ADDRESS OF PRESIDENT S. C. BARTLETT.
There is perhaps some propriety in my saying an earnest word for the educational work of this Association, representing as I do a college that from its birth abolished the color line in education. More than a century ago Dartmouth College was training the red man and more than half a century ago the black man. Our first six graduates included three missionaries to the Indians, and the last class that entered contains a full-blooded Dakota and a Cherokee. Fifty-nine years ago, twenty-two years before the first anniversary of this Association, we were educating the negro. In 1824 a young man from Martinique, of irreproachable character and conduct, but with some African color and African blood in his veins, applied for admission. Objections were raised in some quarters from the fear that his presence would prove unwelcome. The students heard of it, held meetings and sent a committee to urge his reception, and under the direction of a most conservative Board of Trustees, with Dr. Bennet Tyler at its head, he was admitted, and into one of the most distinguished classes in the history of the institution. There, in company with forty classmates, who from that small number have furnished six college professors, two theological professors, two college presidents, two Indian missionaries, a senator of the United States and a judge of a Supreme Court, Edward Mitchell went on in comfort, graduated with honor and did a good work in the Baptist ministry. Since then many colored men have entered without hindrance, inconvenience, disability or disrespect. They have been the equal companions and in some instances the room-mates of their fellow students. In June last two such young men graduated, one of them an appointment man and a commencement speaker.
We know the colored man as a student, a Christian and a gentleman. And without making contrasts or comparisons, I will say that were all our students as irreproachable as these last two colored men, there would be no more discipline in the institution. We might burn our college laws.
I have seen the colored student elsewhere in Northern schools. Some of you remember that choice young man, Barnabas Root, a Christian scholar in America, though the son of a heathen chief in Africa. I well remember his graduating oration at Knox College, second to no other on that occasion. I remember him as three years a student in Chicago Theological Seminary, in all respects the peer of his classmates. When that young man passed away just on the threshold of his missionary career, it was a grievous loss to his race and to the church.
It is not necessary to say that all are like these. But these show what can be and sometimes will be. Educationally, they are a most hopeful race, because, in the main eager for improvement. And with whatever deductions, it may be doubted whether the summons to awake and arise intellectually, socially and morally ever fell on the ears of six or seven millions of people with such a simultaneous thrill of response. When I look out on our educational work at the South, I am greatly impressed with what has been already done, even more than I am oppressed with what remains to be done.
What have you done? No doubt it was a notable plan of the French authorities in this country near two hundred years ago to encircle this young nation with a chain of military stations from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico. But this Association has done better than that. You have gone not to the outskirts, but to the centre. You have planted your cordon of educational fortresses from the Potomac and the Ohio almost to the Rio Grande, through the heart of the South in all the great slave-holding States. They are there to stay and to re-construct. They are already working powerfully, not alone on the education of individual young men and young women, but on the education of the community and of public sentiment. What a change has the President of the Board of Trustees of Berea College lived to behold—the man who was robbed and driven out, but who now sees white men and black in nearly equal numbers graduating together, and audiences of three or four thousand gathered to hear them. And these sixteen other anniversaries lately chronicled in the American Missionary, with their interested audiences and crowded halls, sometimes in stately buildings, are the signal tokens of a great transformation.
No more significant testimony could be given to this change than a sort of wail in the Atlantic Monthly over the “New Departure in Negro Life,” a lament over the decadence of “the jocund customs of the past,” with its thoughtless levity and hilarity, and over the “half-hearted manner in which the characteristic festivities that remain are gone through with.” What does it mean? It means, says the writer, that “an unmistakable change in the negro character is at hand, and in an advanced state of progress. He is putting away childish things and striving in his own crude way to grasp matters of higher import. The bulk of the race have learned to read after a fashion. His primer, his vade mecum, is the Bible. Never before, perhaps, in the history of the world, have two decades brought about such a manifest change in a race. Religion, religionism, forms the staple of his speech by day, and the stuff that his dreams are made of by night.”
Would that the picture was more completely true. But, thank God, it is at least founded on fact. The race is aroused, and in earnest. It is bent on accumulation, education, elevation. The world may pay as little heed to the movement as did the Roman world in the time of Tacitus to the Christian Church in the Eternal City; but the time is not distant when the world will see that this quiet work is one of the great movements of modern history.