Footnote 174: [(return)]
See "An Oration delivered before the Few and Phi Gamma Societies of Emory College: Slavery in the United States; its consistency with republican institutions, and its effects upon the slave and society. Augusta, Ga., 1853."
Footnote 175: [(return)]
November, 1855.
Footnote 176: [(return)]
"The Rights of the South defended in the Pulpits, by B.M. Palmer, D.D., and W.T. Leacock, D.D., Mobile, 1860."
CHAPTER XI
SOCIAL PROGRESS, 1820-1860[177]
So far in our study we have seen the Negro as the object of interest on the part of the American people. Some were disposed to give him a helping hand, some to keep him in bondage, and some thought that it might be possible to dispose of any problem by sending him out of the country. In all this period of agitation and ferment, aside from the efforts of friends in his behalf, just what was the Negro doing to work out his own salvation? If for the time being we can look primarily at constructive effort rather than disabilities, just what do we find that on his own account he was doing to rise to the full stature of manhood?
Naturally in the answer to such a question we shall have to be concerned with those people who had already attained unto nominal freedom. We shall indeed find many examples of industrious slaves who, working in agreement with their owners, managed sometimes to purchase themselves and even to secure ownership of their families. Such cases, while considerable in the aggregate, were after all exceptional, and for the ordinary slave on the plantation the outlook was hopeless enough. In 1860 the free persons formed just one-ninth of the total Negro population in the country, there being 487,970 of them to 3,953,760 slaves. It is a commonplace to remark the progress that the race has made since emancipation. A study of the facts, however, will show that with all their disadvantages less than half a million people had before 1860 not only made such progress as amasses a surprising total, but that they had already entered every large field of endeavor in which the race is engaged to-day.
When in course of time the status of the Negro in the American body politic became a live issue, the possibility and the danger of an imperium in imperio were perceived; and Rev. James W.C. Pennington, undoubtedly a leader, said in his lectures in London and Glasgow: "The colored population of the United States have no destiny separate from that of the nation in which they form an integral part. Our destiny is bound up with that of America. Her ship is ours; her pilot is ours; her storms are ours; her calms are ours. If she breaks upon any rock, we break with her. If we, born in America, can not live upon the same soil upon terms of equality with the descendants of Scotchmen, Englishmen, Irishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, Hungarians, Greeks, and Poles, then the fundamental theory of America fails and falls to the ground."[178] While everybody was practically agreed upon this fundamental matter of the relation of the race to the Federal Government, more and more there developed two lines of thought, equally honest, as to the means by which the race itself was to attain unto the highest things that American civilization had to offer. The leader of one school of thought was Richard Allen, founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. When this man and his friends found that in white churches they were not treated with courtesy, they said, We shall have our own church; we shall have our own bishop; we shall build up our own enterprises in any line whatsoever; and even to-day the church that Allen founded remains as the greatest single effort of the race in organization. The foremost representative of the opposing line of thought was undoubtedly Frederick Douglass, who in a speech in Rochester in 1848 said: "I am well aware of the anti-Christian prejudices which have excluded many colored persons from white churches, and the consequent necessity for erecting their own places of worship. This evil I would charge upon its originators, and not the colored people. But such a necessity does not now exist to the extent of former years. There are societies where color is not regarded as a test of membership, and such places I deem more appropriate for colored persons than exclusive or isolated organizations." There is much more difference between these two positions than can be accounted for by the mere lapse of forty years between the height of the work of Allen and that of Douglass. Allen certainly did not sanction segregation under the law, and no man worked harder than he to relieve his people from proscription. Douglass moreover, who did not formally approve of organizations that represented any such distinction as that of race, again and again presided over gatherings of Negro men. In the last analysis, however, it was Allen who was foremost in laying the basis of distinctively Negro enterprise, and Douglass who felt that the real solution of any difficulty was for the race to lose itself as quickly as possible in the general body politic.
We have seen that the Church was from the first the race's foremost form of social organization, and that sometimes in very close touch with it developed the early lodges of such a body as the Masons. By 1800 emancipation was well under way; then began emigration from the South to the central West; emigration brought into being the Underground Railroad; and finally all forces worked together for the development of Negro business, the press, conventions, and other forms of activity. It was natural that states so close to the border as Pennsylvania and Ohio should be important in this early development.
The Church continued the growth that it had begun several decades before. The A.M.E. denomination advanced rapidly from 7 churches and 400 members in 1816 to 286 churches and 73,000 members by the close of the Civil War. Naturally such a distinctively Negro organization could make little progress in the South before the war, but there were small congregations in Charleston and New Orleans, and William Paul Quinn blazed a path in the West, going from Pittsburgh to St. Louis.