THE BROTHERHOOD OF MAN; OR, THE THREE BROTHERS WHO SETTLED AMERICA.
BY SECRETARY STRIEBY.
This country was settled by Three Brothers. The first that came was an Englishman, a Cavalier, who located himself at Jamestown; the second was also an Englishman, a Puritan, who landed on Plymouth Rock; the third was an African, and was consigned to the First Brother.
These families multiplied exceedingly and at length came to be numbered by millions. To them was committed a great duty—the founding of an empire, and the taking of three grand steps in the march of human progress, (1) the establishing of civil and religious liberty, (2) the securing of personal freedom for all and (3) the exemplifying of the Brotherhood of Man. The last step only remains to be taken.
The parts of this great duty were unfolded in the due order of development, and sprang naturally out of the heredity and environment of the Brothers. The men and their surroundings given, the results were inevitable. It seems singular that just these men should have been selected by Providence, especially the black man, but the result shows that they were wisely chosen. The black was in the end found to be an essential factor.
I. Let me sketch these Three Brothers.
1. The First, the Cavalier, had been, in the old country, loyal to king and church, a supporter of the House of Stuart and of Archbishop Land. He was a representative of the rural population of England, men who loved broad acres and field sports. In his home in the new world his great ambition was to own a large plantation and multiply the number of his slaves, and thus imitate the baronial life of the mother country. He cared nothing for popular education, and thanked God that there was neither a school-house nor a printing-press in his domain.
2. The Second Brother, the Puritan, had become more accustomed to city life, and was addicted to trade and commerce as well as to farming. His zeal as a reformer in church and State brought him into collision with the House of Stuart, and indeed he was an exile in his new home on account of his religious and political principles. He desired to have “a church without a bishop and a State without a king.” He was earnest in promoting education as well as religion, and his identifying mark everywhere was the meeting-house and the school-house.
3. The Third Brother, the African, was not voluntary in coming to his new home nor in the choice of his occupation. He was a slave. He was strong in body, amiable in disposition, but at length became the innocent cause of much ill blood between the other brothers.
II. The duties assigned to these men.
1. The founding of a great empire.
Never was there a more inviting opportunity—a continent almost unoccupied, coast lined by two great oceans, with climate varied and healthy, and with boundless resources in fertile lands, rivers, lakes and mines; and never was an opportunity better improved—in less than three hundred years the new empire has nearly double the population of the mother country.
2. The second duty was to lead in three great steps in human progress. (1), The first step was to secure and maintain civil and religious liberty. This step was inevitable for the two English brothers. They had planted colonies and organized States. They had secured charters guaranteeing the rights of Englishmen. They had thus a training in the arts of government and had learned to value the blessings of constitutional liberty. In an evil hour the British Government began to invade these chartered rights. The Two Brothers were aroused. The Puritan was by inheritance and principle a foe of arbitrary power. He, of course, was deeply stirred. The Cavalier had indeed been a friend of the Stuarts. He could see no objection to arbitrary power when it was practised by himself and his party on others, but he naturally and suddenly came to see it in an entirely different light when he and his party were the victims; and for once the two brothers were in accord.
A contest was imminent. The British Government could settle it peacefully, if righteously; if not, in blood. It would not restore chartered rights. Then came the Declaration of Independence, the Revolutionary War, the new Republic, with the truest definition and guarantee of civil and religions liberty the world had ever seen. The first of the great steps in human progress, to which these men were called, was taken.
(2.) The second step—the securing of personal freedom for all—was plainly demanded by the taking of the first. The elements of the new contest were embodied in the Declaration of Independence on the one hand and Negro slavery on the other—a great principle and a great fact at war with the principle. The antagonism was seen from the outset. Expediency shut men’s eyes to it, but God and conscience opened them. How skillful for a time were the devices to escape the dilemma. It was said that the Declaration of Independence was only for white men; that it was a mere glittering generality; that the North had nothing to do with slavery, and finally that slavery was right, justified both by law and the Bible. But all in vain. God and conscience would not be silent.
Again a contest was imminent. The South could settle it peacefully, if righteously; if not, in blood. The South would not abolish slavery, and hence the Civil War and the overthrow of slavery. The second step was taken.
(3.) The third step is to exemplify the Brotherhood of Man. This in like manner is demanded by the results of the one preceding—by the two great and opposing facts: Emancipation, and the Negro as he is. On the one hand, every slave was emancipated; in the zeal of the hour he was made a citizen, enfranchised and guaranteed “the equal protection of law.” On the other hand, twenty years have shown that these guarantees are in form and not in fact.
In other respects, too, his condition is seen to be deplorable, full of discouragement to himself and of danger to the nation.
Let me point out some of the facts in regard to his condition:
(1.) He does not enjoy his guaranteed rights.
I wish to give due credit to the extent and to the localities in which he does enjoy these rights, but speaking broadly they are largely denied to him. He was deprived of the ballot at one time by violence, and is now by fraud; in all cases where his vote would be decisive in State or National politics, it is not counted—in other words, the race is practically disfranchised. In the courts he seldom finds a standing as a lawyer or a juror; in the chain-gang only does he enjoy a monopoly. In the church, the school, the shop, he does not, as a rule, have equal rights; he cannot join any church he pleases, cannot choose the school to which he will send his children, cannot enter the shop to learn a trade or to work as a journeyman. He cannot, everywhere, ride in the street car, on the railroad or steamboat with the white man, though he may buy the same first-class ticket; he cannot, in many places, attend the theatre, concert or lecture with the white man, nor with him eat a lunch at the restaurant, nor lodge in the hotel. He is confronted, hindered and insulted at every step he takes towards enjoyment or improvement—a flaming sword guards the avenues of knowledge, industry and virtue against him. His guarantees of equal rights are a mockery.
2. He is left in ignorance and vice.
Here again I wish not only to admit but to rejoice in the progress made. More than a million of the colored people, of ten years old and upward, can write; but, alas! more than three millions cannot! It is these that awaken our fears, for they are in danger themselves and are a danger to the nation. Owing to their illiteracy they cannot keep the accounts of their earnings in the lowest kinds of employment; they cannot enter upon the higher and more profitable avocations; and they cannot rise to the intellectual dignity of a true manhood. Then, too, they are in bondage to their vices. When they escaped from slavery, many of them did not escape from lying, stealing and licentiousness; when they entered freedom many were captured by idleness, improvidence and intemperance. These are the victims of designing men who take advantage of their ignorance to defraud them, and of their vices to enrich themselves or to gratify their lusts. The danger to the nation is from the contagion of vice which spreads beyond race or locality, and from the schemes of political demagogues who can sway to their own ends the millions of these ignorant voters, who have no property to be taxed and no character to maintain.
3. He is under the ban of caste prejudice.
This lies at the bottom of the whole difficulty. This refuses to see his good qualities, denies his capacity for improvement, shuts to him the doors of knowledge, cheats him at the polls, wrongs him in the courts, and consigns him perpetually to the position of a hewer of wood and a drawer of water, thus enstamping the race distinction broad and permanent, and awakening in his heart either utter discouragement or implacable hatred.
In these three facts—the withholding of the negro’s equal rights, his ignorance and vice, and this caste prejudice—are the elements of a race warfare; they foreshadow another “Impending Crisis”—the next “Irrepressible Conflict.” This becomes the more obvious, because the negro, having been recognized as a man before the law, there is no alternative but to withdraw the recognition or to make it real. There is no middle ground—he must be a slave or a freeman; the equal of his white peers. The “Impending Crisis” is the more imminent from the growth of the blacks in number. In spite of all denials, the time is hastening on when the blacks in the Southern States will outnumber the whites; and when they feel their strength in brawn and muscle—and when especially there arise among them men of education and talent, with ambition aroused and with passion stimulated by a sense of injustice—then will the “Irrepressible Conflict” become as certain as, and, we fear, more implacable than, the last great struggle.
But there is a higher stand-point from which to view this great question—the providential. When the negro ceased to be a slave he became invested with a new significance. Then for the first time began to be seen the meaning of his presence in America—the reason why the black man from Africa—the most degraded part of the world—was selected by Divine Providence as one of the Three Brothers to settle this continent. He was the one by whom God could test the nation and call upon it to exemplify before the world the Brotherhood of Man. The full test could only be made when the highest should recognize the lowest.
The nation cannot shirk this test. Justice to the negro demands it; God, who made of one blood all nations, demands it; Christ, who died for all men, demands it; he cares for the poor and repudiates caste; he was born in poverty and toiled for his living; his mission was announced and attested by miracles of help for the needy and the preaching of the gospel to the poor; he touched the leper when he healed him; he ate with publicans and sinners; in his church there is neither bond nor free, but all are one in him; and in the final judgment his award will depend upon how he himself was treated in the person of one of the least of his brethren. His voice must be heard. To all that call him Lord, and mean to obey his word and follow his example, this whole question must be lifted out of the realm of prejudice into the higher plane of Christian duty, and when placed there, who can doubt the issue? The Brotherhood of Man must be recognized and exemplified.
But the question remains, How shall this next great step in human progress be taken? The question will be settled and the step will be taken in righteousness, for no question is ever settled till it is settled right. As we have seen before, the issue between the American Colonies and the British Government, and that between the North and the South in regard to slavery, might both have been settled peacefully, if righteously; and so the question now before the nation may be settled peacefully, if righteously, by giving the negro his guaranteed rights, lifting him out of his ignorance and vice, and especially by taking him from under the ban of caste prejudice. But it is to be feared that these concessions will not be made, and then the question will be settled by a bloody war of races, involving the North as well as the South.
But this conclusion is too startling to contemplate without instinctively turning to the possibility of a peaceful solution of the problem. Let me suggest:
1. The Northern Brother has a great responsibility in this matter. He, too, enslaved the Black Brother for a time, and gave his consent to the virtual recognition of slavery in the Constitution; and when at length he saw his error and demanded the emancipation of the slave, the South resisted him to the utmost in the terrible war; and when the slave was freed and the North insisted on making him a citizen and on giving him the ballot, the Southern Brother, though he could no longer resist, yet entered his most earnest protest. He said: “I know these negroes; they are not fit for the ballot and will ruin the country if they have it.” But the Northern Brother had the power, and like General Jackson he “took the responsibility.” He cannot now shrink from that responsibility. He cannot, with any better success than Pilate, wash his hands and thus be made guiltless. He brought his innocent Brother into his present trouble and it will be both cowardly and criminal to leave him to his fate. No! if this great problem is ever solved peacefully and righteously, the North must awake fully to its special duty, and perform it at whatever cost of money and self-sacrifice.
2. The Southern Brother has a still deeper interest in this matter. In the first place he owes something to the Black Brother, who always helped and never hindered him, who tilled his land and made his wealth, who, during the war, cared for the plantation and protected the family—though he knew that the master fought to rivet his fetters all the tighter. Then again, the Southern Brother has and must have the Black Brother with him, near him, his immediate neighbor, and whatever discomforts or dangers may arise, he must be the first, and for a time, the only one to suffer. He cannot remand the negro back to slavery, nor even to serfdom—the nineteenth century cannot tolerate the one more than the other—even in Russia, much less in America. Nor can the present anomalous position of the negro long be maintained. It is full of vexations and of dangers; the negro will soon be strong enough to resist it, and the North, as in the contest about slavery, must take sides with the Black man.
Why should the South fight against the inevitable? In a recent number of the Century, a Confederate officer, Col. Alexander, in giving a racy sketch of Pickett’s famous charge at Gettysburg, incidentally refers, in a humorous way, to one of their chaplains who was accustomed to pray that “Providence would consent at last to come down and take a proper view of the situation.” The Colonel, at one auspicious juncture in the preliminary fight, was inclined to believe that the prayer of the good chaplain was about to be answered. But when all was over and the battle was lost, he dryly admits that “Providence had evidently not yet taken a proper view of the situation.” The same admission was equally pertinent at Appomattox—and has been ever since—indeed, is it not time for the South to see that the trouble is not with Providence but with itself—that it should “consent at last to take a proper view of the situation”? Providence did not take its view during the war to sustain slavery, and will not in the struggle to maintain caste, which is now the great issue, as slavery then was. That issue the South is pushing to the front with new energy. For example, the great churches, Methodist and Presbyterian, that had been rent asunder by the anti-slavery agitation before the war, had seemed for a time since to be happily coming together once more, but recently that fair prospect has become darkened, and mainly by the strong exactions in regard to caste-separation demanded by the South. Then as to schools, the South has always been understood to be opposed to the co-education of the races, but the recent demonstrations in one of the States are almost amusingly violent. We stolid Northern people are tempted to smile at the fear that the white young gentlemen and ladies of the South are so eager to marry negroes that they dare not be trusted in the same school together, and that such stringent measures as fines, imprisonment and the chain-gang are deemed necessary to prevent it! But we are glad to find that these severe measures were planned by over-zealous young politicians, and that “the sober second thought of the people” has substituted less barbarous methods, and that other Southern States do not follow the bad example.
But more seriously, the South has never enforced laws against the criminal mingling of the races that has almost bleached the negroes white. Is lawful marriage more criminal than concubinage? But who wants the intermarriage of the races to take place? Not the North, certainly. The Southern whites ought to be able to resist the temptation. Every step in the advancement of the blacks contradicts the charge that they desire it. No! the charge is fictitious, and is only paraded to give force to the plea for caste-distinction and exclusion, which is now the main hindrance to the incoming of the Brotherhood of Man.
But the Southerner pleads strongly against recognizing the political equality of the races. He says, The negro is not my equal in intelligence, property or character. Why should he cast a ballot he cannot read, elect men to make laws which they themselves cannot read, to impose taxes of which he pays almost nothing, and to squander the money for the benefit of demagogues? A most estimable Christian gentleman from South Carolina said to me not long since: “On one point the people of our State are agreed. We will not again be ruled by the negroes. We have tried it and we will not permit it to be repeated.” To all this the ready answer is: It was one thing for ignorant, degraded and unscrupulous negroes at that time to rule—nay, I may say, ruin—the State, and another and very different thing, to permit negroes that are educated, possessed of property and of established character to take their proper share in the administration of the affairs of the State; and this brings me to my final point.
3. It is the duty of the hour and of all concerned to unite in aiding the negro to acquire knowledge, property and character. In the Revolutionary struggle, the two White Brothers stood shoulder to shoulder for one object; in the last sad conflict they fought against each other to the bitter end. It is time that the enmity of the last struggle should be laid aside and the amity of the first should be imitated. Let the two White Brothers unite in directing the general government to make ample provisions on terms satisfactory to both to promote popular education in the South; let the State governments in the South vote means to second the effort. Let the North, as individuals and churches, multiply greatly its generous offerings and increase the number of its consecrated men and women to carry forward the work, and let the South respond in its measure in personal contributions and labors, and especially let its people welcome these Northern teachers, not with suspicion and ostracism, but with co-operation and the respect due to their Christian characters. Let the large religious denominations bury dead issues and unite in lifting up the negro. On what nobler or more Christian platform could they stand? Let them come to him not as the priest and the Levite, but as the Samaritan; and let the Black Brother show more alacrity than ever in responding to these efforts in his behalf. When all this is done, there will be realized the great mission of these Three Brothers in America—the founding of a great empire, the establishing of civil and religious liberty, the granting of personal freedom to all, and last and greatest of all, the crowning glory of illustrating the Brotherhood of Man!