The National Convocation of the Haitien Church, following the Bishop’s death, requested the Church in America to send a delegation to Haiti to look over the field and counsel with the native Church as to the measures to be adopted which would best serve its interests. Meanwhile, the Rev. Pierre E. Jones, Dean of the Convocation, administered the District pending the decision of our American Church. Mr. Jones gives the following most significant information: “Only a strongly organized, national, Protestant Episcopal Church can surely bring about a revolution in the religious views and opinions of our Roman Catholic fellow-citizens. The English Wesleyans entered Haiti in 1818, and have today four Missions, two native ministers and one foreign. The American Methodists entered the field in 1824, and have today one mission and one foreign minister. The American Baptists entered the field in 1848, and have today three native ministers and three missions. The Protestant Episcopal Church entered the field in 1861; it became an autonomous Church in 1874; and has today fifteen well-organized parishes, seven mission stations, and fifteen ordained native ministers. We have also a young Haitien in the Divinity School in Philadelphia, and a young woman in the Deaconess House in the same city. After their courses are completed, they will return home to strengthen our little army of brave ones.”
In January, 1912, the Board of Missions requested the Rt. Rev. Dr. Knight, Bishop of Cuba, to be the chairman of the delegation in response to the above request. The Bishop, with his party, arrived at Port-au-Prince about the close of the month, and later sent an interesting account of the expedition, which was published in The Spirit of Missions for September and October 1912. As a sidelight on the difficulties which had beset the path of Bishop Holly, this extract from Bishop Knight’s letter is illuminating. Referring to Port-au-Prince he says, “There is a saying that it has been burned and rebuilt every seven years as a result of frequent revolutions.” And then, as an earnest, let us devoutly hope, of what may come to pass, this sketch is given of the newly elected President Le Conte. “It was some time before I understood that this gentle and soft-spoken Negro was the chief executive of this turbulent black republic. There was nothing uncouth about him; he had no braggadocio manners; on the contrary, he seemed refined and effeminate. It was hard to realize that only a few months before he had landed on his native shores, after five years of exile; had gathered a few followers; and had swept his course onward to the Capital, until the martial Simon fled before him. With his advent to power, better days for Haiti seem to have dawned. Le Conte belongs to one of the oldest and most refined families of the Island. He is grandson of the first President, the military genius who, taking up the sword of Toussaint, completed the deliverance of Haiti from France. He has been highly educated, and has spent much time abroad. He has come to power when militarism has ridden his country for many years, and crushed out its industries. He is reversing these things. The number (of the army) has been reduced. The new broom is sweeping clean. Our Church can be a great aid at this time if she rises to the opportunity.”
Bishop Knight met and advised with the Council of the Haitien Church, called in special session. The action taken is thus described: “The Convocation remained in session for a week; and, finally, by a practically unanimous vote, passed a resolution requesting the American Church to receive the Haitien Church as a Missionary District.” One can but regret, and deeply, that the purpose of Bishop Holly’s fifty years of vision, which seemed so great to him, should have been abandoned, when the Convocation voted to relinquish its autonomy. Let us hope that this is but a temporary status.
It was not until 1913 that General Convention could reply to the request of the Church in Haiti, and meantime Bishop Knight was deputed to render episcopal service there. In that year General Convention, having elected the Rev. Charles B. Colmore as Bishop of Porto Rico, appointed him to the charge of the Missionary District of Haiti. The connection between Porto Rico and Haiti is exceedingly remote, and the means of transportation most difficult, so that Bishop Colmore found a task impossible to be done efficiently. Like a good soldier, he obeyed orders, and the Church must take all the onus for the short-comings. He holds the District together, promoting the existing enterprises, and greatly encouraging the work of the Woman’s Auxiliary, of which little or no notice seems previously to have been taken. To overcome, as far as possible, the disadvantages of the conditions, the Rev. A. R. Llwyd was appointed commissary to the Bishop, and, in 1918, he began work in this capacity. With headquarters in Port-au-Prince, Mr. Llwyd has indefatigably labored to repair rents and build up waste places.
The reports, as well as the comments of visitors, all agree that what is most needed for the upbuilding of the people is the Christian Industrial School. This was Bishop Holly’s dream; it must still be the objective until realized.
In 1919, General Convention resolved that Haiti must have a negro Bishop of its own, and elected the Rev. Samuel Grice of Payne Divinity School. He felt constrained to decline, and the Rt. Rev. Dr. Morris, of the Panama Canal Zone, was appointed to take the oversight of the Church in Haiti. At best, an absentee Episcopate can do little more than conserve, and Haiti awaits the day when love and generosity shall overflow in the American Church, so that she may fully seize the day of opportunity. It is her chance to do for the struggling Church of the Haitiens what our American representatives, civil and military, are doing for their Government,—settle and establish and train, and thus in good time set free a people from the thraldom of ignorance and vice. It is doubtful if either can succeed without the other; it is pretty certain that social training must fail unless religious culture accompany it. “Except the Lord build the house, their labor is but lost that build it.”
Chapter IV
THE SLAVE AND THE FREEDMAN IN AMERICA
The importation of Negroes to the American mainland began about 1525, following the license for such traffic by Philip of Spain. From that time, through Spanish and French companies chiefly; and after the Spanish Armada, through English companies chiefly, the trade in African slaves was vigorously pursued. While statistics are unreliable, Stone approves the guess that “the number transported to Spanish America may be said to have been somewhere between four and seven millions; for English America, insular and continental, about three millions during the century preceding the Revolution. The number brought into the Thirteen Colonies may have been about three hundred thousand.”
The first slaves (about twenty in number) were brought to our colonies by a Dutch vessel which landed at Portsmouth, Va., in 1619, just twelve years after the first permanent settlement by the English. This we have upon the authority of John Rolfe. Thus the Negroes, though not of their own wills, were among the first settlers of the new country. It is vain to discuss the question of responsibility, or of moral culpability. However revolting to the modern mind and heart, slavery was the inheritance of our forefathers, practiced in every conceivable form, not only in Africa, but among every people and in every land. When practiced within racial lines, it extended all the way from the kindly, household slave relations of the Romans, where slaves were sometimes the teachers of their masters’ children, to the relations with war-trophies to be sold or exploited as chattels. When practiced inter-racially, the differences of race were apt to harden into prejudice with its general indifference to the consequences of cruelty. But in either case, it was the universal practice of heathen and Christian peoples until a comparatively recent time. Moral culpability did not enter into the reckoning of the ages preceding ours, and responsibility was readily admitted or never questioned. And this was true of our colonist forefathers who carried on the slave traffic as sellers and buyers in the early days. Even after the consciousness of the wrong of it had been awakened in many by the experiences of slavery, they found themselves the victims of a system of social life which they would gladly have escaped. This is equally true of the southern and the northern colonists.
It was because of the rapid growth of this consciousness of the wrong of slavery, naturally quickened by the advance of Democracy during the eighteenth century, that the traffic was made illegal in 1807. It was also because so large and so respectable a number of slave-holders realized themselves to be the victims of an inherited system of social life from which they could find no satisfactory means of escape, that the system took more and more the form of humane feudalism in which, however, the vassals were workers and not soldiers to be protected and not exposed to danger. And when Emancipation came, there were not a few who felt and expressed it. “It is not the Negroes who are emancipated, but the Whites; only we cannot realize it until the last of our old people are gone.” And this was true, for the Negro had yet to learn the art of freedom and acquire its character before it could become the reality as well as the blessing it should be. True, too, that the white man was not yet emancipated, for he had still to fulfil the obligation to his old people, many of them children as yet in development, loving and beloved; and this, in many cases, he did to the last dollar and to the last dust of meal, and to the last old servant laid to rest.