The Negro and the Nation Part 17

The South had suffered far more than the North, and the South reaped the larger profit. The fallacy of the old Southern civilization had been the idea that labor is a curse and is to be shirked on to somebody else.

Overthrow and impoverishment brought labor as a necessity to every one, and slowly it was revealed as a blessing.

When General Lee, stately in figure and bearing and splendid in dress, met in surrender the st.u.r.dy Grant, in worn and homely service uniform, it was emblematic of the yielding of the aristocratic order to the industrial democracy. There was significance in the victor's kindly words,--"Let your soldiers keep their horses; they will need them when they get home for the spring plowing." That was it,--they turned from chargers to plow-horses, and much to their safety and gain. Their masters, too, from fighters became toilers, and if it seemed a fall it proved a rise.

Before long on the street cars of Charleston and New Orleans were seen young men of good family as drivers and conductors. Anything for an honest living! Our fine old friend, Thomas Dabney, had been ruined along with everybody else. He and his family undauntedly set themselves to do their own household work. General Sherman was reported to have said, "It would be a good thing if this sent every Southern woman to the wash-tub." "Did Sherman say that?" said Dabney; "he shall not send my daughters to the wash-tub!" and the old hero turned laundry-man for the family as long as the need lasted. But the educated cla.s.s soon found fitter work than as laundry-men or car conductors. The more exacting places called for occupants. There was a great enlistment in the ranks of teachers. Lee took the presidency of Washington university and gave to its duties the same whole-hearted service, the same punctilious care, that he had given to the command of the army of Northern Virginia. In peace as in war he was an exemplar to his countrymen,--and his countrymen now were spread from Maine to California.

But what was to be the fate of the emanc.i.p.ated negro? Jefferson had believed that he must be sent back to Africa. "Colonization" had been the watchword of Southern emanc.i.p.ators, so long as there were any. Even Lincoln apparently looked to that. But wholesale colonization was clearly impossible. The freedmen neither could nor would be transported in a body to Africa. And had it been possible it would have stripped the land of laborers and left it a waste.

The South's a.s.sumption was that the negro was intrinsically an inferior and must be kept subordinate to the white man. The North, in its management of political reconstruction, had practically a.s.sumed that the negro was the equal of the white man and was so to be treated. There was a third view of the matter,--that the negro was at an inferior stage of manhood, and the necessary task was to develop him. He is a man, but an imperfect man,--make him a whole man. To that end some of the finest forces of the nation were now directed. But the invigorating and commanding spirit, who conceived the saving idea, put it into practice, and gave guidance and inspiration to both races,--the man who found the way out was Samuel Chapman Armstrong.

He came of Scotch-Irish blood, and of st.u.r.dy farming stock, bred in the fertile fields of Pennsylvania and in the best traditions of Christianity. His father and mother gave themselves to the missionary work, in that lofty enthusiasm whose wave swept through the country early in the nineteenth century. The boy was born in 1839 in the Hawaiian Islands, and grew up in the joy-giving climate, with a happy boy-life, swimming the sea and climbing the mountains; trained firmly and kindly in obedience and service; impressed by the constant presence in the home of unselfish and consecrated lives. As he grew older, his bright eyes studied the native character, emotional, genial, unstable; he saw the wholesale conversions to Christianity, speedy, happy, and well-nigh barren of fruit. Going to America for his education, he completed it at Williams College under the presidency of Mark Hopkins.

Garfield said that his conception of a university was a pine bench with Mark Hopkins at one end and a student at the other. He gave a stimulus alike intellectual and moral; his special teaching was in philosophy, broadly reasoned, n.o.bly aimed, closely applied to the daily need.

Armstrong spoke of him in later years as his spiritual father.

Graduating in 1862, he enlisted in the Union army, took his share in Gettysburg and other fights, became an officer of negro troops, and rose to a brigadier-generalship. He said that to him, born abroad, the cause of Union made no strong appeal,--what he was fighting for was the freedom of the slaves. The war finished, he left the army, entered the service of the Freedmen's Bureau under General Oliver O. Howard, and was a.s.signed to the Jamestown peninsula in Virginia. There were huddled together thousands of the freedmen,--the unconscious cause of the war, the problem of the future,--simple, half-dazed, a mixture of good and bad, of physical strength, kindly temper, crude morals and childish ignorance. For a time the officials of the Bureau, as best they could, kept order, found work, settled quarrels, and promoted schools. But what was to be the large outcome?

Armstrong had been known to his a.s.sociates as a man of splendid and many-sided vitality. A college cla.s.smate, Dr. John Denison, graphically describes him, "A sort of cataclysm of health, like other cyclones from the South seas"; what the Tennessee mountaineers call "plumb survigrous"; an islander, with the high courage and jollity of the tar; "a kind of mental as well as physical amphibiousness." Extraordinary in his training and versatility; able to "manage a boat in a storm, teach a school, edit a newspaper, a.s.sist in carrying on a government, take up a mechanical industry at will, understand the natives, sympathize with the missionaries, talk with profound theorists, recite well in Greek or mathematics, conduct an advanced cla.s.s in geometry, and make no end of fun for little children." He had had the training of a missionary station in a Robinson Crusoe-like variety of functions. A knight-errant to the core, the atmosphere of Williams under Hopkins gave him his consecration. His comrades recognized him as an intellectual leader, essentially religious but often startlingly unconventional, "under great terrestrial headway," "the most strenuous man I ever saw." He said of himself: "missionary or pirate."

Now after the sobering of three years of campaigning his immediate duties brought him face to face with the tremendous problem of the negro, and the elements of the solution already lay in his own character, experience, personality.

What were the a.s.sets of the negro? He had, by inheritance and training, the capacity and instinct of labor. What an advantage that is appears by the contrast with the Indian, who is perishing for want of just that.

But the negro knew labor only as the hard necessity of his lot,--it had to him no higher significance. "Education," was the watchword of the generous spirits of another race who were coming to his help. They found at first great promise in the freedman's eagerness to learn reading and writing. But it soon appeared that this was an outreaching toward some vague social advantage, and that the actual acquisition through speller and copybook carried him and his children but a little way up. It was a pressing necessity to provide teachers, and of his own race; so, rightly and naturally, were founded the normal school and the college. He needed his own educated preachers, physicians, lawyers; for these, too, there must be training. So, rightly and naturally, were planted universities,--Atlanta, Fisk, Howard. It was an unquestioned creed that the white man's training as preacher, lawyer, physician, teacher, must begin with years of Latin and Greek; so what other way for the negro?

So, as almost inevitable, the early education of the race began as a copy of the white man's methods. But sadly inadequate, alas, as we begin to see, is a cla.s.sical education for the typical white man of our time; and immense was the gap between the teaching of which that was the core and crown, and the wants of the black field-hands and their children.

Labor, education,--and what of religion? The slave had found in Christianity, often in rude, half-barbaric forms, a consolation, a refuge, a tenderness and hope, to which we can scarcely do justice.

Perhaps its most eloquent expression to our imagination is those wonderful old-time melodies, the negro "spirituals," as they have been made familiar by the singers of the negro colleges. Their words are mystic, Scriptural, grotesque; the melodies have a pathos, a charm, a moving power, born out of the heart's depths through centuries of sorrow dimly lighted by glimmerings of a divine love and hope. The typical African temperament, the tragedy of bondage, the tenderness and triumph of religion, find voice in those psalms.

Religion is not to be despised because it is not altogether or even largely ethical. The heart depressed by drudgery, hardship, forlornness, craves not merely moral guidance but exhilaration and ecstacy. Small wonder if it seeks it in whisky; better surely if it finds it in hymns and prayers and transports partly of the flesh yet touched by the spirit. Further, by faithful masters and mistresses there was given to the slave's religion, in many cases, a clear and strong sense of moral obligation. Uncle Tom in his saintliness may be an idealization, but the elements were drawn from life.

Yet the slave's and so the freedman's religion was very one-sided and out of all proportion emotional. Its habitual aim was occasional transport on earth and rapture in heaven. Of the day's task, of homely fidelities and services, of marriage and parenthood and neighborhood and citizenship, it made almost no account.

Face to face with these impoverished and groping souls, what had Armstrong, in his experience, knowledge, personality, with which to meet them? "He was filled through and through"--the quotation is from the admirable biographical sketch by his daughter--"with a deep sense that by hard work alone can any of us be saved--a sense based on many obscure foundations of observation and deduction. Away back in the corners of his mind were recollections of sundry wood-choppings and milkings carried on under protest by himself and his companions; and knowledge, too, of how his father and mother had spent their ambitious youth in work, the mother spinning by the fireside, the father doing ch.o.r.es at his home in Pennsylvania. It was the boys who faced and conquered hard physical jobs that became the men of endurance later." He had seen and shared the devotion of the missionary spirit, and had seen, too, how largely it failed of fruit by being spent on supernatural conversion and mystical emotion. He knew the tropical temperament, common to Hawaiian and negro,--how accessible to transient fervor, how deficient in persistence and continuity. He had watched his father's operations, as minister of public instruction under the Hawaiian king; his experiments in more practical and prosaic education and religion, half frowned on by the ecclesiastics of America, but rich in suggestion.

He knew that the Hilo manual labor school, where the boys paid their expenses by labor, slightly trained, was a marked success. His intensely active nature had caught from Hopkins the philosophic outlook, and the human materials were before him in rich abundance. Above all, while unspeculative in religion, and content to employ its traditional forms,--"they're imperfect enough," he said, "but they're the best we've got"--the instincts of his great and disciplined nature sent him straight to the central realities of character, which are the true foundations of society.

His ideal crystallized by that swift and sudden process in which the long subconscious growth of the mind sometimes comes to fruitage. He said in later years that before he entered the Bureau's service, while sailing on a troop-ship to Texas, he saw as in a dream his school much as it afterward became. Twice afterward the vision came to him.

Stationed at Hampton in 1866, while he was bringing order out of the chaos around him, his mind was reaching forward surely and swiftly to his larger project.

This was the germ thought: Character is to get its direction and energy in the day's work. Just as man's physical needs drive him to toil, his spiritual necessities find their best field and cultivation in the same toil. The freedmen's first need is to earn a living; then to acquire such a margin as will allow some little ease and comfort and refinement; and along with these goes the need of good habits, high aims, disciplined character. Teach the industrial lesson and the moral lesson together. Train them to work intelligently and cheerfully; teach them at the same time whatever of book knowledge best fits their need; and constantly inspire them with the spirit of service to their kind.

Provide in this way for some hundreds of young men and women, who shall go out as teachers to educate and train their people along these lines.

That was the ideal,--the germ of Hampton, of Tuskegee, of the new education of the negro; the suggestion and stimulant of the new education as it is coming to be for the white.

CHAPTER x.x.xVII

ARMSTRONG

Armstrong was a man of action, and of words only as far as they helped action. He reached the starting of his school in 1868, within two years after he was a.s.signed to duty at Hampton. For external help he had first the countenance and support of the Freedmen's Bureau. He was in its service and pay until 1872. He had the warm and practical friendship of General Howard, who, after inviting him to take charge of the new university in Washington bearing his own name, skilfully gained for his Hampton enterprise a moderate appropriation from Congress. If the Freedmen's Bureau had accomplished nothing else,--and it did accomplish much, especially in education--it would have been justified merely by giving Armstrong his opportunity. Next he turned to private benevolence.

Of the various organizations, church and secular, that were devising and doing for the freedmen, perhaps the most efficient was the American Missionary a.s.sociation. From its officers Armstrong won response, sympathy, contributions. He had to face the difficulties of a pioneer.

There were precedents against him. Experiments somewhat similar had been tried and failed. At Mount Holyoke seminary for women, created by the genius and devotion of Mary Lyon, and at Oberlin college, where the best New England tradition had been transplanted--there had been long and earnest trial of giving the students work by which to partially pay their expenses. But it had been given up,--the women students were taxed beyond their strength; the farmers complained that the boys were thinking of their books, and the teachers said their pupils came with half strength to their lessons. But Armstrong knew the material he was dealing with, and how different from the nervous, high-strung pupils of Oberlin and Mount Holyoke was the vigorous, sensuous material he was to mold.

He began in April, 1868, with small things,--a matron, a teacher, fifteen pupils and buildings worth $15,000. In a month there were thirty pupils. Things moved straight on,--they were moved by the a.s.siduity, the enthusiasm, the inspiration, of Armstrong, and the answering temper which he woke in pupils, teachers, contributors, observers. Presently a special effort, an appeal to friends, solicitude, students zealously making bricks and laying them, help from General Howard--and so, in 1870, a n.o.ble building, Academic Hall, and presently again, Virginia Hall,--and the school kept growing.

Its moral success was promptly won. The subject answered to the experiment,--those dark-skinned boys and girls came eager to learn. No one had believed in them, and they had not believed in themselves, but they speedily learned self-respect and gained the respect of others.

They did what was asked of them, earned most of their support, showed good workmanship and scholarship, were blameless in morals, caught the spirit of the place, and went out to carry light into the dark places.

No holiday task was set them. There was a working day of twelve hours, between the cla.s.s-room, the work-shop, the drill-ground and the field, with rare and brief s.n.a.t.c.hes of recreation. They met the demand with a resource inherited from their ancestors' long years of patient labor.

The hard toil was a moral safeguard. The African race is sensuous, and co-education might seem perilous. The danger was completely averted by the influence of labor, strenuous and constant, but diversified and interesting. The essentials of character,--industry, chast.i.ty, truth and honesty, serviceable good-will,--were the aim and result of the Hampton training; and all ran back to the homely root that man should be trained to earn intelligently and faithfully his daily bread.

The story of Hampton is a theme not for a chapter but for a volume. How its founder won favor and friendship by his tact and large-mindedness; how he established good relations with the Virginians; how the Inst.i.tute became the parent of other schools; how Booker Washington was there fitted for the founding of Tuskegee and the leadership of his race; how the work was extended to the Indians; how Armstrong's spirit and example gathered and inspired a company of teachers perhaps unsurpa.s.sed,--mostly women, whose refining influence on the pupils he specially valued; how he dreamed of what he never reached, some day to give industrial education at Hampton to the whites; how a worthy successor took his place, efficient and self-effacing; how deeply the Hampton idea has permeated the education of the Southern negro, and is coming to influence white education North and South,--all this can here be recalled but by a word.

But on the personality of its leader we must for a moment linger, to note one or two of its traits. His splendid vitality overflowed at times in frolic and extravagance. He never lost the spirit of the boy. He would come into a group of his serious-minded teachers and say, "Oh!

what's the good of saving souls if you can't have any fun?" and start a frolic or organize an all-day picnic. In his home he introduced "puss in the corner" and "the Presbyterian wardance" among the very elect. He delighted his children with romances. "Like Dr. Hopkins, he believed that the cla.s.s-room should be a jolly place, and used to say that no recitation was complete without at least one good laugh. 'Laughter makes sport of work,' he said." His teaching sometimes came in a droll story. "Once there was a woodchuck.... Now, woodchucks can't climb trees. Well, this woodchuck was chased by a dog and came to a tree. He knew that if he could get up this tree the dog could not catch him. Now, woodchucks can't climb trees, but he had to, so he did."

His devotion to his work was so whole-souled that it was joyous and seemed unconscious of cost. In the touching pages he wrote when death impended, he said, "I never gave up or sacrificed anything in my life."

Yet he constantly made what most men count heavy sacrifices. His work involved frequent and laborious trips to the North to arouse interest and raise money. He did it in as gallant a fashion as he had led a charge, or as he made appeal to the students hanging reverently on his words. A glimpse of him on one of these begging tours is given by Professor Francis G. Peabody:

"I suppose that every lover of General Armstrong recalls some special incident which seems most entirely typical of the man's life and heart.

For my part, I think oftenest of one of those scenes in his many begging journeys to the North. It was at a little suburban church far down a side street on a winter night in the midst of a driving storm of sleet.

There was, as nearly as possible, no congregation present; a score or so of humble people, showing no sign of any means to contribute, were scattered through the empty s.p.a.ces, and a dozen restless boys kicked their heels in the front pew. Then in the midst of this emptiness and hopelessness up rose the worn, gaunt soldier, as bravely and gladly as if a mult.i.tude were hanging upon his words, and his deep-sunk eyes looked out beyond the bleakness of the scene into the world of his ideals, and the cold little place was aglow with the fire that was in him, and it was like the scene on the Mount, that was not any less wonderful and glistening because only three undiscerning followers were permitted to see the glory."

Those frequent and long journeys went far to break up the happy home life in which he delighted, with the wife whose congenial and intimate companionship was his for nine years and the little girls to whom he was the most delightful of fathers. Then for twelve years, until his second marriage, he was almost a homeless man. He wore out his wonderful const.i.tution; he suffered from dyspepsia and sleeplessness; a paralytic stroke crippled him; but for a year and a half he struggled on, cheerful, self-forgetful,--then the end.

His countrymen scarcely yet realize all that he was. He was the successful leader in that real emanc.i.p.ation of the American negro to which the legal emanc.i.p.ation was but a prelude. Beyond that, it would hardly be too much to say that he did more than any other man in either hemisphere to rationalize and Christianize our still half-medieval system of education. The working ideals of Hampton are to-day higher than those of Yale and Harvard. It may be questioned whether any professed preacher has done so much to develop the best modern type of religion; centered in daily work, reaching out into all human service, and consciously inspired by the divine life. It would not be extravagant to say that in the little group--perhaps half a dozen in all--whom America has contributed to the world's first rank of great men, not one stands higher in heroic manhood and far-reaching service than Samuel Armstrong.

But any comparison seems almost unworthy of his lofty spirit. There is no rivalry among the saints. Would that Armstrong could here be portrayed as he appeared in life. The outer man spoke well the inner. To look upon, he was a thoroughbred; of soldierly bearing, alert, vivid, n.o.ble; with the twinkle of mirth, the flash of resistless purpose,--a man to love, to revere, to follow. As a sort of mental portrait-sketch, we may glean a few of his sayings. It was as true of him as of Luther that his words were half-battles. They were flashed out like sparks struck from action. As to his special work, these:

"The North thinks that the great thing is to free the negro from his former owner; the real thing is to save him from himself."

On the dissolution of the American Anti-slavery Society, (because nothing remained for it to do): "It failed to see that everything remained. Their work was just beginning when slavery was abolished."

"I cannot understand the prevailing views of the war among pious and intelligent Americans. It is simply barbaric--to whip the South and go home rejoicing, to build monuments of victory, leaving one-third of their countrymen in the depths of distress."

"The reconstruction measures were a bridge of wood over a river of fire."

(In 1878): "Hereafter it will be seen that negro suffrage was a boon to the race, not so much for a defense, but as a tremendous fact that compelled its education. There is nothing to do but attempt its education in every possible way. In their pinching poverty the Southern States have seized the question of negro education with a vigor that is the outcome of danger."

(In 1887): "The political experience of the negro has been a great education to him. In spite of his many blunders and unintentional crimes against civilization, he is to-day more of a man than he could have been had he not been a voter."

"The war was the saving of the South. Defeat and ruin brought more material prosperity to the South than to the North, and the future has untold advantages in store. Education is part of it, but capital and enterprise, which make men work, are the greater part. The negro and poor white, and, more than all, the old aristocrat, are being saved by hard work, which, next to the grace of G.o.d, saves our souls."

"We hew from the raw material, men who have come out of deep darkness and wrong, without inheritance but of savage nature, the best product we can, and care as much to infuse it with a spiritual life and divine energy as with knowledge of the saw, plane, and hoe."

And, of his broader outlook on life, these: "I am convinced of the necessity of organizing pleasure as well as religion in order to sustain Christian morality."

"The chief comfort in life is babies."