but as helping them. The sending of these young people from their homes has attracted the attention of the Indians to the subject of education more than any other thing that has taken place for years; and the correspondence which has sprung up between the parents and the children, as well as the return of the educated pupils, will deepen the interest. We have aided some of the pupils at Hampton, and we are disposed to consider the earnest wish of Capt. Pratt, now in charge of the Government School for Indian youth at Carlisle Barracks, that we extend the effort into several of our schools in the South. Gen. Armstrong’s experience at Hampton shows that the joint education of the Indian and Negro pupils is a success, that they are helpful to each other.
With this rapid sketch of our work among the three neglected races in America, and extending from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast, I pass to the next item in this review—where we follow the negro to his home in the land of his fathers.
7. The Mendi Mission in Africa.
When the Council met in Detroit we had just sent out our first company of Freedmen as missionaries to Africa. Three years is not long enough to warrant absolute conclusions, yet such as we have reached I give. 1. We are very hopeful as to the ability of the colored American to endure the climate of Africa. 2. We are a little disappointed as to his qualifications in ripeness of judgment and maturity of character, for the duties of a missionary. Perhaps we expected too much. The white missionary has behind him the culture of seventeen centuries; the colored of seventeen years! But of the fitness of the few now, and ultimately of many, we have no doubt. We must select at first more carefully, and train the rest more fully. Nor have we any question as to the call of God to these Freedmen to carry the Gospel to Africa, and we “bate not a jot of heart or hope” in our work of preparing and sending them.
The discouragements we share with all the noble societies that have responded to the grand impulse inspired by the wonderful discoveries of Livingstone, Stanley and others; nay, with all who in every age have heard the Divine call for great enterprises in behalf of religion and humanity. God begins his great movements by preliminary trials and disappointments; in them only are heroes and martyrs trained. Persecutions were essential to the success of the primitive church. Bull Run saved the republic and overthrew slavery; and our confidence in the Divine purposes for Africa are all the stronger for the discipline at the outset. He means no holiday parade, but thorough, apostolic sacrifice and success. And lastly,
8. To pay that debt and to carry on our work, with its enlargements, its endowments and buildings, we have, in these three years, received into our treasury six hundred and twenty-seven thousand dollars. If we add the sums received by our affiliated schools ($283,132), the amount is nine hundred and ten thousand dollars; and if we add to this the one hundred and fifty thousand dollars received from Mrs. Stone, now rapidly to be expended, the total will be one million and sixty thousand dollars! The churches seem to have had confidence in us, and to have appreciated our work. For this, through you, we wish to thank them, and to ask continued confidence and the means to carry on the enlarged work that opens before us.
II. The work before us.
When we turn from what we have done to what we have yet to do, we are overawed at both its vastness and its pressing urgency.
1. Whatever other danger threatens this republic, or calls for the labors of its Christian people, that arising from the three colored races is, I do not say the greatest, but the most obvious. The vast influx of European peoples does indeed, awaken serious apprehension, for they bring with them infidelity or Romanism; yet thus far no overt peril has arisen from this source, for they have so spread themselves among the masses that their influence has gathered to no focal point. But the Indian has been an irritant throughout the whole history of our occupancy of the land, and in all parts of it. Blood has flowed freely in the track of our wrongs against him, and will do so until we act like Christians and he becomes one. The Chinamen on our Western coast are few, and yet how their coming has shaken the nerves of the nation! What other set of immigrants, so few in number, has excited so much irritation—not on their part, but among ourselves about them? But the great disturber—yet the utterly unintentional disturber—of the peace of this nation, is the negro. For nearly half a century the storm has raged around him, as around Elijah in Horeb—the wind of tempestuous discussion in pulpit, press and Congress; the earthquake, rending asunder trade-interests, religious denominations, dividing even the nation itself into two hostile sections; the lurid and awful fire of war, with its blood, carnage and desolation. Last of all came “the still, small voice,” and God was in it. But how little has it been heeded. The wind is scarcely lulled; the earthquake is quiet but the dreadful chasms remain; the fires are smouldering, but now and then a darting flame of Ku Klux outrage or a Chisholm murder reveals the pent-up heat below! Then as to the anointing! Elijah anointed the kings and the prophet—giving thereby the grace to do the Divine behests, whether of vengeance or mercy. We have enacted the Freedman into a king where all are sovereigns, and a prophet where all the Lord’s people are priests, but we have not given him the knowledge or the spiritual grace that alone can anoint him as a king or priest.
The source of the special irritation in regard to these races is not far to seek. If a man moves into your neighborhood who is of your own race and color, though you may differ from him in theories of trade, politics or religion, yet assimilation and esteem may arise. But if he has a tawny skin, delights in the promiscuous use of the tomahawk and scalping knife, and withal claims an ancient title to the very land you occupy; or if he has a yellow face, wears a cue, eats with chop-sticks and is willing to work fifty per cent. cheaper than you can; or if he has a black face, with the stigma of slavery and caste-prejudice upon him, then the case is altered; assimilation and friendship are not so easy. But these people are here and they must stay; they are so numerous that you cannot ignore them; you must choose between leaving them as they are, a perpetual source of annoyance and danger, or training them to become useful citizens. Moreover, they are your neighbors, fallen among thieves, which stripped them of their raiment and wounded them, and you must choose between the part of the priest and Levite or of the good Samaritan. The meanest of them all is your brother, and you are your brother’s keeper.
But if you mean to act the part of a neighbor and a brother to these great multitudes, you have no small job on hand—which brings me to my next point.
2. The dangers and the duties of emancipation.
The nation that emancipates a large number of slaves assumes a grave responsibility. This is increased if the emancipation is immediate and the ex-slaves remain on the soil, and especially if they differ widely in race from the master-class. All these difficulties attach to our Act of Emancipation; but they are not an argument against emancipation. The old abolitionists were right—immediate emancipation was the nation’s duty. No preparation could be made for the change before it took place—slavery must be supreme or nothing. The safety lies alone in the wise after-treatment. Then or never, and soon if ever, must the Freedman be prepared for his new position. We have striking illustrations at hand. We begin with the nearest in point of time:
In 1861 Russia emancipated nearly fifty millions of serfs. This was the result of a ground-swell of popular sentiment demanding some break in the iron-clad despotism of an absolute monarchy. The next year the empire completed a thousand years of national existence. In the joyful enthusiasm over these two great events, there arose a strong hope of the advent of constitutional liberty. The changes, however, were few and utterly disappointing; and the issue of emancipation scarcely less so, involving the ruin of most of the landed aristocracy, and the ignorance, idleness and intemperance of a large share of the serfs. And now, after twenty years of unrelaxed despotism and the continued deterioration of the masses, the educated people in Russia see no better remedy than Nihilism!
In 1834 Great Britain emancipated 800,000 slaves in the West Indies, giving £20,000 as compensation to the masters, but making almost no provision for the education and religious instruction of the negroes. The hour of emancipation presented a touching scene in many places. Slavery ended on the midnight that ushered in the first of August, and the negro population, engaged in devotional exercises till that hour, were then on their knees and awaiting in silence the gift of the great boon of freedom coming from the hand of God! That was the auspicious era for beginning the work of elevating this inoffensive and willing people. But the golden moment was lost, for with inadequate provision for schools and churches, they gradually sunk in ignorance and superstition, back almost to African fetishism. So hopeless was the field that this Association withdrew its missionaries, and at length the British Government, aroused to its mistake, and after the loss of one third of a century of most precious time, established a thorough system of common schools. The tide begins slowly to turn.
In remoter years God himself became the emancipator of about two millions of slaves. Even He did not attempt the task of leaving them on the soil to meet the scorn or the power of the masters. But He showed His appreciation of their need of education and religious training by halting almost immediately after setting out on their long journey and opening a church-school on Mount Sinai. That most wonderful of all schools was kept there for a whole year—God himself the teacher. And when their journey was resumed, He directed in the construction of a portable church-school edifice in which instruction was continued till their journey’s end. God’s appreciation of the need of homes for the ex-slaves is seen in the fact that He had employed gangs,—not of men, but of nations—for centuries in clearing the land, building houses, and planting olive-yards and vine-yards for them.
This act of emancipation must be the model for Christian nations, so far as the circumstances are the same. There must be no preliminary apprenticeship, but immediate emancipation, followed by prompt, thorough, and persistent training of the people in knowledge, piety, and in acquiring homes.
I call attention lastly to
3. The results and outlook of our own emancipation. Let us consider these, not as is usually done, from the standpoint either of the politician of the North, or the planter of the South, but from that of the negro himself.
With all its glory, emancipation has brought to the negro three great disappointments.
(1.) Education was to him the talisman of the master’s power, and above all, it was the key to open the long concealed treasures of God’s word. He stretched forth his hand for it as if it were Aladdin’s lamp, which by a few touches would reveal the hidden riches. But there was no magic in the lamp; it showed him only a long and difficult road, that by patient and persevering travel would bring him to the coveted knowledge. Then, again, the common school fund of the South gives him but few schools, and those are open but for a short time, while his own necessities bend him down to the struggle for existence, and allow him little means to educate his children, or power to spare them from work in the field.
(2.) His next great disappointment was in the ballot. This, too, he had seized with avidity as the symbol of sovereign power—the one grand test of equality with the master. In two states he wielded it in uncontrolled majority, but his use of it was so disgraceful to himself and so ruinous to the state, that his friends were amazed and his foes exasperated. He showed that he lacked the intelligence to wield this great power, and the strength of character to resist its temptations; and now the symbol is wrenched from his grasp and he is once more helpless before superior knowledge.
(3.) His last disappointment was as to the ownership of land. What visions floated before him of land that he could call his own and of a home that he might adorn and use for himself and family. It is wonderful to see how much he has done to realize this vision. But this, too, in large measure eludes his grasp. If he rents he must pay a rental almost equal to the value of the land; and if he buys, he must take the united toil of himself and family to pay for it; and hence his dilemma. If he buys his home, he cannot educate his children; if he educates them, he cannot buy the home!
Do we wonder that with the crushing of these “great expectations,” and with as little hope in most cases of seeing things better as when he was a slave, he yields to despair, and rather than “bear the ills he has he flies to others that he knows not of,” and that Kansas becomes his refuge?
The Kansas refugees are not the most hopeless of the colored people; they, at least, have the energy to flee. But there are large numbers that are content to sink to the bottom and stay there; they are the water in the hold that threatens to drag down the ship. Yet, thank God, there is still another portion, not so large, but more hopeful and enterprising than either, that get homes and educate their children. These are the ones whose children crowd our schools; they are the hope of the race; they have the right ideal—that an education, of heart as well as head, is the rod of God in the hand of man; that makes character, wields the ballot, wins the home and works the land! This is the class to help first, and this is the way to help—give them the good school and the pure church.
The emergency was too great to brook delay. This Association did not wait. It struck in at this point at the outset and has stuck to it ever since. It is on the right track, as is now admitted on all sides. Pres. Hayes utters the practical sentiment of the nation, and he but echoes what Judge Tourgee, the author of “A Fool’s Errand,” representing the radical opinions of the North, and Rev. Dr. Ruffner, Supt. of Public Instruction of Virginia, representing the conservative views of the South, had already uttered, that there is no way of making the Freedmen safe members of society but by educating them. To the colored people themselves nothing is more inspiring and helpful than the kind of work achieved by the American Missionary Association in your behalf. When these people recall the little handful of their number that cowered under the guns of Fort Monroe for protection and the little school opened there, and now see the large buildings at Hampton, the broad farm and the busy workshops in which their children are trained; when they remember the scowling looks of the masters in Atlanta when Gen. Sherman had gone, and now see the Atlanta University, visited by those old masters—and the best of them—who come away with commendations so warm, that the state grants $8,000 a year to the education of their children, when they think of the timid crowds of their people in Nashville at the close of the war, and now see Jubilee Hall, sung into existence by their children, who have called forth the tribute of tears from crowned heads abroad as well as people at home; when, in short, they see all over the South such schools taught by teachers from the North, and behold their children going forth year by year, by scores and hundreds to teach and to preach, this is to them the manna that sustains them in their wilderness journey. Will you help us to multiply that bread, as Jesus did when He fed the multitudes, saying—“give ye them to eat”? Multiply it not only for the thrifty and enterprising, but multiply it for the discouraged ones now ready to flee to Kansas! Yea, multiply it so abundantly that the most hopeless and degraded may be fed by it and become strong; and then you will have helped save the Freedmen and the nation, and will have helped win a victory for caste-crushed people over all the world—a victory for freedom, humanity and religion!