THE MOUNTAIN WORK AND THE COLORED PEOPLE.
There are three things which give special emphasis to the importance of pushing forward the “Mountain Work.”
1. The great material, intellectual and spiritual destitution of the more than two million people of our Southern mountains—a people of good natural endowments, who respond readily to the life-giving impulses of a pure gospel—is the thing which appeals most directly to our sympathy.
2. Many well-informed business men are confidently declaring that this is the richest mineral region of the world. Already they are either building or planning railroads through every part of the mountains, which are made profitable not only by the wonderful mines which open at their approach, but also by the great forests of black walnut, poplar, and other valuable timber. This, of course, means that the present primitive condition of things cannot long remain. It must give way to something else. Whether it shall be to godlessness and wickedness of every form, or whether the natural religiousness of the people shall be met with pure and uplifting gospel influences—with the Church and the Christian school—depends in a large measure on what our churches and individual Christians say through the treasury of this Association. What will take years of work and thousands of dollars in the future can now be done in months and with hundreds.
3. But this work has a connection with our other Southern work which has been little noted. These mountains extend down into the very heart of the South, in a territory 200 miles broad and 500 miles long. In the late war, the people were loyal to the Union almost to a man, and thousands of them fought for its preservation. Slaves were few among them, and colored people are now scarcely more numerous than they are in the North, though the proportion is increasing. The result is a natural affiliation with what are known as “Northern Ideas.” The feeling against a Christian treatment of the colored people is neither so bitter nor so deep-rooted as elsewhere in the South. It has been demonstrated that no-caste churches and schools can be established and maintained, and the general sentiment of the whole region can, by vigorous missionary work, be moulded to the Christian view.
The people of this region—vivified and developed, intellectually and spiritually, on the broad basis of Congregational Christianity; believing in, and practicing, the doctrine that all men were created free and equal and should have equal rights in all public matters; and, in their new and fast-increasing commercial importance, in constant contact with other portions of the South—would furnish an unanswerable argument against the fears of the Southern white people with reference to the amalgamation of the races, and other direful results, which would follow a just treatment of the colored man. “And seeing the man which was healed standing with them, they could say nothing against it.”