Many of the freedmen were gifted in small trades, and even when laws were passed excluding them from populous slave-areas, petitions were common requesting that worthy ones might be permitted to remain. On the seaboard, boating and fishing provided, on a small scale, both a profitable and a free life for many. A few cases of large slave and land-holding appear, particularly in Louisiana. Cyprian Ricard bought at Sheriff’s Sale, in 1851, an estate in Iberville Parish, at a cost of nearly a quarter of a million dollars. “Marie Metoyer, of Nachitoches Parish, had fifty-eight slaves, and more than two thousand acres of land when she died in 1840.” There were others in Louisiana, as well as in South Carolina, Virginia and Maryland.
These conditions among the freedmen as well as the patriarchal system on the plantations had their results in the development of the race.
Along with, and under the tuition of, the pioneers of America, the Negro cleared the forests, drained the swamps, subdued the wild lands, built the homes and absorbed the civilization of the older race which he served. Here, as always, service of others was the highest service of self; for, conscious or otherwise, all service has its reaction upon the servers. What the older races got, through the long, weary, successive preparations of the ages of stone and wood and iron; of slave and feudal and chivalric and democratic eras; that, in contact with the highest form of which America was capable, the ablest and most diligent among the Negroes got through their amazing capacity for absorption and adaptability. To those who know the Negro best, this capacity for adaptation and absorption is still unbelievable; while to those who know him remotely, it is a miracle, unexplained or misconstrued. To the former—his white friends of the South through three centuries of intimate association—the difficulty is to understand what their eyes behold—a child-race of seventy years ago already producing leaders who stand among their people as clear, true ensigns of their race. To the latter—the man who knows the Negro more remotely—the miracle is explained only upon the assumption that the Negro is a Caucasian in black and not what God made him—a Negro—with his own racial characteristics, able to absorb what is best in the world, to build it unto himself and to stand before his Master and before mankind in God and self-fashioned black manhood.
The scientific professions have been entered by ever-increasing numbers and by increasingly better-trained men; by women, too, though in smaller numbers. Doctors, lawyers, inventors, chemists, scholars, editors, some worthy to rank high in their professions, and some known on both sides of the ocean, are at once the pride of their race, and the ministers to its many needs.
There were tribes in Africa, which produced men of decided artistic talent, untrained. They are represented here in the coterie of worthy sculptors and painters. All were musicians, rude doubtless in their native haunts, but always plaintive. These, too, are here, everywhere softened and sweetened in a gentler atmosphere, and in highest culture producing a black Patti, a Fish Quartette, and others of like gifts. It may not be to the credit of composer or player, but the fashionable (and abominable) rag-time music is their gift to the world. In poetry, Paul Lawrence Dunbar is universally read and sung, and there are many others almost as worthy. In fiction, a morning paper of December 14, 1921, announces the winner of the prize of the Gincourt Academy, Paris, as René Moran, a negro novelist of the Island of Martinique. America, in spite of blots, here and there, has been kind to the Negro, has given him a chance, has helped him to embrace it, has taught him much, and learned somewhat from him.
Chapter V
THE PERIOD OF WAR AND RECONSTRUCTION
We have seen the results of the patriarchal system under which the Negro lived in America during the slave era. Then, with the four long years of war, followed by the eleven (in one State fifteen) long, weary years of Reconstruction, came the day of testing of the results of the carefully built up family and trade-school training.
Regarding the war-period and the result of its testing, White and Negro alike agree. No one is better qualified to speak of it than the one Negro who knew, and who, more than any man of his day, is entitled to the credit and the honor of fashioning out of the past a new and greatly better era for his people and his country, Dr. Booker T. Washington.
He writes: “The self-control which the Negro exhibited during the war marks, it seems to me, one of the most important chapters in the history of the race. Notwithstanding that he knew his master was away from home fighting a battle which, if successful, would result in his continued enslavement, yet he worked faithfully for the support of his master’s family. If the Negro had yielded to the temptation and suggestion to use the torch or dagger in an attempt to destroy his master’s property or family, the result would have been that the war would have been quickly ended; for the master would have returned from the battlefield to protect and defend his property and family. But the Negro, to the last, was faithful to the trust that had been thrust upon him, and during the four years of war, there is not a single instance recorded where he attempted in any way to outrage the family or to injure his master’s property.”
His white friends have said as much. Thomas Nelson Page writes: “It is to the eternal credit of the Whites and of the Negroes that, during the four years of war, when the white men of the South were absent in the field, they could entrust their wives, their children, all they possessed, to the care and guardianship of their slaves with absolute confidence in their fidelity.” And again: “They raised the crop that fed the Confederate Army, and suffered without complaint the privations which came alike to White and Black.”