The result of this "work" was, as stated by the witness, and not disputed by any one before the committee, that in this parish, containing 2,700 registered Republican voters, and only 238 Democrats, the Democrats returned a majority of 2,300. The witness, who was a candidate on the Republican ticket, swears that not more than 360 votes were cast. Democratic shot-gun eloquence did its "work," as prophesied by Mr. Askew, ex-chairman of the Democratic committee, but it also served as a wonderful stimulus to migration from Madison Parish.

We cite this case for two reasons: First, because it has been said that the Negroes have not emigrated from bulldozed parishes; and, secondly, because it serves as an illustration of the many similar cases which were given to the committee.

We desire also to invite attention to the evidence of Henry Adams, a colored witness from Shreveport, La. Adams is a man of very remarkable energy and native ability. Scores of witnesses were summoned by the majority of the committee from Shreveport but none of them ventured to question his integrity or truthfulness. Though a common laborer, he has devoted much of his time in traveling through Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas, working his way and taking notes of the crimes committed against his race. His notes, written in terse and simple language, embraced the names of six hundred and eighty-three colored men who have been whipped, maimed or murdered within the last eight years, and his statement of these crimes covers thirty-five pages of closely printed matter in the report. We are sure no one can read it without a conviction of its truthfulness, and a feeling of horror at the barbarous details he relates. Adams is the man who has organized a colonization council, composed of laboring colored people, and rigidly excluding politicians, which numbers ninety-eight thousand who have enrolled themselves with a view to emigration from that country as early as possible. He details the character and the purpose of the organization and the efforts it has made to obtain relief and protection for its members. "First," he says, "we appealed to the President of the United States to help us out of our distress, to protect us in our rights and privileges. Next, we appealed to Congress for a territory to which we might go and live with our families. Failing in that," says he, "our other object was to ask for help to ship us all to Liberia, Africa, somewhere where we could live in peace and quiet. If that could not be done," he adds, "our idea was to appeal to other governments outside of the United States to help us to get away from the United States and go and live there under their flag." What a commentary upon our own boasted equality and freedom! Finding no relief in any direction, they finally resolved to emigrate to some of the Northern States. He says they had some hope of securing better treatment at home until 1877, when "we lost all hopes and determined to go anywhere on God's earth, we didn't care where; we said we was going if we had to run away and go into the woods." Perhaps we can best summarize the condition of affairs in Louisiana and the causes of the exodus from that State, as the Negroes themselves regarded them, by quoting a brief extract from the report of the business committee to the colored State convention held in New Orleans on the 21st of April, 1879:

NEW ORLEANS, April 21, 1879.

Mr. President: Your committee on business have the honor to submit this their final report. Discussing the general and widespread alarm among the colored people of Louisiana, including so potent a fear that in many parishes, and in others perhaps largely to follow, there is an exodus of agricultural labor which indicates the prostration and destruction of the productive, and therefore essentially vital, interests of the State. The Committee find that the primary cause of this lies in the absence of a republican form of government to the people of Louisiana. Crime and lawlessness existing to an extent that laughs at all restraint, and the misgovernment naturally induced from a State administration itself the product of violence, have created an absorbing and constantly increasing distrust and alarm among our people throughout the State. All rights of freemen denied and all claims to a just recompense for labor rendered or honorable dealings between planter and laborer disallowed, justice a mockery, and the laws a cheat, the very officers of the courts being themselves the mobocrats and violators of the law, the only remedy left the colored citizens in many of parishes of our State today is to emigrate. The fiat to go forth is irresistible. The constantly recurring, nay, ever-present, fear which haunts the minds of these our people in the turbulent parishes of the State is that slavery in the horrible form of peonage is approaching; that the avowed disposition of men in power to reduce the laborer and his interest to the minimum of advantages as freemen and to absolutely none as citizens has produced so absolute a feat that in many cases it has become a panic. It is flight from present sufferings and from wrongs to come.

Here are the reasons for the exodus as stated by the colored people themselves. In view of the facts which we have stated, and of the terrible history which we cannot here repeat, does any one believe their statement of grievances is overdrawn? Is there any other race of freemen on the face of the earth who would have endured and patiently suffered as they have? Is there any other government among civilized nations which would have permitted such acts to be perpetrated against its citizens?

We will not dwell upon the conditions which have driven these people from Mississippi. It would be but a repetition of the intolerance, persecutions, and violence which have prevailed in Louisiana. The same Democratic "shot-gun eloquence" which was so potent for the conversion of colored Republicans in the one has proven equally powerful in the other. The same "eloquence" which wrested Louisiana from Republicans also converted Mississippi. And in both the same results are visible in the determination of the colored people to get away.

Nearly all the witnesses who were asked as to the causes of the exodus answered that it was because of a feeling of insecurity for life and property; a denial of their political rights as citizens; long-continued persecutions for political reasons; a system of cheating by landlords and storekeepers which rendered it impossible for them to make a living no matter how hard they might work; the inadequacy of school advantages, and a fear that they would be eventually reduced to a system of peonage even worse than slavery itself.

On the latter point they quoted the laws of Mississippi, which authorize the sheriff to hire the convicts to planters and others for twenty-five cents a day to work out the fine and cost, and which provide that for every day lost from sickness he shall work another to pay for his board while sick. Under these laws they allege that a colored man may be fined $500 for some trifling misdemeanor, and be compelled to work five or six years to pay the fine; and that it is not uncommon for colored men thus hired out to be worked in a chain gang upon the plantations under overseers, with whip in hand, precisely as in the days of slavery. And some of the witnesses declared that if an attempt be made to escape they are pursued by blood-hounds, as before the war.

Henry Ruby, a witness summoned by the majority of the committee, swore that in Texas, under a law similar to that in Mississippi, a colored man had been arrested for carrying a "six-shooter" and fined $65, including costs, and that he had been at work nearly three years to pay it. The laws of that State do not fix the rate for hiring, but "county convicts" may be hired at any price the county judge may determine. He mentioned the case of a colored woman who was hired out for a quarter of a cent a day. Describing this process of hiring, he says:

They call these people county convicts, and if you have got a farm you can hire them out of the jail. They have got that system, and the colored men object to it. I know some of these men who have State convicts that they hire and they work them under shotguns. A farmer hires so many of the State, and they are under the supervision of a sergeant with a gun and nigger-hounds to run them with if they get away. They hire them and put them in the same gang with the striped suit on, and, if they want, the guard can bring them down with his shotgun! Then they have these nigger-hounds, and if one of them gets off and they can't find him they take the hounds, and from a shoe or anything of the kind belonging to the convict they trail him down.

Q. Are these the same sort of blood-hounds they used to have to run the Negroes with?—A. Yes, sir.

These things need no comment. To the Negro they are painfully suggestive of slavery. Is it a wonder that he has resolved to go where peonage and blood-hounds are unknown?

Several witnesses were called from Saint Louis and Kansas, who had conversed with thousands of the refugees, and who swore that they all told the same story of injustice, oppression and wrong. Upon the arrival of the first boat-loads at Saint Louis, in the early spring of 1879, the people of that city were deeply moved by the evident destitution and distress which they presented, and thousands of them were interviewed as to the causes which impelled them to leave their homes at that inclement season of the year. In the presence of these people, and with a full knowledge of their condition and of the flight, a memorial to Congress was prepared, and signed by a large number of the most prominent and most respectable citizens of Saint Louis, embracing such names as Mayor Overholtz (a Democrat), Hon. John F. Dillon, judge of the United States circuit court, ex-United States Senator J.B. Henderson and nearly a hundred other leading citizens, in which the condition and grievances of the refugees are stated as follows:

The undersigned, your memorialists, respectfully represent that within the last two weeks there have come by steamboats up the Mississippi River, from chiefly the States of Louisiana and Mississippi, and landed at Saint Louis, Mo., a great number of colored citizens of the United States, not less than twenty hundred and composed of men and women, old and young, and with them many of their children.

This multitude is eager to proceed to Kansas, and without exception, so far as we have learned, refuse all overtures or inducements to return South, even if their passage back is paid for them.

The condition of the great majority is absolute poverty; they are clothed in thin and ragged garments for the most part, and while here have been supported to some extent by public, but mostly by private charity.

The older ones are the former slaves of the South; all now entitled to life and liberty.

The weather from the first advent of these people in this Northern city has been unusually cold, attended with ice and snow, so that their sufferings have been greatly increased, and if there was in their hearts a single kind remembrance of their sunny Southern homes they would naturally give it expression now.

We have taken occasion to examine into the causes they themselves assign for their extraordinary and unexpected transit, and beg leave to submit herewith the written statements of a number of individuals of the refugees, which were taken without any effort to have one thing said more than another, and to express the sense of the witness in his own language as nearly as possible.

The story is about the same in each instance: a great privation and want from excessive rent exacted for land, connected with murder of colored neighbors and threats of personal violence to themselves. The tone of each statement is that of suffering and terror. Election days and Christmas, by the concurrent testimony, seem to have been appropriated to killing the smart men, while robbery and personal violence in one form and another seem to have run the year round.

* * * * *

We submit that the great migration of Negroes from the South is itself a fact that overbears all contradiction and proves conclusively that great causes must exist at the South to account for it.

Here they are in multitudes, not men alone, but women and children, old, middle-aged, and young, with common consent leaving their old homes in a natural climate and facing storms and unknown dangers to go to Northern Kansas. Why? Among them all there is little said of hope in the future; it is all of fear in the past. They are not drawn by the attractions of Kansas; they are driven by the terrors of Mississippi and Louisiana. Whatever becomes of them, they are unanimous in their unalterable determination not to return.

There are others coming. Those who have come and gone on to Kansas must suffer even unto death, we fear; at all events more than any body of people entitled to liberty and law, the possession of property, the right to vote, and the pursuit of happiness, should be compelled to suffer under a free government from terror inspired by robbery, threats, assaults, and murders.

We protest against the dire necessities that have impelled this exodus, and against the violation of common right, natural and constitutional, proven to be of most frequent occurrences in places named; and we ask such action at the hands of our representatives and our government as shall investigate the full extent of the causes leading to this unnatural state of affairs and protect the people from its continuance, and not only protect liberty and life, but enforce law and order.

It is intolerable to believe that with the increased representation of the Southern States in Congress those shall not be allowed freely to cast their ballots upon whose right to vote that representation has been enlarged. We believe no government can prosper that will allow such a state of injustice to the body of its people to exist, any more than society can endure where robbery and murder go unchallenged.

The occasion is, we think, a fit one for us to protest against a state of affairs thus exhibited in those parts of the Union from which these Negroes come, which is not only most barbarous toward the Negro, but is destructive to the constitutional rights of all citizens of our common country.

Accompanying this memorial are numerous affidavits of the refugees fully confirming all its statements.

As to the future of the exodus we can only say that every witness, whose opinion was asked upon this point, declared that it has only begun, and that what we have seen in the past is nothing compared to what is to come, unless there shall be a radical change on the part of Democrats in the South. They say that the Negro has no confidence in the Democratic party, and that if a Democratic President shall be elected there will be a general stampede of the colored race.

There is but one remedy for the exodus—fair treatment of the Negro. If the better class of white men in the South would retain the colored labor, they must recognize his manhood and his citizenship, and restrain the vicious and lawless elements in their midst. If Northern Democrats would check the threatened inundation of black labor into their States, they must recognize the facts which have produced the exodus and unite with us in removing its causes.

We present in conclusion the following brief summary of the results of the investigation:

First: This movement was not instigated, aided or encouraged by Republican leaders at the North. The only aid they have ever given was purely as a matter of charity, to relieve the distress of the destitute and suffering emigrants who had already come to the North.

Second. Not one dollar has ever been contributed by anybody at the North to bring these people from their homes. On the contrary, the only contributions shown to have been made for such purpose were made by the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Company, a Democratic corporation which employed agents to work up the emigration from North Carolina, paying $1 per head therefor.

Third. It is not proven that the emigrants are dissatisfied in their new homes and wish to return to the South. On the contrary, a standing offer to pay their expenses back to the South has not induced more than about three hundred out of thirty thousand to return.

Fourth. It is not proven that there is no demand for their labor at the North, for nearly all those who have come have found employment, and even in Indiana hundreds of applications for them were presented to the committee.

Fifth. It is not proven that there is any sufficient reason for the grave political apprehensions entertained in some quarters, for it was shown by Mr. Dukehart, who sold all the tickets to those who came from North Carolina, that not more than two hundred voters had gone to Indiana.

Sixth. The exodus movement originated entirely with the colored people themselves, who for many years have been organizing for the purpose of finding relief in that way, and the colored agents of such organizations have traveled all over the South consulting with their race on this subject.

Seventh. A long series of political persecutions, whippings, maimings and murders committed by Democrats and in the interest of the Democratic party, extending over a period of fifteen years, has finally driven the Negro to despair, and compelled him to seek peace and safety by flight.

Eighth. In some States a system of convict hiring is authorized by law, which reinstates the chain-gang, the overseer, and the bloodhound substantially as in the days of slavery.

Ninth. A system of labor and renting has been adopted in some parts of the South which reduces a Negro to a condition but little better than that of peonage and which renders it impossible for him to make a comfortable living, no matter how hard he may work.

Tenth. The only remedy for the exodus is in the hands of Southern Democrats themselves, and if they do not change their treatment of the Negro and recognize his rights as a man and a citizen, the movement will go on, greatly to the injury of the labor interests of the South, if not the whole country.

WILLIAM WINDOM. HENRY W. BLAIR.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Congressional Record, 46th Congress, 2d Session, X, p. 155.

[2] Ibid., pp. 155-170.

[2a] Congressional Record, 46th Congress, 2d Session, X, p. 170.

[3] Reports of Committees of Senate of the United States for the First and Second Sessions of the Forty-Sixth Congress, 1879-80, VII, pp. iii-xiii.

[4] Report of the Committee of the Senate of the United States for the First and Second Sessions of the Forty-Sixth Congress, 1879-80, VII, pp. viii-xxv.



SOME UNDISTINGUISHED NEGROES

MR. J. H. LATROBE, corresponding secretary of the Maryland Colonization Society and later President of the American Colonization Society, has left the following story:

"It was while I was reading in the same room with General Harper that there entered one day a tall, gaunt, square-shouldered, spare, light mulatto, who announced himself as Abel Hurd. He was a Bostonian by birth, and a seaman by profession. In a voyage to the East his vessel had been captured by the Malays, and he alone, if I recollect rightly, escaped death, owing to his complexion. He had a varied fortune; had at one time been in Cochin-China, again in Tibet, and, after passing some twenty years in the East, had returned to America, and was looking out for employment. Some one had heard how deeply interested General Harper was in Africa and African colonization, and had sent Hurd to him. About this time there was a great doubt as to the mouth of the Niger; whether it was to be found at the bottom of the Bight of Benin, and whether it was not identical with the Congo, or Zaire, south of the line. This was a question in which General Harper was interested, and he determined to fit out Hurd and send him northward from Liberia until he struck the river, which he was then to follow to its mouth, and I was deputed to superintend the outfit.

"Hurd's idea was to take as little baggage with him as possible, and to rely upon the resources of his wit and ingenuity in making his way among the interior tribes. He had had a vast experience, and he directed his own equipment. I do not recollect all that he was furnished with, but I recollect having devised a hollow cane, in the top of which was a compass and the tube of which contained papers and pencils. These were to be resorted to when the compass and materials openly were lost. I think I wrote, at General Harper's dictation, a letter of instructions. Had Hurd lived and succeeded, he would have anticipated the Landers, Richard and John, who explored the Niger in 1832-34. He arrived safely in Liberia, and made several short excursions into the interior, but he had a theory that it was necessary to train himself for the great journey. Abstinence was a part of his training. It was a mistake. He took the acclimating fever, and, although he recovered from the first attack, he had a relapse brought on by some imprudence and died."[1]

* * * * *

CHARLES H. WEBB.—During the years when the American Colonization Society was preparing to establish a colony of freedmen in Africa, it early became evident that the mere transportation of the blacks to their native home would mean little in establishing them in life. It was, therefore, necessary to organize schools in which Negroes desiring to be colonized could be trained in agriculture, mechanical arts and even in the professions. Among the first to qualify in the field of medicine was Charles H. Webb. In his examinations he exhibited evidences of ripe scholarship and much proficiency in his chosen field. He set sail for Liberia in 1834, after having completed his medical studies, which he had pursued under the direction of the American Colonization Society for a number of years. In the following autumn, however, he fell a victim to the local fever aggravated by some imprudence on his part and died before he could render his people much service.[2]

* * * * *

A SHREWD NEGRO.—A Kentucky slave, named Jim, with the humiliation of slavery rankling in his breast, resolved to make an effort to gain freedom. At last the opportunity came and he started for the Ohio River. There he told his story to a sympathetic member of his race, offering him a part of his money, if he would row him across to the Indiana shore. He was directed to George De Baptist, a free man of color, who was then living in Madison but removed soon afterwards to Detroit, Michigan. The master of the slave arrived in town with a posse and diligently searched it for the Negro. His sympathizers contrived, however, to avoid the slave hunters and the fugitive was conducted through the corn fields and byways to a depot of the Underground Railroad. He rested a few days at the station kept by William Byrd, of Union County, Indiana. From that point he was speedily forwarded northward until he reached Canada.

Appreciating as he had never done before the real value of freedom, he longed to do something to confer this great boon upon his wife and children whom he left behind him in Kentucky. He soon found a way to solve this problem. He said to himself, "I'll go to old Massa's plantation, and I'll make believe I am tired of freedom. I'll tell old Massa a story that will please him; then I will go to work hard and watch for a chance to slip away my wife and children."

His master was greatly surprised one morning to see Jim return home. In answer to the many questions propounded to him, he gave the explanation which he had planned. He told his master that he found that Canada was no place for Negroes, and that it was too cold and that they could not earn any money there. He spoke of how the Negroes were cheated by the whites and subjected to other humiliations, which made him tired of his freedom. His master was very much pleased with the story, spoke pleasantly to him and permitted him to work among his slaves and those of his neighbors as a missionary to convince the blacks of the folly of escaping to Canada.

The slave resumed his usual labor, working during that fall and winter but planning at the same time a second flight. In the spring he succeeded in bringing together his wife and children and a few of his slave friends on the Indiana side of the Ohio River. He reached the first station of the Underground Railway with his party numbering fourteen and hurried them from point to point until they reached the home of Levi Coffin in Indiana. They were hotly pursued and had narrow escapes, but by wise management they made their way through Spartansburg, Greenville and Mercer County, Ohio, to Sandusky, from which they crossed over to Canada.[3]

* * * * *

B. F. GRANT.[4]—I was born in the State of Pennsylvania, Little Britain Township, Lancaster County, Sunday morning, August 12, 1838. I am the son of the late Henry and Charlotte Grant.

My father was born a slave in the State of Maryland in Cecil County. He was freed at the age of nineteen, upon the death of his master. My mother was born of free parents in Harford County, Maryland. Both came in their youth to Pennsylvania, where they were married. Of that union there were born twelve children, eight boys and four girls. The subject of this sketch was the fifth son of the family.

In 1844 my father moved with his family from Lancaster to York County, across the Susquehanna River. I was then between five and six years old.

The first political event that I remember was the Presidential campaign of Henry Clay and James K. Polk in 1844. In the fall of that year each party had a pole raising at Peach Bottom, York County, Pennsylvania. Mother took us to see the pole raising and then the people were all shouting for Henry Clay, but soon after that I remember hearing them singing a song::

"Oh poor cooney Clay, The white house was never made for you And home you better stay."

Polk was elected, and soon after the inauguration of President Polk in 1845 the great controversy over the Mexican War and Negro slavery arose. The Negro question was the topic of the day, both in and out of Congress and among all classes. This continued until in 1846, when the war broke out between the United States and Mexico, and lasted two years.

When it was over the United States had the victory. Then the slaveholders of the South, with the copperheads of the North, tried to force their slaves or their slave influence into every State and territory of the United States. So great became the agitation and excitement that the poor slaves became restless and uneasy over their condition, and they commenced to run away by the thousands from the Southern States. They made for the free States and Canada. This gave rise to what was known as the Underground Railroad.

This brings me to consider what I call my boyhood days. Having passed my childhood, I now began to think, feel and consider that I was a human being as well as the white boys who surrounded me, living on farms just as I lived. Therefore I began to believe that I had the same God-given rights that they had, and was not born to be kicked around like a dog any more than they were.

About this time I began to attend the so-called public school. I well remember those school days, for they made a lasting impression upon my mind. If God had not had mercy on the poor little Negro who attended the public school of Pennsylvania in those days, I know not what would have become of me; for the poor white trash from the teacher down had no mercy upon him. They were upon him like vultures upon their prey, ready to devour him at any time for any cause.

I will mention only a few things which the little Negro had to endure, simply because he was a Negro. He was not permitted to drink from the same bucket or cup as the white children. He was compelled to sit back in the corner from the fire no matter how cold the weather might be. There he must wait until the white children had recited. If the cold became too intense to endure, he must ask permission of the teacher, stand by the fire a few minutes to warm and then return to the same cold corner. I have sat in an old log school house with no chinking between the logs until my heels were frost-bitten and cracked open. Sometimes we had a poor white trashy skunk that would sit in the school room and call us "niggers" or "darkeys." If the little Negro got his lesson at all, he got it; if not, it was all the same.

For seven long years, 1844 to 1851, my father lived about five miles from the Maryland line and about one mile from the Susquehanna River. That is where I saw some of the evils of the institution called slavery. Sometimes I wondered whether there was any God for the Negro.

My father was one of the members of the Underground Railroad. I well remember some of the members of that club which used to meet at our house. They were Robert Fisher, Lige Sarkey, Isaac Waters, Henry W. Grant, Isaac Fields, Thomas Clarke and others who used to meet and make their arrangements to convey the fugitives across the Susquehanna River. The night was never too dark or the storm never too severe for those brave, noble-hearted, courageous men to do their work. They did not fear death. Although they were uneducated men ignorant of the letter, they were directed by a Higher Power. The hand of God led them, and so they succeeded in carrying off hundreds, nay I might truthfully say thousands from the counties of Cecil, Harford and Baltimore. All lived to be old men.

After the Mexican War the Southern slaveholders and copperheads of the North got it into their heads to extend slavery throughout the borders of the United States. Robt. Toombs, one of the noted fire-eaters of the South, said he would call the roll of his slaves at the foot of Bunker Hill Monument. In 1848 came the crisis of the Presidential election. The Mexican War was over and the country had a vast amount of territory added to her southern borders. The cotton gin had been invented, and cotton had come into great demand. It was as good as gold. The Negro, therefore, was in great demand.

Presidential nominations were made. The Whigs nominated Gen. Taylor, and the Democrats nominated Lewis Cass. The Whig candidate was successful. While Gen. Taylor was a Southern man, he was somewhat opposed to the extension of slavery, and, therefore, not a favorite of the nullifiers of the South. He did not live long. Then they got their dupe, the Vice-President, Millard Fillmore, a northern man, but a red-hot copperhead who stood in with the South. I can well remember those times when all the fire-eating leaders of the South and the poor dirty trash of the North got their desire when that poor dupe of a President allowed the mischievous fugitive slave act to become a law of the land. This law was a curse to the nation, an outrage upon the poor Negro and suffering humanity. This bill gave the poor Negro no protection in the land of his birth, a country boasting of being the land of the brave and the home of the free. These terms, however, were nothing but bombast; they would just come and take a freeman and carry him into absolute slavery without judge or jury.

I can well remember the Christiana riot. I was not living far from there at that time. Those were the days that tried the poor Negro's soul, and were a disgrace to the white man. I was then about fifteen years old and we had to suffer everything but death, and sometimes that; for the slave hunters were like their bloodhounds, always upon the Negro's track. There were daily riots between the slaves and Negro hunters.

While quite young, and claiming to be a Christian, too, I was almost ready to say with Job, "Cursed was the night wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said, there is a man child conceived." My disgust at the treatment given my people made me resolve to leave the country and to go to Liberia, Africa, because the fugitive slave law was too obnoxious for me both in principle and practice. Because of the outbreak of the Civil War, however, I failed to carry out this plan.

Now I recall my third Presidential election. The candidates were Gen. Winfield Scott and Franklin Pierce. Pierce was the Democratic candidate and he overwhelmingly defeated Gen. Scott, which placed the Democrats in absolute power. All the fire-eaters of the South with the copperheads of the North held full sway, arrayed against the anti-slavery party of the North and East, and backed by the President, the Supreme Court and Congress. The world knows the condition of the country at that time. The Negro's condition during all of that administration recalls to my memory a picture too dark to attempt to describe.

During this administration there was a man by the name of Dred Scott, owned by an army officer named Emerson. He took Scott into a free territory; this slave, Scott, sued for his freedom; the case was carried from court to court until it reached the Supreme Court, which handed down that opinion known throughout the world as the Dred Scott decision. It meant that a Negro had no rights that a white man was bound to respect; that he was of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race either in social or political relation; and so far inferior that they need not be respected, but might be reduced to slavery for the white man's benefit. This decision placed the damnation seal on the poor Negro in the United States. It left him absolutely without help.

In 1856 opened the great political drama. The candidates were James Buchanan, the Democrat, John C. Fremont, Republican, and ex-Vice-President Millard Fillmore, of the Know Nothing Party. James Buchanan, the Democrat, was elected; the world knows the consequences of the next four years in and out of Congress. Death and destruction were in the path. We had John Brown's insurrection, the Christiana riot, the tragic death of Lovejoy, and hundreds of other events which I cannot mention at this time.

In 1860 the Presidential campaign came off. The candidates were Abraham Lincoln, Republican, John C. Breckenridge, Southern Democrat, and S. A. Douglass, Northern Democrat, with John Bell, Union Democrat. This was a hot contest. Lincoln was elected.

Then came the Great Rebellion. On April 12, 1862, in company with my brother, John H. Grant, we left our home in York Co., Pa., for Washington, D. C., then the center of war activities. Both of us found employment as teamsters in the Quartermaster's Department. On June 15 we were transferred into Gen. Pope's Army in Virginia. We were relieved of our teams and put to herding horses and mules throughout Gen. Pope's campaign. After Pope was defeated at the second battle of Bull Run, I returned to Washington and went back to driving my team. In 1863 I was transferred to the woodcutter department as an outside clerk and put to measuring wood which was cut every two weeks. I also looked after the commissary. I was there until the Confederates ran us out in June.

I returned to Washington, D. C., and began my Christian and literary work. I was converted sixty-five years ago, and joined the A. M. E. Z. Church, then called Wesley Church. Rev. Abner Bishop was the pastor. The church was in Peach Bottom Township, York County, Pennsylvania.

I have been always a lover of the Sunday School work. My interest continues to this day. There is one little incident in my Sunday School work which I will relate. When I was a boy, with another young boy like myself, we found that our Sunday School needed some literature. We succeeded in collecting some money, and Moses Jones and I found that the nearest place to get the books was Lancaster City, about twenty-five miles from the church. Undaunted, we took the money and walked to Lancaster, and back again with the books. Some of those books remained a great many years in the library of that school.

I am the man who opened the first free school to colored boys in the District of Columbia. This was in the basement of the old Mt. Zion Church in 1863 under the Friends' Association of Philadelphia, of which Mr. H. M. Laing, of that city, was president. I also opened a school to freedmen in Fairfax County, Virginia, at Bull Run. After being there about three months, one of the Freedmen's Bureau Officers came over from Manassas and placed me and my school back under the direction of the Friends' Association and the same Mr. Laing was still its president. I remained there two years.

When I opened the school it was a little log cabin built as a headquarters by the Confederates. They were encamped there in the spring or rather the winter of 1861-62. While I was teaching at Bull Run, Prof. John M. Langston was appointed to a position in the Freedmen's Bureau. I became acquainted with him, interested him in my work and he secured me one hundred and fifty dollars to assist in building there a house for two purposes, a church and a school. In this school I gave the founder of the Manasses Industrial School, Miss Jennie Dean, her first lessons. Now after the lapse of fifty years, the Bull Run School is still standing as one of the public schools of Fairfax County, Virginia.

While teaching in the Bull Run School I was elected a delegate to the first National Negro Convention after the Civil War. This met in the Israel Church, Washington, D. C., in 1868. This church was then A. M. E. Zion, but now C. M. E. There I met some of the leading Negroes of the world. Among them were Hon. Frederick Douglass, Prof. John M. Langston, Rev. Henry H. Garnett, C. L. Remond, Robert Purvis, Geo. T. Downing, Geo. B. Vashon, Rev. Wm. Howard Day, Prof. Bassett, Robt. W. Elliot, Bishop Henry M. Turner, Prof. Isaac C. Weaver, Richard Clarke, John Jones, Prof. O. M. Green, Geo. W. White, P. H. Martin, John R. Lynch, and A. R. Green. These were some of the lights in that convention. Hon. Fred. Douglass was elected president, with Rev. H. L. Garnett as vice-president.

After two years at Bull Run, I returned to the District of Columbia, where I became acquainted with a white gentleman named Edmond Tewney, from the State of Maine, who came to the District as one of the founders of Wayland Seminary. As there was some misunderstanding between him and some of the other members of the faculty, he left the school, and organized another, known as the National Theological Institution for the Instruction of Young Colored Men and Women for preachers and teachers.

I became associated with that school, and was an assistant teacher and a pupil at the same time. It was a Baptist institution, and some of those who afterward became the most able Baptist preachers in the city attended that school. Some of them were Rev. John D. Brooks, Rev. James Jefferson, Rev. Edward Willis, Rev. M. J. Laws, Rev. J. M. Johnson, Rev. Henry Lee, and many others who did great good for God's church and for suffering humanity.

I will return to my church and Sunday School work in the District of Columbia and its vicinity. I was the Church Clerk for Union Wesley A. M. E. Z. Church for twenty-five years, and the superintendent of its Sunday School for thirty years.

I have been acquainted with all the bishops of that Church and a great many of its leading elders since I joined the church in 1853, sixty-five years ago. Some of the worthy prelates and leaders who have been my warm personal friends are: Bishops J. J. Clinton, J. J. Moore, C. C. Petty, C. R. Harris, J. W. Hood, J. W. Smith, J. Logan, J. W. Small, and Elders J. Harvey Anderson, Geo. W. Adams, Thos. Betters, R. J. Daniels, R. S. G. Dyson, and many others who have gone from my mind at this writing. I have had much of joy and happiness in my church life.

I am still in the Master's service. I am at present District Sunday School Superintendent of the Washington District of the Philadelphia and Baltimore Conference of the A. M. E. Z. Church. On August 12, 1918, I was eighty years old.

MARY L. MASON.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Semmes, John H. B. Latrobe, pp. 140-142.

[2] The African Repository, X, 104, and XII, 18.

[3] Coffin, Reminiscences, pp. 139-144.

[4] This personal narrative was secured from B.F. Grant, of Washington, D. C., by Miss Mary L. Mason.



BOOK REVIEWS

American Negro Slavery. By ULRICH BONNELL PHILLIPS. A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as determined by the Plantation Regime. D. Appleton and Company, New York and London, 1918. Pp. 529.

This book is both more and less than a history of slavery in America. It transcends the limit of the average treatise in this field in that it shows how the institution influenced the economic history of America in all its ramifications. It falls far short of being a complete history of slavery for the reason of the neglect of many aspects by the author. The book is successful as a compilation or digest of the sources of the history of slavery cast in the mind of a man of southern birth and northern environment in manhood.

The author furnishes adequate background for this work in tracing the slave trade, beginning with the exploitation of Guinea and proceeding to a detailed consideration of the maritime traffic. Slavery as it existed in the West Indies is portrayed in his account of the sugar industry. In the continental colonies it appears in his treatment of the tobacco industry, rice culture and the interests of the northern colonies. He shows how the struggle for the rights of man resulted in a sort of reaction against slavery in the North and the so-called prohibition of the African slave trade.

In his discussion of the introduction of cotton and the domestic slave trade, there are few facts which cannot be obtained from several standard works. His treatment of types of plantations, with reference to their management, labor, social aspects and tendencies, is more informing. The contrast between town and country slaves, the discussion of free Negroes, slave crime and the force of the law, do not give us very much that is new. On the whole, however, the book is a valuable piece of research giving a more intensive treatment of economic slavery than any other single volume hitherto published.

On the other hand, the book falls far short of giving a complete history of the institution of slavery. In the first place, the book is too much of a commercial account. The slaves are mentioned as representing both persons and property, but this treatise lacks proportion in that it deals primarily with the slaves as property in the cold-blooded fashion that the southerners usually bartered them away. Very little is said about the blacks themselves, seemingly to give more space to the history of the whites, who profited by their labor, just as one would in writing a history of the New England fisheries say very little about the species figuring in the industry, but more about the life of the people participating in it. It is evident that although a southerner, Mr. Phillips has lived so far from the Negroes that he knows less about them than those who have periodically come into contact with them but on certain occasions have given the blacks serious study. This is evidenced by Mr. Phillips' own statement when he says in his preface, that "a generation of freedom has wrought less transformation in the bulk of the blacks than might casually be supposed." This failure to understand what the Negroes have thought and felt and done, in other words, the failure to fathom the Negro mind, constitutes a defect of the work.

Another neglected aspect of the book is the failure of the author to treat adequately the anti-slavery movement. It was not necessary for him to give an extensive treatment of abolition but it is impossible to set forth exactly what the institution was without giving sufficient space to this attitude of a militant minority toward it. It was certainly proper for the author to say more about the northerners and southerners who arrayed themselves in opposition to the institution. In his chapter on the economic views of slavery this aspect was mentioned but not properly amplified. Some references to it elsewhere, of course, appear in parts of the book but, considering the importance of this phase of the history of slavery in America, one can say it has been decidedly neglected. The author, as he says in his preface, avoided "polemic writings, for their fuel went so much to heat that their light upon the living conditions is faint." It was not necessary also to avoid the controversy in which these writers participated. No one will gainsay the fact that persons who engage in controversy cannot be depended upon to tell the truth, but if the slavery dispute largely influenced the history of the country, it should have adequate treatment in a history of this kind.

* * * * *

John H. B. Latrobe and His Times. By JOHN E. SEMMES. The Norman, Remington Company, Baltimore, Maryland. Pp. 595. Price $6.00.

This is an extensive biography of a man born in Philadelphia and, after some adventures elsewhere, transplanted to Baltimore, where he became one of the first citizens of the land. His career as a cadet at West Point, his study and practice of law, his business interests, his travels and connections with learned and humanitarian societies all bespeak the many-sidedness of a useful citizen. The work contains a Latrobe genealogy and a topical index. It is well illustrated and exhibits evidences of much effort on the part of the author.

The part of the book most interesting to students of Negro history, however, is the chapter on African colonization, a subject which engaged the attention of Latrobe for many years and for which he became an influential promoter in serving as corresponding secretary of the Maryland Colonization Society and as president of the American Colonization Society. Although only one chapter of the book is devoted to this aspect of Mr. Latrobe's biography, it figured as largely in his life as any other public interest. He said: "I cannot now recall in order all that I did for it. It was the one thing then, and has ever been the one thing outside of my lawyer's calling, to which I have devoted myself." His biographer says that he spent about one quarter of his working hours during ten years of his life in advocating colonization. Dr. Daniel C. Gilman, President of Johns Hopkins University, said at a meeting of the Maryland Historical Society held in Latrobe's memory that "probably his greatest distinction outside of his professional life was acquired in promoting the cause of African colonization in ante-bellum days."

The author, however, instead of informing the reader as to what Latrobe did for colonization, laments the failure of this enterprise and endeavors to show that colonization or segregation in some form must be the solution of the Negro problem. In the chapter mentioned above he refers to this important work of Latrobe, not to set forth what he actually accomplished in this field, but to give the author's views. He proceeds to quote Thomas Jefferson, Henry Clay and Abraham Lincoln, and finally Horace Grady and Bishop H. M. Turner on colonization, with a view to convincing the reader that although Mr. Latrobe's effort at colonizing the Negroes in Africa failed, it must eventually be brought about since the two races will not happily live together and then the great work of Latrobe will stand out as an achievement rather than as a failure. This branching off into opinion rather than into a scientific treatment of facts renders the biography incomplete so far as it concerns one of the larger aspects of Latrobe's life. The reader must, therefore, go to the papers of Latrobe to trace his connection with colonization with a view to determining exactly how largely this interest figured in the life of a successful lawyer and business man and the extent to which he interested the people throughout the country. The public will, therefore, welcome a more scholarly biography of J. H. B. Latrobe.

* * * * *

The Mulatto in The United States. By EDWARD BYRON REUTER. Richard G. Badger, The Gorham Press, Boston, 1918. Pp. 417. Price $2.50 net.

This is the first work to deal especially with the people of color and will, therefore, attract some attention. It is chiefly valuable for the discussion which it will arouse rather than for the information given. It is an unscientific compilation of facts collected from a few sources by a man who has devoted some time to the study of the Negro but just about enough to misunderstand the race. His chief shortcoming consists in his misinformation. For scientific purposes the book has no value.

In the beginning of the work there is a discussion of mixed blood races in the old world, concluding with a treatment of the same in the West Indies and America. Considering the mulatto the key to the race problem in America, Mr. Reuter undertakes to show the extent of race mixture, its nature and growth. He discusses the intermarriage of the races, unlawful polygamy, intermarriage with Indians, intermixture during slavery and concubinage of black women with white men. He seems to know nothing of the numerous facts easily accessible in various works, which show that during slavery there was also a concubinage of white women with black men. In the next place, the author treats the Negro of today, depending mainly on a few unreliable sources of information such as the proceedings of certain Negro conventions, a Negro newspaper and the few books specially devoted to Negro history. In this it appears that he does not know that the chief sources of Negro history are not books bearing such titles, for the history of the race has not yet been written.

Mr. Reuter's conclusions are fundamentally wrong for the two reasons that he does not know who the mulattoes are and, although taking cognizance of the fact that science has uprooted the idea of racial inferiority, he is loath to abandon the contention that the mulatto is superior to the Negro. For example, in his chapter on leading men of the Negro race, in which he specifies whether they are blacks or mulattoes, he has classified as mulattoes a large number of Negroes who have practically no evidences of white blood and are commonly referred to throughout the country as the blacks of the Negro race. The title of the book, therefore, should not be The Mulatto but The Negro. It would then establish nothing as it does. Upon the careers of these black persons he has supported his theories as to the superiority of the mulatto. This encourages him, therefore, to intimate that because of their proximity to the racial characteristics of the white race they are in some respects superior to the blacks. Here we have the return of the ante-bellum proslavery philosopher disguised as a scientific investigator.

* * * * *

The Anti-Slavery Movement in Kentucky. By ASA EARL MARTIN, Assistant Professor of American History, The Pennsylvania State College. The Standard Printing Company of Louisville, Kentucky, 1918. Pp. 165.

In this volume there is an effort to bring out something new in the history of slavery. The author is mindful of the tendency of most writers of the history of slavery to direct their attention to the radical movements associated with the names of the leading abolitionists. His effort is to treat that neglected aspect of slavery having to do with the work of the gradual emancipationists. "These men, unlike the followers of Garrison, who were restricted to the free States," said he, "were found in all parts of the Union. They embraced great numbers of leaders in politics, business and education, and while far more numerous in the free than in the slave States, they nevertheless included a large and respectable element in Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and Missouri." He has in mind here, of course, the conservative slaveholders of the border States who had for a number of years felt that slavery was an economic evil of which the country should rid itself gradually by systematic efforts. Feeling that they contributed in the end a great deal to the downfall of the regime and in some respects exercised as much influence as the abolitionists, he has undertaken to set their story before the world.

The author begins with the first attack upon slavery, the early anti-slavery movement in Kentucky, the colonizationist idea, the work of the anti-slavery societies, and the efforts of the church to exterminate the evil. In the eighth and ninth chapters he treats more seriously the main question at issue, namely, exactly how men of that slave-holding commonwealth persistently endeavored to find a more rational means of escaping the baneful effects of the institution. His important contribution, therefore, is that abolition found little favor in Kentucky while gradual emancipation moved the hearts of men of both parties and even of slave-holders. How the struggle between these pro-slavery and anti-slavery parties culminated in 1849 in the defeat of the latter, is the concluding portion of the book. He shows that Kentucky exceeded most of the border slave States in permitting the freer and more extensive discussion of that question than any of the other commonwealths similarly situated.

Professor Martin's work, therefore, is a complement of Dr. I. E. McDougle's Slavery in Kentucky. Whereas Professor Martin deals primarily with the work of the gradual emancipationists, Dr. I. E. McDougle directs his attention largely to some other aspects of the question. Both of these works may be read with profit. In them the whole question has been adequately discussed and there will not soon be a need for further investigation in this field.



NOTES

Within a few years from the time the United States army will be reduced to a peace status, the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History will publish a scientific history of the Negro soldiers in the great war. As this effort will require a large outlay, it is earnestly desired that persons interested in the propagation of the truth will give this movement their support. A campaign for funds has begun and the encouragement hitherto received indicates that the amount necessary to finance this enterprise will be secured.

At present it is impossible to indicate exactly the extent of this work. It will be first necessary to make an extensive research into all of the sources of information as to the Negroes' participation in the war and when the data thus collected will have been properly digested, a more detailed description of the work may be forecasted. It is safe to say, however, that the work will consist of several volumes written by the Director of Research.

* * * * *

This same interest is set forth, as follows, in an item appearing in the December number of the Crisis:

"The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has appropriated funds and commissioned the Director of Publications and Research to collect the data and compile a history of the Negro in the Great War.

"Dr. DuBois has invited a number of Negro scholars, soldiers and officials to form an Editorial Board, which will be able to issue an authentic, scientific and definitive history of our part in this war.

"The personnel of this board will be announced later. Meantime, we want the active cooeperation of every person who can and will help. We want facts, letters and documents, narratives and clippings. Let us all unite to make the record complete. Correspondence may be directed to this office."

The following important announcement appeared in the December number of the Crisis:

TERCENTENARY

The husband of Pocahontas wrote in 1619: "About the last of August came a Dutch man of warre that sold us twenty Negars." From this beginning sprang the present twelve million Americans of Negro descent.

Next August will mark the Three Hundredth Anniversary of this vast transplantation of a race, which ranks easily as one of the most significant movements of mankind. Such an event can hardly be "celebrated," for it connoted too much of misery and human sorrow. On the other hand, it is too stern and meaningful a happening to be forgotten. For this reason, a group of thirty-three colored men met in New York, October 19, 1918, at the invitation of a committee appointed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

They determined to inaugurate "A Solemn Memorial of the Tercentenary of the Transplanting of the Negro race to the United States." In order, however, to give all sections and interests of the Negro race adequate voice and representation in these plans, this committee set about choosing a Committee of "Three Hundred and More," in whose hands the Memorial will take final shape. This Committee is now being chosen and will meet in New York early in January, 1919.

* * * * *

The Linchoten Vereeniging has published for Mr. E. C. Godee Mossbergen two volumes of Reizen in Zuid-Afrika in de Hollandse Tijd.

* * * * *

From the press of Longsman two volumes bearing on Africa have been published. One is by Sir Hugh Clifford, entitled the German Colonies, with special relation to the native population of Africa. The other, by H. C. O'Neill, is the War in Africa and the Far East, dealing largely with the conquest of the German colonies.

* * * * *

Houghton, Mifflin and Company have published a study entitled Lincoln in Illinois by Miss Octavia Roberts. This work is largely a compilation of the recollections of his contemporaries.

* * * * *

To extend the work of the Association the Director of Research is now making an effort to secure the cooperation of five persons who, like Mr. Julius Rosenwald, will contribute $400 annually to the support of this cause. Mr. Moorfield Storey and Mr. Cleveland H. Dodge have each pledged themselves to give this amount. It is earnestly hoped that other philanthropists will subscribe.



THE JOURNAL

OF

NEGRO HISTORY

VOL. IV—APRIL, 1919—NO. 2



THE CONFLICT AND FUSION OF CULTURES WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE NEGRO[1]

Under ordinary circumstances the transmission of the social tradition is from the parents to the children. Children are born into society and take over its customs, habits, and standards of life simply, naturally, and without conflict. But it will at once occur to any one that the life of society is not always continued and maintained in this natural way, by the succession of parents and children. New societies are formed by conquest and by the imposition of one people upon another. In such cases there arises a conflict of cultures and as a result the process of fusion takes place slowly and is frequently not complete. New societies are frequently formed by colonization, in which case new cultures are grafted on to older ones. The work of missionary societies is essentially one of colonization in this sense.

Finally we have societies growing up, as in the United States, by immigration. These immigrants, coming as they do from all parts of the world, bring with them fragments of divergent cultures. Here again the process of assimilation is slow, often painful, not always complete. In the case where societies are formed and maintained by adoption, that is by immigration, the question arises: How far is it possible for a people of a different race and a different culture to take over the traditions and social inheritance of another and an alien people? What are the conditions which facilitate this transmission and, in general, what happens when people of different races and cultures are brought together in the intimate relations of community life?

These questions have already arisen in connection with the education of the Negro in America and with the work of foreign missions. If the schools are to extend and rationalize the work they are already doing in the Americanization of the immigrant peoples, questions of this sort may become actual in the field of pedagogy. This paper is mainly concerned with the Negro, not because the case of the Negro is more urgent than or essentially different from that of the immigrant, but because the materials for investigation are more accessible.

Admitting, as the anthropologists now seem disposed to do, that the average native intelligence in the races is about the same, we may still expect to find in different races certain special traits and tendencies which rest on biological rather than cultural differences. For example, over and above all differences of language, custom or historic tradition, it is to be presumed that Teuton and Latin, the Negro and the Jew—to compare the most primitive with the most sophisticated of peoples—have certain racial aptitudes, certain innate and characteristic differences of temperament which manifest themselves especially in the objects of attention, in tastes and in talents. Is the Jewish intellectual, for example, a manifestation of an original and peculiar endowment of the Jewish race or is he rather a product of traditional interest and emphasis characteristic of Jewish people—a characteristic which may be explained as an accommodation to the long-continued urban environment of the race?[2] Is the Negro's undoubted interest in music and taste for bright colors, commonly attributed to the race, to be regarded as an inherent and racial trait or is it merely the characteristic of primitive people? Is Catholicism to be regarded as the natural manifestation of the Latin temperament as it has been said that Protestantism is of the Teutonic?

Here are differences in the character of the cultural life which can scarcely be measured quantitatively in terms of gross intellectual capacity. Historical causes do not, it seems, adequately account for them. So far as this is true we are perhaps warranted in regarding them as modifications of transmitted tradition due to innate traits of the people who have produced them. Granted that civilization, as we find it, is due to the development of communication and the possibility of mutual exchange of cultural materials, still every special culture is the result of a selection and every people borrows from the whole fund of cultural materials not merely that which it can use but which, because of certain organic characteristics, it finds stimulating and interesting.

The question then resolves itself into this: How far do racial characteristics and innate biological interests determine the extent to which one racial group can and will take over and assimilate the characteristic features of an alien civilization? How far will it merely take over the cultural forms, giving them a different content or a different inflection? This problem, so far as it is related to the lives of primitive peoples, has already been studied by the ethnologists. Rivers, in his analysis of the cultures of Australian people, has found that what we have hitherto regarded as primitive cultures are really fusions of other and earlier forms of culture.[3] The evidence of this is the fact that the fusion has not been complete. In the process of interchange it frequently happens that what Rivers calls the "fundamental structure" of a primitive society has remained unchanged while the relatively formal and external elements of alien culture only have been taken over and incorporated with it.

There are indications also that, where cultural borrowings have taken place, the borrowed elements have for the people who have taken them over a meaning different from what they had for the people from whom they were borrowed. W.J. McGee, in an article entitled "Piratical Acculturation," has given an interesting illustration of this fact.[4] McGee's observations of the Beri Indians go to show that they imitated the weapons of their enemies, but that they regarded them as magical instruments and the common people did not even know their names. There are numerous other illustrations of this so-called "piratical acculturation" among the observations of ethnologists. It is said that the Negroes in Africa, when they first came into possession of the white man's guns, regarded them as magical instruments for making a noise and used them, as the Germans used the Zeppelins and the newspapers, merely to destroy the enemy's morale.

No doubt the disposition of primitive peoples is to conceive everything mystically, or animistically, to use the language of ethnology, particularly where it concerns something strange. On the other hand, when the primitive man has encountered among the cultural objects to which civilization has introduced him, something which he has been able to make immediately intelligible to himself, he has at once formed a perfectly rational conception of it. Some years ago at Lovedale, South Africa, the seat of one of the first successful industrial mission schools, there was an important ceremony to which all the native African chiefs in the vicinity were formally invited. It was the introduction and demonstration of the use of the plow, the first one that had ever been seen in those parts. The proceedings were followed with great interest by a large gathering of natives. When the demonstration was finished one old chief turned to his followers and said with great conviction: "This is a great thing which the white man has brought us. One hoe like that is worth as much as ten wives." An African chief could hardly have expressed appreciation of this one fundamental device of our civilization in more pragmatic or less mystical terms. The wise old chief grasped the meaning of the plow at once, but this was because he had been pre-adapted by earlier experience to do so.

It is the subjective, historic and ultimately, perhaps, racial and temperamental factor in the lives of peoples which makes it difficult, though not impossible, perhaps, to transmit political and religious institutions to people of a different racial type and a different social tradition. William James' essay, "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings," in which he points out how completely we are likely to miss the point and mistake the inner significance of the lives of those about us, unless we share their expedience, emphasizes this fact. If then the transmission and fusion of cultures is slow, incomplete and sometimes impossible, it is because the external forms, the formulas, technical devices of every social tradition can be more easily transmitted than the aims, the attitudes, sentiments and ideals which attach to them are embodied in them. The former can be copied and used; the latter must be appreciated and understood.

For a study of the acculturation process, there are probably no materials more complete and accessible than those offered by the history of the American Negro. No other representatives of a primitive race have had so prolonged and so intimate an association with European civilization, and still preserved their racial identity. Among no other people is it possible to find so many stages of culture existing contemporaneously. It has been generally taken for granted that the Negro brought a considerable fund of African tradition and African superstition from Africa to America. One not infrequently finds in the current literature and even in standard books upon the Negro, references to voodoo practices among the Negroes in the Southern States. As a matter-of-fact the last authentic account which we have of anything approaching a Negro nature worship in the United States took place in Louisiana in 1884. It is described by George W. Cable in an article on "Creole Slave Songs" which appeared in the Century Magazine in 1886. In this case it seems to have been an importation from the West Indies. I have never found an account of a genuine instance of voodoo worship elsewhere in the United States, although it seems to have been common enough in the West Indies at one time.

My own impression is that the amount of African tradition which the Negro brought to the United States was very small. In fact, there is every reason to believe, it seems to me, that the Negro, when he landed in the United States, left behind him almost everything but his dark complexion and his tropical temperament. It is very difficult to find in the South today anything that can be traced directly back to Africa. This does not mean that there is not a great deal of superstition, conjuring, "root doctoring" and magic generally among the Negroes of the United States. What it does mean is that the superstitions we do find are those which we might expect to grow up anywhere among an imaginative people, living in an intellectual twilight such as exists on the isolated plantations of the Southern States. Furthermore, this superstition is in no way associated, as it is in some of the countries of Europe, southern Italy for example, with religious beliefs and practices. It is not part of Negro Christianity. It is with him, as it is with us, folk-lore pure and simple. It is said that there are but two African words that have been retained in the English language. One of these is the word Buckra, from which comes Buckra Beach in Virginia. This seems remarkable when we consider that slaves were still brought into the United States clandestinely up to 1862.[5]

The explanation is to be found in the manner in which the Negro slaves were collected in Africa and the manner in which they were disposed of after they arrived in this country. The great markets for slaves in Africa were on the West Coast, but the old slave trails ran back from the coast far into the interior of the continent, and all the peoples of Central Africa contributed to the stream of enforced emigration to the New World. In the West Indies a good deal was known among slave-traders and plantation owners about the character and relative value of slaves from different parts of Africa, but in the United States there was less knowledge and less discrimination. Coming from all parts of Africa and having no common language and common tradition, the memories of Africa which they brought with them were soon lost.

There was less opportunity in the United States also than in the West Indies for a slave to meet one of his own people, because the plantations were considerably smaller, more widely scattered and, especially, because as soon as they were landed in this country, slaves were immediately divided and shipped in small numbers, frequently no more than one or two at a time, to different plantations. This was the procedure with the very first Negroes brought to this country. It was found easier to deal with the slaves, if they were separated from their kinsmen.

On the plantation they were thrown together with slaves who had already forgotten or only dimly remembered their life in Africa. English was the only language of the plantation. The attitude of the slave plantation to each fresh arrival seems to have been much like that of the older immigrant towards the greenhorn. Everything that marked him as an alien was regarded as ridiculous and barbaric.[6] Furthermore, the slave had in fact very little desire to return to his native land. I once had an opportunity to talk with an old man living just outside of Mobile, who was a member of what was known as the African colony. This African colony represented the cargo of one of the last slave ships successful in landing in this country just at the opening of the war. The old man remembered Africa and gave me a very interesting account of the way in which he was captured and brought to America. I asked him if he had ever wished to return. He said that a missionary who had been in their country and spoke their language had visited them at one time. This missionary offered to send them back to Africa and even urged them to go. "I told him," said the old man, "I crossed the ocean once, but I made up my mind then never to trust myself in a boat with a white man again."

The fact that the Negro brought with him from Africa so little tradition which he was able to transmit and perpetuate on American soil, makes that race unique among all peoples of our cosmopolitan population. Other peoples have lost, under the disintegrating influence of the American environment, much of their cultural heritage. None have been so utterly cut off and estranged from their ancestral land, traditions and people. It is just because of this that the history of the Negro offers exceptional materials for determining the relative influence of temperamental and historical conditions upon the process by which cultural materials from one racial group are transmitted to another; for, in spite of the fact that the Negro brought so little intellectual baggage with him, he has exhibited a rather marked ethnical individuality in the use and interpretation of the cultural materials to which he has had access.

The first, and perhaps the only distinctive institution which the Negro has developed in this country is the Negro church, and it is in connection with his religion that we may expect to find, if anywhere, the indications of a distinctive Afro-American culture. The actual conditions under which the African slaves were converted to Christianity have never been adequately investigated. We know, in a general way, that there was at first considerable opposition to admitting the Negro into the church because it was feared that it would impair the master's title to his slaves. History records too that the house servants were very early admitted to churches and that in many cases masters went to considerable pains to instruct those servants who shared with them the intimacy of the household.[7] It was not, however, until the coming of the new, free and evangelistic types of Christianity, the Baptists and the Methodists, that the masses of the black people, that is, the plantation Negroes, found a form of Christianity that they could make their own.

How eagerly and completely the Negro did take over the religion of these liberal denominations may be gathered from some of the contemporary writings, which record the founding of the first Negro churches in America. The first Negro church in Jamaica was founded by George Liele, shortly after the close of the Revolutionary War. George Liele had been a slave in Savannah, but his master, who was a Tory, emigrated to Jamaica upon the evacuation of that city. Andrew Bryan in Savannah was one of Liele's congregation. He was converted, according to the contemporary record, by Liele's exposition of the text "You must be born again!" About eight months after Liele's departure, Andrew began to preach to a Negro congregation, "with a few white." The colored people had been permitted to erect a building at Yamacraw, but white people in the vicinity objected to the meetings and Bryan and some of his associates were arrested and whipped. But he "rejoiced in his whippings" and holding up his hand declared "he would freely suffer death for the cause of Jesus Christ." Bryan's master interceded for him and "was most affected and grieved" at his punishment. He gave Bryan and his followers a barn to worship in, after Chief Justice Osbourne had given them their liberty. This was the origin of what was probably the first Negro church in America.

George Liele and Andrew Bryan were probably not exceptional men even for their day. The Rev. James Cook wrote of Bryan: "His gifts are small but he is clear in the grand doctrines of the Gospel. I believe him truly pious and he has been the instrument of doing more good among the poor slaves than all the learned doctors in America."[8] The significant thing is that, with the appearance of these men, the Negroes in America ceased to be a mission people. At least, from this time on, the movement went on of its own momentum, more and more largely under the direction of Negro leaders. Little Negro congregations, under the leadership of Negro preachers, sprang up wherever they Were tolerated. Often they were suppressed, more often they were privately encouraged. Not infrequently they met in secret.

In 1787 Richard Allen and Absolom Jones had formed in Philadelphia the Free African Society, out of which four years later, in 1790, arose the first separate denominational organization of Negroes, the African Methodist-Episcopal Church. George Liele, Andrew Bryan, Richard Allen, and the other founders of the Negro church were men of some education, as their letters and other writings show. They had had the advantage of life in a city environment and the churches which they founded were in all essentials faithful copies of the denominational forms as they found them in the churches of that period.

The religion of the Negroes on the plantation was then, as it is today, of a much more primitive sort. Furthermore, there were considerable differences in the cultural status of different regions of the South and these differences were reflected in the Negro churches. There was at that time, as there is today, a marked contrast between the Upland and the Sea Island Negroes. Back from the coast the plantations were smaller, the contact of the master and slave were more intimate. On the Sea Island, however, where the slaves were and still are more completely isolated than elsewhere in the South, the Negro population approached more closely to the cultural status of the native African. The Sea Islands were taken possession of in the first years of the war by the Federal forces and it was here that people from the North first came in contact with the plantation Negro of the lower South. They immediately became interested in the manners and customs of the Island Negroes, and from them we have the first accurate accounts of their folk-lore and sayings.

The Sea Island Negroes speak a distinct dialect and retain certain customs which are supposed to be of African origin. It is, however, in their religious practices that we have the nearest approach to anything positively African. This has undoubtedly the characteristics of primitive ritual. But this does not mean that it is African in origin. It seems to me more likely that it is to be interpreted as a very simple and natural expression of group emotion, which is just beginning to crystallize and assume a formal character. The general tone of these meetings is that of a religious revival in which we expect a free and uncontrolled expression of religious emotion, the difference being that in this case the expression of the excitement is beginning to assume a formal and ritualistic character.

In the voodoo practices, of which we have not any accurate records, the incantations that were pronounced by the priests, contain strange, magic words, scraps of ancient ritual, the meanings of which are forgotten. Lafcadio Hearne, who knew the Negro life of Louisiana and Martinique intimately and was keen on the subject of Negro folk-lore, has preserved for us this scrap from an old Negro folk song in which some of these magic words have been preserved. Writing to his friend Edward Krehbiel he says:

"Your friend is right, no doubt about the 'Tig, tig, malaborn La Chelerna che tango Redjoum!'

"I asked my black nurse what it meant. She only laughed and shook her head. 'Mais c'est voodoo, ca; je n'en sais rien!' 'Well,' said I, 'don't you know anything about Voodoo songs?' 'Yes,' she answered, 'I know Voodoo songs; but I can't tell you what they mean.' And she broke out into the wildest, weirdest ditty I ever heard. I tried to write down the words; but as I did not know what they meant I had to write by sound alone, spelling the words according to the French pronunciation."[9]

So far as I know there are, among the plantation hymns, no such remains of ancient ritual, mystical words whose meanings are unknown, no traces whatever of African tradition. If there is anything that is African about the Negroes' Christianity, it is not African tradition but the African temperament which has contributed it. I assume, therefore, that what we find in the most primitive form of Negro Christianity is not the revival of an older and more barbaric religion but the inception of a new and original form of Christianity.

An interesting fact in regard to the religious practices of the Negroes of the Sea Islands, which has not, so far as I know, been recorded in any of the descriptions of that people, is the existence among them of two distinct religious institutions; namely, the church and the "praise house." The praise house is the earlier institution and represents apparently a more primitive and more characteristically Negro or African type. In slavery days, the church was the white man's place of worship. Negroes were permitted to attend the services and there was usually a gallery reserved for their use. Churches, however, were relatively few and not all the slaves on the plantation could attend at any one time. Those who did attend were usually the house servants. On every large plantation, however, there was likely to be, and this was characteristic of the Sea Island plantations, a "praise house" where the slaves were permitted to worship in their own peculiar way. It was here that the "shout" took place. After the Civil War, churches were erected and regular congregations of the Negro denominations were formed. The Negro churches, however, never wholly displaced the praise houses on Port Royal and some of the other islands. It is a singular fact that today, among the Negroes of Port Royal, at any rate, no one is converted in church. It is only in the praise houses that Negroes get religion. It is only through the praise house that one enters the church. The whole process involves, as I have been informed, not merely an "experience," the precise nature of which is not clear, but also an examination by the elders to determine whether the experience is genuine, before candidates are admitted in good standing as members of the congregation.

On the whole the plantation Negro's religion was a faithful copy of the white man's. It was content rather than the form which suffered sea change in the process of transmission from the white man to the black. What this content was, what new inflection and color the Negro slave imparted to the religious forms which he borrowed from his master we may, perhaps, gather from a study of the plantation hymns. These folksongs represent, at any rate, the naive and spontaneous utterance of hopes and aspirations for which the Negro slave had no other adequate means of expression. The first and most interesting account we have of these Negro spirituals is that of Col. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, in his Army Life in a Black Regiment.[10] He collected them from the lips of his own black soldiers as they sang them about the campfire at night. He was almost the first to recognize that these rude plantation hymns represented a real literature, the only literature the American Negro has produced, until very recent times.

Col. Higginson has compared the Negro spirituals to the Scotch ballads and to the folk songs of other races. It is, however, not so much their similarities as their differences which are interesting and significant. Negro folk songs are ruder and more primitive. The verses, often but not always rhymed, are, as in the case of the example given below, composed almost entirely of single phrases, followed by a refrain, which is repeated again with slight modifications, ending, not infrequently, in an exclamation.

An' I couldn't hear nobody pray, O Lord!

Couldn't hear nobody pray. O—way down yonder By myself, I couldn't hear nobody pray.

In the valley, Couldn't hear nobody pray, On my knees, Couldn't hear nobody pray, With my burden, Couldn't hear nobody pray, An' my Saviour, Couldn't hear nobody pray.

O Lord! I couldn't hear nobody pray, O Lord! Couldn't hear nobody pray. O—way down yonder By myself, I couldn't hear nobody pray.

Chilly waters, Couldn't hear nobody pray, In the Jordan, Couldn't hear nobody pray, Crossing over, Couldn't hear nobody pray, Into Canaan, Couldn't hear nobody pray.

In Negro folk songs the music and expression are everything. The words, often striking and suggestive, to be sure, represent broken fragments of ideas, thrown up from the depths of the Negroes' consciousness and swept along upon a torrent of wild, weird and often beautiful melody. One reason the verses of the Negro folk songs are so broken and fragmentary is that the Negroes were not yet in secure possession of the English language. Another explanation is the conditions under which they were produced. The very structure of these verses indicate their origin in the communal excitement of a religious assembly. A happy phrase, a striking bit of imagery, flung out by some individual was taken up and repeated by the whole congregation. Naturally the most expressive phrases, the lines that most adequately voiced the deep unconscious desires of the whole people, were remembered longest and repeated most frequently. New lines and variations were introduced from time to time. There was, therefore, a process of natural selection by which the best, the most representative verses, those which most adequately expressed the profounder and more permanent moods and sentiments of the Negro were preserved and became part of the permanent tradition of the race.