If white Southerners at first objected to teaching negroes, this objection speedily vanished before the argument: “We should teach the negroes ourselves if we do not wish them influenced against us by Yankees,” and, “We should keep the money at home,” and the all-compelling “I must make a living.” As the carpet-bag governments went out of power, Northern schoolteachers lost their jobs and Southern ones got them. As negroes were prepared, Southern whites appointed negroes to teach negroes, which was what the blacks themselves desired and believed just.
School fights between the races ceased as Southern whites or Southern negroes came in charge of schools for blacks, and as Northern people who came South to work in charitable enterprises understood conditions better. Those who had unwittingly wrought ill in the first place had usually meant well. The missionary of the sixties and seventies was not as wise as the missionary of today, who knows that he must study a people before he undertakes to teach and reform them, and that it is all in the day’s work for him not to run counter heedlessly to established social usages or to try to uproot instantly and with violence customs centuries old. A reckless reformer may tear up more good things in a few weeks than he can replant, or substitute with better, in a lifetime.
THE CARPET-BAGGER
CHAPTER XXVIII
The Carpet-Bagger