To the positive and infallible declarations to the Negroes that allegiance to the Church of their masters meant the continuation of slavery, the great racial instinct, as yet untutored to know better, responded with tremendous and deep fervor. Only the few could know better, and have the courage to follow their own convictions. And what else could have been possible in view of the actual conditions? Had wiser counsels prevailed, and had old racial and personal attachments and interdependencies, so carefully built up, been fostered as the best condition under which to work out the stupendous problems of the new time, no one can doubt that the story of American life would have been different, and few can doubt that it would have been better. As it was, the conditions which served the unworthy ends of the white demagogue, were sadly fruitful in heartrending results upon the religion of the Negro.
For many, there was the clinging memory of heathen superstitions—hardly asleep—certainly not dead. There was the “call of the wild”—powerful over all nature, however highly developed—and now heard by a people only just freed from the leash. What race in all history has ever faced such sudden, such powerful temptations as were freely cast before this people, backed up by military occupancy? The amazing thing is, that they stood before such temptations with as little resulting harm to themselves and to the Whites as may justly be charged against either.
It was not alone, or even chiefly, that this was made possible by precautions to prevent racial clashes. It was, before everything else, because of the two centuries of American life in which the Negroes had more and more progressed in all that goes to transform heathen savages into Christian men and women, and had earned the right of trust and affection without the clogging burden of vast responsibility impossible of fulfilment. Dr. Washington is right when he says, as already noted, “I do not believe that the Negro was so much at fault ... for the mistakes that were made in too many cases, as were the unscrupulous white leaders who got the Negroes’ confidence ... to further their own ends.”
Those years of association had produced their intimate, confidential friendships between the white master and the strong head-men on every plantation—friendships which nothing could destroy; and every community points back to level headed, wise, older Negroes who saw, though they could not fully measure, the seriousness brought by the new day. The quiet, almost secret conferences of these old friends about the new life, entered as leaven into the great unleavened, working, dismayed mass. The break became a chasm as reconstruction advanced. The race had not yet had time to become established.
We must note, too, that slavery, however serviceable in the discipline of a new people, did not conduce to self-reliance in any walk of life; it was not the favorable condition out of which to develop steadfastness in the religious life so essential to desirable citizenship. “The law is the schoolmaster to lead to Christ,” is not only the terse description of a long episode in the history of our religious forefathers, it is still more the expression of the law of religious growth. First, there is the period of the imposition of law, with its tuition of restraint from without, gradually developing into self-imposed control as the sense of the reasonable justice and righteousness of it develops. Then the habit of balanced self-restraint, as the motive of righteousness, becomes instinct with life through the growth of the Christ-life in us, when the pattern life is the only life dominant over conscience.
To have expected this process to be completed, and its fruits full-grown, in any considerable number of this newly, partially converted people, was certainly unreasonable. It is our complaint of our own race, that, after more than twelve centuries of inherited Christian faith, we are so far from this consummation. At the very best, slavery was the reign of law, but with no settled objective toward the full “liberty of the children of God”; and as long as St. Paul’s law of development was arrested in mid-operation, it had scant chance of complete fruition.
In an age of progressive education through the printed page, this accepted means of hastening tuition in religious knowledge and spiritual character, was withheld from the slave as inapplicable, even dangerous, to his condition. While it may be recalled that Christianity flourished before printing, it is enough to say that human progress is the product of its own age, and the condition of an age retards him who declines or is deprived of conformity to it, as readily as it stimulates him who conforms.
Such is our attempt to explain the very great defection of the Negro from the white Churches after the war. Doubtless it falls short of being a complete explanation, but it seems to be at least a natural one.
The year 1880 may properly be considered as marking the close of the period of the War and Reconstruction. With exceptions noted later, the period was one of consternation to the leaders of the Church, and deep regret over what seemed the failure of the long years of devoted ministry; for the negro race had shown retrogression in every way, religiously, morally, and industrially. Those twenty years of lost opportunity of which Dr. Washington wrote, were lost to all save the very few who were strong enough to yield themselves to the best influences, and steadfastly to build that best into themselves. To the Church leaders of the day, all seemed lost. But was all lost? The answer of faith is an emphatic NO!
The Episcopal Church lost uncounted numbers of members. Some of these doubtless were never shepherded to any earthly fold. Most of them, with no education to add power to a half-formed faith, became partial victims of the temptations of traditional heathen religions. But the newly born and developing faith was not lost, even though the Fathers’ anxiety and profound distress over the lapse of spiritual children to “indications of African barbarism” are pathetic excuse for their despair. It would have been as unnatural for the Whites to measure the full significance of this day of complete revolution in the life of the Negroes, as for the Negroes to escape the first consequences of it. Nor was it possible for such an era to end in a day. Other peoples have had revolutions, and with like results. The French Revolution, with nearly 1700 years of Christian training behind its victims, and its consequences still a factor of no small power in French life, is a pointed instance. Indeed eras, good or bad, do not really end; they carry forward and onward. The era of Reconstruction carried onward in American life; and, in like manner, the era of Slavery, with its mingled beneficence and cruelty, its Christian and industrial training intertwined with heathen traditions, its régime of earnest, zealous, loving ministry, its “line upon line and precept upon precept” of unwearying tuition—this, too, for better or worse, influenced the Negro of a later period. When, at length, the excesses inevitably connected with the new-found freedom had ceased, and when the years of loss had come to an end, then the old training, religious and industrial, and the need for its power in racial development came once more to the fore in the minds of these few truly great and conspicuous leaders whose lives spanned the great gulf of past and present. These were able to wrest much of advantage to their race out of the very mistakes in education which Dr. Washington laments.