TEN YEARS AT THE FRONT.
BY REV. STANLEY B. LATHROP.
The month of November, 1888, completed the cycle of ten years of my active service in the work of the American Missionary Association. They have been years of intense interest and great enjoyment. Ten years of study, four in the army, and eight years of pastoral labor in Wisconsin preceded; but of all these marked periods, none have been more truly enjoyable and fruitful than these last ten years of preaching the gospel to the poor. It has been my good fortune to visit at various times most of the prominent points in the work of the Association in the South, both in the colored and in the mountain white departments.
And so, from this decennial standpoint of experience and observation, I want to put on record a few thoughts which have been simmering in my mind.
1.—The vast importance and far-reaching influence of the work that has been done. From all these schools and churches, scattered through this Southland, there have come forth, year by year, hundreds of young colored men and women, whose minds have been disciplined and characters deeply impressed for a good life. Thousands have gone out to teach and labor among their own people, with hearts aflame with true missionary zeal. They have labored among innumerable trials and discouragements, in leaky, rickety log-cabins, without desks, without blackboards, maps, charts, or other educational necessities. They have been eager and zealous workers for Sunday-schools, for temperance and righteous living, even when oftentimes opposed by the old-time preachers and church-officers of their own race, and sometimes opposed by the whites. So the leaven has spread far and wide. A great work has been accomplished by these schools and churches. These ten years have seen a most decided uplifting of character and power among the colored race. They are steadily acquiring property, building homes and improving their surroundings. There are now over eighty newspapers published by colored men in the former slave States of the South. Some of these are very creditable specimens in typography and in ability, and they have great and increasing influence. The great majority of these editors and teachers have been educated in the A.M.A. schools. There are also several colored lawyers, dentists and physicians, who have almost without exception been educated in our schools. The direct results in our Congregational church work are not as plainly apparent, because most of the students when coming under our influence are already connected with other churches, or else their parents are, which amounts almost to the same thing. So the Baptists and Methodists have reaped rich harvests through the training of their sons and daughters in our schools. But these same denominations have been through this means greatly uplifted and purified, so that great good has come to all these strong and numerous churches, besides the steady growth of Congregationalism as well. Rev. Dr. Curry, one of the leaders of Southern thought, said in a recent address before the Georgia Legislature, "The Congregationalists have done more than all other denominations for the education of the Negro—they have done grandly, patriotically." To my eyes, which have been wide open during these ten years, there are most marked and gratifying signs of progress apparent in every way. Far and near the leaven has spread, the older denominations are improving, the principles of industrial and Christian education are accomplishing untold good.
2.—There is also manifest in these ten years a marked improvement in the feeling between the races. When a man has lived for ten years in the South, he will begin to see how deeply rooted and immovably imbedded in the Southern mind is the sentiment of inborn contempt for the Negro. This was greatly intensified and brought to the surface by the passions and prejudices of the war, with the volcanic upheavals and chaotic events of the "carpet-bag period" which followed. Considering all these things, there has been in my opinion a remarkable loosening of the grasp of prejudice, a gradual melting of the caste principle, especially in the minds of the better class among the whites. I say this deliberately, with personal knowledge of the agitation of the infamous "Glenn Bill" in Georgia, and notwithstanding the prejudice in Alabama which broke up the colored normal school formerly existing in Marion, and afterward successfully opposed its re-establishment in Montgomery, or rather refused the previous State aid. Having been for many years on the Board of Trustees of Atlanta University, and being personally acquainted with a number of the members of the Georgia Legislature, yet I am prepared to state this astonishing paradox—that even the legislators who voted for the Glenn Bill have a much higher regard for the colored race and for the A.M.A. schools than they formerly had. I cannot take time to explain this singular phenomenon, but it is true. One of the prominent members of the Georgia Legislature said to me on the streets of Macon, when he heard the news of President Ware's sudden death at Atlanta University: "Mr. Ware was a hero of the nineteenth century, and deserves a monument to his memory from the State of Georgia." So, notwithstanding Col. Glenn and his followers, the same Legislature of Georgia has recently added two million dollars to the school fund of the State. The efforts of such brave and fearless leaders as Rev. Dr. Haygood, Rev. Dr. Curry, Hon. Walter B. Hill and others have not been in vain, and the good results of the A.M.A. work have commanded respect and even wonder from its bitterest opponents, whose number and zeal decreases. Wisdom and discretion in future will rapidly increase its friends.
3.—I could say much more concerning the colored work, in which (at Macon, Georgia) I spent eight and a half of the happiest years of my life. That branch of work needs to be sustained and extended for years to come. Having now been for eighteen months in the mountain white department of work, and having visited nearly all its most important posts, I am prepared to say that this, also, is a most needy part of the great missionary work which this Society has undertaken. Here are nearly two millions of people, scattered here and there over this great Cumberland Plateau, who because of their inaccessibility, their poverty and indifference, have been largely passed by until recently. The great tides of missionary effort have swirled and risen to the east, the south and the west, but have reached only a little way up into the caves and valleys of this great island plateau, which towers a thousand feet above the surrounding country. The inevitable effects of isolation, of intermarriage, of stagnation and neglect in mental and spiritual matters, has brought about a condition of things which calls for the aid and sympathy of all good Samaritans. They have not suffered in the same way as the colored race, from the former oppression and contagious vices of a superior race; but left alone in their mountain fastnesses, left behind in the march of human progress, they have been a nation of Robinson Crusoes, deteriorating and retrograding from the inevitable nature of mankind when left to itself. Having no momentum from outside, feeling nothing of the swing and swell of progress, hearing little and knowing little of the outer world, they need now our help to uplift and enthuse and save them. Schools, churches, industrial instruction, mental and spiritual training, help for the poor and the ignorant and the degraded is sorely needed. This is comparatively a new field of work, and is still largely unexplored and obscure. There is much to be done, and it should be done now. The results of a very few years of work are encouraging. Pray, friends, pray! Give, friends, give! Help, friends, help!