One party in the South, not including the best elements of Southern society, but for the present the dominant one, has already matured and avowed its solution of the problem. “The negro,” they say, “belongs to a race constitutionally and forever inferior—a race foreordained to serve in some capacity the superior white race. You have declared by law that he shall not be a chattel; we are determined that he shall not be more than a serf. Rule over us he shall not; rule with us he shall not; if he must vote, he shall vote as we bid him; by all the methods usually employed for that end wherever caste prevails, by compulsory ignorance, by superstition, by terrorism, by fraud, when necessary by force, he shall be compelled to stay in his place as a member of a subject, an abject race.”
There are others—and it must not be ignored that among them are some of the leaders of opinion at the South—whose language is less violent, and whose measures are less threatening, but whose end is substantially the same. They are willing, possibly I should say desirous, to better the condition of the negro, so far as to make him a better laborer, a more thrifty and useful factor in political economy, a more honest man and a more devout Christian, but with stringent limitations to his social and political ambition. They favor education, but an education so controlled by the superior race, and so differenced from the education given to the children of this race, that it shall beget no dangerous and revolutionary aspirations. These men favor religion for the blacks—but such a religion as shall keep them occupied with emotional fervors and boisterous bodily exercises, not such as shall encourage thoughtful study of truth in God’s word and works.
The Christian Solution.
Now, as the policy of the party unfriendly in a greater or less degree to the freedman, is based on the assumption of his inferiority, so the policy of his friends and benefactors—and he has friends at the South as well as at the North—must be based on the counter assertion of his manhood. It is not necessary—it is somewhat dogmatic, it is at least premature—to assert his equality in all respects with the white man. That is an ethnological question which it may take ages to settle, and when settled it will be mainly a matter of scientific interest. But that the negro is a man; that everything distinctively human belongs to him; that he is capable of improvement; that his intellectual faculties are expanded, and his moral nature is elevated by means of the same truths and the same influences which invigorate and enlarge and fructify the souls of other men, and that he is entitled to his full share, without stint or reserve, of all the knowledge and all the human agencies and the divine influences by which it is ordained that our common humanity shall reach its highest attainable perfection—this is the broad basis of principle on which the American Missionary Association, and all true missionary associations, found their policy in dealing with negroes, as with all other races of men whom God has made of one blood on all the face of the earth, and for whose common redemption and perfection Christ died, who is the Saviour of all men.
But in one sense the freedman is something more than a man; he is an American citizen; and he is more than an ordinary citizen; he is a voter. He has been entrusted by the nation with the highly important duty of giving expression to the municipal, the State, and the national will in legislative, judicial and executive acts. He is an integral part of the sovereignty of this nation. We may or may not think it a national mistake to have made him so important a functionary. But the negro is here. He is here either to corrupt our politics, to degrade our social life, to debase our religion, possibly to drag us into another civil war, if we continue or repeat in some other form our injustice and tyranny to him; or, he is here to perform some useful, perhaps some noble, part in the work of developing a Christian civilization at home and extending it abroad through the earth, if we are faithful to the trust committed to us by Providence in him.
The Negro Intellectually.
The question of the negro’s intellectual capacity has almost become obsolete as a debatable question. Strange that it should ever have been seriously maintained, that a race which has produced its full share of the world’s great men all along through history, a race which has given to the world a Hannibal, an Augustine, a Toussaint, is a race lacking intellectual capacity. Strange it is, on the other hand, that a race, however gifted, should, though oppressed and stupefied by ages of bondage, so frequently throw off minds of a high order.
If it should be said that these are a few picked men, whose cases do not indicate the intellectual capacity of the race, I reply it is only a few picked men of any race who are capable of high intellectual attainments, and that, because the rarest of talents is that ambition for high attainments which will carry one through toils and sacrifices to the far-away prize. I know no better test of intellectual capacity than the ardent desire for knowledge, and that desire the freedmen have in a remarkable degree. When the freedman spelt out, by the light of his pine-torch, the words: “Thou God seest me,” and then jumped to his feet and exclaimed: “John Martin, you can read! John Martin, you are a man!” he uttered a truth which too few of the boasted superior race so well appreciate—that manhood comes from power to appropriate great ideas. There is no doubt that the returns for money invested in freedmen’s schools are large. No one can read the accounts sent to us by teachers in these schools, and doubt that. The soil is a virgin one, and yields great crops for a small outlay. Think what the Peabody Fund is doing for the whole South! Think how wide-reaching would be the effects of a few thousand dollars put into the colleges at Atlanta, Berea and Nashville, where it might be hoped that almost every single dollar would quicken some mind which else were benighted, but which, if enlightened, might carry light to hundreds of benighted minds.
The Negro’s Moral Capacity.
If the negro had come out of this long, cruel bondage without being terribly degraded morally; if, as some pretend, his moral nature had been under an elevating discipline, then had slavery not been “the sum of all villainies.” But there is no denying that the American negro bears the marks of his bondage, in his indolence, his untruthfulness, his dishonesty, his animalism. But these are all vices of the slaves, not of the men; of the condition, not of the race. The possibilities of the negro nature are to be estimated by its highest actual attainments in the most favored individuals. Two of the noblest races of history have come from an ancestry less promising than our Southern freedmen—the Israelites and our own ancestors.