The old South

by H. M. Hamill

Linked indissolubly with this aristocracy of wealth and of blood was one which, in my judgment, was stronger than either, and which extended beyond the lines of those who were born to the purple of wealth or the pride of a great name. I do not know better how to denominate it than this—the aristocracy of honor. Proud of their great homes and positions of leadership, and boastful of their high descent, the aristocrats of the Old South, true to the Cavalier traditions, erected an ethical system that defined and regulated personal and public matters and became the inflexible code of every Southern gentleman. Its foundation was laid in a man’s “honor,” and the honor of a gentleman was the supreme test and standard of every relation, public and private. The extremes of this old Southern ethical code were illustrated, on the one part, by the maxim that “a man’s word is his bond,” which meant that, the word of honor once passed between men, it must be as inviolable as life itself. Practically, it came to mean, as the present generation little knows or appreciates, that ninetenths of the business of the Old South was a mere promise to pay, and that its millions rested from year to year upon the faith and honor that underlay its vast credit system. A gentleman of the Old South might be guilty of not a few peccadillos. He might sin easily and often against himself, but woe to the man who sinned against other men by withholding what was due and had been promised “on honor.” Personally I have known men of large business affairs whose whole fortunes depended on the passing of a word, and who on the instant would have surrendered their last dollar to make good that “word of honor.” Nor was this exceptional. It was bred in the bone and flesh of every old-time Southern boy that upon this word of personal faith the gentleman must take his stand, and at whatever cost of comfort or convenience or self-denial or sacrifice, even to the death, he must make it good. Such was the code of honor upon its business side.

There was another illustration of the code of a more somber kind, now many years obsolete. It was by the crack of pistol and flash of sword that in the old time not infrequently were determined the fine points of honor. Long ago this “code duello,” with its Hotspur partisans, passed away, and I thank God for the gentler spirit that has come in its stead. With all of its blood and brutality, however, it had one merit which I am frank to allow it. It compelled one to circumspection in what he said and did, or it made him pay instant price for his wrongdoing. It differentiated the man of courage from the bully and the sneak, and it set in bold relief the marks of the gentleman. I am glad to say, too, that during the long and evil reign of the code duello satisfaction in money and by damage suits at law was not as popular as now. The Kentuckian whose bloody face provoked the inquiry, “What ails you?” answered by the code and card when he replied, “I called a gentleman a liar.” The kind of gentleman who would salve the wounded honor of his person or family by a check was unknown or unrecognized before the war.

If one wishes to see the old-time planter at his best, he will find him as the pencils of Page, Harris, and Hopkinson Smith have drawn him—courtly, genial, warm-hearted, gracious, proud of his family, boastful of his ancestral line, a lover of gun and dog and horse and mint julep, an incomparable mixer in the society of well-bred ladies and gentlemen, as unique and distinguished a figure as ever graced the ball or banquet room, the political forum, or the field of honor. His race will soon be extinct, and only the kindly voice and pen of those who knew him and loved him in spite of his weaknesses will truly perpetuate his memory. For two hundred years and more his was the conspicuous and unrivaled figure upon the social and political stage of our history. The good that he did lives after him; may the evil be interred with his bones!

Side by side with the aristocrat, waiting deferentially to do his bidding, with a grace and courtliness hardly surpassed by his master, I place the negro servant of the Old South. If one figure was unique, the other is not less so. Either figure in the passing throng would quickly arrest your attention. I am frank to confess to a tender feeling for those faithful black servitors of the Old South—the “Uncle Remuses” and “Aunt Chloes” of picture and poetry. On the great plantations, in their picturesque colors, in constant laughter and good nature, well fed and clothed and generally well-kept and moderately worked, the negro of slavery lived his careless, heart-free life. The specter of hunger and want never disquieted him. His cabin, clothing, food, garden, pocket money, and holidays came without his concern. I think I state the truth when I say that for the millions of slaves of the Old South there were fewer heartaches than ever troubled a race of people. Freedom may be an inestimable boon. I know that poet and orator have so declared. But when I look upon the care-worn faces of the remnant of old-time negroes who have been testing freedom for a generation and have found it full of heartache and worry, I take exception to the much-vaunted doctrine of liberty as the panacea for all human ills. An old darky, with white head and shuffling feet and haunted look in his eyes, stopped the other day at the door of my office, and, after the manner of the old days, his cap in hand, asked “if massa could give the old nigger a dime?” Something in my voice or manner must have intimated to him that, like him, I belonged to the old order, as he said: “It’s all right for some folks, dis thing they calls freedom; but God knows I’d be glad to see the old days once more before I die.” Freedom to him, and to others like him, had proven a cheat and a snare. I have no word of apology or defense for slavery. Long ago I thanked God that it was no longer lawful for one human being to hold another in enforced servitude. But a generation or more of free negroes has been our most familiar object-lesson, and the outcome is painful at best. The negro who commands respect in the South to-day, as a rule, is the negro who was born and trained under slavery. The new generation, those who have known nothing but freedom, it is charity to say, are an unsatisfactory body of people generally. Whenever you find a negro whose education comes not from books and college only, but from the example and home teaching and training of his white master and mistress, you will generally find one who speaks the truth, is honest, self-respecting and self-restraining, docile and reverent, and always the friend of the Southern white gentleman and lady. Here and there in the homes of the New South these graduates from the school of slavery are to be found in the service of old families and their descendants, and the relationship is one of peculiar confidence and affection; and this old-time darky, wherever you find him in his integrity, pride, and industry, is in bold contrast with the post-bellum negro, despite his educational opportunity. Living as I do in a city famed for its negro schools, I have tried to observe fairly, and indeed with strong predilection in their favor, the processes and results of negro education. Son of an abolitionist of the Henry Clay school, I have sincerely wanted to see the negro succeed educationally and take his place with other men in skill and service. If any city of the South should be the first to confirm the negro’s fitness for an education and his increase in value and in character as the subject of it, I thought it but fair to expect it of a city famous for its colored universities. But, with honorable exceptions to the rule, the negro of post-bellum birth and education in this city is usually a thorn in the flesh to one who seeks or uses his service, no matter what that service may be. “We don’t have to work any more,” said one recently; “we are getting educated.” Yet when one of the darky patriarchs of the Old South died the other day, a leading daily paper, in a tender and beautiful editorial, noted how this colored gentleman of the old school, after a long life of honor and trust, with hundreds of thousands of dollars passing through his hands as confidential messenger, had won the respect of all men by the sheer nobility of his life.

CONFEDERATE MONUMENT.

Perhaps the education of hand and foot and eye—the manual training schemes of Booker Washington and other like negro educators—may suffice to avert the degeneracy of the younger negro race. The trouble, however, is that many of these are not enamored of hard work and constant labor. They turn their backs upon ax and saw and plow which the white man offers them along with ample wages, and prefer the negro barroom and the crap table. After forty years have gone, and millions of money have been expended by both Northern and Southern whites in an effort to educate and train him for profitable service, the negro is found practically in two classes—the larger class massed in the cities and towns, too often despising and shirking work except as compelled to it by sheer necessity; the other class consisting of those who are not ashamed of any kind of work in field, factory, or shop, the significant thing being that those who want work and are doing it are commonly the negroes with little or no education, while those who are shunning work are usually of the so-called educated class.

I am not surprised at the failure of the negro’s secular education to make him a good and profitable citizen. It is only another illustration of the folly of trying to sharpen the intellect and leave untrained the heart and conscience. The Old South, by contact, example, and precept, put a conscience and a sense of right and honorable living into its slaves. The New South is largely filling them with books. The negro of the Old South was religious, genuinely so, though by reason of his emotional nature his religion was often a matter of feeling. But such religion as he had he got from white teachers and preachers, and it was real and scriptural. It bound him to tell the truth, to lie not, to be sober and honest, and to do no man wrong. How well the negro learned and practiced this old-fashioned religion of slavery, let two facts attest. First, few negroes thus trained in the Old South, so far as the speaker knows, have suffered by rope or fagot for the unnamable crime that so often has marked the negro of the New South. If there be exceptions to this rule, certainly they are exceedingly rare. Secondly, at a time when every white man and even white boys were at the front fighting the battles of the Confederacy, the wives and mothers and children of the soldiers were cared for loyally and devotedly by the negro slaves to an extent unmatched in the history of the world. Such was the honor and conscience of the negro slaves that they watched over the helpless women and children of those who were engaged in a conflict involving their own slavery.

What the negro needs more than books and college curriculum is a conscience. He needs religion of the genuine, transforming kind that will stop his petty thieving, his street corner loafing, and his tendencies toward the barbarism from which in the Old South religion wrested his fathers. I think the time has come when our Southern white churches should turn again toward the negro and help him as far as possible to a knowledge of pure and undefiled religion, after the example of such ministry as that of Capers and Andrew to the slaves. If I find any fault with ourselves in our relationships with the negro, it is that we too easily conceded that the negro’s moral and religious interests should be taken out of our hands since the war by sentimentalists, or by those whose labors among the negroes were inspired by political rather than by genuinely benevolent motives. Once politics is no longer an ally to the negro, and White House favors are not permitted to turn his head, I have some hope that the Southern white and the negro may come together in peace and mutual affection under the power of the gospel of Jesus Christ, and after an alienation of more than a generation may take up again the old order of religious instruction and training, which the white fathers of the Old South were so zealous to give and which the black servants were so eager to receive. When a young pastor came to me a few weeks ago asking an opinion upon the fact that, in response to a request from a score or more of families of negroes on his charge who were without church and other religious facilities, he and his wife had formed their children into a Sunday school and the teachers of his white school were giving them faithful and intelligent instruction every Sabbath, I saw in the incident an intimation of what the New South must do if it would restore the lost negro conscience of the Old South.

I cannot dismiss this passing glance at the social life of the Old South without a sense of abiding regret that it is gone forever. My last personal contact with it was the Christmas just preceding the war. Though the air was thick with rumors of impending strife, no gun as yet had broken the quiet of a land so full of peace and prosperity. I think the merriment of those last holidays of ’61 was greater than ever before. I recall it all the more vividly because it was the last old-fashioned Christmas that came to my boyhood, as it was the last that came to the Old South. For weeks preceding it everything on the old plantation was full of stir and preparation. Holly and mistletoe and cedar were being put about the rooms of the big house to welcome home the boys and girls from school. Secret councils were being held as to the Christmas gifts that were to be given religiously to every one, white and black. The back yard was piled up with loads of oak and hickory to make bright and warm the Christmas nights. The negro seamstresses were busy making new suits and dresses for all the servants. The master of the plantation was figuring up the accounts of the year and making ready for generous drafts upon his ready money. There was an increasing rustle of excitement and happiness that ran from the gray-haired grandfather and mother down to the smallest pickaninny in the remotest negro cabin. The peace and goodness of God seemed to brood over it all. The stately plantation home, with its lofty white columns, its big rooms, its great fireplaces, opened wide to all sons and daughters and grandchildren, uncles and aunts, nephews and nieces. We poured into it; and if ever heaven came close to earth and mingled with it, I think it was that Christmas Eve when the last wanderer and exile had come and the grace was said at the great table by a gray-haired patriarch of the Old South. There was little sleep for small boys and girls, and long before daylight of Christmas shone in upon us we were scurrying from room to room crying, “Christmas gift!” to which, whenever first spoken by child or dependent, there could be but the one gracious response. Out on the back porches the negroes were waiting in grinning rows to follow our example, and many were the dusky faces that beamed with delight over their never-failing Christmas remembrances. Down in the cabins and up in the big halls of the mansion the lights and fires burned the entire week, and there was nothing that could eat that was not surfeited with the world of eatables made ready. I must beg pardon of the W. C. T. U., which had not then begun its beneficent prohibitory career, if I recall the big flowing bowl of eggnog, renewed daily and served generously to all. I know that this old-time Christmas beverage is growing into disrepute, for which I am sincerely glad, but I confess to a sort of carnal delight of memory when I recall how good it tasted to the average small boy on an early Christmas morning.