But far the most satisfactory statement of the annual report is its record of the religious spirit which guides, controls and pervades this whole educational movement. The information that at seven out of eight of the chartered institutions “special religious interest has been manifest, adding scores and scores of these scholars to the number of the disciples of Christ,” and that, “as yet, but very few have been graduated from our various courses of study who had not become Christians,” is a record of the crowning mercy of God. So may it ever be. The heart and conscience must be quickened with the intellect or there is no good hope for that race, or for any other race. It must be Christian education. The school and the Church must move on together at the South as they started together from Plymouth Rock, and they must extend, as far as possible—certainly must offer—their joint benign influences, not to a portion of the population, but to all classes and races alike. For the part can receive its full benefit only in conjunction with the benefit of the whole. This is no new principle, but the method in which, as our annual reports show, this Association has been proceeding throughout its history. Having always refused to recognize the color-line, it can proceed on no other basis without defeating its own ends, and compromising its own principles. And the recent decision of the Supreme Court has rolled a new burden on the Church.
Hence it is that your committee look with much interest upon the experiment, tried and effectually settled at Berea, and now extending thence among the “mountain whites,” of including all classes and races in the purview of our educational and Christian work. We refer to the movement at Williamsburg, a county-seat on the Cumberland River, which is simply a repetition of the movement at Berea of twenty years ago—with this difference, that the abolition of the color-line, both in church and school, at Williamsburg, is fully accepted beforehand by an actual constituency in that place. Here the establishment of an academy to educate teachers for the common schools of the county—of whom, as of the population, but a small portion are colored persons—went hand in hand with the opening of the church to both races alike, and has led most naturally to the establishment of three adjacent preaching places, and the formation of another church at the nearest railway station. This method, when viewed simply on its own merits, seems to be at once the dictate of a wise Christian economy, and an almost necessary sequence, or rather part, of the work of Christian education. Within the particular regions where this Association is planting its schools, exerting its influence and gaining the confidence of the community, it would seem to have peculiar advantages and a special call to leaven the whole community with the institutions of the gospel; while the molding influence of its Christian schools will be left incomplete, except as permanently embodied, fortified and nourished by surrounding Christian churches, built upon the same fundamental principles. Similar in condition, character and wants to this Whitley County, in Kentucky, is a great area of five hundred miles by two hundred, beginning in Virginia and extending to Alabama, occupied chiefly by a white population numbering nearly two millions, of whom more than half the adults can neither read nor write. It is one of the most needy and neglected regions of our country, and presents a pressing call to Christian philanthropy to enter and occupy.
S. C. Bartlett, Chairman.
ADDRESS OF PRESIDENT S. C. BARTLETT.
There is perhaps some propriety in my saying an earnest word for the educational work of this Association, representing as I do a college that from its birth abolished the color line in education. More than a century ago Dartmouth College was training the red man and more than half a century ago the black man. Our first six graduates included three missionaries to the Indians, and the last class that entered contains a full-blooded Dakota and a Cherokee. Fifty-nine years ago, twenty-two years before the first anniversary of this Association, we were educating the negro. In 1824 a young man from Martinique, of irreproachable character and conduct, but with some African color and African blood in his veins, applied for admission. Objections were raised in some quarters from the fear that his presence would prove unwelcome. The students heard of it, held meetings and sent a committee to urge his reception, and under the direction of a most conservative Board of Trustees, with Dr. Bennet Tyler at its head, he was admitted, and into one of the most distinguished classes in the history of the institution. There, in company with forty classmates, who from that small number have furnished six college professors, two theological professors, two college presidents, two Indian missionaries, a senator of the United States and a judge of a Supreme Court, Edward Mitchell went on in comfort, graduated with honor and did a good work in the Baptist ministry. Since then many colored men have entered without hindrance, inconvenience, disability or disrespect. They have been the equal companions and in some instances the room-mates of their fellow students. In June last two such young men graduated, one of them an appointment man and a commencement speaker.
We know the colored man as a student, a Christian and a gentleman. And without making contrasts or comparisons, I will say that were all our students as irreproachable as these last two colored men, there would be no more discipline in the institution. We might burn our college laws.
I have seen the colored student elsewhere in Northern schools. Some of you remember that choice young man, Barnabas Root, a Christian scholar in America, though the son of a heathen chief in Africa. I well remember his graduating oration at Knox College, second to no other on that occasion. I remember him as three years a student in Chicago Theological Seminary, in all respects the peer of his classmates. When that young man passed away just on the threshold of his missionary career, it was a grievous loss to his race and to the church.
It is not necessary to say that all are like these. But these show what can be and sometimes will be. Educationally, they are a most hopeful race, because, in the main eager for improvement. And with whatever deductions, it may be doubted whether the summons to awake and arise intellectually, socially and morally ever fell on the ears of six or seven millions of people with such a simultaneous thrill of response. When I look out on our educational work at the South, I am greatly impressed with what has been already done, even more than I am oppressed with what remains to be done.
What have you done? No doubt it was a notable plan of the French authorities in this country near two hundred years ago to encircle this young nation with a chain of military stations from the Gulf of St. Lawrence to the Gulf of Mexico. But this Association has done better than that. You have gone not to the outskirts, but to the centre. You have planted your cordon of educational fortresses from the Potomac and the Ohio almost to the Rio Grande, through the heart of the South in all the great slave-holding States. They are there to stay and to re-construct. They are already working powerfully, not alone on the education of individual young men and young women, but on the education of the community and of public sentiment. What a change has the President of the Board of Trustees of Berea College lived to behold—the man who was robbed and driven out, but who now sees white men and black in nearly equal numbers graduating together, and audiences of three or four thousand gathered to hear them. And these sixteen other anniversaries lately chronicled in the American Missionary, with their interested audiences and crowded halls, sometimes in stately buildings, are the signal tokens of a great transformation.