YALE UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
VOLUME I

BY THE SAME AUTHOR
Up from Slavery
Character Building
Working with the Hands .
The Future of the American '
Negro
The Story of My Life and
Work
Sowing and Reaping
Tuskegee and Its People
The Negro in Business

Copyright, igog, by George G. Rockwood
BOOKER T. WASHINGTON

The Story of the Negro
The
Rise of the Race from Slavery

By

BOOKER T. WASHINGTON

VOLUME I

New York
Doubleday, Page & Company
1909

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED, INCLUDING THAT OP TRANSLATION
INTO FOREIGN LANGUAGES, INCLUDING THE SCANDINAVIAN
COPYRIGHT, 1909, BY THE OUTLOOK COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, I909, BY BOOKER T. WASHINGTON
PUBLISHED, NOVEMBER, 1909

PREFACE
In writing this volume it has been my object to
show what the Negro himself has accomplished in
constructive directions. I have not undertaken to
discuss the many problems which have arisen
through the contact of the Negro with other races,
but to tell a simple, straight story of what the Negro
himself has accomplished in the way of attaining
t<|) a higher civilisation.
It ought to be explained, too, that I have not
u ndertaken to write any formal or detailed history
o f the entire Negro race. In many cases names of
worthy and successful individuals have been
omitted for want of space. In other cases I have
used names merely as illustrations of what the race
has been able to accomplish.
I want to make grateful mention, also, of the
sarvice which Dr. Robert E. Park has rendered
in the preparation of this volume. Without his
constant and painstaking assistance I could not have
accomplished the object which I have had in view.
I am deeply grateful, also, to Mr. Monroe N. Work
for valuable assistance.
If the reading of these chapters shall in any degree
inspire any Negro to make himself useful and sue-

vi THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
cessful in the world, and if in any degree what I have
written will cause any individuals, not members of
my own race, to take a more generous and hopeful
view of the condition and prospects of the Negro,
I shall feel that I have accomplished what I started
out to do in the writing of these pages.
Booker T. Washington.
Tuskegee Institute, Alabama.

CONTENTS— Volume I
PART I
THE NEGRO IN AFRICA
Chapter Page
I. First Notions of Africa  3
II. The American Negro and the Native African . 18
III. The African at Home  36
IV. The West Coast Background of the American Negro 57
PART n
THE NEGRO AS A SLAVE
V. The First and Last Slave Ship .... 85
VI. The First Slaves  107
VII. The Indian and the Negro  125
VIII. The Negro's Life in Slavery .... 144
IX. Slave Insurrections and the Negro "Peril" . . 171
X. The Free Negro in Slavery Days .... 192
XI. Fugitive Slaves  215
XII. Negro Settlements in Ohio and the Northwest
Territory  233
XIII. The Negro Preacher and the Negro Church . . 251
XIV. The Negro Abolitionists  279
XV. The Negro Soldier's Fight for Freedom . . 310

THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
VOLUME I
Part I
THE NEGRO IN AFRICA

:..-

The Story of the Negro
CHAPTER I
FIRST NOTIONS OF AFRICA
SOME years ago, in a book called "Up From
Slavery," I tried to tell the story of my own
life. While I was at work upon that book the
thought frequently occurred to me that nearly all
that I was writing about myself might just as well
have been written of hundreds of others, who began
their life, as I did mine, in slavery. The difficulties
I had experienced and the opportunities I had dis
covered, all that I had learned, felt and done, others
likewise had experienced and others had done. In
short, it seemed to me, that what I had put into the
book," Up From Slavery," was, in a very definite way,
an epitome of the history of my race, at least in the
early stages of its awakening and in the evolution
through which it is now passing.
This thought suggested another, and I asked
myself why it would not be possible to sketch the
history of the Negro people in America in much the
same way that I had tried to write the story of my
3

4 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
own life, telling mostly the things that I knew of
my own personal knowledge or through my acquain
tance with persons and events, and adding to that
what I have been able to learn from tradition and from
books. In a certain way the second book, if I were
able to carry out my design, might be regarded as
the sequel of the first, telling the story of a struggle
through two and one-half centuries of slavery, and
during a period of something more than forty years
of freedom, which had elsewhere been condensed
into the limits of a single lifetime. This is, then, the
task which I have set myself in the pages which
follow. There comes a time, I imagine, in the life of every
boy and every girl, no matter to what race they
belong, when they feel a desire to learn something
about their ancestors; to know where and how
they lived, what they suffered and what they achieved,
how they dressed, what religion they professed and
what position they occupied in the larger world about
them. The girl who grows up in the slums of a
large city, the Indian out in the wide prairie, the
"poor white" boy in the mountains of the Southern
states, and the ignorant Negro boy on a Southern
plantation, no matter how obscure their origin, each
will feel a special interest in the people whose for
tunes he or she has shared, and a special sympathy
with all that people have lived, and suffered and
achieved.

FIRST NOTIONS OF AFRICA 5
The desire to know something of the country
from which my race sprang and of the history of my
mother and her people came to me when I was still
a child. I can remember, as a slave, hearing snatches
of conversation from the people at the "Big House"
from which I learned that the great white race in
America had come from a distant country,from which
the white people and their forefathers had travelled
in ships across a great water, called the ocean. As
I grew older I used to hear them talk with pride about
the history of their people, of the discovery of
America, and of the struggles and heroism of the
early days when they, or their ancestors, were fight
ing the Indians and settling up the country. All
this helped to increase, as time went on, my desire
to know what was back of me, where I came from,
and what, if anything, there was in the life of my
people in Africa and America to which I might point
with pride and think about with satisfaction.
My curiosity in regard to the origin and history
of the dark-skinned people to which I belong, led me
at first to listen and observe and then, later, as I got
some schooling and a wider knowledge of the world,
to inquire and read. What I learned in this way only
served, however, to increase my desire to go farther
and deeper into the life of my people, and to find out
for myself what they had been in Africa as well as in
America. What I was first able to hear and to learn did not,

6 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
I confess, take me very far or give me very much
satisfaction. In the part of the country in which I
lived there were very few of my people who pre
tended to know very much about Africa. I learned,
however, that my mother's people had come, like
the white people, from across the water, but from
a more distant and more mysterious land, where
people lived a different life from ours, had different
customs and spoke a different language from that
I had learned to speak. Of the long and terrible
journey by which my ancestors came from their
native home in Africa to take up their life again
beside the white man and Indian in the New World,
I used to hear many and sinister references, but not
until I was a man did I meet any one, among my
people who knew anything definite, either through
personal knowledge or through tradition, of the
country or the people from whom my people sprang.
To most of the slaves the "middle passage," as the
journey from the shore of Africa to the shore of
America was called, was merely a tradition of a
confused and bewildering experience, concerning
whose horrors they had never heard any definite
details. Nothing but the vaguest notions remained,
at the time I was a boy, even among the older people
in regard to the mother country of my race.
In slavery days the traditions of the people who
lived in the cabins centred almost entirely about
the lives and fortunes of the people who lived in the

FIRST NOTIONS OF AFRICA 7
"Big House." The favourite stories around the
cabin fireside related to what this or that one had
seen on some distant journey with "old master,"
or perhaps to the adventures they had when master
and they were boys together.
It has often occurred to me that people who talk
of removing the Negro from the Southern states and |
colonising him in some distant part of the world dol
not reflect how deeply he is rooted in the soil. In/
most that the white man has done on this continent'
from the time Columbus landed at San Salvador
until Peary penetrated farthest North, the Negro
has been his constant companion and helper. Any
one who considers what the Negro has done, for
example, in the Southern states alone, in cutting
down the forests, clearing the land, tilling the soil
and building up the farms and the cities, will recog
nise that, directly and indirectly, his labour has been
an enormous contribution to the civilisation of the
Western world. Any one, on the other hand, who
will listen to the songs that we sing, and the anecdotes
that are told by the Negro and concerning him; any
one who will read the literature and the history of
the Southern states, will see that the Negro has j
contributed, not merely his labour, but something
also of his inner life and temperament to the
character and quality of the South.
Until freedom came the life of the Negro was so
intimately interwoven with that of the white man

8 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
that it is almost true to say that he had no separate
history. To the slave on the plantation the "Big
House," where the master lived, was the centre of
the only world he knew. It was after freedom came
that the masses of the Negro people began to think
of themselves as having a past or a future in any way
separate and distinct from the white race. There
were always some among them, like Frederick
Douglass, who were different in this respect
from the masses. They became the fugitive
slaves. After I began to go to school I had my first oppor
tunity to learn from books something further and
more definite about my race in Africa. I cannot say
that I received very much encouragement or inspira
tion from what I learned in this way while I was in
school. The books I read told me of a people who
roamed naked through the forest like wild beasts,
of a people without houses or laws, without chastity
or morality, with no family life and fixed habits of
industry. It seems to me now, as I recall my first definite
impressions of my race in Africa, that the books I
read when I was a boy always put the pictures
of Africa and African life in an unnecessarily cruel
contrast with the pictures of the civilised and highly
cultured Europeans and Americans. One picture
I recall vividly was in the first geography I studied.
It was the picture of George Washington placed side

FIRST NOTIONS OF AFRICA 9
by side with a naked African, having a ring in his nose
and a dagger in his hand. Here, as elsewhere, in
order to put the lofty position to which the white race
has attained in sharper contrast with the lowly
condition of a more primitive people, the best among
the white people was contrasted with the worst among
the black.
Naturally all this made a deep and painful impres
sion upon me. At this time I had the feeling, which
most of us are likely to have when we are young and
inexperienced, that there must be something wrong
with any person who was in any way, whether in
dress or manners, markedly different from the per
sons and things to which I was accustomed. It
seemed to me at that time a mark of degradation that
people should go about with almost no clothes upon
their backs. It did not occur to me that, possibly,
the difference in the customs of wearing clothes in
Africa and in America, and the difference in the
feeling that people in Europe and in Africa have
about clothes, was largely a matter of climate. It
seemed to me that a human creature who would
willingly go about with a ring in his nose must be a
very fierce and terrible sort of human animal, but
it never occurred to me to have any such feelings in
regard to the persons whom I had seen wearing
ornaments in their ears. In spite of all this, I still
held fast to the notion that a race which could
produce as good and gentle and loving a woman as

io THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
my mother must have some good in it that the
geographers had failed to discover.
It is hard for one who is a member of another race
and who has not had a like experience to appreciate
the impression that has often been made upon me,
and upon other members of my race as they have
listened, as inexperienced boys and girls, to public
speeches in which the whole Negro race was
denounced in a reckless and wholesale manner, or
as they have read newspapers and books in which
the Negro race has been described as the lowest and
most hopeless of God's creation. Sometimes, when
I was a young man, I was driven almost to despair by
the hard and bitter, and frequently, as it seemed to
me, unjust statements about my race. It was
difficult for me to reconcile the ruthless denunciations
which men, with whom I was acquainted, would
make in their public speeches, with the uniform
courtesy and kindness which they had shown to me
and others of my race in all their private relations.
Even now it is difficult for me to understand why so
many Southern white men will allow themselves, for
the purpose of enforcing an argument or in 'he heat
ofa political discussion, to go so far in the denuncia
tion ofthe Negro as to do injustice to their own better
natures and to their actual feelings toward coloured
people whom they meet, perhaps, in business, or
toward the servants employed in their own house
hold, the woman who cooks their food, looks after

FIRST NOTIONS OF AFRICA n
their house and cares for their children. I mention
these facts because they serve to illustrate the singu
lar relations of interdependence and opposition in
which the white and black people of the South stand
to each other to-day, all of which has had and is hav
ing a very definite influence upon the development of
my people in the South.
The hard and discouraging statements which I
was compelled to hear in regard to my race when I
was a boy, had, at different times, two very different
effects upon me. At first they sometimes made me
feel as if I wanted to go away to some distant part of
the earth and bury myself where I might be a stranger
to all my people, or at least where the thing that we
call race prejudice did not exist in the way it does in
the Southern states. Sometimes I thought of doing
something desperate which would compel the world,
in some way or other, to recognise what seemed to i
me the wrongs of my race. But afterward, and on
second thought, the effect was to drive me closer to
my own people, to make me sympathise with them
more intimately and more deeply, to feel toward
them as I did toward my own dear mother who had
brought me into the world when she and they were
slaves. In the end there grew up within me, as a result of
both these feelings, a determination to spend my life
in helping and strengthening the people of my race,
in order to prove to the world that whatever had

12 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
been its feelings for them in the past it should learn
to respect them in the future, both for what they were
and what they should be able to do. I made up my
mind, also, that in the end the world must come to
respect the Negro for just those virtues for which
some people say he is despised, namely because of
his patience, his kindliness, and his lack of resentment
toward those who do him wrong and injustice.
The feelings that divided my mind and confused
my purposes when I was a young man, have also
divided the members of my race. The continual
adverse criticism has led some of us to disavow our
racial identity, to seek rest and try our successes as
members of another race than that to which we were
born. I>L_laiL led othersjaf us to seek to get away
as far as possible from association with our own race,
and to keep as far away from Africa, from its
history and_ from its traditions as it was possible
for us to do.
My attention was first called to this disposition of
members of certain section of my race to get away
from themselves, so to speak; to be ashamed, in other
words, of their history and traditions, when I found
them bashful or lukewarm in regard to singing the
old songs which are the peculiar and unique product
of Negro life and civilisation in this country. I have
heard musical critics, whose judgment the world
respects, say that the old plantation hymns and songs
were among the most original contributions that

FIRST NOTIONS OF AFRICA 13
America has made, not only to music but to any one
ofthe so-called fine arts, and this not merely for their
intrinsic charm and beauty but for their qualities,
which make it possible for the trained musician to
develop out of them more elaborate and refined
musical forms, such as have been given to them
recently by the Negro composer, Coleridge-Taylor.
For myself, though it has been my privilege to hear
some of the best music both in Europe and America,
I would rather hear the jubilee or plantation songs
of my race than the finest chorus from the works of
Handel or any other of the great composers that I
have heard. Besides, this music is the form in which
the sorrows and aspirations of the Negro people, all
that they suffered, loved, and hoped for, in short their
whole spiritual life, found its first adequate and satis
fying expression. For that reason, if for no other,
it should be preserved.
What I have said here of my own feelings in regard
to my race is representative of the feelings of thou
sands of others of the black people of this country.
Adverse criticism has driven them to think deeper
than they otherwise would about the problems which
confront them as a race, to cling closer than they
otherwise would have done to their own people, to
value more highly than they once did, the songs
and the records of their past life in slavery. The
effect has been to give them, in short, that sort of
race pride and race consciousness which, it seems

14 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
to me, they need to bring out and develop the best
that is in them.
So it was that, thinking and studying about the
origin and the destiny of my people, and of all of the
forces that were working for and against them in my
own country and elsewhere, the desire to know more
about the history of my own people steadily increased
and I tried, as well as I was able, to understand the
Negro thoroughly, intimately, in those qualities
in which, as a race, he is weak, as well as in those
qualities in which he is strong.
This habit of observation and study of my own
race, in the way I have described, led me to inquire
into the personal histories of the men and women of
my own race whom I have met in all parts of the
United States. I sought to make myself acquainted
with their difficulties and their successes, to under
stand their feelings and their habits of thought, to
discover the inner drift and deeper currents of their
lives; for any one who knows to any extent the
character ofthe Negro people, knows that they have,
just as other people, an outside and inside, and
one cannot always tell what is going on deep down
in their hearts merely from looking in their faces.
Sometimes the Negro laughs when he is angry and
1 cries when he is happy. Very often, has it seemed
to me, the Negro himself does not know or fully
Understand what is going on in the depth of his own
mind and heart.

FIRST NOTIONS OF AFRICA 15
Perhaps it will not be out of place for me to say
here, at the beginning of this book, that the more
I have studied the masses of the race to which I
belong, the more I have learned not only to sym
pathise but to respect them. I am proud and happy
to be identified with their struggle for a higher and
better life.
Now and then I have read or heard it said that, in
consequence of the inconveniences, the hardships
and the injustices that members of my race frequently
suffer, because of the colour of their skins, there was
something exceptional and tragic about the situation
of the Negro in America, "the tragedy of colour,"
as one writer has called it. No doubt there is much
that is exceptional in the situation of the Negro, not
only in America, but in Africa. No one is more
willing than I to admit this to be true. But hard
ships and even injustice, when they concern the
relations of people who are divided by creed, by
class, or by race, are not exceptional. On the
contrary, they are common, and every race that has
struggled up from a lower to a higher civilisation has
had to face these things. They have been part of its J
education. Neither is there, as far as my experience'
goes, anything peculiarly tragic connected with the
life of the Negro, except in the situation of those
members of my race who, for one reason or another,
have yielded to the temptation to make a secret of
their lowly birth and appear before the world as

16 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
something other than they are. Every coloured
man knows, or has heard, of such cases, and in the
whole history of the Negro race there are few sadder
stories than some of these lives. I should say it was
only when an individual suffers from his own folly,
rather than the mistakes of others, that he is likely
to become the hero of a tragedy. This is just as true
of a race. The Negro race has suffered much
because of conditions for which others were respon
sible. As a rule Negroes have had very little chance
thus far, to make mistakes of their own. We have
not been free long enough. While the world hears
a great deal about " the tragedy of colour " and
other phrases ofthe so-called Negro problem, I have
observed that the world hears little, and knows,
perhaps, less about the Negro himself. This is true
of white people but it is also true of coloured people.
Some time ago, I had the privilege of meeting at
Cambridge, Mass., a group of about twenty-five
young coloured men who were studying at Harvard
University. I found that most of these young men
had a high standing in the University, were respected
by their professors and, upon inquiring in regard to
the subjects of their studies, I learned that several of
them had taken extended courses in history. They
seemed to know in detail, the story of Greek and
Roman and English civilisations, and prided them
selves upon their knowledge of the languages and
history of the French and German peoples. They

FIRST NOTIONS OF AFRICA 17
knew a great deal about the local history of New
England and were perfectly familiar with the story
of Plymouth Rock and the settlement of Jamestown,
and of all that concerned the white man's civilisation
both in America and out of America. But I found
that through their entire course of training, neither
in the public schools, nor in the fitting schools, nor
in Harvard, had any of them had an opportunity
to study the history of their own race. In regard to
the people with which they themselves were most
closely identified, they were more ignorant than they
were in regard to the history of the Germans, the
French, or the English. It occurred to me that this
should not be so. The Negro boy and girl should
have an opportunity to learn something in school
about his own race. The Negro boy should study
Negro history just as the Japanese boy studies Japan
ese history and the German boy studies German
history. Let me add that my knowledge of the Negro has
led me to believe that there is much in the story
of his struggle, if one were able to tell it as it deserves
to be told, that it is likely to be both instructive and
helpful, not merely to the black man but also to the
white man with whom he is now almost everywhere,
in Africa as well as America, so closely associated.
In the last analysis I suppose this is the best excuse
I can give for undertaking to tell "The Story of
the Negro."

CHAPTER II
THE AMERICAN NEGRO AND THE NATIVE AFRICAN
THE stories which I heard as a child were
what the average American Negro boy is
likely to hear in regard to his African an
cestors, and my chief reasons for repeating them is
that they were very largely mistaken and need to be
corrected. I had always heard Africa referred to as the
"Dark Continent"; I pictured it to myself as a
black, sunless region, with muddy rivers and gloomy
forests, inhabited by a people, who, like everything
else about them, were black. I supposed that the
nearer I got to the original African, the blacker I
would find him, and that all lighter coloured Negroes
I had seen were a spurious sort, whose blood had
been adulterated by mixture with some of the lighter
races. I was much surprised, therefore, to learn,
when I came to study the native races of Africa, that
the man, whom scientists believed to be the original
African, namely, the Bushman — and with him I
include his near relatives, the Dwarfs of Central
Africa — was not black but yellow; that the Negro,
the real black man, is after all merely one of the
18

THE AMERICAN NEGRO 19
earliest settlers of the continent, coming from some
where else, probably Asia, no one knows exactly
where or how.
In a recent volume upon "The Native Races of
South Africa," George W. Stow says in regard to
relations of the Bushmen and the other Negro people
of South Africa:
It seems somewhat surprising that so many writers have con
tinued to class these people [Bushmen] with the Negroes and other
dark-skinned species of men; whereas, if we are to judge from
the physical appearance, with a solitary exception of the hair, no
two sections of the human race could be more divergent. Their
closest affinities in this respect are certainly more frequently to be
found among those inhabiting the Northern Hemisphere than any
other portion of the world.*
On the other hand it appears from native traditions
that, with the exception ofthe Bushmen, all the native
peoples emigrated from the North to the South.
Other traditions state that, "when their forefathers
migrated to the South, they found the land without
inhabitants, and that only the game and the Bushmen
were living in it."
It is an indication of the low estimate which the
other South African tribes put upon the Bushmen
that they did not count them as "inhabitants."
One who studies the books about Africa will read
a great deal about the true Negro who lives, as the
books tell us, in the Soudan, a part of Africa that is

* "The Native Races of South Africa," George W. Stow, p. 6.

20 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
often referred to as Negroland. After I had learned
that the original African was not a black man and
not a Negro, in the strict scientific sense of the word,
I was led to explore, as well as I was able by the aid
of books and maps, that part of Africa where the
Negro is supposed to be at home. I wanted to find
more about the real black man.
The true Negro, I learned, is only one section of
what is ordinarily known as the Negro race; the
other is the Bantu, a mixed people, generally brown
in colour, who were the first invaders of South Africa,
driving out the original Bushmen, and gradually
extending themselves over most of that part of the
continent below the equator.
Negroland, stretching clear across the country,
or at least from the Atlantic to the Nile, as
far north as the Desert of Sahara and as far
south as the equator, is a wide region, and there
are many different tribes and many different
types of people inhabiting it. From the North
Arab invaders and merchantmen have entered the
country and mingled with the earlier and darker
races. Wave after wave of conquest has poured
itself out over the rich lands between the desert
and the mountains that divide these inland regions
from the coast and hundreds of years of slave-
raiding have so broken up and intermingled the
different racial stocks that it is as hard for one, not
an expert, to find the "true Negro" in Africa  that

THE AMERICAN NEGRO 21
is without any mixture of foreign blood — as it is to
find the colour line in the United States.
How difficult this sometimes is I may, perhaps,
illustrate by an experience of my own a few years
ago in Alabama. I was travelling at this time with
one of our students at Tuskegee, who was very light
in colour, when we had some distance to go in a
carriage. At the end of our journey, the owner of
the carriage, who was a white man, collected fifty
cents from me but called upon the student who was
with me for a dollar. After considerable argument
and some inquiry, we discovered that it was the
rule to charge white men a dollar for the same service
for which Negroes paid only fifty cents, and my
companion had been taken for a white man. But
even after this the student was not inclined to pay the
extra price. He seemed to think fifty cents was too
much pay for being a white man, at least for so short
a time. Upon another occasion, when an important exposi
tion was being held in one of our Southern states,
I recall that, in order to encourage Negroes to attend,
the exposition authorities decided that on certain
days of the week coloured people could be admitted
at half price. The white people were to pay the
regular price, fifty cents. The notion of the man
agers was that many coloured people were staying
away from the exposition because they were too
poor to pay the regular entrance fee, and that if the

22 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
price were lowered on certain days large numbers,
who could not otherwise afford it, would go. The
event proved that the calculations of the managers
were correct. Large numbers of coloured people
crowded into the exposition on Negro day, but at the
end of two weeks the doorkeepers had become des
perate. They wanted to throw up their jobs because,
as they said, it was too embarrassing work to pick
out, by their colour, the black people from the white.
As an illustration of the way in which the inter
mingling of the racial stocks has come about in
Africa, I may mention the fact that, when Dr. Barth,
in 1850, first visited the Negro city of Kano, which is
the most important trading centre of Western Sou
dan, he found it, a place of thirty to forty thousand
inhabitants, which at certain seasons of the year
was increased to sixty thousand, divided into
numerous quarters, each of which was inhabited by
a different type of people. One quarter was devoted
almost exclusively to Arab merchants; a second was
inhabited by Fellani, the ruling class; still other
quarters were taken up by different tribes of the
subject people, among them the merchant and
manufacturing people, the Hausas. In addition to
these, there were the slaves — gathered from all
portions of the country but principally from the
tribes living near the coast — who made up nearly
half the population.*
* "Discoveries in North and Central Africa," Henry Barth, P.H.D.,Vol.I, p. 507.

THE AMERICAN NEGRO 23
I cannot now remember where I first got the idea
that a man who was dark in colour was necessarily
more ignorant and in a lower stage of civilisation
than one who was lighter. At any rate there seemed
to be a general understanding to that effect, when 1 1
was a boy — at least among most people. Perhaps
it was due to the fact that on the plantations, as a
rule, lighter coloured slaves were more often employed
as house servants, and, because of their more
intimate association with their masters, were held
in higher esteem and had more opportunities for
advancement than the field hands. Perhaps it was
merely a reflection of the general opinion, which
slaves somehow imbibed, that everything white was
good and everything black was bad. I recall that
in the matter of religion, although, it may never have
been directly referred to, we, always understood that
God was white and the Devil was black.
In any case I grew up with the idea that in Africa ,
the lowest and most degraded type of man was black,/
and the blacker he was the further down in the scale
of civilisation I expected him to be. The fact seemp
to be that this is nowhere true in Africa. For
instance, the Hausas, the great trading people of the
Soudan, who live in walled cities and carry on a trade
extending over the whole region between the West
Coast and the Nile, are, according to Dr. Charles
Henry Robinson, "as black as any people in the
world." The Bushmen, on the other hand, who,

24 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
as I have already said, are yellow, have nowhere
risen above the hunting stage of civilisation.
, No one question, I may say right here, is more
frequently asked me than this: "What is the relative
ability ofthe Negro of mixed and unmixed blood ?"
I usually answer that my experience and observation
convince me that, where the environment has been
equally favourable, there is no difference in ability.
As an illustration I may say that at Tuskegee it has
been customary to award the honour of delivering
the valedictory address to the student making the
highest average in scholarship, industrial work and
deportment, and during a period of about twenty
years, ten of those who gained this honour were
Negroes of pure blood. I understand that at
Hampton Institute, in Virginia, where they have had
an experience covering a considerably longer period,
the same thing has been found to be true. I might
add that the late J. C. Price, during his lifetime by
all odds the leading and most prominent man of his
race in North Carolina and one of the most eloquent
men in the country, was pure black. The two lead
ing and most progressive men, in commercial and
business directions, in the State of Mississippi,
Isaiah T. Montgomery and Charles Banks, have no
mixture of blood. W. W. Brown, who founded the
largest and most successful fraternal organisation
that has ever existed among the black people in
America, was a pure black. It would not be

THE AMERICAN NEGRO 25
difficult to multiply examples of this kind, but there
is one other name that should not be omitted —
Major R. R. Moten, Commandant at the Hampton
Institute, Hampton, Va., who is one of the few
Negroes in this country who can trace his ancestry,
in an unbroken chain, back to his people in Africa.
The most conspicuous example of a success in liter
ature is,' perhaps, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, the poet,
who was a man of unmixed blood.
Let me add that, as my observation and ex
perience of human life have widened, I have learned
to doubt the wisdom of laying down any general
rules that fix for all times the. status of any people,
or determine in advance the progress they are able
or likely to make under conditions different from
those in which they happened, at the present time,
to be found.
I had a lesson in this respect a few years ago at
Tuskegee. It happened that in one ofthe geography
classes, which at that time were studying Africa, the
students came one day upon a passage in which the
Bushmen were described as the lowest type of
human being to be found in Africa. The writer
went on to describe this people in a way which made
our students feel that the Bushmen were about as
low, degraded and hopeless a type of human nature
as could well be imagined.
While the class was discussing this passage, a boy
in the back ofthe room raised his hand and indicated

26 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
that he had something to say. It turned out that
he had recently come from South Africa and knew
something of the natives, and he did not agree with
the statements in the geography. He went on to
say that his mother was a Bushwoman and that his
father was a Hottentot, a tribe which is generally
supposed to be closely related to the Bushmen. He
had been born in the bush. Afterward, while he
was still a small boy, his father and mother had
moved into town and he had been enabled in this
way to get something of an education. As the
young Bushman happened to stand near the head of
his class and spoke with personal knowledge of both
his father's and mother's people, as well as of the
other tribes of South Africa, what he had to say was
listened to with the greatest interest and attention.
When he followed it up by going to his room and
bringing back photographs with which to illustrate
his statement, both the class and the teachers were
convinced that, however much truth there might be
in the general description given in geographies, the
Bushmen who, for a hundred years or more, had been
hunted like wild beasts by the other stronger tribes
of South Africa, were to a very large extent, the
victims of circumstances.*
*" Every race of man, savage or civilised, that came in contact with them [the
Bushmen] appropriated their land without a single pretext of justification, and
waged a war of extermination against them as soon as they resisted or resented the
wrong that was done them. The pastoral tribes of natives and colonial flock-owners
could not appreciate the feelings of attachment which those who lived by the chase
alone had to their hunting-grounds, while the constant encroachments which were
made upon them impressed the untutored minds of the hunter race with the idea

THE AMERICAN NEGRO 27
This incident helped to confirm me in the belief
that in our efforts to help the weaker peoples of the
earth, we should not despair even in the case of the
most humble and backward of the human family.
In mathematics and in physical sciences it is possible
to make exact statements and lay down laws that are
universal and unchanging, but in what concerns
human life and history we cannot be so precise and
definite. Human beings are constantly doing
unprecedented things and it is usually, I suspect, the
unexpected and unprecedented things that men do
that are the most important.
As a boy I had been accustomed to hear Africa
referred to as one hears of Mexico, as if it were a
place where a comparatively homogeneous people
lives, having much the same customs, language, and
civilisation; in short, as if it were a country instead
of a continent. It was some time before I was able
to realise the vast extent and variety of the territory
over which the dark races of Africa are spread.
Africa is larger and considerably more varied in its
geographical structure than North America. The
territory occupied by the dark races of Africa, for
example is more than two times that occupied by the
United States.
that the whole world was arrayed against them. Their almost fierce love of
independence, their almost equally unalterable determination to maintain and die
in their primitive modes of life, utter contempt — at least of the majority of them —
for all pastoral or agricultural pursuits, made them to be looked upon by all the
larger and more robust of the African races as a species of wild animal, which it was
praiseworthy to exterminate whenever an opportunity offered." — "Discoveries in
North and Central Africa," Henry Barth, Ph. D., Vol. I, p. 21J.

28 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
I found also that I had only the vaguest notion of
the multitude of different peoples that inhabit Africa
and the variety of civilisations represented among
its inhabitants, not only among the more advanced
races along the Mediterranean but also among the
Negro peoples who still hold possession of nearly
seven-eighths of the continent. For instance, Sir '
Harry H. Johnston says of the people inhabiting
the English protectorate of Uganda, where a careful
study has been made ofthe native peoples:
Within the limits of the Protectorate are to be found specimens
of nearly all the more marked types of African man — Congo
Pygmies, and the low types of the Elgon and Semliki forests,
the handsome Bahima, who are negroids and are as much related
to the ancient Egyptians as to the average Negro, the gigantic
Turkana and the wiry and stunted Andorobo, the Apollo-like
Masai, the naked Nile tribes, and the scrupulous clothed Baganda.
These last again are enthusiastic, casuistic Christians, while other
tribes of the Nile provinces are fanatical Mohammedans. The
Bahima are burdened with a multiplicity of minor deities, while
the Masai and kindred races have practically no religion at all.
Cannibalism lingers in the western corners of the protectorate;
while natives of the other provinces are importing tinned apricots
or are printing and publishing in their own language summaries
of their history.*
Speaking of the popular notion of the African
' people to which I have referred, Professor Jerome
' Dowd, a Southern white man who resides in Char
lotte, N. C, author of a recent sociological study
of the African races, says:
**"" The Uganda Protectorate," Sir Harry H. Johnston, Vol. I, preface.

THE AMERICAN NEGRO 29
When the average European or American white man thinks or
writes of the Negroes he considers them as one race and attributes
to them certain traits which are supposed to be equally common to
all groups and to all localities. This is a mistaken view and may
be likened to an attempt to class all of the Aryan peoples as a
homogeneous race, having common features and traits. In fact
the Negroes of the world, just as the Aryans, are scattered over a
great area, live in different environments and have varied and
opposite mental and physical peculiarities. Indeed, the Negro
races ofthe world differ from each other even more widely than the
different branches of the Aryan stock. In Africa, for example,
the Negroes are distributed over the territory of much greater
extent and of greater physical diversity than is true of the Aryan
races of Europe. They also differ more than the Aryan races in
general appearance, in stature, physiognomy, and mental and moral
constitution. Hence, to speak of all Negroes in Africa as one
race, having common characteristics, is as misleading and is as
unscientific as if we should consider all Europeans and Americans
as of one race, and attribute to all of them the same traits.*
Another statement which one frequently hears,
made indiscriminately of the dark races of Africa,
is that they are constitutionally lazy and cannot be
induced to work. I shall have something to say
about the Negro as a labourer later in this work;
here it is, perhaps, sufficient to recall the fact that
in the greater portion of Africa the black man is still
almost the only labourer. It is he who builds the
railways and the bridges, digs the gold in the South
African mines, and collects the rubber in the Congo
forests. Miss Mary Kingsley, in her volume,
"Travels in West Africa," says of the Kruboys,
* Southern Workman, May, 1908.

30 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
"that they are the most important people of West
Africa; for without their help the working of the
Coast would cost more lives than it already does,
and would be in fact practically impossible." In
his book on Tropical Africa, Henry Drummond,
describing the way in which the natives come from
far and near to try the sensation of methodical work
on the building ofthe Cape to Cairo railway, says:
The severest test to which the Native of Central Africa has yet
been put is in the construction of ihe Stevenson Road between
Lakes Nyassa md Tanganyika. Forty-six miles of this road have
already been made, entirely by native labour, and the work could
not have been better done had it been executed by English navvies.
I have watched by the day a party of seventy Natives working upon
the road. Till three or four years ago, none had ever looked upon
a white man, nor till a few months previously had one of them ever
seen a spade, a pick-axe or a crow-bar. Yet these savages handle
these tools to such purpose that with only a single European
superintendent they have made a road full of difficult cuttings
and gradients, which would not disgrace a railway contractor at
home. The workmen keep regular hours, six in the morning till
five at night, with a rest at midday — work steadily, continu
ously, willingly and, above all, merrily. This goes on in the heart
of the tropics, almost under the equator itself, where the white
man's energy evaporates and leaves him so limp that he cannot be
an example to his men.*
The fact is, very little comes out of Africa, from an
.elephant's tusk to a diamond, that is not the result
ofthe labour ofthe African. This does not mean that
the native labourer is always as persistent and
intelligent as he should be, nor that native labour is,
* "Tropical Africa," Henry Drummond, p. 64.

THE AMERICAN NEGRO 31
everywhere and for all purposes, of the same value.
Experience has shown that one tribe is more useful
in one form of labour and another tribe in some other
form. What the African has needed most to make
him a better labourer has been the same incentive
to work which the white man had. Where one stick
sharpened forms a spear, two sticks make a fire, and
fifty sticks a place to live, there is little incentive to
systematic and persistent work. This completeness
andrnodeslyjof wants is, in my opinion,- at the bottom
oil the difficulty in Africa. The trutt> is that the
Negro in Africa or out of it develops in industrial
_efficiency, as other^ human beings do, in response to
his .needs : aj^Jiis_ogportumties.
I had this fact impressed upon me in a very
striking way during a recent visit to Cleveland,
Ohio, when I went to see a little brass foundry
run by a coloured man who is engaged in the
manufacture of those little brass wheels that run
along the trolley wires of our electric railways and,
by means of the trolley pole connect the cars with
the electric current.
The operation of casting these wheels, as I was
informed, requires unusual skill and experience,
because it is necessary to secure just the right degree
of hardness and toughness in the metal, and I was
the more interested in noticing the way in which
this man and his assistants did their work because
I recall that the art of working in iron was one of the

32 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
crafts that had been the special property, from time
immemorial, of the people of my race.
Dr. Franz Boas, Professor of Anthropology at
Columbia University, says that, "while much ofthe
history of early invention is shrouded in darkness,
it seems likely that at the time when the European
was still satisfied with rude stone tools, the African
had invented or adapted the art of smelting ore."
IJhad been reading a few days before a description
ofthe rude methods by which, with little more than
a simple bellows and a charcoal fire, native Africans
reduced the ores and forged the implements, many of
them of great beauty as well as usefulness, which one
may still meet with in many parts of Africa.
I am not sufficiently familiar with the detailed
methods of smelting ores and casting metals to be
able to even suggest the vast distance between the
primitive methods of the Native African and the
infinitely more intricate and complicated technique
fc>f the modern industry. The thought, the study
and the invention of thousands, perhaps of millions
of minds, have contributed to create the very condi-
\ tions of the modern iron industry. The contrast
between the Native African, working laboriously
in the solitude of the African forests, with his primi
tive tools, after a traditional method, and the
American Negro, in his own foundry, with the
advantage of all the machinery, knowledge, and the
skill that modern science and modern invention have

THE AMERICAN NEGRO 33
contributed to the improvement of iron industry,
is impressive enough. But this contrast does not
represent the difference in innate qualities in the
men themselves, but rather the difference in the
civilisations that surround them.
It probably requires just as much skill and just
as much patience to make one of those long and
graceful spearheads you may see on the end of an
African lance as it does to make the trolley wheel;
but it takes all our civilisation to make the trolley
wheel possible.
In what I have written thus far in regard to Africa
and African peoples I have sought to emphasise
the vastness of the territories which they inhabit;
the distances which divide them from one another;
the variety of physical types in which they are
represented; the complicated social relations that
sometimes exist among them, and the difficulty of
making general statements, laying down general
laws that hold good at all times and all places for all
of the African peoples.
There is, however, a tie which few white men can
understand, which binds the American Negro to the
African Negro; which unites the black man of
Brazil and the black man of Liberia; which is
constantly drawing into closer relations all the
scattered African peoples whether they are in the old
world or the new.
There is not only the tie of race, which is strong in

34 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
any case, but there is the bond of colour, which is
specially important in the case of the black man.
It is this common badge of colour, for instance, which
is responsible for the fact that whatever contributes,
in any degree to the progress of the American Negro,
contributes to the progress of the African Negro,
and to the Negro in South America and the West
Indies. When the African Negro succeeds, it helps
the American Negro. When the African Negro
fails, it hurts the reputation and the standing of the
Negro in every other part of the world.
I have rarely met in America any one of my race
who did not, in one way or another, show a deep
interest in everything connected with Africa. The
millions of Negroes in America are almost as much
interested, for example, in the future of Liberia and
Abyssinia, as they are in their own country. There
is always a peculiar and scarcely definable bond that
binds one black man to another black man, whether
in Africa, Jamaica, Haiti, or the United States.
One evidence ofthis interest ofthe Negro in America
in the Negro in Africa is the work that the
American Negro churches are doing in Africa to help
civilise and Christianise their brethren there. There
is scarcely any branch ofthe Negro church in America
that does not have an organisation through which it
is sending men and women and money into some
portion of Africa. The readiness with which some
of the strongest and brightest men and women in

THE AMERICAN NEGRO 35
America, who have had superior opportunities, are
ready to return to Africa and give their lives in an
effort to uplift their fellows, indicates the strong
racial tie that binds the black people of the world
together. On the other hand, it is true that Negroes in other
parts of the world are beginning to interest them
selves more and more in the fortunes of the Negro
in America. In a very marked degree the one
hundred and thirty millions of black people out
side of America are looking to the ten millions of
Negroes in the United States for guidance and for
inspiration. They are watching closely the progress
of these American Negroes. They are beginning to
realise that if it is possible for the ten million black
men in America, surrounded by modern machinery
and all the other forces of civilisation, to get into line
and march with the procession, that it is also pos
sible for them, in time, to follow, somewhat more
slowly, perhaps, but in the same direction.

CHAPTER III
THE AFRICAN AT HOME
SOME time during the latter part of 1899,
or the early part of 1900, I received through
the German Embassy, in Washington, a
letter saying that the German Colonial Society
wanted a number of students from Tuskegee to go
out to German West Africa to teach the natives how
to produce cotton by American methods.
While I had been a student at Hampton Institute,
Virginia, it was one of my ambitions, as it has been
the ambition of a great many other Negro students
before and since, to go out some day to Africa as a
missionary. I believed that I had got hold at
Hampton of a kind of knowledge that would be
peculiarly helpful to the Native Africans and I felt
that my interest in the people out there, vague and
indefinite as it was, would in some way or other help
and inspire me in the task of lifting them to a higher
plane of civilisation.
After I went to Tuskegee I gave up my ambition
of going to Africa. I had not been long there,
however, before I was convinced that I could, per
haps, be of larger usefulness through the work I was
36

THE AFRICAN AT HOME 37
able to do in this country, by fitting, for the same
service I wanted to perform, Africans who came as
students to America, and by sending from Tuskegee
men and women trained in our methods, as teachers
and workers among the native peoples. The
request I received through the German Embassy
was, therefore, particularly welcome to me, for
it gave me an opportunity to realise, in a direct
way, the ambition I had never wholly lost
sight of.
A group of our best students was selected for this
African mission. They went out to Togoland, West
Africa, and began to establish stations in different
points in that colony, and then started in to grow
cotton, using the native labour as far as they were
able, but necessarily, at first, doing a large part ofthe
work themselves.
They met all sorts of difficulties. They found the
American cotton was not suited to African soil, and
were compelled to cross it with native varieties in
order to produce an hybrid type that possessed the
valuable qualities of both. They had considerable
difficulty, at first, with the native labourers. I
remember that John Robinson, one of the party who
remained to carry out the work after the others had
returned home, told me of an incident, which made
me see, in a way in which I had not been able to see
before, that the education of the native African in
the white man's civilisation must begin much farther

38 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
back and with much simpler matters than most of us
are likely to imagine.
Among the other things this party had taken out to
Africa was a wagon, which had been manufactured
by the students at Tuskegee. While this wagon was
being unloaded and put together, the native porters
looked on with interest, never having seen anything
that went on wheels before. After the wagon had
been loaded ready to start the attention of members
of the party was turned for a time in another
direction. When they came back to the wagon
they were greatly surprised to see that the natives
had unloaded and taken it apart, and were busily
engaged in fastening its wheels and other parts on
their heads, preparatory to carrying them, along with
the other goods, to their destination in the interior.
Mr. Robinson explained to them, through an inter
preter, the use of the wagon, and tried to show them
the advantage of it. They were interested in seeing
this curious machine of the white man work, but
they were quite positive in their conviction that the
good old-fashioned way of carrying everything on
their heads was the better. Now that roads have
been opened up and the natives have actually seen a
wagon worked, Mr. Robinson tells me they take it
as a hardship if they are asked to carry anything.
During the time this experiment in educating the
Native African was going on, I followed its progress,
through the accounts I received from students on

THE AFRICAN AT HOME 39
the ground and from the reports of the German
Colonial Society, with close attention and intense
interest. It was the nearest I had come, up to that
time/ to anything like a practical and intimate
acquaintance with the African at home.
Among the first thing the Tuskegee students did
in Africa was to build for themselves comfortable
houses, to supply them with well made but simple
furniture, to put in these houses not only the necessi
ties, but some of the comforts of life. I was inter
ested to note that, within a few months the Natives
and, especially the women, had gotten the notion
that they wanted the same kind of houses and some
ofthe same kind of furniture. The women naturally '
made their wants known to the men, and before these
students had been in Africa half a dozen years the
Natives in their vicinity had reached the point where,
with the training they had received and with the
desire they had gained for better homes to live in,
better tools to work with, and for all the other advan
tages which the black man in America seemed to
possess over the black man in Africa, they were
performing about as satisfactory service as the same
class of human beings would have performed in any
other part ofthe world.
Native Africans have been sent from Africa to
Tuskegee. Our Tuskegee students have returned
from time to time and made their reports of
successes. Thus in a very vital and practical manner

40 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
has our institution become connected with the
progress and civilisation of our brethren in the
darker continent.
Some time ago in looking through the pages of
some magazine or book of science, I ran across a
statement that, when men first began to study the
stars systematically and with telescopes, they dis
covered a certain class of errors in their calculations
which were due to the personality of the observers.
One man's brain, acting quicker, would record the
stars as moving more rapidly; another would record
them as moving more slowly than their actual
movements. It became necessary, therefore, in
order to make the calculations correct, to study and
take account of these personal aberrations.
It has occurred to me, in the course of my reading
about the African peoples, that it would contribute
much to the accuracy ofour knowledge, if some study
were made of the sort of errors that creep into our
observations of human beings. Important as it is
that we should have a correct knowledge of the stars,
it is more important that we should have an accurate
knowledge of men. For instance, I have noticed that
a man born and reared in the Southern states
invariably looks upon the Negro with different eyes
from the man born and reared in the Northern
states. In their reports and interpretations of the
simplest facts they are often widely divergent in their
views. Even when they agree with each other about

THE AFRICAN AT HOME 41
the Negro, for instance, it has often seemed to me
that their agreement was due to a misunderstanding.
Frequently amusing situations occur in the dis
cussion of the Negro. Many of these have occurred
in my presence. It seldom occurs, for instance, when
I am travelling on a train that the discussion
does not turn on the question as to what is the
physical, moral, and mental effect on the individual
when he is of mixed blood. One man will argue
very seriously that there should be no mixture of
blood, for the reason that he is quite sure that wher
ever there is a mixture it results in a weakened
individual, bodily, mentally, morally. Within ten
or fifteen minutes another man will begin, in the
absence of the first, to discuss the same subject and
will, in an equally serious and positive manner,
state that wherever in all history the Negro has been
able to accomplish anything of value to the world
it had been because he had some tincture of white
blood in his veins.
During these discussions I am sometimes reminded
of an incident that occurred during my early boyhood,
which, because it illustrates a phase in the develop
ment of the Negro in America, I may be permitted
to mention it here. Very soon after the days of
slavery and even before the public school system had
been organised, there arose in the community a
discussion among our people as to whether the world
was round or flat. It lasted for several days, and

42 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
divided the community into two pretty stubborn
factions. During the discussion a coloured man
came along, a school teacher, who had very little
actual learning, and made application to open a
school. The question as to whether the world was
flat or round was submitted to him, or rather he was
asked how he would treat the question in the school
room, and he replied that he was prepared to teach
either "flat," "round," or just as the individual
family requested.
The continual discussion of the Negro often
reminds me, as I have stated, of this story. The
Negro question or the Negro himself seems able to
be accommodated to almost any and every shade
of opinion. That explains how two men with
diametrically opposite views sometimes come to an
agreement about the Negro; one thinks he should be
flat and not round, the other thinks he should be
round and not flat; but both agree that there is
something wrong with him.
If it is difficult for people ofthe same race to under
stand one another when they are talking about things
in regard to which their experience has been different,
it is still more difficult for one race to pass judgment
upon another, particularly when these races differ
so widely from one another^, as the white man and
the Negro. Dr. Franz Boas has called attention to
this difficulty in a paper before the American Associa
tion of Science. "As the white race is the civilised

THE AFRICAN AT HOME 43
race," he says, " every deviation from the white type
is considered as the characteristic feature of a lower
type; . . . the greater the difference between
the intellectual, emotional and moral processes and
those found in our civilisation, the harsher the
judgment ofthe people."*
Under these circumstances it is natural enough
that the black man, who is furthest removed physi
cally from the white man, should suffer more than
others from the sort of prejudice Professor Boas des
cribes. With the possible exception ofthe Jew, no race
has ever been subjected to criticisms so searching and
candid, to state it mildly, as the Negro. And yet I
have found that those who have known and under
stood the Negro best, have usually been kindest in
their judgment of him and most hopeful of his future.
For instance, the late Miss Kingsley, an English
woman, who seems to have entered deeper into
the mind of the West African than most others,
says of the West Coast Negro:
The true Negro is, I believe, by far the better man than the
Asiatic; he is physically superior, and he is more like an English
man than the Asiatic; he is a logical, practical man, with feelings
•that are a credit to him, and are particularly strong in the direction
of property. He has a way of thinking he has rights whether he
likes to use them or no, and he will fight for them when he is
driven to it. Fight you for a religious idea the African will not;
he is not the stuff you make martyrs out of, nor does he desire to
shake off the shackels ofthe flesh and swoon into Nirvana. . . .

* " Proceedings of the American Association for the Advancement of Science,"
Vol. XLIH., 1894.

44 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
His make of mind is exceedingly like the make of mind that
thousands of Englishmen ofthe stand-no-nonsense, Englishman's-
house-is-his-castle type. Yet, withal, a law-abiding man, loving
a live Lord, holding loudly that women should be kept in their
place, yet often grievously henpecked by his wives, and little better
than a slave to his mother whom he loves with the love he gives
to none other.*
Concerning the affection which the African has
for his mother, Miss Kingsley quotes the Rev.
Leighton Wilson.
Mr. Wilson was born and educated in South
Carolina. In 1834 he went to Africa as a mission
ary and remained there for eighteen years, in close
contact with the civilisation of the forefathers of the
present American Negroes. He was among the first
missionaries to Africa. He remained in the active
service of the Southern Presbyterian Church until
his death in 1886. While in Africa he studied the
languages and reduced the native tongue of some of
the tribes to writing. He says:
Whatever other estimate we may form of the African, we may
not doubt his love for his mother. Her name, whether dead or
alive, is always on his lips and in his heart. She is the first thing he
thinks of when awakening from his slumbers and the last thing he
remembers when closing his eyes in sleep; to her he confides secrets
which he would reveal to no other human being on the face ofthe
earth. He cares for no one else in time of sickness, she alone must
prepare his food, administer his medicine, perform his ablutions,
and spread his mat for him. He flies to her in the hour of his
distress, for he well knows if all the rest of the world turn against
him, she will be steadfast in her love, whether he be right or wrong.
* " West African Studies," p. 373.

THE AFRICAN AT HOME 45
If there be any cause which justifies a man using violence towards
one of his fellowmen it would be to resent an insult offered to his
mother. More fights are occasioned among boys by hearing
something said in disparagement of their mothers than all other
causes put together. It is a common saying among them, if a
man's mother and his wife are both on the point of being drowned,
and he can save only one of them, he must save his mother, for
the avowed reason if the wife is lost he may marry another, but he
will never find a second mother. . . .*
Mr. Wilson points out that the Africans of the
Grain Coast have long since risen above the hunting
life; they have fixed habitations, cultivate the soil
for means of subsistence, have herds of domestic
animals, construct for themselves houses which are
sufficient to protect them alike from the scorching
heat of the sun and the chilly damps of the night;
they show a turn for the mechanical arts, and in the
fabrication of implements of warfare and articles of
ornament they display surprising skill.
"As we see them in their native country," he
continues, "they show none of that improvidence
or want of foresight for which they have almost
become proverbial in this country, which shows that
circumstances have made them what they are in this
respect. They plant their crops with particular
reference to the seasons of the year, and they store
away provisions for their future wants with as much
regularity as any people in the world, so that times
of scarcity and want are less frequent among them

?"Western Africa," pp. 116, 117.

46 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
than among others who pretend to a much higher
degree of civilisation."
Referring to the farms of the Kru people, the
tribes from which the seamen of the West Coast
are drawn, Mr. Wilson says:
The Natives of the Kru country cultivate the soil to some
considerable extent. Their farms are generally two or three
miles distant from the villages, and are made at this distance to
keep them out of the reach of their cattle. Nearer to the
villages they have inclosed gardens in which they raise small
quantities of plantains, corn, bananas, peas, beans, and a few
other vegetables.
Of the mechanical skill of the neighbouring
Ashanti people, whose territory is in the English
Gold Coast colony, Mr. Wilson tells us, "that they
manufacture gold ornaments of various kinds and
many of them of much real taste. They fabricate
swords, agricultural implements, wooden stools, and
cotton cloths of beautiful figures and very substantial
texture."* From time to time, as Tuskegee graduates have
returned from the various stations in Africa in which
they have been at work, they have brought back with
them specimens of native workmanship in iron,
wood and leather. I have frequently been impressed
with the beauty of some of the designs that native
craftsmen have worked out upon their spears and in
their homespun cotton cloth. The leather tanned
by some of these native tanners is often surprisingly
* " Western Africa," p. 187.

THE AFRICAN AT HOME 47
beautiful in colour, design and finish. Some of
the specimens of the native handicrafts have been
placed on exhibition in the museum at Tuskegee, and
in one or two cases we have been able to reproduce
in our classes in basketry the shapes and designs of
some of these native articles.
"Nothing, perhaps," says Professor Franz Boas,
"is more encouraging than a glimpse of the artistic
industries of the native African. A walk through
the African museums of Paris and London and
Berlin is a revelation. I wish you could see the
sceptres of African kings, carved of hardwood and
representing artistic form; or the dainty basketry
made by the people of the Kongo River and of the
region of the Great Lakes of the Nile, or the grass
mats of their beautiful patterns.
"Even more worthy of our admiration," he
continues, "is the work of the blacksmith who
manufactures symmetrical lance heads, almost a
yard long, or axes inlaid with copper and decorated
with filligree. Let me also mention in passing the
bronze castings of Benin and the West Coast of
Africa, which, although perhaps due to Portuguese
influences, have so far excelled in technique any
European work, that they are even now almost
inimitable."* The blacksmith seems to occupy a very important
place in the social life of Africa. Travellers have
? Atlanta University Leaflet, No. 19.

48 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
found these smiths at work in the most remote and
inaccessible parts of the continent, where they may
be seen collecting the native iron and copper ores;
smelting and reducing them, and then working them
in their primitive forges, into hoes, knives, spear and
arrow heads, battle-axes, wood-working tools, rings
and hatchets.
Just as everywhere in the Southern states to-day,
especially in the country districts, at the crossroads,
or near the country store, one finds the Negro black
smith, so, in some of the remote regions in Africa,
every village has, according to its size, from one to
three blacksmiths. Each smith has an apprentice
and his art is a craft secret most zealously guarded.
Samuel P. Verner, like the Rev. Leighton Wilson,
a Southern white man and missionary of the
Southern Presbyterian church, says in his book,
"Pioneering in Central Africa," of these African
blacksmiths: The proficiency of some of these men is astonishing. I
frequently have my work done by them and their skill amazed
me. They have the art of tempering copper as well as of making
soft steel. Some of the objects of their craft which I placed in
the National Museum at Washington are revelations to the
uninitiated in their remarkable complexity and variety.
Mr. Verner's mission station was in the Kongo
Free State, on the upper courses of the Kasai, in
the heart of savage Africa where the people have
never been touched by the influences of either the
European or Mohammedan civilisations. Speaking

THE AFRICAN AT HOME 49
of the carving and wood working of some of these
tribes, Mr. Verner says:
Some of these Africans are wonderfully adept. They can
produce a geometrical figure whose perfection is amazing. Their
tools are of the simplest, yet they can carve figures of men and
animals, pipes, bowls, cups, platters, tables, and fantastic images.
I saw a chair carved out of a solid block of ebony. Their work
in ivory is also rare and valuable and I believe their talent in
those lines ought to be developed.
Throughout West Africa, wherever the European
has not established his trading factory, the native
market is an institution which is a constant source
of surprise to travellers. These markets are the
native clearing houses for the produce of the soil
and the fabricated articles of the land. They are
generally the centre of the trading operations of a
district ranging from ten to thirty miles. Here will
be seen vegetables and fruit, poultry, eggs, live pigs,
goats, salt of their manufacture, pottery of their own
make, strips of cloth, grass-woven mats, baskets
and specimens of embroidery and art work, besides
numberless other articles of various sorts and kinds
which are essential to African comfort and well being.
From the small group of native merchants who
travel with their wares within a radius of thirty or
fifty miles, to the large caravans of the Hausa
traders who cross the Desert of Sahara, and at times
reach the Eastern and Western confines of the
continent, everywhere in Africa the black man is a
trader.

So THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
Among the more primitive tribes the village markets
are confined to two or three hundred buyers or sellers,
but in the greater markets like that of Kano and
Upper Nigeria, twenty or thirty thousand traders
will be gathered together at certain seasons of the
year. It is an interesting fact, as indicating the
African's interest in trade, that in many tribes the
market place is considered sacred ground, and, in
order that trade may be carried on there with
out interruption, no strife is permitted within its
precincts.
__Professor Boas, writing in 1904, said:
The Negro all over the African continent is either a tiller of
the soil or the owner of large herds; only the Bushmen and a few
of the dwarf tribes of Central Africa are hunters. Owing to the
. high development of agriculture, the density of population of
: Africa is much greater than that of primitive America and
consequently the economic conditions of life are more stable.
It may be safely said that the primitive Negro community
with its fields that are tilled with iron and wooden implements,
with its domestic animals, with its smithies, with its expert wood-
carvers, is a model of thrift and industry, and compares favour
ably with the conditions of life among our own ancestors.*
It is just as true in America, as it is in Africa, that
those who know the Negro intimately and best have
been, as a rule, kindest and most hopeful in their
judgments of him. This may seem strange to those
who get their notion of the Southern white man's
opinion of the Negro, from what they see in the
press and hear from the platform, during the heat of a
* Ethnical Record, March 1904.

THE AFRICAN AT HOME 51
political campaign, or from the utterances of men who,
for one reason or another, have allowed themselves
to become embittered. Southern opinion of the
Negro, particularly as it finds expression in the press
and on the platform, is largely controversial. It has
been influenced by the fact that for nearly a hundred
years the Negro has been the football in a bitter
political contest, and there are a good many Southern;
politicians who have acquired the habit of berating
him. The Negro, in the South, has had very
little part in this controversy, either before or since
the war, but he has had a chance to hear it all, and
it has often seemed to me, if, after all that has taken
place, the Negro is still able to discuss his situation
calmly, the white man should be able to do so
also. But that is another matter.
Nineteen times out of twenty, I suppose, a stranger
coming South, who inquires concerning the Negro
from people he meets on the train or on the highways,
will get from these men pretty nearly the same
opinion he has read in the newspapers or heard in
political speeches. These criticisms of the Negro
have been repeated so often that people have come
to accept and repeat them again without reflection.
The thing that shows this to be true is, that the very
men who denounced all Negroes will very likely "1
before the conversation is ended tell of one, and
perhaps, half a dozen individual Negroes in whom
they have the greatest confidence.

52 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
A Southern white man may tell you, with the
utmost positiveness, that he never knew a single
Negro who would not steal — except one. Every
white man knows one Negro who is all right — a
model of honesty, industry, and thrift — and if he
tries to remember, he will think of other Negroes in
whom he has the greatest confidence, and for whom
he has a very genuine respect. Considering that
there are a good many more white people in the
South than there are Negroes, it seems to follow,
.logically, that in spite of what one hears about the
Negro in general, there are a good many individual
Negroes who are pretty well thought of by their
iwhite neighbours.
It is well to take into consideration, also, that
when Southern people express their confidence and
their respect for an individual black man, they are
speaking of one whom they know: on the contrary,
when they denounce in general terms the weakness
and the failure ofthe Negro race, they have in mind a
large number of whom they know a great deal less.
I do not mean to suggest that there is no justifica
tion for the criticism ofthe Negro that one often hears
in the South. I have never thought or said that the
Negro in America was all that he should be. It
does seem to me, however, that the Negro in the
United States has done, on the whole, as well as he
was able, and as well as, under all the circumstances,
could be reasonably expected.

THE AFRICAN AT HOME 53
It was not unusual, particularly in the early part
of the last century, to find among the slaves men
who could read and write Arabic and were learned
in the lore ofthe Koran. W. B. Hodgson, a South
ern slave holder, published in 1857 a paper in which
he gave an account of a Negro slave who had trans
lated the gospel of John into Negro dialect, using;
"the letters of the Koran, the book of his first religi'J
ious instruction, in transcribing the gospel, the book
of his second instruction and conversion, and in the
adopted dialect of his land of captivity." Most of
the slaves came from what were known as the pagan
tribes of the coast. In spite of the fact that so large
a proportion of the slaves came from these interior
tribes it was not until Mungo Park made his famous
first journey to the interior of the Soudan in 1795
that the Western world knew anything definite
about that region. The eminent German traveller
and scholar, Dr. Henry Barth, first reached the
famous commercial city of Kano in 1850, and until
1900 it was said not more than five Europeans had
ever visited that city. The accounts that travellers
give of the region and the people present a picture
of African life so different from that ofthe coast cities
that I am tempted to quote at some length from these
descriptions. Several peoples, of strikingly different characteris
tics, contributed to form the several loosely connected
states which now form the British Colony of North-

54 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
ern Nigeria, of which Kano is the principal city.
The most important and interesting of these are the
Hausas and the Fulahs or Fellani, as they are some
times called. The Fulahs are noted for their military
spirit; the Hausas for their commercial enterprise.
l; One has a light complexion and the other is dark.
The Fulahs are an equestrian people, with a
cavalry armed with lances and swords. They are
zealous Mohammedans with a knowledge how to
"divide and govern." Their independent character
is described by the proverbial saying that "a Fulah
man slave will escape or kill his master, and that a
Fulah girl slave will rule the harem or die." The
Hausas are superior to the Fulahs in the arts of
Ipeace. They are possessed of unusual industry,
judgment and intelligence and have a considerable
degree of literary taste. The Hausas carry on the
internal trade of the North and Central Soudan.
They are well clothed and have many well built
cities with population sometimes of from twenty
to sixty thousand. Barth, in describing Kano,
which is, perhaps, to West Africa, what Chicago is
to the United States, tells us that he mounted on
horseback, "rode for several hours round all the
inhabited quarters, enjoying at his leisure from the
saddle the manifold scenes of public and private
life, of comfort and happiness, of luxury and misery,
of industry and indolence, which were exhibited in
the streets, the market places, and in the interior of

THE AFRICAN AT HOME 55
the courtyards." Here he saw "a row of shops
filled with articles of native and foreign produce
with buyers and sellers in every variety of figure,
complexion, and dress." Now an "open terrace of
clay with a number of dye-pots and people busily
employed in various processes of their handicraft;
here a man stirring the juice and mixing with indigo
some colouring wood in order to give it the desired
tint, there another drawing a shirt from the dye-pot,
there two men beating a well-dyed shirt"; further
on, "a blacksmith busy with his tools in making a
dagger, a spear or the more useful ornaments of
husbandry," and, in another place, "men and women
hanging up their cotton thread for weaving."
The market of Kano, said to be the largest in
Africa, is celebrated for its cotton cloth and leather
goods. Traditions of Kano go back over a thousand
years. It is surrounded by walls of sun-dried clay
from twenty to thirty feet high and fifteen miles in
circumference. The greatest chieftain that ever ruled in West \
Africa, Mohammed Askia, lived in Kano. He \
became ruler in 1492 and held sway over a region J
probably as large as the German Empire. Barth
tells us that Mohammed Askia was an example of '•
the highest degree to which Negroes have attained in
the way of political administration and control.
His dynasty, which was entirely of native descent,
is the more remarkable if we consider that this Negro

56 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
king was held in the highest esteem and veneration
by the most learned and rigid Mohammedans. Not
only did he consolidate and even extend his empire,
but went in 1495 on a pilgrimage to Mecca accom
panied by 1,500 armed men, 1,000 on foot and 500 on
horseback, and founded there a charitable institution.
He extended his conquests far and wide from what
is now the centre of Nigeria, westward almost to
the borders of the Atlantic Ocean and northward to
the south of Morocco. Askia governed the sub
jected tribes with justice and equity. Everywhere
within the borders of his extensive dominions his
rule spread well-being and comfort.*
The career of Mohammed Askia is possibly the
best example of the influence of Mohammedanism
on that portion of Africa from which our American
slaves were taken.

* " Discoveries in North and Central Africa,*' Henry Barth. See also, " A
Tropical Dependency" : an outline of the ancient history of the Western Soudan
with an account of the modern settlement of northern Nigeria," Thora L. Shaw,
(Lady Lugard.)

CHAPTER IV
THE WEST COAST BACKGROUND OF THE AMERICAN
NEGRO
SLAVES were probably brought to America
from every part of Africa, for the slave trade
seems to have penetrated, before it ended, to
every corner of the continent. But the larger number
of them came, undoubtedly, from the West Coast. It
is said that, at one time, 200,000 slaves sailed annu
ally from the West Coast of Africa, and during a
period of two hundred years, it is estimated that
3,200,000 slaves were shipped to America from a
single point in the Niger Delta.* These people of
the West Coast were, for the most part, the broken
fragments of races that had been driven to the sea
by the stronger races of the interior. They did not
represent the highest to which the black man had
attained in Africa, and their contact with the white
man of the slave-trading class during the four
hundred years or more that the foreign slave trade
was in existence, did not improve them.
The African slave trade was not the source of all
that was evil in the native life of the West Coast,
* " West African Studies," Mary H. Kingsley, p. 510.
57

58 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
but it is responsible for a great deal of it. The slave
trade did not, for instance, cause the destructive
tribal wars among the Natives, but it incensed them.
It added the motive of gain and gave the savage
warfare the character of a commercial enterprise.
The evils of the traffic did not end, however, with
the immediate and tangible destruction that it
wrought. It corrupted the native customs and
destroyed the native industries. It substituted the
cheap machine-made European goods for the more
artistic native manufactures, which take a great deal
more time and energy to produce.
"At the present time," says Professor Boas, "the
distribution of Negro culture in Africa is such that
in all the regions where the whites have come in
contact with the Negro, his own industries have
disappeared or have been degraded. As a con
sequence, all the tribes that live near the coast of
Africa are, comparatively speaking, on a low level
of industrial culture. It is but natural that the
blacksmith, who can exchange a small lump of rubber
picked up in the woods for a steel knife, prefers this
method of obtaining a fine implement to the more
laborious one of making a rather inefficient knife of
soft iron with his primitive tools. It is not surpris
ing that the cheap cotton goods replace the fine grass-
cloth and the bark-cloth which the African women
prepare. The European trader carries to the coast
of Africa only the cheap products of European

THE WEST COAST BACKGROUND 59
factories, but nothing that would give to the Negro
the white man's method of work."*
Of course the degradation of the native industries,
in the way Professor Boas has described it, is not con
fined to Africa nor to the slave trade; it goes on
wherever machine-made goods come in contact with
native and home-made products. Much the same
thing may be seen among the Negro farmers in the
Southern states where they have yielded to the
temptation to raise nothing but cotton — what is
called the "money crop." For example, the Tuske
gee Institute is located in the midst of one of the
finest sweet potato growing soils in the world. Not
withstanding this, canned sweet potatoes used to
be shipped into this part of Alabama. It requires
less work to use the canned sweet potatoes which
have been dug, cleaned, and cooked, than it does to
prepare the land, produce the sweet potato crop,
clean them, and cook them. But it makes the farmer
dependent upon the store-keeper or more frequently
on the money-lender.
One of my favourite ways of emphasising this
mistake, in my talks to the Negro farmers, is to get
a basket of canned vegetables from the store, show
them what they are buying, calculate what they are
paying for them, and make clear to them how much
they could save and how much more independent
they would be if they raised these things at home.
? Ethnical Record, March, 1904, p. 107.

6o

THE STORY OF THE NEGRO

It may be interesting to note here exactly what it
was the white man gave the black man for those
cargoes of human beings that were shipped from
Africa to America. The list of trade goods was
somewhat different at different periods of the slave
traffic and for different parts of the coast. The
following is a list of trade goods as used in the latter
part of the seventeenth century for the region about
Sierra Leone:

French brandy or rum
Iron bars
White calicoes
Sleysiger linen
Brass kettles
Earthen cans
All sorts of glass buttons
Brass rings or bracelets
Bangles and glass beads of sundry
colours
Brass medals
Gunpowder Musket balls and shot
Old sheets
Paper
Red caps
Men's shirts

Earrings Dutch knives
Hedging bills and axes
Coarse laces
Crystal beads
Painted calicoes (red), called
chintz
Oil of olive
Small duffels
Ordinary guns
Muskets and fuzils
All sorts of counterfeit pearls
Red cotton
Narrow bands of silk stuffs or
worsted, about half a yard
broad for women, used about
their waists

In those early days it was customary to reckon the
value of slaves in hides and in bars or iron. A slave
was worth at Gambia from twelve to fourteen bars of
iron, which is equal in value to about one-half a
hogshead of brandy.
The slave trade brought to the surface the worst in

THE WEST COAST BACKGROUND 61
both the white and the black races. In the slave
marts of the coast towns it was usually the worst
elements of both races that met, but it was here that
the African got his first notion of the white man's
civilisation, and it was here also that the white man
gained his first and most intimate acquaintance with
the African.
There is, I understand, a very natural and a very
widespread distrust among the Natives of the coast
towns and of the civilisation they represent.
One hears so little from the Natives themselves in
regard to this subject, or any other for that matter,
that I am tempted to quote here a statement of Miss
Kingsley which gives an insight into the way the
African mother looks upon these matters:
It is to the mass of African women, untouched by white culture,
but with an enormous influence over their sons and brothers, that
I am now referring as a factor in the dislike to the advance of
white civilisation; and I have said they do not like it because,
for one thing, they do not know it; that is to say, they do not know
it from the inside and at its best, but only from the outside.
Viewed from the outside in West Africa white civilisation, to a
shrewd mind like hers, is an evil thing for her boys and girls. She
sees it taking away from them the restraints of their native culture,
and in all too many cases leading them into a life of dissipation,
disgrace, and decay; or, if it does not do this, yet separating the
men from their people. . . . Then again both the native
and his mother see the fearful effects of white culture on the young
women, who cannot be prevented in districts under white con
trol from going down to the coast towns and to the devil. It is
this that causes your West African bush chief to listen to the old
woman whom you may see crouching behind him, or you may not

62 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
see at all, but who is with him all the same, when he says, "Do not
listen to the white man, it is bad for you."*
The Negro people of the country districts in the
Southern states are, I suspect, much more like the
masses ofthe Africans, who live beyond the influences
ofthe coast towns, than any other portion of any race
in the United States. As often as I can find the time
to do so, I get out into the country among this class
of people. I like to sleep in their houses, eat their
food, attend their churches, talk with them as they
plant and harvest their crops. In this way I have
gotten the inspiration and material for much that I
have written and much that I have had to say from
time to time about the Negro in America.
jj In recent years I have noticed among the people,
(in what I have called "the country districts," a
: growing distrust for the city, not unlike that distrust
hof the Africans in the bush for the coast towns.
1 Among the debating societies that are frequently
formed among the country people, and in the
churches and in the school houses, wherever the
people get together, as they are fond of doing, to
talk over their local affairs or discuss some abstract
question, one of the favourite topics of discussion
is the relative merits of the town and country. In
the absence of other forms of excitement it frequently
happens that a whole community will divide on some
purely abstract question of this kind, and the debate
? " West African Studies," p. 376 et seq.

THE WEST COAST BACKGROUND 6^
will continue for months at a time. Usually the
younger people are for the city and its opportunities,
but the older people are for the country and its
independence. \
The most self-reliant and substantial characters
among my race that I know in the South are those
who have been so surrounded as not to get hold of
the vices and superficialities of towns and cities,
but remained in the country where they lead an
independent life. I have seen many of these char
acters who have come to our Tuskegee Negro
conferences. I have in mind one man in particular,
J. M. Sanifer, a farmer from Pickins County, Alabama,
who comes to our Negro conference every year.
The first thing that he usually exhibits when he
begins to speak is a new suit of clothes. The history
of this suit of clothes is interesting. The wool out of
which it has been made has been grown upon the
backs of sheep owned by himself and pastured on his
land. The wool has been woven into cloth by his
wife. The garments have been made entirely by his
wife and daughters. This man takes great pride in
explaining to his fellow members of the conference
how he produces his own clothes, his own food, and
I remember on one occasion he mentioned that during
the previous twelve months he had had, except
coffee, nothing in his home in the way of food that had
not been produced on his farm. Mr. Sanifer has had
very little of what we sometimes call "book learn-

64 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
ing," but there are some things that one learns from
the study of things as well as from the study of books.
There were some things that the African learned in
American slavery; there are some other and quite
different things the American Negro is now beginning
to learn in freedom. None of these more funda
mental matters are ordinarily taught from books;
but if they are to be counted as part of what we
call education, then Mr. Sanifer is educated.
I have suggested in what I have already written
some ofthe reasons why the white man has not found
the black man at his best on the West Coast and
particularly in the West Coast towns. To judge
the African by what one may see in these coast towns
or by what one may see in South Africa, or in the
Nile regions of the Soudan, or wherever the native
African has come in close contact with white civilisa-
^'iion, is much the same as if one were to judge the
'j' civilisation of America by what one can see in the
slums of great cities. The people who live in these
slums are, for the most part, uneducated, and have
lost many of the habits and customs that make life
decent and dignified. But few people, I dare say,
would wish to pass judgment, either on the future
of America or ofthe people who live in the city slums
merely from what they were able to see there during
a hurried or casual visit.
The descriptions of travellers often give one the
impression that the moral, religious, and intellectual

THE WEST COAST BACKGROUND 65
life of the African is a mere jumble of cruel and
fantastic superstitions. But the African religion is/
not a mere superstition.
"After more than forty years' residence among
these tribes," says Rev. R. H. Nassau, "fluently
using their language, conversant with their customs,
dwelling intimately in their huts, associating with
them in the varied relations of teacher, pastor, friend,
master, fellow-traveller and guest, and in my special
office as missionary, searching after their religious
thought (and therefore being allowed a deeper
entrance into their soul life than would be accorded
to a passing explorer) I am able unhesitatingly to
say that among all the multitude with whom I have
met, I have seen or heard of none whose religious
thought was only a superstition."*
In reading Dr. Nassau's book, I was impressed
with the fact that Fetishism, as he defines it, is not
merely a West African religion, but a West African
system of thought, a general point of view and way
of looking at things which enters into all the Native's
ideas, and gives its colour to most of the affairs of
his daily life.
This way of looking at and interpreting things so
thoroughly pervades everything West African, is so
different from our way of looking at things and is, as
it seems to me, so important to any one who wants
to get at the back of the African's mind, and find
* " Fetishism in West Africa," R. H. Nassau, p. 36.

66 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
something consistent in his institutions and behaviour
! that I am tempted to quote again here at some length
ifrom Miss Kingsley on this subject. She says:
One of the fundamental doctrines of Fetish is that the con
nection, of a certain spirit with a certain mass of matter, a material
object, is not permanent; the African will point out to you a light
ning-stricken tree and tell you that its spirit has been killed;
he will tell you when the cooking pot has gone to bits that it has
lost its spirit; if his weapon fails it is because some one has
stolen or made sick its spirit by means of witchcraft. In every
action of his daily life he shows you how he lives with a great,
powerful spirit-world around him. You will see him before start
ing out to hunt or fight rubbing medicine into his weapons to
strengthen the spirits within them, talking to them the while;
telling them what care he has taken of them, reminding them of
the gifts he has given them, though those gifts were hard for him
to give, and begging them in the hour of his dire necessity not to
fail him. You will see him bending over the face of a river talking
to its spirit with proper incantations, asking it when it meets a
man who is an enemy of his to upset his canoe or drown him, or
asking it to carry down with it some curse to the village below which
has angered him, and in a thousand other ways he shows you what
he believes if you will watch him patiently.*
The fundamental difference between the African
and the European way of thinking seems to be that
for the African there is no such thing as dead matter
in the world. Everything is alive, and for that
reason there is no such thing as a machine, at least
in the sense that we think of it. We are inclined to
look at the physical world about us as if everything
that happened was turned out relentlessly by some
* "West African Studies," p. 130.

THE WEST COAST BACKGROUND 67
great passionless machine. But the African thinks
that the world is alive in every part; it is a world of
spirits and persons like ourselves.
Miss Kingsley continues:
The more you know the African the more you study his laws
and institutions, the more you must recognise that the mainj
characteristic of his intellect is logical, and you see how ins
all things he uses this absolutely sound but narrow thought-form.
He is not a dreamer or a doubter; everything is real, very
real, horridly real to him. It is impossible for me to describe
it clearly, but the quality of the African mind is strangely
uniform. This may seem strange to those who read accounts of
wild and awful ceremonials, or of the African's terror at the white
man's things; but I believe you will find all people experienced in
dealing with uncultured Africans will tell you that this alarm and
brief wave of curiosity is merely external, for the African knows,
the moment he has time to think it over, what the white man's thing
really is, namely, either a white man's Juju or a devil.
It is this power of being able logically to account for everything
that is, I believe, at the back of the tremendous permanency
of Fetish in Africa, and the cause of many of the relapses into it
by Africans converted to other religions; it is also the explanation
of the fact that white men living in districts where death and danger
are every-day affairs, under a grim pall of boredom, are liable to
believe in Fetish, though ashamed of so doing.*
African medicine, so far as it has any system at all,
is based on Fetish. The African believes that
diseases are caused by an evil spirit, and the efficacy
of drugs depends on the benevolent spirits, which,
being put into the body, drive away the malevolent
disease-causing spirits.
"There is," says Miss Kingsley, "as in all things
* Ibid., p. 124.

68 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
West African, a great deal of Fetish ceremonial
mixed up with West African medical methods.
Underlying them throughout there is the Fetish
form of thought, but it is erroneous to believe that
all West African native doctors are witch doctors,
because they are not. One of my Efik friends, for
example, would no more think of calling in a witch
doctor for a simple case of rheumatism than you
would think of calling in a curate or a barrister; he
would just call in the equivalent to our consulting
physician, the country doctor, the Abiadiong. But
if he started being ill with something exhibiting
cerebral symptoms he would have in the witch doctor
at once."
What Miss Kingsley calls the Abiabok is really
the village apothecary, who is also a sort of country
doctor whose practice extends over a fair-sized dis
trict, wherein he travels from village to village.
Big towns have resident apothecaries, and these
apothecaries are learned in the properties of
herbs, and they are surgeons as far as surgery
is ventured upon. "A witch doctor," says Miss
Kingsley, "would not dream of performing an
operation." Ex-President G. W. Gibson of Liberia, with whom
I have talked, who went out to Africa as a boy, shortly
after the colony was founded, speaks the native
language fluently and has a long and intimate
acquaintance with the native peoples, says that

THE WEST COAST BACKGROUND 69
certain ofthe African methods of dealing with disease
are very effective. For instance, the people in
Liberia are frequently troubled with rheumatism
and dropsy. For these diseases, he says, no
medicines have been found equal to those of the
Native doctor.
Like all the other crafts in Africa the use of drugs
is a trade secret, and the native doctor has to go
through a long apprenticeship before he is allowed
to practise. It is not unusual, Mr. Gibson
says, for some one living in the settlements,
white men as well as black, to go out to those
Bush doctors to obtain relief from certain kinds
of disease.
Sometimes the coloured people in America,
particularly those of the older generation, have had
very quaint notions about medicine, but many of
them, even those most ignorant of books, seem to be
natural doctors or nurses. Frequently at Tuskegee
a boy or girl having after been given the best care
by our resident physician has remained sick for
several months with few signs of recovery. Then
the mother of this student would come to the institu
tion and ask permission to take her child home for
a few weeks. Notwithstanding the fact that the
mother lived a long way in the country, miles from
any doctor, the student would return within a
few weeks in an apparently sound and healthy
condition. *

70 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
The methods of the witch doctor, as distinguished
from the methods of the ordinary village doctor,
seem to me, to a certain extent, like those of the
* Christian Scientist, at least in so far as he seeks to
work directly on the soul and to drive out the disease
by driving the idea of it out of the patient's mind.
The witch doctor has to do with malevolent spirits,
but as some of these malevolent spirits are human
beings, his methods often take the form of a criminal
proceeding, he being called in to assist in the con
viction of the persons who are responsible for the
disease. It is these criminal proceedings that
have given the witch doctor his present bad
reputation. And yet it is admitted that the witch
doctors, as a rule, are very skilful in ferreting
out crime.
One of the most interesting books in regard to
Africa which I have been able to lay my hands on is
'¦! Sarbah's "Fanti Customary Laws," a collection made
by a native lawyer and member of the English bar,
from cases tried under English jurisdiction in
native courts. This customary law corresponds, in
the life of the Fanti people, a tribe inhabiting
what is known as the Gold Coast, to the common
law of England, and Mr. Sarbah, in collecting it in a
permanent form has performed a service for his
people not unlike that of Blackstone for the English
common law. Everywhere in Africa where the life
of the people has not been disturbed by outside

THE WEST COAST BACKGROUND 71
influences, the people are governed by law. There
is law relating to property, to morality, to the pro
tection of life, in fact, in many portions of Africa
law is more strictly regarded than in many civilised
countries.* "No other race on a similar level of culture," says
Professor Boas, "has developed as strict methods
of legal procedure as the Negro has. Many of his
legal forms remind us strongly of those of mediasval
Europe. For instance, it is hardly a coincidence
that the ordeal as a means of deciding legal
cases when all other evidence fails, has been
used in Europe as well as throughout Africa,
while it seems to be entirely unknown in ancient
America." In looking at the social institutions of the African
we must not ignore his popular assemblies that are
generally held in the palaver house or in the open air.
Here matters legislative as well as judicial are settled.
Though there are no written laws, certain ancient
customs and usages form the precedent for dis
cussion and settlement. When a law has been agreed
upon, it is customary in some of the coast tribes
for a public crier to proclaim it through the town.
This is repeated at dusk when all the people are
supposed to be at home so that no one can
plead ignorance in case the law is violated. In
?"Fanti Customary Laws, a brief introduction to Principles of the Native
Laws and Customs of the Fanti and Akan Sections of the Gold Coast, with a
Selection of Cases thereon Decided in the Law Courts," John Mensah Sarbah.

72 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
trial cases the witness takes an oath of which the
following is an example:
O God! come down, thou givest me food.
In this case I come as a witness and I will speak.
If I tell lies, I will go in the bush and serpent bite me;
If I go in a canoe, the canoe will sink and I drown;
If I climb a palm-tree I must fall and die.
You (God) let the thunder fall and kill me.
If I tell the truth, then I am safe in Thee.
The native African tribes, which have never been
touched by the Mohammedan civilisation have,
as is generally known, no written literature. Only
one tribe, the Vei people who live in the hinterland
of Sierra Leone and Liberia, have invented an
alphabet.* But Africans are great story-tellers and,
according to Leighton Wilson, they have almost
any amount of "unwritten lore, in the form of
fables, allegories, traditionary stories and proverbial
sayings, in which is displayed no small share of
close observation, lively imagination and extraor
dinary shrewdness of character." He describes one
famous African story-teller, Toko, by name, who
might have been an ancestor of Joel Chandler
Harris's "Uncle Remus."
"Toko," he says, "has a very remarkable and
intelligent countenance, strongly marked with the
* It [the Vei language] possesses a syllabic alphabet of over two hundred
characters, invented in 1834 by Doalu Bukere, a powerful member of the tribe.
This "writing system is even still used in correspondence and for recording
family events, and in it the inventor wrote a history of his nation and a treatise
on ethics. — Africa, Elisle Rectus, Vol. Ill, p. 218.

THE WEST COAST BACKGROUND 73
deep vein of natural humour which pervades his
whole composition. He is careless in dress, unpre
tending in his manners, but his shrewdness and
unbounded humour, almost in spite of himself,
peer out at every turn in conversation. When he
sets out to rehearse one of his favourite fables, all his
humour is at once stirred up, and he yields himself
to the spirit of the story. He is all glee himself, the
hearer cannot for his life avoid being carried along
with him. The wild animals of the woods are
summoned beforehis audience, they are endowed with
all the cunning and shrewdness of man and before
you are aware of it, you have before your imagination
a perfect drama."
Heli Chatelain, who has collected some of this
unwritten literature in a volume entitled "Folk
Tales of Angola," says that those who "think the
Negro is deficient in philosophical faculties ignore
their proverbs which both in direction and depth of
meaning, equal those of any other race."
"At the bottom of patience," says one of these
proverbs, "there is heaven." "Hold a true friend
with both hands," says another. " Hope is the pillar
of the world," and, "He is a heathen who bears
malice," are others.
Perhaps the Native African, except under
Mohammedan influences, has been less successful
in building up and maintaining permanent and lasting
governments than in other directions, but he has been

74 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
more successful in this respect than is generally
supposed. Professor Boas, speaking of some Negro Central
African tribes that have never come under Moham
medan influence, says:
The power of organisation that manifests itself in Negro com
munities is quite striking. Travellers who have visited Central
Africa tell of extended kingdoms, ruled by monarchs, whose power,
however, is restricted by a number of advisers. The constitution
of all such states is, of course, based on the general character
istics of the social organisations of the Negro tribes, which, how
ever, have become exceedingly complex with the extension ofthe
domain ofa single tribe over neighbouring peoples.
The Lunda empire, for instance, is a feudal state governed by a
monarch. It includes a number of subordinate states, the chiefs of
which are independent in all internal affairs, but who pay tribute
to the emperor. The chiefs ofthe more distant parts ofthe country
send caravans carrying tribute once a year, while those near by have
to pay more frequently. The tribute depends upon the character of
the produce of the country. It consists of ivory, salt, copper,
slaves, and even, to a certain extent, of European manufactures.
In case of war the subordinate chiefs have to send contingents to
the army of the emperor. The succession in each of the subordi
nate states is regulated by local usage. Sons and other relatives of
the subordinate chiefs are kept at the court of the emperor as a
means of preventing disintegrations of the empire.
A female dignitary occupies an important position in the govern
ment of the state. She is considered the mother of the emperor.
She has a separate court, and certain districts pay tribute to her.
Both the emperor and female dignitary must be children of one of
the two head wives of the preceding emperor. The emperor is
elected by the four highest counsellors of the state, and his election
must be confirmed by the female dignitary; while her election takes
place in the same way, and she must be confirmed by the emperor.
The office of counsellors of the state is hereditary. Their power is

THE WEST COAST BACKGROUND 75
important, because four among them have the privilege of electing
the emperor and the female dignitary, as described before. Besides
this, there is a nobility, consisting, as it would seem, of the wealthy
inhabitants, who have the privilege of expressing their opinion in
regard to the affairs of the state. This empire is known to have
existed since the end of the sixteenth century, although its extent
and importance have probably undergone many changes. It
would seem that sometimes the boundaries of the state were limited,
and that at other times many tribes were subject to it. In 1880 the
state was about as large as the Middle Atlantic states.
One reason for the instability of the kingdoms
that have grown up and flourished from time to
time on the Western Coast is, as Mr. Dowd has
pointed out, that the forests and rivers cut the
population into fragments and prevent coopera
tion. It is interesting to note that Negro freedmen have
not only established governments in Haiti in
America, Liberia in Africa, but from 1630 to 1700
fugitive slaves maintained the Negro State of
Palmares in what is now Brazil, against all the other
slave-holding provinces of that colony. Negro
slaves, imported from East Africa to become guards
of palaces and fighting seamen forthe Indian princes,
became so powerful that they carved out states for
themselves, one or more of which are still ruled by
Negro princes, as dependencies of the government
of India.*
Ofthe native states of Central Africa none have
been more studied, or better known than the
* " The Colonisation of Africa," Sir Harry H. Johnston.

76 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
Kingdom of Uganda. In a recent article Mr.
Winston Churchill, M. P., writes concerning the
country and the people:
The Kingdom of Uganda is a fairy tale. You climb up a
railway instead of a bean stalk, and at the end there is a wonder
ful new world. The scenery is different, the vegetation is
different, and, most of all the people are different from anything
elsewhere to be seen in the whole range of Africa. Instead of
the breezy uplands we enter a tropical garden: in place of naked
painted savages clashing their spears and gibbering in chorus to
their tribal chiefs, a complete and elaborate policy is presented.
Under a dynastic King, a parliament, and a powerful feudal
system, an amiable, clothed, polite, and intelligent race dwell
together in an organised monarchy upon the rich domain between
the Victoria and Albert Lakes. More than two hundred thousand
natives are able to read and write. More than one hundred
thousand have embraced the Christian faith. There is a court,
there are regents and ministers and nobles, there is a regular
system of native law and tribunals; there is discipline, there is
industry, there is culture, there is peace.
This description of conditions in Uganda strikes
me as the more interesting because this progress has
i been made in a land where the white man cannot
'live. "Every white man," says Mr. Churchill,
"seems to feel a sense of indefinable depression.
A cut will not heal, a scratch festers. In the third
year of residence even a small wound becomes a
running sore. One day a man feels perfectly well;
the next, for no apparent cause, he is prostrated
with malaria, and with malaria of a peculiarly
persistent kind, turning often in the third or fourth
attack to blackwater fever. In the small European

THE WEST COAST BACKGROUND 77
community at Entebbe there have been quite recent
ly two suicides. Whether, as I have suggested in
East Africa, it be the altitude, or the downward ray
of the Equatorial sun, or the insects, or some more
subtle cause there seems to be a solemn veto placed
upon the white man's permanent residence in these
beautiful abodes."
It has often seemed to me that, in estimating the
possibilities of the Negro race, one should not over
look the extraordinary capacity of the Negro for
adapting himself, whether in Africa or in America,
to the conditions in which he finds himself. It is
this powerof fitting himself into, and adapting himself
to, new conditions, which has enabled him to survive
under conditions in which other peoples have
perished. The Indian in the West Indies, in South
America and North America, the Sandwich Islanders,
the Australians and the New Zealanders have
steadily receded before the advance of the white
civilisation. The Negro is the only primitive people,'*
as I have said elsewhere, which has looked the white
man in the face and lived.
The Natives of South Africa are an illustration of
the quality I refer to. The changes which the white
man has made, during the last fifty years in South
Africa, have brought enormous hardship to the native
peoples. Against these changes they have frequently
rebelled, but in the end, as they saw they were facing
the inevitable, they have sought to adapt themselves

78 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
to it. And they have not become discouraged; and
they have not died out. On the contrary, they have
steadily increased in numbers as the inter-tribal wars
died out.
I remember some years ago meeting a young
African who had come to Tuskegee as a student from
the region around Johannesburg, South Africa. He
had managed to save a considerable sum of money
at the time of the late Boer war in South Africa, and
he had made use of that money to come to America
to get an education. He had not learned, at this
time, to speak our language fluently, and it was with
some difficulty that he expressed himself in English.
I managed to get from him, however, a vivid impres
sion of the change that had come over him and his
people since the white men first invaded their country.
He had grown up, he said, in the kraal, with no
thought and no ambition to do otherwise, than his
father had done before him — to till a little strip of
land, to tend the cattle, and, as he said, "to play."
In the simplicity ofthis life there was no thought and
no care for the future, no notion that life could ever
be other than it was. Looking back upon it, this
seemed one long, unbroken holiday. He very well
understood how crude and how aimless this savage
life was likely to seem to people who lived in a higher
stage of civilisation, but he made no apologies for it.
He said it was "glorious"; that was his word.
But the white man came, and soon all was changed.

THE WEST COAST BACKGROUND 79
At first his people welcomed the strangers, for they
had long been acquainted with the missionaries and
liked them. But after the discovery of gold and
diamonds the white man came in ever increasing
numbers, bringing with him strange customs and
wonderful machinery.
At the same time came the drought and pestilence
and a great war. For the first time within his
memory people began to die of hunger. Many of
the young men left their villages and went into the
mines and then wandered away into the cities and
never came back. The old men were much troubled
and began to sit long in council considering what was
to be the future of the people and what was the best
thing to do.
Out of all this unrest there has grown up among
the Natives an ardent desire for education. It is
pathetic to note the earnestness with which, at the
present time, these people are seeking the white
man's education in order that they may fit themselves
and their people for the white man's civilisation.
And this desire for education, so far as I can learn,
is not confined to those who live in the settlements
but it has taken hold, also, of the people living in the
remote regions, wherever a Christian missionary has
penetrated. Some of the African chiefs have sent their sons as
students to Tuskegee and I have frequently been
touched by the appeals for assistance in the way of

80 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
teachers that have come to us through these students
and from other sources.*
An incident quoted by Archibald Colquhoun in a
recent book on South African affairs, gives some
idea of the earnestness of this desire of the Natives
for education.
A Native family, squatting on a Dutch Africander
farm, earned between them a small sum weekly for
rooting up prickly pear, the farmer's pest. Not
being near any school, they paid the whole sum,
* As showing the widespread desire for education among these people a report
of an educational meeting^which I ran across some time ago, struck me as significant.
As a result of a general invitation 160 natives of note assembled December 28, 1905,
at Lovedale, the seat of the first important industrial school for Natives in Africa.
They came from the most populous districts of Cape Colony, from Bechuanaland,
from the Orange Free State and from Basutoland. There were pastors of all
denominations, chiefs of tribes sent by their headchiefs, men of influence represent
ing no special part of the country, among them two editors of native newspapers.
This meeting was called at the instance of Dr. James Stewart, who for forty
years had been the director of the Lovedale school. The commission appointed
after the Boer war to investigate the condition of the natives had recommended,
after two years investigation, the establishment of a university for blacks. The
purpose of this meeting was to secure the carrying out of this project. Un
fortunately, five days before the assembly convened Dr. Stewart died. He did
not live to see the realisation of his plan, but the meeting was a success. It was
announced at this meeting that if the Natives would raise $200,000 among their
own people the Government would give the school an annual grant of $50,000.
After two days of discussion the proposition was unanimously endorsed by the
convention. The report of this meeting makes the following comment upon the
proceedings: "A remarkable fact in regard to the action of this convention was the spirit
of union that reigned. The Natives who had come together from all points of
the compass, laid wholly aside their tribal jealousies and their bloody quarrels
of former times. More than that the ordinary barriers which divide the sects
seemed no longer to exist; the Lutherans voted with the Presbyterians, the
Anglicans with the Wesleyans and the Congregationalists. Finally the Native
chiefs put off their dignities and surrendered for the time being their prerogatives
in order to discuss and to vote in the ranks with their subjects. The blacks who
had never been able to unite for war, when the whites were killing and robbing
them of their lands, were all now of one mind and purpose for establishing a
great center of higher education for all the natives of South Africa."

THE WEST COAST BACKGROUND 81
their entire income, to a Native teacher (a half
educated man from the nearest kraal) to act as
tutor to their children, and they subsisted on what
they could glean, or (it is to be feared) steal. When
they were questioned on the subject these people were
perfectly clear as to their motive, which was to give
their children a better chance in the world. " In the
face of such a strong demand," says Mr. Colquhoun,
"it is useless to make any attempt to stop the tide of
progress. If Natives cannot get the education they
demand in South Africa, they can and will go to
America for it."*

* "Africander Land," p. 51.

Part II
THE NEGRO AS A SLAVE

CHAPTER V
THE FIRST AND LAST SLAVE-SHIP
SOME time in August of the year 1619 a
strange vessel entered the mouth of the
James River, in what is now the State of
Virginia, and, coming in with the tide, dropped anchor
opposite the little settlement at Jamestown. This
ship, which carried the Dutch flag, had the appear
ance of a man-of-war, but its mission, as it turned
out, was peaceful enough, for its purpose was trade,
and among other merchandise it carried twenty
Negro slaves.
This Dutch man-of-war, which brought the first
slaves to the first permanent English settlement
in the new world, is, so far as the United States is
concerned, the first slave-ship, for it was probably
the first slave-trader to visit the North American
continent. But the twenty Africans were not the first slaves
to reach what is now the territory of the United
States, and the oversea African slave-trade had
been in existence for a century before this time.
In fact, Negro slaves were known in ancient Greece !
and Rome and regular accounts of the African slave
85

86 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
trade with Europe are in existence since 990 A. D.
In 1442 Portuguese ships brought back Moorish
prisoners from a voyage to the Coast of Africa. As
ransom the Portuguese accepted a certain amount of
gold and a number of "black Moors," with curled
hair. About this same time the Spanish merchants of
Seville began to import gold and slaves from Western
Africa. As witness to the extent of this traffic,
there is still preserved an interesting letter, written
ij in 1474 to the celebrated Negro, Juan de Valladolid,
lalso called the " Negro Count," which not only
: shows that the number of these dark-skinned aliens in
Spain was at that time considerable, but gives some
idea, also, ofthe manner in which they were treated.
"For the many good, loyal, and signal services
which you have done us, and do each day," the
letter begins, "and because we know your sufficiency,
ability, and good disposition, we constitute you
mayoral and judge of all the Negroes and mulattoes,
free or slaves, which are in the very loyal and noble
city of Seville, and throughout the whole arch
bishopric thereof, and that the said Negroes and
mulattoes may not hold any festivals, nor pleadings
among themselves except before you, Juan de
Valladolid, Negro, our judge and mayoral of the
said Negroes and mulattoes.
"And we command," the letter continues, "that
you, and you only, take cognisance of the disputes,
pleadings, marriages, and other things which may

FIRST AND LAST SLAVE-SHIP 87
take place among them, for as much as you are a
person sufficient for that office and deserving of your
power, and you know the laws and ordinances which
ought to be kept, and we are informed that you are
of noble lineage among the said Negroes."* The
letter is signed Ferdinand and Isabella, King and
Queen of Spain.
When the Spanish explorers and adventurers came
to America they brought many of these Spanish
Negroes with them as servants and as slaves. It is
probable that a few Negroes were sent out to the
West Indies as early as 1501. Soon after this date,
as shown by a letter of King Ferdinand, dated Sep
tember 15, 1505, a considerable number of slaves
were introduced into Santo Domingo. In this letter
the following sentence occurs: "I will send you
more Negro slaves as you request. I think there
may be a hundred." Here we have the beginning
of African slavery in America, over a century before
its introduction into Jamestown, Va.
The records show that Negroes in 1516 worked
with Balboa on the Isthmus of Panama; that Pizarro,
*The organization of a quasi-independent Negro state within the limits of
a larger controlling white state, the existence of which is suggested in this letter,
has a parallel, I may say in passing, in Connecticut, where a state organisation
with governor, judge and other officers formerly existed with jurisdiction over
the minor offences of slaves. In this way the slaves of Connecticut, long before
emancipation was seriously considered in the United States, were given a form of
self-government. The plan seems to have been conceived by some of the older
Negroes who exercised their office, with the consent of their masters, but also
with the authority which their age and experience exercised over the younger
members of the community. — " Economic Co-operation Among Negro Ameri
cans," Atlanta University Publications, No. 12, p. 19.

t
88 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
the conqueror of Peru, and Las Casas, the Dominican
Bishop and missionary, had Negro bodyguards.
Negroes also accompanied the expeditions of
Vasquez de Ayllon, Narvaez, Coronado and De Soto.
With the ill-fated expedition of Narvaez was the
Negro Estevan, in English, Stephen. For eleven
years, from 1528 to the year of his death, 1539, this
Negro Stephen was with the Spanish explorers on
the mainland of North America. He wandered
hundreds of miles across what is now the south
western part of the United States, two centuries or
more before our western frontier touched that
section of the country. He was a slave of one of
the survivors of the Narvaez expedition and must
have been a man far above the average type. In
one of the folk-tales of the Zuni Indians he lives
to-day, after a lapse of more than three and a half
centuries, and one well-known writer of American
history has called him the discoverer of Arizona.
According to the Spanish historian, Oviedo, Negroes
were among the settlers of the Spanish colony of
Chicora, in 1526, on what is now the coast of South
Carolina, and this, so far as known, was the earliest
appearance of the black man on the soil of the
United States. In 1526, when, under Vasques de
Ayllon, eighty-one years before the English, the
Spaniards tried to found a settlement on the James
River near the present sight of Jamestown, Virginia.
Negro slaves were employed in the work. An

FIRST AND LAST SLAVE-SHIP 89
insurrection of the Negro labourer and the death of
Ayllon were among the causes for the failure of the
venture. African slaves accompanied the expedition
of De Soto to Florida in 1539. Negro slaves were
settled at St. Augustine, Florida, by Pedro Menendez,
in 1565. These, however, were Spanish slaves
who had been trained as artisans and cultivators of
the soil and were of a different character from
those fresh levies of labourers who were brought
direct to America from Africa.*
Almost nothing is known of the history of the
ship that brought the first slaves, in 1619, to the
settlement of Jamestown; not even its name is
remembered. The coincidence has often been
noted, however, that the Mayflower, which is said
to have brought to America the first seeds of civil
and religious liberty, reached Plymouth a year later,
1620, so that Negro slavery is older than Anglo-
Saxon liberty on the soil of the United States.
In reading the early history of the United States,
I have been impressed with the fact that religious
animosities among European people were largely
responsible for the settlement of America.
The original thirteen states of the Union were
very generally settled by refugees from the religious
wars and religious persecutions of Europe, and three
of them at least, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania,
and Maryland, were settled by religious sects who
? Magaiine of American History, Vol. 26, pp. 349-366.

90 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
had crossed the ocean in order to secure freedom
of religious worship.
The Scotch-Irish, who so widely settled the
southern colonies, left their homes in Ireland to a
large degree because of the oppression that they
suffered in consequence of their religious faith.
North Carolina, which was one of the first of the
English colonies to grant religious liberty to the
persecuted sects of Europe, was frequently referred
to as a "Quaker Colony," because ofthe number of
those persecuted people who settled there.
South Carolina was also a refuge for a large num
ber of Huguenots, who were the Calvinists of
France. As an illustration of some of the milder
forms of persecution to which these people were
subjected in their homes, in France, because of
their religious opinions, I may quote the following
paragraph, from Bancroft's History of the United
States: Huguenots were, therefore, to be employed no longer in
public office; they were, as far as possible, excluded from the
guilds of tradesmen and mechanics; and a Calvinist might not
marry a Roman Catholic wife.*
It is a very curious fact that, at the very same
time ships were leaving Europe with people who
j were seeking in America a solution and an escape
from the religious controversies that had for cen
turies torn Europe asunder, other ships were leaving
* Bancroft's History of the United States, Vol. n, p. 176.

FIRST AND LAST SLAVE-SHIP 91
Africa bearing to this continent other people who
were to be the seeds of new conflicts and leave, as
a heritage, a new problem; a problem in many ways
as difficult and perplexing as that which faced
Europe at the beginning of the Protestant
Reformation. Religious prejudice, transplanted to American
soil, did not at once die out. A study of some of
the older colonial codes will show that Quakers,
who were nonconformists, and Catholics, who were
not always counted as Christians, were subjected to
restrictions which were frequently quite as severe
as those imposed upon the free Negroes before
the war. Under the law of Virginia in existence in
1705, for instance, Catholics, Indians and Negro
slaves were denied the right to appear " as witnesses
in any case whatsoever, not being Christians," but
this was modified somewhat in 1732, when Negroes,
Indians, and mulattoes were admitted as witnesses
in the trial of slaves.*
In one particular instance religious prejudice
against the Catholics was curiously associated
with prejudice, on account of race, against the Negro.
I refer to what is known in the history of New York
as the "Negro Plot of 1741."
In this year the city of New York was thrown
into convulsions of excitement by the rumours of a
conspiracy among some ofthe lower class of Negroes,
? History of ths.Negta.Race, Williams,. Vol. I., P.J29.

92 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
supposed to have been instigated by Spanish
Catholics, to burn the city and destroy the inhabi
tants. These rumours were confirmed by a letter,
received about this time from General Oglethorpe
of Georgia, which reported that Spain had employed
a number of Catholic priests, who were to go through
the country pretending to be physicians, dancing
masters, "and other such kinds of occupations,"
who were to get the confidence of families and so
further the plans "to burn all the considerable
cities in English North America."
Shortly before this time a Spanish vessel, manned
in part by Spanish Negroes, had been captured
and the Negroes, although they claimed to be free,
sold into slavery in the colony. Suspicion directed
to one of these slaves added to the excitement.
Among other persons arrested was a man supposed
to be a Catholic priest. Circumstances seemed to
connect certain other Catholics in the colony with
the supposed conspiracy. As usual, in such instances
of intense social commotion, fresh rumours and
fresh suspicions added fuel to the excitement and
before it had died away one hundred and seventy-
eight persons were arrested, thirty-six were executed
and seventy-one transported. Among those executed
was the supposed Catholic priest to whom I have
referred. Eighteen Negroes were hanged and
fourteen were burned. They were executed in
sight of the spot where the United States Custom

FIRST AND LAST SLAVE-SHIP 93
House now stands in the square that still has the
name of Bowling Green. It occurs to me, as I am
writing this, as an illustration of the progress of the
Negro, that Charles W. Anderson, the United States
Collector of Internal Revenue, who occupies a suite
of offices in this building is a Negro.
In spite of the numerous "confessions" of white
people and black, arrested during the period that
the excitement lasted, there does not seem to have
been any sufficient evidence that any conspiracy to
burn the city existed. The explanation seems to
be that the community was for the time labouring
under one of those strange social delusions, like
that which seized upon the people of New England
during the period of the Salem witchcraft panic.
The situation, as it existed at the height of the
excitement, as well as the circumstances that finally
brought the prosecutions to an end, are summed
up in the following paragraph from Smith's " History
of New York":
The whole summer was spent in the prosecutions; every
new trial led to further prosecutions: a coincidence of slight
circumstances was magnified by the general terror into violent
presumptions; tales collected without doors, mingling with the
proofs given at the bar poisoned the minds of the jurors; and
the sanguinary spirit of the day suffered no check till Mary, the
capital informer, bewildered by frequent examinations and sug
gestions, lost her first impressions, and began to touch characters
which malice itself did not dare to suspect.""

* Quoted in Williams, " History of the Negro Race," Vol. I., p. 169.

94 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
I have referred here at some length to these cir
cumstances because they show that in times past
religious prejudice, like racial prejudice, has often
been the source of those wild fears and vague sus
picions by which one class of people in the com
munity is sometimes incited to violence against
another and weaker class.
In spite, however, of the bitter animosities that
once divided them, the people of the different
religious creeds have since learned to live side by
side in peace. Is there any sound reason why
the white man and the black man, who, after all,
understand one another here in America pretty
well, should not do as much ? I do not believe
there is.
In 1741, at the time of the "Negro Plot," the
population of New York City numbered 10,000, of
which 2,000 were Negroes. At this time the number
of slaves in the whole colony of Massachusetts did
not amount to more than 3,000. The number
in Pennsylvania had reached 11,000 in 1754, but
in some of the more southerly colonies the
number of slaves, particularly in proportion to
the number of inhabitants was considerably
larger. In South Carolina, for instance, the Negroes
were at one time in the proportion of 22 to 12
of the white population.* In 1740 this state
had 40,000 slaves.
* Bancroft's "History of the United States," Vol. II., p. 171.

FIRST AND LAST SLAVE-SHIP 95
In spite of restrictions that were put upon it from
time to time the slave-trade continued to flourish
down to the time of the American Revolution, when
for a time it ceased, only to leap into more vigorous
life at the close of the war. At the beginning of the
nineteenth century England held in all her colonies
in the new world 800,000 slaves. France had
250,000; Denmark 27,000; Spain and Portugal
600,000; Holland 50,000; Sweden 600. There were
about 900,000 slaves in the United States and about
2,000,000 in Brazil.*
I was much impressed in reading some years ago
Mungo Park's travels with his account of slavery
as he found it in those parts of Africa which he
visited. His description enabled me, as I thought,
to see how easily and naturally the milder form of
domestic slavery, which seems to have existed in
those countries from the earliest times, had grown, ,
under the influence of contact and commerce with
European people, into foreign slave-trade. In
other ways, also, it seems to me I have learned
something about African slavery in America, from
what I read of African slavery in Africa.
At the time of Park's famous journey he estimated
that the proportion of slaves to the free population,
in the regions through which he travelled, was
about three to one. These slaves were of two
descriptions: those who were born slaves and those
* " Suppression of the Slave Trade," DuBois, p. 131.

96 THE STORY OF THE NEGP^O
who had become slaves either through capture in
war, insolvency, or as punishment for crime.
There existed at that time in Africa regular mar
kets for the purchase and sale of slaves, just as they
afterward existed at Alexandria, at Natche^ and
New Orleans in America. Mungo Park noted, also,
the interesting fact that in the eye of an African
purchaser the value ofa slave increased in proportion
to his distance from his native kingdom, for the
reason that when slaves were only a few days' journey
from their homes they frequently succeeded in mak
ing their escape. On the other hand, when several
kingdoms intervened, making escape more difficult,
they were more easily reconciled to their situation.
The same thing was true, and for the same reason,
during the existence of slavery in America. For
instance, from 1820 to 1830, slaves were selling at from
$150 to $300 each in Virginia, while during the
same time the same slaves in New Orleans would
be worth from $800 to $1,200. The difference was
due, in large part, to the agricultural conditions,
since at that time an able-bodied Negro could earn
$200 a year for his master on a sugar plantation in
Louisiana, over and above the cost of his keep.
But the difference was due in a considerable degree,
also, to the fact that in Louisiana the slave was, under
ordinary conditions, beyond all hope of freedom.*
* " The Domestic Slave Trade of the Southern States," Winfield N. Collins, pp.
28 and 29.

FIRST AND LAST SLAVE-SHIP 97
"The slaves which are purchased by Europeans
on the coast," Mu , go Park continues, " are chiefly
of this description" (i.e., from the interior). "A few
of them are collected in petty wars, which take place
near the coast, but by far the greater number are
brought down in large caravans from the inland
countries, of which many are unknown, even by
name, to Europeans."
It was true in Africa, as it was afterward in
America, that slaves of mild disposition and such
as were not disposed to run away were retained by
their masters, while others who showed signs of
discontent or appeared in other ways intractable,
were disposed of in some distant state. Thus the
domestic slave-trade merged easily and naturally
nto the foreign slave-trade and the intractable
slaves from the interior were sent to America.
On his way back to the coast, after his long
journey to the interior, Mungo Park joined company
with a party of merchants on their way to the coast,
having among other merchandise a coffle of slaves,
which they exchanged later for European rum and
tobacco. These long marches of the slave-caravans and
the methods of caring for and confining the slaves
in the part ofthe country through which Mungo Park
travelled were not unlike those which one might have
seen fifty years ago on one of the old slave-roads,
from Alexandria, Virginia, to Natchez, Mississippi,

98 THE STORY OF TIE NEGRO
although the African journey vas in many respects
more difficult.*
In the course of this long md tedious journey
from the interior of Africa to the coast, Mungo
Park had an opportunity to become thoroughly
acquainted with all phases of the slave-traffic, as
it then existed, and he has given many intimate and
interesting glimpses into the life, thoughts, and
feelings ofthe unfortunate captives, whom he seemed
to have an unusual ability to understand and sympa
thise with. Of one party of captives which, at
one point in his journey, were added to the caravan,
he said:
Eleven of them confessed to me that they had been slaves from
their infancy, but the other two refused to give any account of
their former condition. They were all very inquisitive, but they
viewed me at first with looks of horror, and repeatedly asked if my
countrymen were cannibals. They were very desirous to know
what became of the slaves after they had crossed the salt water.
I told them they were employed in cultivating the land; but they
would not believe me, and one of them, putting his hand upon
the ground, said, with great simplicity: "Have you really got

* In his history, " The Domestic Slave Trade of the Southern States," pp.
52, 101, Prof. Winfield N. Collins, of Claremont College, N. C, says:
"The number of slaves currently estimated to have been transported to the
South and Southwest during 1835 and 1836 almost staggers belief. The Mary
ville, Tenn., Intelligencer made the statement in 1836 that, in 1835, 60,000 slaves
passed through a Western town on their way to the Southern market. Also, in
1836 the Virginia (Wheeling) Times says, intelligent men estimated the number
of slaves exported from Virginia during the preceding twelve months as 120,000, of
whom about two-thirds were carried there by their masters, leaving 40,000 to
have been sold. ... In the transportation of slaves the utmost precautions
were necessary to prevent revolt or escape. When a 'coffle' or 'drove' was
formed to undertake its march of seven or eight weeks to the South the men would
be chained — two by two, and a chain passing through the double file and fasten
ing from the right and left hands of those on either side of the chain."

FIRST AND LAST SLAVE-SHIP 99
such ground as this to set your feet upon ? " A deeply rooted
idea that the whites purchase slaves for the purpose of eating
them, or of selling them to others that they may be devoured
hereafter, naturally makes the slave contemplate a journey toward
the coa^t with great terror, insomuch that the 'slatees' are forced
to keep them constantly in irons and watch them very closely to
prevent their escape.
At another part of the journey one of the slaves
belonging to the coffle, who had travelled for several
days with great difficulty, was unable to travel farther
and his master therefore determined to exchange him
for a young girl belonging to the townspeople with
whom they were stopping. "The poor girl," Park
continues, "was ignorant of her fate until the bundles
were all tied up in the morning, and the coffle ready
to depart, when, coming with some other young
women to see the coffle set out, her master took her
by the hand and delivered her to the singing man.
Never was a face of serenity more suddenly changed
into deepest distress; the terror she manifested on
having the load put upon her head and the rope
fastened round her neck, and the sorrow with which
she bade adieu to her companions were truly
affecting." This dread of the African slave of being sent down
to the slave-markets of the coast towns is like the
fear that constantly haunted the slaves in Maryland,
Virginia, and the other border states, that some
day they might be sold into the Far South. The
most heartrending scenes of slave-life in the South

ioo THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
occurred when owners, on account of debt or some
other misfortune, were compelled to separate families
and sell them to the traders. It was not alone the
parting of children from parents, husbands from
wives, that made these scenes sad and memorable, but
frequently it was just as hard for the slaves to part
from their owners and members of his family, to
which, through years of association, they had become
deeply attached. This feeling of sorrow has found
expression in the words of an old plantation song
that originated in Virginia, the words of which
are in part as follows:
Mother is Massa goi'n to sell, sell us to-morrow ?
Yes, my child! Yes, my child! Yes, my child!
Going to sell us down in Georgia ?
Yes, yes, yes,
Going to sell us way down in Georgia.
Yes, yes, yes!
Oh! Watch and pray!
Fare you well mother,
I must leave you.
Fare you well,
Fare you well, Mother,
I must leave you.
Fare you well.
Oh! Watch and pray!
The slave-caravan, to which Mungo Park was
attached, finally reached the river Gambia, where
the slaves were set on board a ship and brought down
to the coast. At Goree one hundred and thirty, of
whom about twenty-five had been of free condition

FIRST AND LAST SLAVE-SHIP 101
and were able to read and write Arabic, were shipped
to America. There being no other vessel at hand,
Park took passage on the slaver and followed the
slaves, whom he had accompanied from the interior
to their destination in America.
"My conversation with the slaves," he said, "gave
them great comfort and, in truth they had need of
every consolation in my power to bestow; not that
I observed any wanton acts of cruelty practised
either by the master or seamen toward them, but
the mode of confining and securing Negroes in the
American slave-ships made these poor creatures
suffer greatly and a general sickness prevailed among
them. Besides the three who died at Gambia, and
six or eight while we remained at Goree, eleven
perished at sea, and many of the survivors were
reduced to a very weak and emaciated condition."
After 1808, when it became a crime to bring slaves
from Africa to the United States, the conditions under
which the trade was carried on grew worse. In the
course of the next forty years, before the trade with
the United States finally ended in 1862, it seems that
every possibility of cruelty and of suffering, inherent
in the traffic, was exhausted by the experience of
those who were merchants and those who were
merchandise in this iniquitous traffic. Of the
slaves imported from the region at the mouth of the
Niger it was estimated that one-third and often
more perished before they reached the coast, 15

102 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
to 20 per cent, more were lost in the voyage on the
middle passage or while they were going under the
process of seasoning, so that the number of slaves
that finally found their way to the plantations did
not, in many cases, represent more than one-third
of those who were originally torn from their homes
by slave-raiders in order to meet the demand for
labour in America.*
Sometimes people, enticed down to the coast
by showing them strips of bright coloured calico,
were seized and put on board the slave-ships. In
other cases, after the slave-traders had successfully
got on board a party of slaves, they seized the
native slave-merchants themselves and carried them
off, in turn, into slavery. I have often heard Major
R. R. Moton, of Hampton, relate the story, which
was told him by his grandmother, of the manner in
*A writer quoted by Miss Kingsley (West African Studies, p. 511), says that a
moderate allowance for loss of life between the interior and the slave-ship would
be at least 40 per cent. This was in the region of the lower Niger, whence, accord
ing to Mr. Clarkson, the historian of the abolition of the slave trade, more slaves
were taken than from all the other slave-dealing centres of the West and
Southwest Coast of Africa.
"Death hovered always over the slave-ship," says the historian Bancroft. "The
Negroes, as 1 they came from the higher level to the seaside — poorly fed on the
sad pilgrimage, sleeping at night on the damp earth without covering, and often
reaching the coast at unfavourable seasons — imbibed the seeds of disease, which
confinement on board ship quickened into feverish activity. There have been
examples where one-half of them — it has been said, even, where two-thirds of
them — perished on the passage. The total loss of life on the voyage is com
puted to have been, on the average, fifteen, certainly full twelve and one-half, in
the hundred: the harbors of the West Indies proved fatal to four and one-half more
out of every hundred. No scene* of wretchedness could surpass a crowded slave-
ship during a storm at sea, unless it were the same ship dismasted or suffering from
a protracted voyage and want of food, its miserable inmates tossed helplessly to
and fro under the rays of a vertical sun, vainly gasping for a drop of water. —
" History of the United States," Vol. Ill, p. 405.

FIRST AND LAST SLAVE-SHIP 103
which his great-grandfather, at that time a young
African chief, was enticed on board a slave-ship and
brought to America. He had successfully brought
down to the coast and sold a party of slaves which
he had taken as captives in one of the tribal wars.
The trade concluded he was himself invited to dinner
on board the slave-ship. He was given something to
drink which put him to sleep. When he awoke he
found himself far out at sea, no longer a prince
but merely one among the number of slaves he
himself the day before had sold.
Some few years ago during a stay of a few days
at Mobile, Alabama, I visited a little colony of
Africans, who local tradition says are the remnants
of the last cargo of the last slave-ship which was
landed in the United States.
Mobile Bay during the latter days of the slave-
trade was a favourite entrance for slave-smugglers
to the United States. At the upper entrance of the
bay, where the Alabama and Tombigbee rivers
pour their waters into it through a number of dif
ferent channels, there are many places in which it
was possible to hide a slave-ship. It was in one of
these ships, smuggled in through these channels, by
which the majority of the people in the "African
Colony" were brought to America.
In this community I met native Africans who
still speak the old tribal language and still retain
to some extent, I was told, their ancient tribal

104 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
customs. I talked with one of these men who still
passes by his African name. He is called Ossie
Keebe. He told me his were a hill people. They
lived in the uplands of Dahomey, seven days from
the sea. There had been a war — there was always
war in those slave-raiding days, he said — and one
night their village had been captured and all who
were not killed were marched down to the sea and
sold. When I asked this old man if he ever thought of
returning to Africa, he replied: "Yes, I goes back to
Africa every night, in my dreams." Meeting this
old man whose dreams carry him back to Africa, I
felt as if I had discovered the link by which the old
life in Africa was connected with the new life in
America. The people I met in the African colony were not,
however, the last slaves brought to the United States.
The famous yacht, Wanderer, which carried 500
slaves into Georgia in 1858, is supposed to have
brought 420 slaves more in i860. But as late as
1862 a ship ran the blockade of Federal ships and
landed slaves in Mobile. Far up the river in
some remote part of that wilderness of swamp and
water there still may be seen, I have been told, above
the surface of the water portions of the iron work
of the Lawrence, which was possibly the last ship
to bring slaves into the United States. The ship was
burned to keep it from falling into the hands of the

FIRST AND LAST SLAVE-SHIP 105
"Yankees" during the war, but there are young men
in the African colony who still remember to have
played about the hull when they were boys. There
are still people living in Mobile who were brought
over as slaves upon it in 1862.
No one will ever know how many thousands of
Africans, during the progress of the slave-trade,
were carried from their homes in Africa to be used
as labourers in the opening up of the new and wild
country in North and South America. It has been
estimated that 270,000 slaves were brought into the
United States between the years 1808 and i860, from
the time that the slave-trade was legally abolished
to the time when it practically ceased. In view of
the fact that other estimates indicate that fifteen
thousand slaves were smuggled into the United
States in 1858; that at another time fifteen thousand
slaves were brought into Texas alone in one year,
this may be taken as a low estimate.
Even this is no indication of the number of slaves
that were imported during this time and before into
the West Indies and into South America. South
America and the West Indies, like some of the
states of the Far South, were slave-consuming
countries, and it was necessary to constantly bring
in new levies to keep up the supply.
I have taken some pains to examine the different
estimates made by different writers at different
periods of the slave-trade and for different portions

106 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
of North and South America, and I have reached
the conclusion that the total number of slaves landed
in the western world from the beginning to the end
of the slave-trade cannot have been less than twelve
millions, and was probably much more.
Perhaps twelve millions more were taken in the
slave-raids, perished on the way to the coast or in the
"middle passage," or in the process of seasoning,
so that no less than twenty-four million human beings
were either brought to America as slaves or perished
on the way hither. I have not examined carefully
the figures of European emigration, but I venture
to say that from the time America was discovered
down to i860, the number of white people that
have immigrated from Europe to North and South
America is less than the number of black people who
were brought over in slave-ships during the same
period.

CHAPTER VI

THE FIRST SLAVES

DURING a recent visit to Baltimore, Mary
land, chance threw in my way a facsimile
copy of an old Baltimore newspaper, the
Maryland "Journal, the first number of which was
published August 20, 1773. This paper contained
one or two items of news, and several advertisements
that were peculiarly interesting to me. One of these
advertisements, which attracted my attention, was
about as follows: TEN POUNDS REWARD
Ty AN away, on the 6th of July laf t, from the f ubscriber, living in Bond's
-"•^- forest, within eight miles of Joppa, in Baltimore County, an Irish
Servant Man, named Owen M'Carty, about 45 years old, 5 feet 8 inches
high, of a swarthy complexion, has long black hair, which is growing a
little grey, and a remarkable fear under the right eye. He had on and
took with him when he went away, a fhort brown coat, made of country
manufactured cloth, lined with red flannel, with metal buttons, oznabrigs
trowf ers patched on both knees, a white f hirt, an old pair of fhoes, and an
old felt hat. He was a foldier in fome part of America about the time of
Braddock's defeat, and can give a good defcription of the country. Who
ever takes up the faid Servant and brings him to Alexander Cowan, or
John Clayton, Merchants, in Joppa, or to the f ubferiber, if he is taken in
the County, f hall receive Five Pound s, and if out of the County, the above-
mentioned Ten Pounds, as a reward and confederation for his trouble
and eipenfe. Barnard Reillt. 107

108 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
Until a short time ago the condition of bondage
had always been associated in my mind, as in the
minds of most coloured people in this country, with a
black skin. I had heard, as most schoolboys have
heard, that centuries ago there had been white slaves
in England and that in other parts of Europe slavery
and serfdom had lasted to a much later period than
in England. I remember reading somewhere the
story of Pope Gregory who, seeing some beautiful
English slaves exposed for sale in the Forum at Rome,
was so impressed by their sad condition that he deter
mined to undertake the conversion of Britain.
These events, however, all belong to a remote past.
I never had the least idea until I began to investigate
the subject that any human being except the Indian
and the Negro had ever been bought and sold, and
in other respects treated as property in America.
The fact is, however, that, although Negro slaves were
brought to Jamestown, only twelve years after the
first settlement there, the system of white servitude
! had preceded black slavery in both the Plymouth
'and Virginia colony. Most of the work on the
plantations and elsewhere was performed at first by
white servants who were imported from England and
sold like other merchandise in the markets of the
colony. The historian, Bancroft, says ofthis matter:
Conditional servitude, under indentures or covenants, had
from the first existed in Virginia. The servant stood to his master
in the relation of a debtor, bound to discharge the cost of emigra-

THE FIRST SLAVES 109
tion by the entire employment of his powers for the benefit of his
creditors. Oppression early ensued: men who had been trans
ported into Virginia at the expense of eight or ten pounds, were
sometimes sold for forty, fifty, or even threescore pounds. The
supply of white servants became a regular business, and a class of
men, nicknamed " spirits," used to delude young persons, servants,
and idlers, into embarking for America, as to a land of spontaneous
plenty. White servants came to be an article of traffic. They were
sold in England to be transported, and in Virginia were sold to the
highest bidder; like Negroes they were to be purchased on ship
board, as men buy horses at a fair. In 1672 the average price in
colonies where five years of service were due, was ten pounds
while a Negro was worth twenty or twenty-five pounds.*
It has often been said that the almshouses and the
prisons were emptied to furnish labourers for the
colonies of Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia.
But it was not merely the destitute and the outcast
that were sold into servitude in the English colonies
in America. Many of these persons were political
prisoners and persons of quality.
" So usual," according to the same historian, " was
this manner of dealing in Englishmen that not the
Scots only, who were taken in the field of Dunbar,
were sent into involuntary servitude in New England,
but the Royalist prisoners of the battle of Worcester;
the leaders in the insurrection of Penruddock were
shipped to America."
At other times large numbers of Irishmen were sold
into servitude in different parts of America.
Because the number of slaves brought to America
•Bancroft's " History of the United States," Vol. I, p. 175.

no THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
was so immense, the sufferings which they under-
; went has made a profound impression upon the
world, but from all that I have been able to learn, the
j sufferings endured by these unfortunate Irish bond-
, servants during the course of the long voyages to
((America were frequently as hard as those of the
\ slaves. "The crowded exportation of Irish Catho-
\ lies," Bancroft remarks, "was a frequent event, and
was attended by aggravations hardly inferior to the
usual atrocities of the African slave-trade."
In 1685, when nearly a thousand prisoners were
condemned to transportation for taking part in the
insurrection of Monmouth, "men of influence at
court scrambled for the convicted insurgents as a
merchantable commodity."
Bond-servitude as it existed in the English colonies
was in many respects peculiar and unlike any form
of servitude which had existed among English people.
The first bond-servants were sent out bythe London
company, the company by which the Virginia colony
was founded. It was not intended that servants
should be transferred from one master to another.
But the depressed condition of agriculture follow
ing the massacre of 1622, according to James Ballagh,
compelled planters to sell their servants and thereafter
"made the sale of servants a very common practice
among both officers and planters."
For instance, in 1623, George Sandys, the treasurer
of Virginia, was forced to sell the only remaining

. THE FIRST SLAVES in
servants of the company, the seven men on his
plantation, for one hundred and fifty pounds of
tobacco. "Gradually," says Mr. Ballagh, "the legal per
sonality of the servant was lost sight of in the dis-!
position to regard him as a chattel and a part of the!
personal estate of the master, which might be
treated and disposed of very much in the same/
way as the rest of the estate. He became thus)
rated in inventories of estates, and was disposed
of both by will and deed along with the rest of
the property."*
At the same time there grew up a systematic specu
lation in servants both in England and in Virginia.
A servant could be transported to America for from six
to eight pounds and sold for from forty to sixty pounds.
London and Bristol were the chief markets for young
men and women who were sold to shipowners who
transported them to America and sold them.*j* The
number of servants imported who were obtained in
this and other ways was, from 1650 to 1675, when the
trade began to decline, considerable. The number
* " White Servitude in the Colony of Virginia," Johns Hopkins University Studies,
p. 44.
+ Bristol, which was the last to give up the practice of selling bond-servants
to the English colonies in America, had been six hundred years before, at the
time of the Norman Conquest, the chief stronghold of the slave-trade. At that
time any one who had more children or more servants than he could keep, took
them to the market-place at Bristol. A historian of that time, William of
Malmesbury, says that it was no uncommon thing to behold young girls exposed
for sale in the Bristol market, in the days when Ireland was the greatest mart
for English slaves. — Greene's " Short History of the English People," Vol. I.,
p. no. "History for Ready Reference," Larned, Vol. I., p. 317.

112 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
of such white servants imported into Virginia alone
from 1664 amounted to 1,500 a year. And it is
said that the number sent from England to the
colonies and the West Indies amounted to 15,000
a year.It was surprising to me to learn that a little more
than two hundred years ago Englishmen sold the
prisoners taken in their civil wars in much the same
way that the African people captured and sold people
of their own race. But the knowledge of these facts
has helped me to understand that when Negro
slavery began in this country the condition of the
African slaves was not so exceptional as it afterward
became and as it now seems.
Under the conditions I have referred to, the gradual
transition from white servitude to Negro slavery,
which took place during the seventeenth and eigh
teenth centuries, came about naturally and easily.
At first the condition of the Negro slave was in most
respects like that of the white servant, except that
one was a servant for a fixed period of years and the
other was a servant for life. As time went on, how
ever, the two things, black slavery and white servi
tude, began to grow apart. The condition of the
white servant was continually improved, and the
condition of the black slave grew steadily worse.
The same thing which took place in Virginia took
place in other Southern colonies. Finally, at the
close of the eighteenth century Negro slavery had

THE FIRST SLAVES 113
almost entirely replaced white servitude in all the
Southern colonies.*
Speaking of the causes which brought white servi
tude to an end in North Carolina, Dr. John Spencer
Bassett, formerly Professor of History and Political
Science in Trinity College, N. C, says :
The incoming of Negro slaves, who, when the experimental
stage was passed, were seen to be cheaper than the white servants,
was probably the most powerful of all the causes of the decreased
importation of bond-servants. The rivalry was between the whites
and the blacks. The blacks won. It is impossible not to see in
this an analogous process to that by which Negro slavery supplanted
Indian slavery in the West Indies. The abuses connected with
Indian slavery touched the conscience of the people, and the
Negroes who could better stand slavery were introduced to replace
it. The abuses connected with white slavery touched the hearts
of the British people, and again the Negro was called in to bear
the burden bf the necessary labour. In each case it was a survival
of the -fittest^ Both Indian slavery and white servitude were to go '
down before the black man's superior endurance, docility, and
labour capacity, f
I have referred at some length to conditions of
white servitude in the English colonies before
the introduction of the Negro slaves in order to
illustrate how easily and naturally the transition was
* The condition of the apprenticed servants in Virginia differed from that of
slaves chiefly in the duration of their bondage, and the laws of the colony favoured
their early enfranchisement. . . . Had no other form of servitude been known
in Virginia than such as had been tolerated in Europe, every difficulty would have
been promptly obviated by the benevolent spirit of colonial legislation. But a
new problem in the history was now to be solved. For the first time the Ethiopian
and the Caucasian races were to meet together in nearly equal numbers beneath
a temperate zone. — Bancroft, "History of the United States," Vol. I., pp. 176,
177. t " Slavery and Servitude in the Colony of North Carolina," Johns Hopkins
University Studies, p. 77.

n4 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
made from slavery in Africa to slavery in America.
But I confess these facts have for me another and a
different interest. It is important that the people
of my race should not gain the idea that, because they
were once in slavery, their situation is wholly excep
tional. It is important that we should bear in mind,
when we are disposed to become discouraged, that
other races have had to face, at some time in their
history, difficulties quite as great as ours. In
America Negro slavery succeeded white servitude
and it seems probable if the Negro had not been
discovered and brought to this country as a labourer
the system of white servitude would have lasted in
this country a great deal longer than it actually did.
I was interested in noting in what I have read con- .
cerning the relations of the races at this early period
that the first distinctions made between the black r?an
and the white man were not on the ground of race and
colour, but on that of religion. That is no doubt
characteristic of a time when people were divided by
'religion rather than by race. The Negroes were
"heathen," and the law distinguished between those
who were Christians and those who were not. For
instance, the law declared that no Christian could be
made a slave for life. The white bondmen were
usually referred to as "servants," or "Christian ser
vants," and were in this way distinguished from
slaves. "The right to enslave a Negro," says Pro
fessor Bassett, " seems to have been based on the

THE FIRST SLAVES 115
fact that he was a pagan." There was a general
notion throughout all Christendom that it was wrong
for one Christian to enslave another, and that as soon
as a pagan was baptised he could be no longer held
as a slave. This prevented, for many years, the
work of Christianising the Negroes. So strong was
this feeling that it was necessary in several of the
colonies to pass laws expressly stating that the con
dition of the slave was not changed when he was
taken into church.*
On the other hand, as the white servant was a
Christian, the principle was gradually established
that he could only be held in servitude by Christians,
or those "who were sure to give him Christian
usage ! " " Thus free Negroes, mulattoes, or Indians,"
says Mr. Ballagh, "although Christians, were
incapacitated from holding white servants, as also
were infidels, ' such as Jews, Moors, and Mohamme
dans.' Where a white servant was sold to them,
or his owner had intermarried with them, the ser
vant became ipso facto free."*}*
It is a curious fact that one of the first laws passed
discriminating against the Negro because of his
racg took away from him the right to hold a white
man in bondage.
In Virginia and Maryland it was one hundred and
* " Slavery and Servitude in the Colony of North Carolina," Johns Hopkins
University Studies, p. 45 et seq.
•(•"White Servitude in the Colony of Virginia," Johns Hopkins University
Studies, p. 63.

116 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
fifty years before white servitude finally gave way to
Negro slavery. In other Southern colonies, Negro
slavery, introduced from the West Indies, was almost
from the first the only form of labour known on the
plantations. In South Carolina an effort was made to re-estab
lish serfdom, as it had existed one hundred years
before in England, and as it still existed in Europe.
In Georgia it was hoped, by prohibiting slavery, to
establish a system of free labour. But in both cases
the effort failed.
General Oglethorpe, the founder of Georgia,
declared that slavery was " contrary to the teachings
of the gospel and opposed to the fundamental law of
England," and when it was proposed to introduce
slavery into the colony he declared that "he declined
to permit so horrid a crime." But within fifteen
years from the founding ofthe colony slavery was fully
established there and the law against it had been
repealed. The fact seems to be that the white "servants,"
such as the company was able to obtain from Eng
land, were not fitted to withstand the climate. Rev.
William B. Stevens, formerly Professor of History
in the University of Georgia, says that strenuous
efforts were made to import white servants but
"many escaped to Carolina. . . . Even the
German servants so often pointed to as patterns of
industry and sobriety were complained of as being

THE FIRST SLAVES 117
'refractory, filled with ideas of liberty and clandes
tinely quitting their masters', who 'were compelled
to resort to corporal punishment or other summary
means to bring them to obedience.'"
In one of the several documents prepared at that
time, setting forth "the true state of the colony," it is
said that so general was the sickness during the
summer months that "hardly one-half of the ser
vants or working people were even able to do their
masters or themselves the least service; and the
yearly sickness of each servant, generally speaking,
cost his master as much as would have maintained
a Negro for four years."
With the introduction of the rice planting the
necessity of employing Africans was doubled. So
difficult did the first settlers find the task of clearing
the land and planting and harvesting the rice that
one writer declares the "white servants would have
exhausted their strength in clearing a spot for their
own graves, and every plantation would have served
no other purpose than a burying ground to its
European cultivators."*
No doubt the black man withstood the climate,
particularly in the states of the Lower South and
the West Indies, and did the rough pioneer work
that was required at that time better than the white
man did or could. Even to-day in most of the West
Indies, in many parts of South America, and in some
» " A True and Historical Narrative of the Colony of Georgia, " p. no.

118 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
parts of the United States, as for instance in the rich
lands of the Yazoo Delta, the Negro is almost the
only man who labours with his hands. But even
with Negro labour the work of clearing the forests
and planting the crops was carried on in those early
days with great loss of life. During the whole
period of slavery plantations in the West Indies, in
South America, and in some parts ofthe United States
the plantations had to be constantly recruited with
fresh levies from Africa to carry on the cultivation
of the soil.
After doing all this pioneer work, making it possi
ble for other human beings to live and prosper there,
one cannot wonder that the Negro thinks it a little
strange that Italians and people from other parts of
Europe and even Asia are invited into the South and
granted privileges that even the Negro himself does
not enjoy. Having performed a service so necessary
and so important for the white man at a time and
under circumstances such as other persons could
not or would not have performed it, it is not strange
if the Negro feels that, at least, the Southern people
ought to deal more kindly with him than with any
foreign race which, after nearly three hundred years
of occupation by the white man and the black man,
has just begun to enter this country.
Among the early colonists of the Carolinas were the
Moravians and the Salzburgers, who were opposed
to slavery upon religious grounds. These people

THE FIRST SLAVES 119
withstood for some time the temptation to employ
Negro slaves. At length, however, they received a
message from the head of the church of Europe to
the effect that if they took slaves with the purpose of
receiving them into the church and leading them to
Christ, not only was this not a sin, but it might
prove a blessing.*
It is an interesting fact which I learned when I
visited their community a few years ago, that the first
person baptised among the Moravians of Salem,
N. C, was a Negro. The Moravians of Salem
are still among the black man's warmest friends.
I might add that, so far as I know, the Moravian
is the only religious sect whose missionaries ever
voluntarily sold themselves into bondage, as did
Leonard Dober and Tobias Leupoldt at San Crux
in the West Indies, that they might evangelise their
fellow slaves.
This desire to Christianise the African and give him
the benefit of a higher civilisation was frequently,
during slavery, offered as an excuse for importing
African labourers to this country and holding them
in slavery.
People differ, and will always differ no doubt, as
to whether the desire to civilise the African was a
sufficient excuse for bringing him to America, at the
cost of so much suffering and expense. For my own
part, I am disposed to believe that it was worth all
* " History of Georgia," Stevens, p. 312. Bancroft, Vol. HI., p. 448.

120 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
that it had cost. At any rate, now that the black
man is here and permanently settled in the midst of
; the white man's civilisation, there can be no good
reason for depriving him of the benefits of being
j here. If any race other than the Anglo-Saxon has
I earned a right to live in this country and to enjoy
the opportunities of American civilisation, it seems
I to me the Negro has earned that right.
One who has not studied the economic conditions
under which the first slaves lived and laboured can
not understand the enormous service that the Negro
performed for the civilisation of America during these
early and pioneer days.
The Indian, both in North and South America, was
pressed into the service of the white man, but he
was not equal to the task and perished under the
hard conditions in which he was compelled to labour.
Concerning the value of the Negro in Brazil,
Heinrich Handlemann, the German historian of
that country, says: "The service of the African
under conditions as they then existed was, in fact,
indispensable. On the other hand, the Indians,
either as slaves or as free labourers, were always
poor labourers, without industry and without
persistence." In Brazil, in Cuba, and in other portions of the
West Indies, one Negro as a labourer was counted
equal to four Indians.*
*" History of Slavery in Cuba, 1511-1868," Herbert H. S. Aimes.

THE FIRST SLAVES 121
It seems to be equally true that no part of the white
race was equal to the task which the Negro performed
in the forests and in the sugar, rice, and cotton fields
of the far South. Repeated attempts were made to
bring in white labourers to perform the work of the
Negro, but without success.
In his history of Louisiana, Gayarre mentions the
fact that about 1718 John Law, the author of the
great speculation in Louisiana lands, agreed to bring
1,600 Germans to Louisiana and settle them on a
concession of twelve miles square granted to him
on the Arkansas River. Other grants were made
upon the same terms. In accordance with the
terms ofthe grant the Mississippi Company, of which
Law was the head, sent out a number of German
peasants, but they were soon swept away by the
climate. Several different attempts of this kind
were made and when they failed it was determined
to bring Negroes direct from Africa. Vessels were
accordingly sent out and brought back cargoes of
Negro slaves, who were distributed among the
inhabitants. By 1728 there were 2,600 Negroes in
the colony and lands were rising in value.
Early attempts were made to introduce German
labourers into some of the more tropical states of
Brazil, but they "perished wholesale of famine and
hardships of all kinds." In 1764, 400 exiled
Acadians were settled in the region known as St.
Nicholas, Haiti, but they were unable to stand the

122 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
climate and were transferred to Louisiana. About
the same time 2,400 Germans founded there the
state of Bombardopolis, but they met the same fate.
Some of them accompanied the Acadians to Louisi
ana, where traces of them still remain. The others
who survived were soon absorbed by the black popu
lation about them and it is said that some of their
descendants of mixed blood may still be found
inhabiting the district.*
The history of the first attempt to settle German
peasants in Louisiana reminds me of an interesting
story told by George W. Cable in his book of " Strange
True Stories of Louisiana." The incidents to which
I refer occurred in connection with another and later
German immigration, when some poor people were
sent over, not as settlers, but as labourers, to
Louisiana. Some time early in the last century a shipload of
these Germans arrived in New Orleans. Many of
them were respectable people who had paid their
own way to America. Others had been sent over
with the understanding that they were to work out
their passage after they reached this country. The
journey was a hard one; there had been a great deal
of sickness, and, as was often the case among those
early immigrants, many of them had died. When
they arrived in port they were sold, much after the
fashion of the bond-servants of Virginia, for a period
*" North America," Reclus, Vol. II, p. 411.

THE FIRST SLAVES 123
of service. In the confusion, it is said, many of
those who had paid their way and were entitled to
their freedom were sold with the rest. Among
these was a little girl, who had lost both her father
and mother on the journey to America. She was
sold as a servant, upon the landing of the ship, and
years passed before her friends again got any trace
of her. She was at this time a slave. She had no
memory of her parents, nor of a time when she had
been free. She believed herself to be a Negro and
called herself a "yellow gal." Her resemblance to
her mother was, however, so great that her friends
began proceedings to secure her freedom, and after
a long trial, lasting years, her identity was finally
established and she was freed.
One thing that made it difficult to prove that she
was free was the fact that at this time so many others
of the slaves in Louisiana were as white as she. It
was testified that the man who owned her had
several other slaves upon his plantation who were
white. I mention this story here because it is one of the
curious facts that have happened in connection with
African slavery and because it illustrates how close
the servitude of the white man brought him to the
condition of the Negro slave. To a very large extent
the curse of slavery rested not merely upon the
African but upon every man who worked with his
hands.

124 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
In the same way and to the same extent the uplift
ing of the Negro in the South means the uplifting of
labour there; for the cause of the Negro is the cause
of the man who is farthest down everywhere in the
world. Educate him, give him character, and make
him efficient as a labourer, and every other portion of
the community will be lifted higher. Degrade the
Negro, hold him in peonage, ignorance, or any other
form of slavery and the great mass of the people in
the community will be held down with him. It is
not possible for one man to hold another man down
in the ditch without staying down there with him.

VII
THE INDIAN AND THE NEGRO
SHORTLY after I went back to Hampton In
stitute, in 1879, to take a further course of
study, General Armstrong, the head of that
institution, decided to try the experiment of bringing
some Indian boys from the Western states and giving
them an opportunity, along with the Negro, to get
the benefits of the kind of education that Hampton
Institute was giving. He secured from the reser
vations something over one hundred wild, and for
the most part entirely unlettered, Indians, and then
he appointed me to take charge of these young men.
I was to live in the same building with them, look
after the discipline, take charge of their rooms, and
in general act as a sort of "house father" to them.
This was my first acquaintance with the Indians.
I do not know that I had ever seen an Indian previous
to this time, although I had read something of them
and had become greatly interested in their history.
During the few years that I was in charge of these
Indian boys I had an opportunity to study them close
at hand, and to get an insight into their characters.
At the same time I had an opportunity to compare
125

126 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
them, in their studies, in their deportment, and in
their conduct generally, with the Negro boys by
whom they were surrounded. Within a short time
I noticed that, in spite of the great differences be
tween them, each race seemed to have acquired a
genuine regard and respect for the other. This is
the more remarkable from the fact that the Indian,
as he comes from the reservations, is very proud;
feels himself superior to the white man, and is very
doubtful about the value of the white man's civilisa
tion that he has been sent to study. Of course,
he naturally feels very much superior to the Negro,
for one reason because he knows that the Negro
has been at one time held in slavery by the white
man. At this time I had no idea of the close and intimate
relations into which the Indian and the Negro had
been brought at various times and in various places
during the history of their life together in the Western
world. The association of the Negro with the Indian
has been so intimate and varied on this continent,
and the similarities as well as the differences of their
fortunes and character are so striking, that . I am
tempted to enter at some length into a discussion of
the relations of each to the other, and to the white
man in this country.
Recently I heard a story which illustrates to a
certain extent what these relations of the three races
are at the present time. The story was told me by

THE INDIAN AND THE NEGRO 127
a teacher who had in his class a certain number of
Indians and an equal number of Negroes. They
had been together for some time, and had managed
to get pretty well acquainted with one another. One
day, while the teacher was discussing with them some
facts in their history.in which he referred to the con
tribution that each of the races had made to the
civilisation in this country, he called upon one of the
Indians to tell the class what seemed to him the good
qualities of the Negroes, as he understood them.
This young Indian seemed to have discovered a
number of valuable qualities in the Negro. He
referred to his patience, to his aptitude for music,
to his desire to learn, etc. Then the teacher called
upon one of the Negro students to tell what
qualities he had discovered in the Indian that he
regarded as admirable and worth cultivating. He
referred to his courage, to his high sense of honour,
and to his pride of race. After this, the teacher called
upon any one in the class to stand up and tell them
in what respects he thought the white man was
superior. The teacher waited for a few moments,
but no member of the class rose. Then he spoke
again to the class, asking them if there was no one
there who was willing and able to say a word for the
white race. But, to his surprise, not one of the class
had a word to say.
This comparatively trivial incident illustrates, I
suspect, pretty well the relations that now exist in this

128 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
country between the three races — the Indian, the
Negro, and the white man. One of the first things
that a student of another race learns, when he begins
to study the history, the literature, and the traditions
of the Anglo-Saxon, is the superiority which that race
has, or feels it has, over all others. No doubt these
boys, both the Indian and the Negro, had been made
to feel this superiority. It had led them, perhaps, to
have a special interest in one another, and given each
a desire to discover and note the qualities that were
rare and valuable in the other. They had never
learned to note the valuable qualities in the white race,
because they had been made to feel that the white
race did not need, and perhaps did not deserve, their
sympathy. It was to me an interesting illustration of
the way in which all the dark-coloured people of this
country, no matter how different in disposition or in
temperament they may be, are being drawn together
in sympathy and interest in the presence ofthe preju
dice of the white man against all other people of a
different colour from his own.
As a matter of fact, the Negro and the Indian have
been in very close and very intimate association in
America from the first. The Negro was introduced
as a labourer in the West Indies, in the first instance,
to take the place of the native Indian, who was the
first slave in America. But Indian slavery in the
West Indies, South America and in North America
did not by any means cease upon the first appearance

THE INDIAN AND THE NEGRO 129
of Negro slavery. After the Spaniards had used up
nearly all the native population ofthe islands of Cuba
and Haiti, in working the mines, they sent out
slave-raiders to the coasts of Florida, to the other
West Indies, and to the coast of South America to
get Indian slaves, particularly from the stronger
Carib tribes. During the long wars between the
Spanish in Florida and the English in the Carolinas,
in which Indians took part on both sides, many
hundreds of Indian prisoners were shipped as slaves
to the West Indies.
For a long time a price was fixed on every Indian
prisoner that should be brought into Charleston and
the enslavement ofthe Indians, according to an early
historian of the colony, "was made a profitable
branch of trade." Not only were Indian slaves
shipped to the West Indies but large numbers of
them were sold into the New England colonies from
South Carolina. For instance, in 1708 an Indian boy
brought thirty five pounds, and an Indian girl brought
fifteen pounds at Salem, Massachusetts, in 1710.
So large, in fact, was, at one time, this traffic in
Indian slaves between the southern and the northern
provinces that in 1712 a law was passed in Massa
chusetts prohibiting the importation of Indian
servants or slaves; the reason given for this measure
in the preamble to the law is the bad character of
the Indian: "being of malicious, surley, and very
ungovernable." This lav/ was directed especially

130 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
against the Southern Indians, the Tuscaroras and
others, of whom 800 were made prisoners as a result
of a war which expelled that tribe from the Caro
linas. Similar laws were passed by Pennsylvania in
1712, New Hampshire in 1714, and Connecticut
and Rhode Island in 1715.*
When the French troops fought and destroyed the
Natchez Indians, under Governor Perier, in 1731,
forty male Indians and four hundred and fifty
women and children were sent to San Domingo, where
they were sold as slaves. At the close of the Pequot
War in New England something like two hundred
of the Indians that remained were sent to the Ber
muda Islands and exchanged for Negro slaves. An
extensive trade in Indian slaves was carried on for
many years with the coast of Venezuela.
During all this time, for a hundred years or more,
the Indian and the Negro worked side by side as
slaves. In all the laws and regulations ofthe Colo
nial days the same rule which was applied to the
Indian was also applied to the Negro slaves. For
instance, in Bishop Spangenberg's "Journal of
Travel in North Carolina," written in 1752, it is
stated that the law declared "whoever marries a
Negro, Indian, mulatto, or any other person of
mixed blood, must pay a fine of fifty pounds." In
all other regulations that were made in the earlier
days for the control of the slaves, mention
?History of Slavery in Massachusetts, G. H. Moore, pp. 61, 62.

THE INDIAN AND THE NEGRO 131
is invariably made of the Indian as well as the
Negro. Gradually, however, as the number of Negro slaves
increased the Indians and their descendants who were
held in slavery were absorbed into and counted with
the body of the Negro slaves. I venture to say that
the amount of Indian blood in the American Negro
is very much larger than anyone who has not investi
gated the subject would be inclined to believe.
Very frequently I have noticed Indian features very
distinctly marked in the students who have come to
us, not only from the Southern states, but also from
Cuba, Porto Rico, and the other West Indian islands.
In some parts of South America this amalgamation
of the two dark-skinned races has gone very much
further than it has elsewhere. The Negro maroons
of Dutch and British Guiana, who have established
little republics of their own back in the mountainous
parts of those two states are very largely mixed with
Indians. Most of the inhabitants of Panama, I
understand, like some of their Central American
neighbours, are of mixed blood, the various
elements being the Spanish, Indian, and the Negro.
In some ofthe villages ofthe Atlantic coast side ofthe
Isthmus of Panama Negroes largely outnumber the
natives with whom they have intermingled to form
the present population. In several of the other
islands of the West Indies, where Negroes make up
nearly the whole population, there are still distinct

132 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
traces among them, of remnants ofthe Indian race
that formerly inhabited these islands, as, for instance,
in the islands of St. Vincent and Dominica.
A number of the Negroes of the United States, I
might add, who have become prominent in one direc
tion or another, are known to have Indian blood in
their veins. I have heard it said, for instance, though
I do not know it to be true, that Frederick Douglass
had some Indian blood. It is pretty well known
that Crispus Attucks, the leader of the Boston
Massacre, was a runaway slave with considerable
Indian blood in his veins. Paul Cuffe, the noted
Negro skipper, who took the first shipload of Africans
back to Africa, and who therefore deserves the honour
of being the first actual coloniser of Africa by
American Negroes, was a man of Indian ancestry.
Among the Negroes in our day who are of Indian
ancestry I might mention T. Thomas Fortune, who
always speaks with pride of the fact that he has in
his veins the fighting blood of his Seminole ancestors.
I remember hearing Mr. Fortune say that he had
in his veins Negro, Indian, and Irish blood, and that
sometimes these antagonistic strains fell to warring
with each other, with very interesting results.
In many other ways besides their connection with
slavery, the Indian and the Negro have been brought
together in this country. In Louisiana, at different
times, the Negroes fought with the white man against
the Indians. At other times, the Indians conspired

THE INDIAN AND THE NEGRO 133
with the Negro slaves against the white man in an
effort to throw off the yoke of slavery. In 1730 the
Chickasaw Indians conspiied with some ofthe slaves
of New Orleans to destroy the whole white population.
The conspiracy was discovered, however, and the
leader, Samba, and seven other Negro leaders were
broken on the wheel to pay the penalty for their
crime. In Alabama the Negroes fought with the
whites against the Indians.
One of the most interesting and picturesque chap
ters in the history ofthe warfare ofthe white man and
the Indian is that which relates the long struggle of
the Seminoles, who were mixed with and supported
by runaway Negroes from the plantations of Georgia
and the Carolinas, to maintain their independence
and preserve their territory. There is a pretty well
established tradition that the famous Seminole chief
Osceola, who, for a long time, had been their faithful
friend, finally turned against the whites, because his
Negro wife, who was the daughter of a fugitive slave,
was captured and sold across the border into slavery.
In a recent account of the last of the unconquered
Seminoles, who are still living in the Everglades
of Florida, I noticed reference to an Afro-Indian,
who apparently holds a position among these people
corresponding to that of a sheriff, since he is
described as executioner ofthe tribe.
The Cherokee Indians of Georgia were large slave
owners, as were also the Creek Indians of Alabama.

134 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
When, in 1838, these Indians were compelled to move
westward to the Indian Territory they took a great
many of their Negro slaves with them. During the
Civil War the Indians of the Territory along with
the white people of the South, defended their right
to hold slave property, but the terms of peace freed
these slaves of the Indians as they did those of the
other Southern slave-holders, and since that time
the freedmen have been incorporated in the different
Indian nations of Indian Territory to which they
belonged as slaves.
So thoroughly have the Negroes and the Indians
intermingled in some of the Indian nations that in
travelling through the country nearly every Indian
you meet seems to be, if I may judge by my own
experience, either a Negro, or a white man.
A few years ago I visited that part of Oklahoma
that was formerly known as Indian Territory, and
I recall my feeling of disappointment and surprise
when I saw almost no Indians either at the railway
stations or in the towns that I visited, whereas I had
expected to see the streets thronged with them.
When I asked a man I met quite casually on the street
where the Indians had all gone, he replied that they
"were back in the hills."
"You know," he continued, "as soon as the Indian
sees* a whitewashed fence he thinks it is time for him
to get out. He is afraid if he stays he will get civilised."
Now this is one respect in which the Negro, largely,

THE INDMN AND THE NEGRO 135
I believe, because he has passed through the con
dition of slavery, differs from the Indian. The Negro
r-j^Jgjjj-tej^^during his conta-ct-with. the white man
in_ slavery, riot to Jie_jifrai__l_jQ£,^ The
result is that as soon as he sees a whitewj'-hpd ffnrp
he tries to get nexttoit...
The two races, the Indian and the Negro, have often
been compared to the disadvantage of the Negro.
I have frequently heard it stated that the Indian
proved himself the superior race by not submitting
to slavery. As I have already pointed out, it is not
exactly true that the Indian never submitted to
slavery. What is nearer the truth is that no race
which has not at some time or other submitted to
slavery of some kind never succeeded in reaching
a higher form of civilisation. It is just as true of
the Bushmen of South Africa, as it is of the Indian,
tint they never submitted to slavery. The Bushmen,
like the Indian, were a hunter race that obstinately
refused to adapt themselves to new conditions, and
the result was that when they met a stronger people
in the Kaffir, of South Africa, they were hunted off
the face of the earth. The same thing, or something
like the same thing, happened in America. At the
time that the white people of New England and of
the Southern states were offering a bounty for every
Indian scalp they could obtain, they were sending
ships across the ocean to get Negro slaves to furnish
the necessary labour for opening up the country and

136 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
tilling the farm. At the time that the Indians were
fighting the white man in the Ohio valley they
relentlessly killed the white men they captured, and,
it is said, sometimes ate them, but spared the lives
of the Negro prisoners, in order to sell them to the
French settlers in Canada and the Mississippi valley.*
The fact is that, so far as the Indian refused to
become a slave ofthe white man, he deprived himself
ofthe only method that existed at that time for getting
possession of the white man's learning and the white
man's civilisation. To me it seems that the patience
of the Negro, which enabled him to endure the hard
ships of slavery, and the natural human sympathy
of the Negro, which taught him, finally, to love the
white man and to gain his affection in return, was
wiser, if you can speak of it in such terms, than the
courage and independence of the Indian which pre
vented him from doing the same.
In the long run it is not those qualities which
make a race picturesque and interesting, but rather
those qualities which make that race useful, that fit
it to survive and profit from contact with a civilisation
higher than its own. So far as I have been able to
learn, the white man, as yet, has never been able to
* It adds something to our notion of the condition of life in the early days in
this country when slavery was first established, if we recall that many of the Indians
of the United States were cannibals when the white man first met them. "For
the purpose of terrifying their Indian enemies, the French commanders used to
threaten to turn them over to the friendly Indians to be eaten, and they did not
hesitate to carry out their threats when they wished to please their anthropopha
gous allies." — "Indiana: A Redemption from Slavery," J. P. Dunn, Jr., pp.
23, 24.

THE INDIAN AND THE NEGRO 137
make the Indian of value, in any large way, in the
great task of civilisation. While the Negro, in
this country, at least, has steadily increased in num
bers, the Indian has steadily decreased, until at the
present time there are nearly ten million Negroes
and less than three hundred thousand Indians in the
United States. Not only has the Indian decreased
in numbers, but he has been an annual tax upon the
Government for food and clothing to the extent of
something like $10,000,000 a year, to say nothing of
the large amount spent in policing him. It has
been estimated that the entire amount expended by
the people of the United States is something more
than a billion dollars.*
The Negro, on the contrary, for two hundred and
fifty years, was brought to this country at an enormous
expense, and during that time, judging, at any rate,
by the prices which were paid for him, the value of
*The expenditure of the United States for these wards of the nation, in the
fiscal year ending June 30, 1902, aggregated $10,049,584.86. From July 4, 1776,
to June 30, 1890, the civil expenditures of the Government on account of the
Indians aggregated a little more than $250,000,000.
The Indian wars of the United States have been more than forty in number.
It is estimated that they have cost the lives of some 19,000 white men, women,
and children, and of more than 30,000 Indians. The military expenditures
have exceeded the civil expenditures doubtless more than four to one. It is
impossible to get at thoroughly trustworty statistics, but it is estimated that
something like two-thirds of the total expense of the army of the United States
from 1789 to 1890, save during periods of foreign and civil wars, is directly or
indirectly chargeable to the Indian account. Upon this basis, the total is more
than $800,000,000. Add thereto the civil list, and we have more than a billion
dollars expended on account of the Indians within a century and a quarter of
our national existence. . . A comparison of the military and the civil
expenditures as above stated would indicate that it was much cheaper to support
the Indian than to fight him. . . . History of tbe United States, Avery.
Appendix, p. 361.

138 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
his services was constantly increasing. I venture to
predict that when the economic history of the Negro
comes to be written it will be found that, both in this
country and in Africa, the black man has proved him
self superior as a labourer to any other people in the
same stage of ciyjjisatiojn-
In seeking to draw here a comparison between the
red man and my own race I do not believe it is
necessary for me to say that I am not influenced in
any way by racial prejudices against the Indian. I
think that when the first Indians were brought to
Hampton I was disposed to feel, as most of the stu
dents did at that time, that since Hampton was
established for the benefit of the Negro, the Indian
should not have been permitted to come in. But it
did not take me long, after getting in personal con
tact with individual Indians, to outgrow that preju
dice. During the time that I had these young men
under my charge, living in intimate daily contact
with them as I did, I learned to admire the Indian.
Perhaps all of us were more kindly disposed toward
the Indians as we learned that they, like ourselves, felt
that they had suffered wrongs and had been oppressed.
In this respect the presence of the Indians at Hamp
ton has been, I believe, a valuable experience to the
mass of the Negro students of the school. It taught
me, at any rate, that other races than the Negro had
had a hard time in this country, and that was, and is, a
valuable thing for the young men of my race to know

THE INDIAN AND THE NEGRO 139
and understand. Just so far as we, as a race, learn
that our trials and our difficulties are not wholly
exceptional and peculiar to ourselves; that, on the
contrary, other peoples have passed through the same
period of trials and have had to stand the same tests,
we shall cease to feel discouraged and embittered.
On the contrary, we shall learn to feel that in our
struggles to rise we are carrying the common burden
of humanity, and that only in helping others can we
really help ourselves. It was from my contact with
the Indian, as I remember, that I first learned the
important lesson that if I permitted myself to hate
a man because of his race I was doing a greater
wrong to myself than I could possibly do to him.
What is true of the Negro in comparison with the
Indian is equally true in his comparison with anyx
other primitive race. The fact seems to be, as I
have said elsewhere, that the Negro is the only race
that has been able to look the white man in the face
during any long period of years and not only live but
multiply. So much has been said about Negro labour in
this country, and so much has been said about
Negro labour in Africa, that I feel disposed to
quote at some length here a statement of the late
Professor N. S. Shaler, formerly Dean of the
Lawrence Scientific School, of Harvard University.
Professor Shaler was not only a scientific man
of broad and deep culture, but he was also a

140 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
Southern man, and had abundant opportunity to
get the facts.
Professor Shaler says:
The Negroes who came to North America had to undergo as
complete a transition as ever fell to the lot of man, without the least
chance to undergo an acclimatising process. They were brought
from the hottest part of the earth to the region where the winter's
cold is of almost arctic severity; from an exceedingly humid to a
very dry air. They came to service under alien taskmasters,
strange to them in speech and purpose. They had to betake
themselves to unaccustomed food and to clothing such as they had
never worn before. Rarely could one of the creatures find about
him a familiar face or friend, parent or child, or any object
that recalled his past life to him. It was an appalling change.
Only those who know how the Negro cleaves to all the dear,
familiar things of life, how fond he is of warmth and friendliness,
can conceive the physical and mental shock that this introduction
to new things meant to him. To people of our own race it would
have meant death. But these wonderful folk appear to have with
stood the trials of their deportation in a marvellous way. They
showed no peculiar liability for disease. Their longevity or period
of usefulness was not diminished, or their fecundity obviously
impaired. So far as I have been able to learn, nostalgia was not
a source of mortality, as it would have been with any Aryan popula
tion. The price they brought in the market, and the satisfaction
of their purchasers with their qualities, show that they were from
the first almost ideal labourers.
A little further on Professor Shaler compares the
Indian as a labourer with the Negro, pointing out
the superiority of the black over the red man in
this respect. It should be remembered in this
connection, however, that almost everywhere, in
Africa, the Negro before coming to America had

THE INDIAN AND THE NEGRO 141
reached a higher stage of civilisation than the Indian.
He already had possession of some of the fundamental
industries, like agriculture and the smelting of ores,
while the system of slavery existing everywhere in
Africa had long accustomed large portions of the
population to the habit of systematic labour.
The Indians who first met the white man on this
continent do not seem to have held slaves until they
first learned to do so from him. It is interesting to
note also that Indian slavery, as practised by both
the white man and the Indian, seems to have main
tained itself among the French population in the
Mississippi valley and in Canada for a considerable
time after it had begun to die out in the English sea
board colonies. Speaking of the Indian, as com
pared with the Negro slave, Professor Shaler says:
If we compare the Algonquin Indian, in appearance a sturdy
fellow, with these Negroes, we see of what stufFthe blacks are made.
A touch of housework and of honest toil took the breath of the
aborigines away, but these tropical exotics fell to their tasks and
trials far better than the men of our own kind could have done.
Moreover, the production of good tobacco requires
much care, which extends over about a year from the time the seed
is planted. Some parts of the work demand a measure of judg
ment such as intelligent Negroes readily acquire. They are, indeed,
better fitted for the task than white men, for they are commonly
more interested in their tasks than whites of the labouring class.
The result was that before the period of the Revolutionary War
slavery was firmly established in the tobacco-planting colonies of
Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina; it was already the foun
dation of their only considerable industry. . . . This industry
(cotton), even more than that of raising tobacco, called for abundant

142 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
labour, which could be absolutely commanded and severely tasked
in the season of extreme heat. For this work the Negro proved to
be the only fit man, for while the whites can do this work, they
prefer other employment. Thus it came about that the power
of slavery in this country became rooted in its soil. The facts
show that, based on an ample foundation of experience, the judg
ment of the Southern people was to the effect that this creature
of the tropics was a better labourer in their fields than the men of
their own race.
Referring to what he calls "the failure ofthe white
man to take a larger share in the agriculture of the
South," Professor Shaler says of the Negro as a
farm labourer:
Much has been said about the dislike ofthe white man for work
in association with Negroes. The failure of the white to have a
larger share in the agriculture of the South has been attributed to
this cause. This seems to be clearly an error. The dislike to the
association of races in labour is, in the slaveholding states, less than
in the North. There can be no question that if the Southern folk
could have made white labourers profitable they would have pre
ferred to employ them, for the reason that they would have required
less fixed capital for their operation. The fact was and is, that
the Negro is there a better labouring man in the field than the white.
Under the conditions he is more enduring, more contented, and
more trustworthy than the men of our own race.*
I have written at some length of the relations of the
Negro and the Indian in this country because these
relations are interesting in themselves and because
they show how thoroughly the Negro, by uniting him
self with the indigenous population of the country,
has knitted himself into the life and rooted himself in
the soil of America. I think I am perfectly safe in
* "Translation of our Race." Popular Science Monthly, Vol. 56, pp. 513, 524.

THE INDIAN AND THE NEGRO 143
saying that the Negro in America has a great deal
more of the blood of the original American in him
than any other race on this continent, other than
the native Indian himself. In fact, if we confine
ourselves to certain parts of the West Indies
and South America, the Negro is the only man who
can still be said to represent, by inheritance of blood,
the original American.
I have taken some pains to find out, as near as I
was able, from the imperfect statistics at hand, the
actual number of people of African descent in the
Western world. Including the ten million persons
of Negro blood in the United States, I believe I am
safe in saying that there are in North and South
America and the West Indies no less than twenty-
one million descendants of the original slaves who
were brought from Africa during the period of two
hundred and fifty years in which the slave-trade
existed.

CHAPTER VIII
THE NEGRO'S LIFE IN SLAVERY
SOME years ago one of the frequent subjects of
discussion among the white people and the
coloured people was the question: Who was
responsible for slavery in America ? Some people
said the English government was the guilty party,
because England would not let the colonies abolish
the slave-trade when they wanted to. Others
said the New England colonies were just as deep
in the mire as England or the Southern states,
because for many years a very large share of the
trade was carried on in New England ships.
As a matter of fact there were, as near as I have
been able to learn, three parties who were directly
responsible for the slavery of the Negro in the
United States. First of all there was the Negro
himself. It should not be forgotten that it was the
African who, for the most part, carried on the slave-
raids by means of which his fellow African was
captured and brought down to the coast for sale.
When, some months ago, the Liberian embassy
visited the United States, Vice-President Dossen
explained to me that one reason why Liberia had
144

THE NEGRO'S LIFE IN SLAVERY 145
made no more progress during the eighty-six years
of its existence was the fact that for many years
the little state had been engaged in a life-and-
death struggle with native slave-traders who had
been accustomed for centuries to ship their slaves
from Liberian ports and were unwilling to give up
the practice. It was only after the slave-trade had
entirely ceased, he said, that Liberia had begun
to exercise an influence upon the masses of the
native peoples within its jurisdiction.
The second party to slavery was the slave-trader
who, at first, as a rule, was an Englishman or a
Northern white man. During the Colonial period,
for instance, Newport, Rhode Island, was the
principal headquarters of the slave-trade in this
country. At one time Rhode Island had one hun
dred and fifty vessels engaged in the traffic. Down
to i860 Northern capital was very largely invested
in the slave-trade, and New York was the port from
which most of the American slave-smugglers fitted
out. Finally there was the Southern white man who
owned and worked the bulk of the slaves, and was
responsible for what we now ordinarily understand
as the slave-system. It would be just as much a
mistake, however, to assume that the South was
ever solidly in favour of slavery as it is to assume
that the North was always solidly against it. Thou
sands of persons in the Southern states were

146 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
opposed to slavery, and numbers of them, like James
G. Birney, of Alabama, took their slaves North in
order to free them, and afterward became leaders
in the anti-slavery struggle.
Like every other human thing, there is more
than one side to slavery and more than one way of
looking at it. For instance, as defined in the slave-
laws in what was known as the Slave Code, slavery
was pretty much the same at all times all over the
South. The regulations imposed upon master and
upon slave were, in several particulars, different
for the different states. On the whole, however,
as a legal institution, slavery was the same every
where. On the other hand, actual conditions were not
only different in every part of the country, but they
were likely to be different on every separate planta
tion. Every plantation was, to a certain extent, a
little kingdom by itself, and life there was what the
people who were bound together in the plantation
community made it. The law and the custom of
the neighbourhood regulated, to a certain extent,
the treatment which the master gave his slave.
For instance, in the part of Virginia where I lived
both white people and coloured people looked with
contempt upon the man who had the reputation of
not giving his slaves enough to eat. If a slave
went to an adjoining plantation for something to
eat, the reputation of his master was damned in that

THE NEGRO'S LIFE IN SLAVERY 147
community. On the whole, however, each planta
tion was a little independent state, and one master
was very little disposed to interfere with the affairs
of another.
The account that one gets of slavery from the
laws that were passed for the government of slaves
show that institution up on its worst side. No
harsher judgment was ever passed on slavery, so
far as I know, than that which will be found in the
decision of a justice of the Supreme Court of
North Carolina in summing up the law in a case
in which the relations of master and slave were
defined. The case I refer to, which was tried in 1829, was
one in which the master, who was the defendant,
was indicted for beating his slave. The decision,
which acquitted him, affirmed the master's right
to inflict any kind of punishment upon his slave
short of death. The grounds upon which this
judgment was based were that in the whole history
of slavery there had been no such prosecution of a
master for punishing a slave, and, in the words of
the decision, "against this general opinion in the
community the court could not hold."
It was a mistake, the decision continued, to say
that the relations of the master and slave were
like that of a parent and child. The object of
the parent in training his son was to render him fit
to live the life of a free man, and, as a means to

148 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
that end, he gave him moral and intellectual instruc
tion. With the case of the slave it was different.
There could be no sense in addressing moral con
siderations to a slave. Chief- Justice Ruffin, of
North Carolina, summed up his opinion upon this
point in these words:
The end is the profit of the master, his security, and the public-
safety; the subject, one doomed in his own person and his pos
terity to live without knowledge and without the capacity to make
anything his own, and to toil that another may reap the fruits.
What moral consideration shall be addressed to such a being to
convince him, what it is impossible but that the most stupid must
feel and know can never be true — that he is thus to labour upon a
principle of natural duty, or for the sake of his own personal
happiness. Such services can only be expected from one who has
no will of his own, who surrenders his will in implicit obedience
to that of another. Such obedience is the consequence only of
uncontrolled authority over the body. There is nothing else which
can operate to produce the effect. The power ofthe master must
be absolute to render the submission ofthe slave perfect.
In making this decision Justice' Ruffin did not
attempt to justify the rule he had laid down on
moral grounds. "As a principle of right," he said,
"every person in his retirement must repudiate it.
But in the actual condition of things it must be
so; there is no remedy. This discipline belongs to
the state of slavery. It constitutes the curse of
slavery both to the bond and free portion of our
population."* This decision brings out into plain view an idea that
* " Slavery in the State of North Carolina," John Spencer Bassett.

THE NEGRO'S LIFE IN SLAVERY 149
was always somewhere at the bottom of slavery —
the idea, namely, that one man's evil is another
man's good. The history of slavery, if it proves any
thing, proves that just the opposite is true, namely,
that evil breeds evil, just^as diseasejbreeds disease,
and that a wrong committed upon one portion of a
community will, in the long run, surely react upon
the other portion of that community.
There was a very great difference between the
life of the slave on the small plantations in the
uplands and upon the big plantations along the
coasts. To illustrate, the plantation upon which I
was born, in Franklin County, Va., had, as I remem
ber, only six slaves. My master and his sons all
worked together side by side with his slaves. In
this way we all grew up together, very much
like members of one big family. There was no
overseer, and we got to know our master and he
to know us. The big plantations along the
coasts were usually carried on under the direc
tion of an overseer. The master and his
family were away for a large part of the year.
Personal relation between them could hardly be
said to exist.
John C. Calhoun, South Carolina's greatest
statesman, was brought up on a plantation not very
much different from the one upon which I was
raised. One of his biographers relates how Patrick
Calhoun, John C. Calhoun's father, returning from

ISO THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
his legislative duties in Charleston, brought home
on horseback behind him a young African freshly
imported in some English or New England vessel.
The children in the neighbourhood and, no doubt,
some of the older people, had never before seen a
black man. He was the first one brought into that
part of the country. Patrick Calhoun gave him the
name of Adam. Some time later he got for him a
wife. One of the children of the black man, Adam,
was named Swaney. He grew up on the planta
tion with John C. Calhoun, and was for many years
his playmate. Swaney lived to a great age, and in
after years used to be fond of talking about the early
years that he and John Calhoun had spent together.
They hunted and fished together, and worked
together in the fields.
"We worked in the field," Swaney is reported
to have said, "and many a time in the hot
brilin' sun me and Marse John has ploughed
together." I have taken these facts from an account of Cal
houn's early life by Colonel W. Pinkney Stark, who
has given, besides, a very excellent account of the
institution of slavery as it existed in the early days
in that part of the country in which he lived. At that
time and in that part of the country the planter
worked his own plantation. The overseer did not
come in until later, and Colonel Stark believes that
"whatever was most harsh in the institution of

THE NEGRO'S LIFE IN SLAVERY 151
slavery was due to the rise of this middleman."
He says:
Not far from the Calhoun settlement lived a man who had
ridden with Sumter in the old war for liberty. During a long
and active life he managed the business of the plantation himself.
Toward the close of his life he consented to try an overseer, but
in every case some difficulty soon arose between the middleman
and the Negroes, in which the old planter invariably took sides
with the latter and rid himself of the proxy. On rainy days
the Negro women spun raw cotton into yarn, which was woven
by his own weaver into summer goods, to be cut by a seamstress,
and made by the other women, assisted by her, into clothing for
the "people." The sheep were shorn and the wool treated in
the same fashion for winter clothing. The hides of cattle eaten on
the place were tanned into leather and made into shoes by his own
shoemaker. He had his own carpenters, wheelwrights, and black
smiths, and besides cattle and sheep the old planter raised his own
stock of horses and mules. He grew his own wheat for flour,
besides raising other small grain, corn, and cotton. He distilled
his own brandy from peaches and sweetened it with honey manu
factured by his home bees. His Negroes were well fed and clothed,
carefully attended to in sickness, virtually free in old age, and
supported in comfort till their death. The moral law against
adultery was sternly enforced, and no divorce allowed. His
people were encouraged to enjoy themselves in all reasonable
ways. They went to a Methodist church in the neighbourhood
on Sunday, and had besides a preacher of their own, raised on the
place. The young people were supplied with necessary fiddling
and dancing. I was present when he died, and heard him say
to his son that he would leave him a property honestly made and not
burdened with a dollar indebtedness. His family and friends
gathered about his bedside when the time had come for him to
go. Having taken leave of his friends, he ordered his Negro
labourers to be summoned from the field to take farewell of him.
When they arrived he was speechless and motionless, but sensible
of all that was occurring, as could be seen from his look of intelli-

1 52 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
gence. One by one the Negroes entered the apartment, and
filing by him in succession took each in turn the limp hand of
their dying master, and affectionately pressing it for a moment,
thanked him for his goodness, commended him to God, and bade
him farewell.
The faithful discharge of the duties of the proprietor of a
plantation in former times demanded administrative as well as
moral qualities of a high order. There was never a better
school for the education of statesmen than the administration
of a Southern plantation under the former regime. A well-
governed plantation was a well-ordered little independent
state. Surrounded with such environments, Calhoun grew
at this school.*
The conditions of the Negro slave were harder on
some of the big plantations in the Far South than
they were elsewhere. That region was peopled
by an enterprising class of persons, of whom many
came from Virginia, bringing their slaves with them.
The soil was rich, the planters were making money
fast, the country was rough and unsettled, and there
was undoubtedly a disposition to treat the slaves as
mere factors in the production of corn, cotton, and
sugar.f ?American Historical Assn. Report, Vol. II., 1899, p. 74 et seq.
•f" That the Negroes were overtasked to the extent of being often permanently
injured, was evident from the complaints made by the Southern agricultural
journals against the bad policy of thus wasting human property. An. Alabama
tradesman told Olmsted that if the overseers make ''plenty of cotton,, the owners
never ask how many niggers they kill"; and he gave the further information
that a determined and perfectly relentless overseer could get almost any wages he
demanded, for when it became known that such a man had so many bales to the
hand, everybody would try to get him. . . .
Louisiana sugar-planters did not hesitate to avow openly that, on the whole,
they found it the best economy to work off their stock of Negroes about once in
seven years, and then buy an entire set of new hands. — "History of the United
States," James Ford Rhodes, Vol. I., p. 308.

THE NEGRO'S LIFE IN SLAVERY 153
And yet there were plantations in this region
where the relations between master and slave
seem to have been as happy as one could ask
or expect under the circumstances. On some
of the large estates in Alabama and Mississippi
which were far removed from the influence of the
city, and sometimes in the midst of a wilderness,
master and slaves frequently lived together under
conditions that were genuinely patriarchal. But
on such plantations there was, as a rule, no
overseer. As an example of the large plantations on
which the relations between master and slave were
normal and happy I might mention those of the
former President of the Confederacy, Jefferson
Davis, and his brother, Joseph Davis, in Warren
County, Mississippi.
The history of the Davis family and of the way
in which their plantations, the "Hurricane" and
"Brierfield," came into existence is typical. The
ancestors of the President of the Confederacy came
originally from Wales. They settled first in Georgia,
emigrated thence to Kentucky, and finally settled
in the rich lands of Mississippi. In 1818 Joseph
Davis, who was at that time a lawyer in Vicksburg,
attracted by the rich bottom-lands along the
Mississippi, took his father's slaves and went
down the river, thirty-six miles below Vicksburg,
to the place which is now called " Davis's Bend."

1 54 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
There he began clearing the land and preparing
it for cultivation.
At that time there were no steamboats on the
Mississippi River, and the country was so wild
that people travelled through the lonely forests
mostly on horseback. In the course of a few years
Mr. Davis, with the aid of his slaves, succeeded in
building up a plantation of about five thousand
acres, and became, before his death, a very wealthy
man. One day he went down to Natchez and
purchased in the market there a young Negro who
afterward became known as Ben Montgomery.
This young man had been sold South from North
Carolina, and because, perhaps, he had heard, as
most of the slaves had, of the hard treatment that
was to be expected on the big, lonesome plantations,
had made up his mind to remain in the city. The
first thing he did, therefore, when Mr. Davis brought
him home, was to run away. Mr. Davis succeeded
in getting hold of him again, brought him back to
the plantation, and then, as Isaiah, Benjamin Mont
gomery's son, has told me, Mr. Davis "came to an
understanding" with his young slave.
Just what that understanding was no one seems
now to know exactly, but in any case, as a result
of it, Benjamin Montgomery received a pretty fair
education, sufficient, at any rate, to enable him in
after years, when he came to have entire charge,
as he soon did, of Mr. Davis's plantation, to survey

THE NEGRO'S LIFE IN SLAVERY 155
the line of the levee which was erected to protect
the plantation from the waters of the Mississippi,
to draw out plans, and to compute the size of
buildings, a number of which were erected at dif
ferent times under his direction.
Mrs. Jefferson Davis, in her memoir of her hus
band, referring to Benjamin Montgomery and to
the manner in which Joseph Davis conducted his
plantation, says:
A maxim of Joseph E.Davis was: "The less people are governed,
the more submissive they will be to control." This idea he
carried out with his family and with his slaves. He instituted
trial by jury of their peers, and taught them the legal form of
holding it. His only share in the jurisdiction was the pardoning
power. When his slave could do better for himself than by daily
labour he was at liberty to do so, giving either in money or other
equivalent the worth of ordinary field service. One of his slaves
kept a variety shop, and on many occasions the family bought
of him at his own prices. He shipped, and indeed sometimes
purchased, the fruit crops of the Davis families, and also of other
people in "The Bend," and in one instance credited one of us
with $2,000 on his account. The bills were presented by him
with promptitude and paid, as were those of others on an inde
pendent footing, without delay. He many times borrowed from
his master, but was equally as exact in his dealings with his
creditors. His sons, Thornton and Isaiah, first learned to work,
and then were carefully taught by their father to read, write, and
cipher, and now Ben Montgomery's sons are both responsible
men of property; one is in business in Vicksburg, and the other
is a thriving farmer in the West.
Some years after the settlement on the bottom
lands at Davis's Bend had been made, Mr. Jef
ferson Davis joined his brother and lived for several

156 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
years upon an adjoining plantation. The two
brothers had much the same ideas about the man
agement of their slaves. Both of them took persona\
supervision of their estates, and Jefferson Davis,
like his brother, had a coloured man to whom he
refers as his "friend and servant, James Pen>
berton," who, until he died, seems to have had
practically the whole charge of the Brierfield planta
tion in the same way that Benjamin Montgomery
had charge of the Hurricane. After the war both
of these plantations were sold for the sum of $300,000
to Benjamin Montgomery and his sons, who con
ducted them for a number of years until, as a result
of floods and the low price of cotton, they were com
pelled to give them up.
Thornton Montgomery afterward moved to North
Dakota, where for a number of years he owned and
conducted a large wheat farm of 640 acres near
Fargo. His brother Isaiah afterward founded the
Negro town of Mound Bayou, Miss., of which I
shall have more to say hereafter.
As illustrating the kindly relations and good will
which continued to exist between the ex-President
of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, and his former
slaves, both during the years that they lived together
on the plantation and afterward, Mrs. Davis has
printed several letters written to her by them after
Mr. Davis's death. . The following letter was written
by Thornton Montgomery, who is at present asso-

THE NEGRO'S LIFE IN SLAVERY 157
ciated with his brother, Isaiah, in business at
Mound Bayou. Christine, North Dakota, December 7, 1889.
Miss Varina: I have watched with deep interest and solicitude
the illness of Mr. Davis at Brierfield, his trip down on the steamer
Leathers, and your meeting and returning with him to the resi
dence of Mr. Payne, in New Orleans; and I had hoped with good
nursing and superior medical skill, together with his great will
power to sustain him, he will recover. But, alas! for human en
deavour, an over-ruling Providence has willed it otherwise. I
appreciate your great loss, and my heart goes out to you in this
hour of your deepest affliction.
Would that I could help you bear the burden that is yours to
day. Since I am powerless to do so, I beg that you accept my
tenderest sympathy and condolence. Your very obedient servant,
Thornton.
To Mrs. Jefferson Davis, Beauvoir, Mississippi.*
From all that I have been able to learn, the early
slaves, and by these I mean the first generation
which were brought to America fresh from Africa,
seem to have remained more or less alien in cus
toms and sympathy to their white masters. This
was more particularly the case on the large planta
tions along the Carolina coast, where the slaves
came very little in contact with their masters, and
remained to a very large degree and for a consider
able time merely an African colony on American soil.
But the later generations, those who knew Africa
only by tradition, were different. Each succeeding
?"Jefferson Davis, Ex-President of the Confederate States," A memoir by his
wife, Vol. II., p. 934.

1 58 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
generation of J-he Creole Negroes — to use the
expression in its original meaning — managed to
pick up more and more, as it had the opportunity,
the language, the ideas, the habits, the crafts, and
the religious conceptions of the white man, until the
life of the black man was wholly absorbed into that
of the plantation upon which he lived.
The Negro in exile from his native land neither
pined away nor grew bitter. On the contrary, as soon
as he was able to adjust himself to the conditions
of his new life, his naturally cheerful and affectionate
disposition began to assert itself. Gradually the
natural human sympathies of the African began to
take root in the soil of the New World and, growing
up spontaneously, twine about the life of the white
man by whose side the black man now found
himself. The slave soon learned to love the
children of his master, and they loved, him in
return. The quaint humour of the Negro helped
to turn many a hard corner. It helped to excuse
his mistakes and, by turning a reproof into a jest,
to soften the resentment of his master for his faults.
Quaint and homely tales that were told around
the fireside made the Negro cabin a place of romantic
interest to the master's children. The simple,
natural joy of the Negro in little things converted
every change in the dull routine of his life into an
event. Hog-killing time was an annual festival,
and the corn shucking was a joyous event which

THE NEGRO'S LIFE IN SLAVERY 159
the whites and blacks, in their respective ways,
took part in and enjoyed. These corn-shucking bees,
or whatever they may be called, took place during
the last of November or the first half of December.
They were a sort of a prelude to the festivities of
the Christmas season. Usually they were held
upon one of the larger and wealthier plantations.
After all the corn had been gathered, thousands
of bushels, sometimes, it would be piled up in the
shape of a mound, often to the height of fifty or
sixty feet. Invitations would be sent around by the
master himself to the neighbouring planters, in
viting their slaves on a certain night to attend.
In response to these invitations as many as one
or two hundred men, women, and children would
come together.
When all were assembled around the pile of corn,
some one individual, who had already gained a
reputation as a leader in singing, would climb on
top of the mound and begin at once, in clear, loud
tones, a solo — a song of the corn-shucking season
— a kind of singing which I am sorry to say has
very largely passed from memory and practice.
After leading off in this way, in clear, distinct tones,
the chorus at the base of the mound would join in,
some hundred voices strong. The words, which
were largely improvised, were very simple and
suited to the occasion, and more often than not they
had the flavour of the camp-meeting rather than

160 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
any more secular proceeding. Such singing I have
never heard on any other occasion. There was
something wild and weird about that music, such as
I suspect will never again be heard in America.
One of these songs, as I remember, ran about
as follows:

Massa's niggers am slick and fat,
Oh! Oh! Oh!
Shine just like a new beaver hat,
Oh! Oh! Oh! refrain:
Turn out here and shuck dis corn,
Oh! Oh! Oh!
Biggest pile o' corn seen since I was born,
Oh! Oh! Oh! u.
Jones's niggers am lean an' po';
Oh! Oh! Oh!
Don't know whether dey get 'nough to eat or no,
Oh! Oh! Oh! refrain:
Turn out here and shuck dis corn,
Oh! Oh! Oh!
Biggest pile o' corn seen since I was born.
Oh! Oh! Oh!
Little by little the slave songs, the quaint stories,
sayings, and anecdotes of the slave's life began to
give their quality to the life of the plantation. Half

THE NEGRO'S LIFE IN SLAVERY 161
the homely charm of Southern life was made by the
presence of a Negro. The homes that had no
Negro servants were dreary by contrast, and that
was not due to the fact that, ordinarily, the man who
had slaves was rich and the man who had no slaves
was poor.
The four great crops of the South — tobacco, rice,
sugar, and cotton — were all raised by slave labour.
In the early days it was thought that no labour
except that of the Negro was suited to cultivate these
great staples of Southern industry, and that opinion
prevails pretty widely still. But it was not merely
his quality _as__a labourer that made the Negro
seem so necessary to the white man in the South;
it was also these other qualities to which I have
referred — his cheerfulness and  sympathy, his'
humour and his fidelity. No one can honestly say
that there was anything in the nature of the insti
tution of slavery that would develop these qualities
in a people who did not possess them. On the con
trary, what we know about slavery elsewhere leads
us to believe that the system would have developed
qualities quite different, so that I think I am
justified in saying that most of the things that
made slavery tolerable, both to the white man and
to the black man, were due to the native qualities
of the African.
Southern writers, looking back and seeking to
reproduce the genial warmth and gracious charm of

1 62 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
that old ante-bellum Southern life, have not failed to
do full justice to the part that the Negro played in it.
The late Joel Chandler Harris, for instance, has
given us in the character of "Uncle Remus" the
type of the Negro story-teller who delights and
instructs the young children of the "big house"
with his quaint animal stories that have been
handed down to the Negro by his African ancestors.
The "Br'er Rabbit" stories of Uncle Remus are
now a lasting element in the literature, not only
of the South, but of America, and they are
recognised as the peculiar contribution of the
American Negro slave to the folk-lore stories of
the world.
In my own state of Virginia, Mr. Thomas Nelson
Page has given us, in "Uncle Billy" and "Uncle
Sam," two typical characters worthy of study by
those who wish to understand the human side of
the Negro slave on the aristocratic plantations of
that state. In Mr. Page's story, "Meh Lady,"
Uncle Billy was guide, philosopher and friend to
his mistress and her daughter in the trying times of
war and in their days of poverty. He hid their
silver, refused to give information to the Union
soldiers, prayed the last prayer with his dying
mistress, comforted her lonely daughter, and at last
gave her away in marriage. At the close of the
wedding, the old man sits in front of his cabin door
and thinks again of the old days. The musings

THE NEGRO'S LIFE IN SLAVERY 163
of Uncle Billy Mr. Page tells in the following
quaint dialect:
An' dat night when de preacher was gone wid he wife, and
Hannah done drapt off to sleep, I wuz settin' in de do' wid meh
pipe, an' I heah 'em setting dyah on de front steps, dee voices
soun'in' low like bees, an' moon sort o' meltin' over de yard, an'
I sort o' got to studyin', an' hit 'pear like de plantation 'live
once mo', an' de ain' no mo' scufflin', an' de ole times done come
back ag'in, an' I heah meh kerridge-horses stompin' in de stall,
an' de place all cleared up again, an' fence all roun' de pahsture,
an' I smell de wet clover blossoms right good, and Marse Phil
and Meh Lady done come back, an' running all roun' me, climb
ing up on meh knees, calling me Une Billy, an' pestering me
to go fishing while somehow Meh Lady and de Cun'l, setting
dyah on de steps wid de voices hummin' low like water runnin'
in the dark.
In the story of "Marse Chan" Mr. Page lets
Uncle Sam, the slave bodyguard, tell in the follow
ing language what happened to his young master
during the Civil War on the field of battle:
Marse Chan he calls me, an he sez, "Sam, we 'se goin to win
in dis battle, an den we '11 go home an' git married; an' I 'm goin'
home wid a star on my collar." An' den he sez, " Ef I'm wounded,
kyah me, yo' hear ?" An' I sez, "Yes, Marse Chan." Well, jes'
den dey blowed boots an' saddles an' we mounted — an' dey
said, "Charge 'em," an' my King ef ever yo' see bullets fly, dey
did dat day. . . . We wen' down de slope, I 'long wid de
res' an' up de hill right to de cannons, an' de fire wuz so strong
dyah our lines sort o' broke an' stop; an' de cun'l was kilt, an'
I b'lieve dey wuz jes' 'bout to break all to pieces wen Marse
Chan rid up an' cotch holt de flag and hollers, "Follow
me." . . . Yo' ain' never heah thunder. Fust thing I
knowed de Roan roll head over heels an' flung me up 'gainst de
bank like yo' chuck a nubbin over g'inst de foot o' de corn pile.

164 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
An' dat what kep me from being kilt I 'spects. When I look
'roun' de Roan was lying dyah stone dead. 'Twan' mo'n a minit,
de sorrel come gallupin' back wid his mane flying and de rein
hangin' down on one side to his knee. I jumped up an' run over
de bank an' dyah, wid a whole lot ob dead mens and some not
dead yit, on de one side o' de guns wid de flag still in he han' an' a
bullet right thru' he body, lay Marse Chan. I tu'n 'im over an' call
'im, "Marse Chan," but twan' no use. He wuz done gone home.
I pick him up in my arms wid de flag still in he han' and toted
'im back jes' like I did dat day when he wuz a baby an' ole master
gin 'im to me in my arms, an' say he could trus' me, an' tell me to
tek keer on 'im long as he lived. I kyah'd 'im way off de battle-
fiel' out de way o' de balls an' I laid 'im down under a big tree
till I could git somebody to ketch de sorrel for me. He was
kotched arter a while an' I hed some money, so I got some pine
plank an' made a coffin dat evenin' an' wrap Marse Chan's body
up in de flag an' put 'im in de coffin, but I did n't nail de top on
strong, 'cause I knowed de old missus wan' to see 'im; an' I got
a' ambulance an' set out fo' home dat night. We reached dyah
de nex' evenin' arter travellin' all dat night an' all nex' day.
In the Palace of Fine Arts in St. Louis during the
Exposition of 1904, there was a picture which made
a deep impression on every Southern white man
and black man who saw it, who knew enough of the
old life to understand what it meant. Rev. A. B.
Curry, of Memphis, Tenn., referring to this picture
in a sermon in his home city on November 27,
1904, said:
When I was in the Palace of Fine Arts in St. Louis this summer,
I saw a picture before which I stood and wept. In the distance
was a battle scene; the dust of trampling men and horses, the
smoke of cannon and rifles filled the air; broken carriages and
dead and dying men strewed the ground. In the foreground was
the figure ofa stalwart Negro man, bearing in his strong arms the

THE NEGRO'S LIFE IN SLAVERY 165
form of a fair-haired Anglo-Saxon youth. It was the devoted
body-servant of a young Southerner, bearing the dead body of his
young master from the field of carnage, not to pause or rest till
he had delivered it to those whose love for it only surpassed his
own; and underneath the picture were these words: "Faithful
Unto Death"; and there are men before me who have seen the
spirit of that picture on more than one field of battle.
The slaves in Virginia and the border states
were, as a rule, far superior, or at least they con
sidered themselves so, to the slaves of the lower
South. Even in freedom this feeling of superiority
remains. Furthermore, the mansion house-ser
vants, of whom Mr. Page writes, having had an
opportunity to share to a large extent the daily life
of their masters, were very proud of their superior
position and advantages, and had little contact with
the field-hands. It is perhaps not generally under
stood that in slavery days lines were drawn among
the slaves just as they were among the white people.
The servants owned by a rich and aristocratic
family considered that the servants of " a poor white
man," one who was not able to own more than
half a dozen slaves, were not in the same social class
with themselves. And yet the life of these more
despised slaves had its vicissitudes, its obscure
heroisms, and its tragedies just like the rest of the
world. In fact, it was from the plantation hands,
as a rule, that the most precious records of slave-
life came — the plantation hymns. The field-hands
sung these songs and they expressed their lives.

1 66 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
I have frequently met and talked with old men
of my race who have grown up in slavery. It is
difficult fqx these old men to express all that they
feel. Occasionally, however, they will utter some
quaint humorous turn of expression in which there
is a serious thought underneath.
One old farmer, who owns a thousand acres of land
not far from Tuskegee, said: "We 's jes' so ign't out
heah, we don' see no diff'rence 'twe'n freedom an'
slav'ry, 'cept den we 's workin' fer someone else,
and now we 's workin' fer oursel's."
Some time ago an old coloured man who has lived
for a number of years near the Tuskegee Institute,
in talking about his experience since freedom,
remarked that the greatest difference he had found
between slavery and freedom was that in the days
of slavery his master had to think for him, but since
he had been free he had to think and plan for
himself. At another time out in Kansas I met an old
coloured woman who had left her home in Tennessee,
directly after the war, and settled with a large
number of other coloured people in what is called
"Tennessee Town," now a suburb of Topeka,
Kansas. In talking with her about her experiences
in freedom and in slavery, I asked her if she did not
sometimes feel as if she would like to go back
to the old days and live as she had lived on the
plantation.

THE NEGRO'S LIFE IN SLAVERY 167
" Sometimes," she replied, " I feel as I 'd like to
go back and see my old massa and missus" —
she hesitated a moment and then added, "but
they sold my baby down South."
Aside from the slave-songs very little has come
down to us from slavery days that shows how
slavery looked to the masses of the people.
There are a considerable number of slave narra
tives, written by fugitive slaves with the assistance
of abolitionist friends, but as these were composed
for the most part under the excitement of the anti-
slavery agitation they show things, as a rule, some
what out of proportion. There is one of these
stories, however, that gives a picture of the chang
ing fortunes and vicissitudes of slave-life which
makes ft especially interesting. I refer to the story
of Charity Bower, who was born in 1779 near
Edenton, North Carolina, and lived to a considerable
age after she obtained her freedom. She described
her master as very kind to his slaves. He used to
whip them, sometimes, with a hickory switch, she
said, but never let his overseer do so. Continuing,
she said:
My mother nursed all his children. She was reckoned a very
good servant, and our mistress made it a point to give one of my
mother's children to each one of her own. I fell to the lot of
Elizabeth, the second daughter. Oh, my mistress was a kind
woman. She was all the same as a mother to poor Charity. If
Charity wanted to learn to spin, she let her learn; if Charity
wanted to learn to knit, she let her learn; if Charity wanted to

168 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
learn to weave, she let her learn. I had a wedding when I was
married, for mistress did n't like to have her people take up with
one another without any minister to marry them. . . . My
husband was a nice, good man, and mistress knew we set stores
by one another. Her children promised they never would
separate me from my husband and children. Indeed, they used
to tell me they would never sell me at all, and I am sure they meant
what they said. But my young master got into trouble. He used
to come home and sit leaning his head on his hands by the hour
together, without speaking to anybody. I see something was the
matter, and begged him to tell me what made him look so worried.
He told me he owed seventeen hundred dollars that he could not
pay, and he was afraid he should have to go to prison. I begged
him to sell me and my children, rather than to go to jail. I see
the tears come into his eyes. "I don't know, Charity," he said;
"I 'II see what can be done. One thing you may feel easy about:
I will never separate you from your husband and children, let
what will come."
Two or three days after he come to me, and says he: "Charity,
how should you like to be sold to Mr. Kinmore ? " I told him 1
would rather be sold to him than to anybody else, because my
husband belonged to him. Mr. Kinmore agreed to buy us, and
so I and my children went there to live.
Shortly after this her new master died and her new
mistress was not so kind to her as he had been.
Thereupon she set to work to buy the freedom of
her children.
"Sixteen children I 've had, first and last," she
said, "and twelve I 've nursed for my mistress.
From the time my first baby was born, I always set
my heart upon buying freedom for some of my chil
dren. I thought it was more consequence to them
than to me, for I was old and used to being a slave."

THE NEGRO'S LIFE IN SLAVERY 169
In order to save up money enough for this pur
pose she set up a little oyster board just outside her
cabin which adjoined the open road. When any
one came along who wanted a few oysters and
crackers she would leave her washing and wait
upon them. In this way she saved up $200, but
for some reason or other she never succeeded in
getting her mistress's consent to buy one of the chil
dren. It was not always easy for a master to
emancipate his slave in those days, even if he wanted
to do so. On the contrary, as she says, " One
after another — one after another — she sold 'em
from me."
It was to a "thin, peaked-looking man who used
to come and buy of me," she says, that she finally
owed her freedom. "Sometimes," she continued,
"he would say, 'Aunt Charity, you must fix me up a
nice little mess, for I am poorly to-day.' I always
made something good for him; and if he did n't
happen to have any change I always trusted him."
It was this man, a Negro "speculator," who,
according to her story, finally purchased her with
her five children and, giving her the youngest child,
set her free.
"Well," she ended, "after that I concluded I'd
come to the free states. Here I am takin' in
washing; my daughter is smart at her needle; and
we get a very comfortable living."
There was much in slavery besides its hardship

170 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
and its cruelties; much that was tender, human
and beautiful. The heroic efforts that many of
the slaves made to buy their own and their children's
freedom deserve to be honoured equally with the
devotion that they frequently showed in the service
of their masters. And after all, considering the
qualities which the Negro slave developed under
trying conditions, it does not seem to me there is any
real reason why any one who wishes him well
should despair of the future of the Negro, either in
this country or elsewhere.

CHAPTER IX
SLAVE INSURRECTIONS AND THE NEGRO " PERIL"
SOMETHING like twenty-five insurrections of
the slaves took place in the United States,
according to Professor Albert Bushnell Hart,
previous to the American Revolution. This is tak
ing no account of the outbreaks that took place
before that time in Louisiana, nor of those that took
place in the other Spanish, French, and English
colonies in the West Indies.*
After the English invasion of Jamaica in 1655, for
instance, the Negro slaves who had fought with
their Spanish masters against the English, betook
themselves to the mountains and maintained a
number of little insurgent governments for nearly
a hundred years until, in 1738, these independent
governments were formally constituted and their
right of existence recognised. They continued until
1796, when their attempt to build roads and
improve the condition of their villages opened
the way for attacks by the English and resulted
in their downfall. It is said, however, that
even to this day some of the wild descendants
*" Slavery and Anti-Slavery," p. 51. 171

172 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
of those maroons are still living in the moun
tainous passes of Jamaica.
The insurrection ofthe slaves which finally resulted
in the establishment, in 1804, of the little Black
Republic of Haiti was a part of the revolutionary
movement that began in France in 1789. Much
has been said and written about the frightful cruel
ties which characterised the revolution in this
island, but any one who will compare what took
place in Haiti and Santo Domingo with the events
which took place during this period in France will
not find, I believe, much to say, considering all of
the circumstances, in disparagement of these revolt
ing slaves and their heroic leader, Toussaint
L'Overture. The most important, because the most far-reach
ing in their effects, of these efforts of Negro slaves
to gain their freedom by force, were the attempted
insurrection of Denmark Vesey in 1822 and the
outbreak under Nat Turner in 1831. These two
events, following closely upon the bloody revolu- ,;'
tion in Haiti and the disturbances in other parts of
the West Indies, made a profound impression upon
the people of the Southern States.
But even before the memorable insurrection of
Nat Turner, two Negroes, Gabriel and Jack Bowler,
were the leaders, in 1800, of an attempted revolt in
Virginia. These two slaves got together and or
ganised something like a thousand Negroes in

SLAVE INSURRECTIONS 173
Henrico County, and with this force marched on the
city of Richmond. A swollen stream, impassable
owing to a recent storm, forced them to halt.
They disbanded, expecting to renew the attempt
the following night, but the plot was discovered
and the citizens of Richmond were aroused before
the attack could be made. A reward was offered
for Gabriel and Jack Bowler. They were caught
and executed.
Twenty- two years later, in Charleston, S. C,
an extensive conspiracy was organised by a free
Negro, Denmark Vesey. Vesey was known among
his people as a deep student of the Bible and ex
erted a marked influence over them, particularly
through their religious meetings which, then as
now, were of the nature of popular assemblies for
the discussion of all questions relating to the welfare
of the race. Vesey's plot failed of its purpose, and
he was caught, duly tried and, with thirty-four
others, put to death.
When a boy in Virginia I recall the stories that
were told around the cabins by the older slave men
and women of the "Prophet" Nat Turner, as he
was called, and of the dreadful incidents that took
place during the insurrection of 1831. Nat' Turner
was a slave preacher in Southampton County,
Virginia. During his boyhood days, as I have heard,
his mother, who was known to be a very religious
woman, taught him that, like Moses, he was to be

174 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
the deliverer of his race. She took great pains to
give him the advantage of what lore and learning
she possessed, and taught him verses and parts of
chapters from the Bible, particularly from the
Prophets of the Old Testament. He was nursed in
the quaint and primitive theology of the plantation
hymns, which helped to stimulate the belief in his
mission to free his people.
He grew up to be a silent, dreamy kind of
man, going, whenever he could, to the caves of
the mountains to brood over the condition of
the slaves.
It appears to have been Turner's plan to collect a
large number of slaves and take refuge in the Dismal
Swamp, in the extreme southeastern section of
Virginia. On August 21, 1831, with the belief
that he was executing the will of God, Nat Turner
started forth with six companions who were soon
joined by others, making a force of sixty men.
Their plan was to exterminate, as far as they were
able, the white race about them. In a short time
sixty white people on different plantations had been
killed. The local militia and United States troops
were called out. The insurgents resisted, but the
resistance proved useless, and after more than a
hundred of them had been killed the uprising was
crushed. Forty-three Negroes in all were put on
trial, of whom twenty-one were acquitted, twelve
were convicted and sold out of the state, while

SLAVE INSURRECTIONS 175
twenty others, including Nat Turner and one
woman, were convicted and hanged.
When the John Brown raid took place at Harper's
Ferry in 1859, five coloured men were a part of his
little band. Of the five men, three were free-born
Negroes and two were fugitive slaves. Two of
them, Dangerfield Newby and Lewis Leary, were
killed during the fighting; John A. Copeland and
Shields Green were captured, tried, and executed;
Osborne Anderson was the only one to escape
from the scene of the disaster.
Newby was tall, well-built, and about thirty years
of age, with a pleasing face. Leary came origin
ally from North Carolina and was a member of
the colony of Southern coloured people at Oberlin,
Ohio. He was twenty-four years of age and quite
well educated.
Copeland, who was related to Leary, was twenty-
two years of age and came from Oberlin. His
letters, written from the jail to relatives, show him
to have been a young man of intelligence and courage.
In a letter to his brother, written shortly before his
execution, were these words, which can be read with
profit to-day after a lapse of nearly fifty years :
My jailer, Captain John Avis, is a gentleman who has a heart in
his bosom as brave as any other. He met us at Harper's Ferry
and fought us as a brave man would do. And since we have
been in his power he has protected us from insult and abuse
which cowards would have heaped upon us. He has done as
a brave man and gentleman would do. Also one of his aids,

176 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
Mr. John Sheats, has been very kind to us and has done all he
could to serve us. And now, Henry, if fortune should ever
throw either of them in your way, and you can confer the least
favour on them, do it for my sake.
On the morning of his execution Copeland wrote
a long letter to his family in Oberlin from which
the following extract is taken:
Let me tell you that it is not the mere fact of hanging to meet
death, if I should express regret, but that such an unjust institu
tion should exist as the one which demands my life, and not my
life only, but the lives of those to whom my life bears but the
relative value of zero to the infinite.
Shields Green was a fugitive slave from South
Carolina, twenty-four years of age, with no knowledge
of letters, but he is said to have possessed con
siderable natural ability and a courage which
showed that, if better trained, he might have become
a man of some importance. He had come to
Chambersburg, Pa., the meeting-place of those who
were to aid Brown, with Frederick Douglass.
Douglass tells how, when he turned to leave the
Chambersburg quarry, where his interview with
John Brown was had, that, on telling Green he
could return with him to Rochester, N. Y., the
Negro turned and looked at the bowed figure of
John Brown, then asked, "Is he going to stay?"
"Yes," was the answer.
Green looked again at Brown, then at Douglass,
and slowly said: "Well, I guess I goes wid de ole
man."

SLAVE INSURRECTIONS 177
When the fight had begun at Harper's Ferry some
of the men soon saw that resistance was useless and
decided to try to make their escape. Green came
under fire while on his way to the arsenal. One of the
men told Green he had better go with them. He
turned and looked toward the engine-house, before
the door of which stood its few defenders and
asked: "You think der 's no chance ?"
"Not one," was the reply.
" And de ole captain can't get away ? "
"No," said the men.
" Well," he replied, slowly, with a long, lingering
look, " I guess I '11 go back to de ole man."
In prison Green was constantly sending expres
sions of consolation and of devotion to Brown and, on
the morning of John Brown's execution, Green sent
him word that he was glad he came, and that he
waited willingly for his own death.
Anderson, born free in Pennsylvania, was twenty-
four years of age. He was well-educated and by
trade a printer. He was a man of natural ability,
simple in manner and address. He wrote a very
interesting pamphlet of the raid after his escape
entitled, "A Voice from Harper's Ferry." He
served during the latter part of the Civil War in one
of the Negro regiments, and died in Washington in
1871. The great slave insurrection which, during the
whole period of slavery, was frequently expected

178 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
and always feared, never actually took place; but
the fear of such a general outbreak always haunted
the South and helped to harden the hearts of the
Southern people against the Negro race. This fear
was responsible, for instance, for the passage of
laws which made it difficult, if not impossible, in
many of the Southern states, for a master to eman
cipate his slaves; made it a crime for him to teach
his slaves to read and write; and imposed such limi
tations and burdens on the free Negroes as reduced
that unfortunate class to a condition often counted
worse than that of slavery.
In the relations which existed between the white
man and the black man in slavery, just as in the
relations which exist to-day between the races in
the South, there was much that was strange and
contradictory, much that was and is hard to under
stand. For instance, it seems to me that in Vir
ginia, at any rate, the relations between master and
slave were usually kindly. The master frequently
trusted his slave, usually cared for and protected
him, and had for him, in many instances, a feeling
of genuine affection. And yet the slaveholder was
never able to shake off his sense of danger of an
uprising of the slaves. "The night-bell is never
heard to toll in the city of Richmond," said John
Randolph of Roanoke, referring to this fear, "but
the anxious mother presses her infant more closely
to her bosom."

SLAVE INSURRECTIONS 179
As a result of his experience in slavery the South
ern white man seems to have learned to make a
pretty complete distinction between the individual
Negro, whom he knows and protects, and the Negro
as a race, whom he denounces in the political cam
paign and sometimes flaunts in the faces of strangers
who do not understand the situation in the South.
These two ways of looking upon and dealing with
the Negro are well rep'resented in the cases of ex-
Governor Vardaman, of Mississippi, and Senator
Tillman, of South Carolina, both of whom, ordi
narily so violent in all their public utterances in
regard to the Negro, are frequently spoken of by
coloured men who know them as unusually kind in
all their personal relations with the Negro. Mr.
Vardaman and Mr. Tillman, it would seem, hate
the Negro in the abstract, but they get along
very well with the actual black man who is their
neighbour. It is sometimes said that the vague, impersonal
sort of fear which the master felt for the Negro during
slavery was due to his knowledge of the savage
instincts of the black man which, unless proper
precautions were taken, might at any moment break
out and overwhelm the country. I am more in
clined to the opinion, however, that the majority
of the Negroes who were brought to this country,
either because of their previous training in Africa
or because of their natural disposition, were more

180 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
submissive, more disposed to attach themselves
and remain faithful to their masters, than any other
race or class of people would have been under
similar circumstances.
I am disposed to believe that the real reason why
the white man feared the black man was because
he felt the injustice of the condition of slavery, and
realised that it was but human nature that, when
j the slave began to understand his position, he
I should seek to become free.
When I hear of a certain type of public man of
the present day, either in the press or on the polit
ical platform, talking about the danger in which
the white race is placed by reason of the presence
of the Negro in this country I cannot but feel that
these men, in their efforts to stir up prejudice
against the Negro, are moved by a bad conscience.
If they really believe there is danger from the Negro
it must be because they do not intend to give him
justice. Injustice always breeds fear.
When I hear people talking about the savage
instincts of the Negro and about the danger with
which they are threatened in consequence, I wish
these people could know and talk, as I have, with
some of the men and women who have gone as
missionaries to Africa and have spent years of
their life alone in the midst of the wildest and most
uncivilised peoples of that continent, with never
so much as a thought of fear. There are scores of

SLAVE INSURRECTIONS 181
cases in ail the Southern States where a few white
people live surrounded by coloured people without
fear of insurrection or murder, because they have
convinced the coloured people that they want to do
the fair thing by them, that they are anxious to
help them, and to see them make progress. I
know personally of a case where for ten years
a half-dozen white women have lived in a
community surrounded by thousands of coloured
people and with no white man near to protect
them, but they have never had the least fear
of violence because they went there to help the
coloured people.
In looking into the history of these insurrections
and conspiracies I have been impressed with the
fact that, so far as concerns the leaders of them,
none of these outbreaks seems to have been inspired
by revenge or to have been due to the ill-treatment
which the slaves had received.
Denmark Vesey was not a slave. In 1822 he
drew a fifteen-hundred-dollar prize in a lottery and
bought his freedom for $600. His real reason for
organising the conspiracy of which he was the
author seems to be revealed in the explanations he
made to some of his fellow-conspirators in inducing
them to join him.
"He said," according to the confession of one
of these men, "he did not go with Creighton
to Africa because he had not a will; he wanted

182 THE STORY OF THE NE^RO
to stay and see what he could do for his fellow-
creatures." To another witness he stated that "he was satis
fied with his own condition, being free, but, as all
his children were slaves, he wished to see what
could be done for them."
Denmark Vesey was a man of some education.
He had travelled all over the world with his master,
who was a ship captain. In his talks with the
slaves he not only quoted the Bible, citing the
passage about the deliverance of the children of
Israel, but he read the speeches in Congress, par
ticularly one speech of a certain Mr. King who,
he said, was "the black man's friend," adding that
" he, Mr. King, had declared he would continue to
speak, write, and publish pamphlets against slavery
the longest day he lived, until the Southern States
consented to emancipate their slaves, for that
slavery was a great disgrace to the country."
Nat Turner was a very different type of man.
He was a dreamer, as I have said, and a fanatic.
So deeply was he himself imbued with the belief
that he was inspired, that his presence impressed
with a sense of awe, not merely the Negro slaves,
but many of the white people who came in contact
with him after his arrest and before his execution.
He is described as a man of ordinary stature,
having " the true Negro face, every feature of which
is strongly marked."

SLAVE INSURRECTIONS 183
Mr. Gray, the gentleman who took his confession,
says of him:
It has been said that he was ignorant and cowardly, and that
his object was to murder and rob for the purpose of obtaining
money to make his escape. It is notorious that he was never
known to have a dollar in his life, to swear an oath, or drink a
drop of spirits. As to his ignorance, he certainly never had the
advantages of education; but he can read and write, and for nat
ural intelligence and quickness of apprehension is surpassed by
few men I ever have seen. As to his being a coward, his reason,
as given, for not resisting Mr. Phipps, shows the decision of his
character. When he saw Mr. Phipps present his gun, he said he
knew it was impossible for him to escape, as the woods were full
of men; he therefore thought it was better for him to surrender,
and trust to fortune for his escape.
He is a complete fanatic, or plays his part admirably. On
other subjects he possesses an uncommon share of intelligence,
with a mind capable of attaining anything, but warped and
perverted by the influence of early impressions. I shall not
attempt to describe the effect of his narrative, as told and com
mented on by himself, in the condemned hole of the prison: the
calm, deliberate composure with which he spoke of his late
deeds and intentions; the expression of his fiend-like face when
excited by enthusiasm; still bearing the stains of the blood of
helpless innocence about him, clothed with rags, and covered
with chains, yet daring to raise his manacled hands to Heaven,
with a spirit soaring above the attributes of man. I looked on
him, and the blood curdled in my veins.
The history of these conspiracies proves that the
very contact of the slave with his master tended to
breed a desire for freedom. Every slave who became
educated sufficiently to read the Bible or to read the
ordinary school books came into contact with the
sentiments and traditions of a people that was

184 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
proud of its independence, and the slave learned
from his master the desire to be free. Frederick
Douglass got his first notions of freedom from
reading the great orations of William Pitt, Lord
Chatham, Fox, and Sheridan in a book called
"The Columbian Orator," which he picked up by
chance. Once this notion of freedom got into the mind of
a slave with a vigorous intellect it never left him.
In Frederick Douglass's "Narrative," published in
1845, he tells us that when he was a slave in Mary
land on the shores of Chesapeake Bay he often
watched the ships as they sailed by, and as they
passed he would express himself in this way:
You are loosed from your moorings, and are free, I am fast in
my chains and am a slave! You move merrily before the gentle
gale, and I sadly before the bloody whip! You are freedom's
swift-winged angels that fly round the world, I am confined in
bands of irons! O that I were free! O that I were one of your
gallant decks, and under your protecting wing !
It is as true to-day as it was before the war that,
while the personal relations of the white man and
the black man in the South are frequently all that
could be desired, the natural development of these
good relations is hindered and held back by the
impersonal fear which the white man seems to
have of the Negro race as a whole. The success
of the Negro as well as that of the white man is,
for that reason, hindered by the efforts to force
upon the South a system which does not fit the

SLAVE INSURRECTIONS 185
desires or the needs of either race. Ever since
the war, for instance, the normal political develop
ment of the South has been stunted by the fear, or
the ghost of the fear, that the Negro would some
time or other again secure the upper hand in the
South as he was supposed to have done directly
after the war. As a matter of fact, the Negro was
never in control in the South. The people who
were in control were representatives of the Repub
lican party in the North who came South and used
their influence with the Negro and with the Gov
ernment at Washington to control the course of
events. Just such a condition never will and
never can arise again. Even if it were possible, the
Negro does not desire it any more than the white
man. What he desires most is the good will of his
white neighbours and the opportunity for the peace
ful development of those fundamental interests
which are the same for both races.
The Negro gained just as little from the tempo
rary power which he held during the Reconstruction
time as he did from the successful and unsuccessful
insurrections by which he sought to gain his free
dom before the war. He has no desire to try that
experiment again.
Scarcely a month or a week has passed since the
Negro became free that some newspaper has not
expressed a fear or made a prediction that there
was going to be an uprising or insurrection of the

186 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
Negroes at some time in some part of the country.
That uprising has never taken place. The nearest
to anything like an uprising of the Negroes in the
South since emancipation took place at the end of
the seventies, when, as a result of real or fancied
oppression in some of the Southern states, dele
gates from fourteen states and territories met in
Nashville, Tenn., May 7, 1879, and advised the
coloured people of the South to "emigrate to those
states and territories where they can enjoy all the
rights which are guaranteed by the laws and
Constitution of the United States." As a result of
this advice 40,000 emigrants, within the period of
a few months, poured into Kansas, largely from
the "Black Belt" of Mississippi and Louisiana.
This movement created such embarrassment
among the planters in the region from which the
emigration took place, and such distress among the
immigrants themselves, because of their helpless
ness when they reached their destination, that the
movement became an object of national concern,
and it required the most energetic efforts upon the
part of Frederick Douglass and other leaders of
the race to prevent the movement assuming larger
and more dangerous proportions.
The chances for another such movement, or for
an uprising of any kind, grow less every year, just
in proportion as the Negro himself gains in
property and in intelligence; in proportion as

SLAVE INSURRECTIONS 187
he enters into the business of the community
in which he lives, and becomes a permanent
and definite factor in its industrial life. The
only possible chance for such an uprising at the
present time would be in a community where the
Negro has little or no interest at stake, and such
communities are now few in the Southern states.
I can best illustrate what I have in mind by
referring to a specific instance which I came across
during a trip of observation through Mississippi in
the fall of 1908. During that visit I spent a day
in Marshall County where, although the Negro
population outnumbers the white more than two
to one, there has not been, with one exception, an
outbreak of any character between the races since
the Civil War. I inquired of the coloured and the
white people there how it was that peace and
harmony prevailed in their community. I received
practically the same answer from both races, which
was in substance this: In that community the
coloured people are large owners of farm land;
they are successful farmers; they own in the princi
pal town of the county, Holly Springs, valuable
business blocks; they are not only engaged in farm
ing, but they are engaged in business, selling gro
ceries, dry-goods, buying and selling cotton.
Besides the coloured people of Mississippi own
several important schools and colleges in Holly
Springs. A racial outbreak would cost the Negroes

188 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
of the county quite as much as the white people,
and this fact has helped to bring about racial peace.
What is true in that community is equally true in
others where the Negro is making real progress.
In these places the people of both races have
discovered that their material and moral interests
are so interlaced that if one race suffers the other
must suffer too.
One Negro in Marshall County, Mr. E. H.
McKissack, is the Treasurer of the State Odd
Fellows organisation, which handles practically
$200,000 each year. This money, which is distrib
uted among the different banks in Holly Springs,
is a visible evidence of the way in which the ma
terial interests of the races are bound together. I
was told during my visit that, whenever the least
danger of racial conflict arose in Marshall County,
the leading coloured men and the leading white
men were in the habit of taking counsel together, in
order to form plans that would result in the main
tenance of peace and friendly relations. On one
occasion, for instance, when the son of a poor
white woman was murdered by a coloured man,
the coloured people were the first to get together
and hold a mass meeting, in which a considerable
sum of money was collected and presented to the
mother of the murdered boy.
In recent years we have had several outbreaks of
mobs, sometimes in the North, sometimes in the

SLAVE INSURRECTIONS 189
South, but I have noticed this difference between
a mob in the North and a mob in the South : A mob
in the South is more short-lived than the one in
the North, and with few exceptions, does not
seek to visit its punishment upon the innocent as
well as upon the guilty. There is a reason for
this. In the South every Negro, no matter how
worthless he may be as an individual, knows one
white man in the town whose friendship and
protection he can always count upon; perhaps he
has gained the friendship of this white man by
reason of the fact that some member of the white
man's family owned him or some of his relatives,
or it may be that he has lived upon this white man's
plantation, or that some member of his family
works for him, or that he has performed some act
of kindness for this white man which has brought
them into sympathetic relations with each other. It
is generally true, as I have said before, that in the
South every white man, no matter how bitter he
may seem to be toward the Negro as a race, knows
some one Negro in whom he has complete confi
dence, whom he will trust with all that he has. It
is the individual touch which holds the two races
together in the South, and it is this individual
touch between the races which is lacking, in a large
degree, in the North.
In bringing to a close what I have written on
the subject of Negro insurrections I am tempted

190 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
to say a word on the subject of Negro courage.
While certain people have fallen into the habit of
denouncing the Negro because he is unduly am
bitious, and because he refuses to remain, as they
say, "in the place for which God made him,"
there are others who claim that the Negro is too
submissive. These latter insist that, if he had the
courage to stand up and denounce his detractors in
the same harsh and bitter terms that these persons
use toward him, in a short time he would win the
respect of the world, and the only obstacle to his
progress would be removed.
It is interesting, sometimes amusing, and some
times even pathetic, to note the conception of
"bravery" and "courage" which some coloured
men, who put their faith in this solution of the
Negro problem, occasionally apply to other mem
bers of their race. For a long time after freedom
came, and the same is not infrequently true at the
present time, any black man who was willing,
either in print or in public speech, to curse and
abuse the white man, easily gained for himself a
reputation for great courage. He might spend but
thirty minutes or an hour once a year in that kind
of "vindication" of his race, but he got the reputa
tion of being an exceedingly brave man. Another
man, who worked patiently and persistently for
years in a Negro school, depriving himself of many
of the comforts and necessities of life, in order to

SLAVE INSURRECTIONS 191
perform a service which would uplift his race,
gained no reputation for courage. On the contrary,
he was likely to be denounced as a coward by these
"heroes," because he chose to do his work without
cursing, without abuse, and without complaint.
There is an element of white people which has
gained a reputation for courage by abusing the
Negro in the same way that certain of the Negroes
have gained a reputation by abusing the white man.
No account is taken by these people of the kind of
courage shown by the white man in the South who,
in an unostentatious way, is helping to lift the
Negro to a higher plane of usefulness. It requires
no real courage for a man to stand up before a
sympathetic audience and denounce wrongs that
had been committed by people thousands of miles
away. Neither does it require any real courage
for five hundred armed men to march out and kill
one helpless individual.
The encouraging thing about the relations of
the races in the United States is that an increasing
number of white men and black men are learning
that the highest courage is that of the man or the
woman who is helping some one else to be more
useful or more happy; that, in the last analysis,
it is not the courage that hurts some one and
destroys something, but the courage that helps
some one and builds something up which the world
needs most.

CHAPTER X
THE FREE NEGRO IN SLAVERY DAYS
SOME time in the fall of 1828, Benjamin
Lundy, the Quaker abolitionist, met by
accident, in a Boston boarding house, a young
man by the name of William Lloyd Garrison, who
was then publishing a total abstinence newspaper,
the National Philanthropist. The next year, after
returning from a visit to a colony of emancipated
slaves which he had succeeded in settling in the
island of Haiti, Lundy announced in his paper
that William Lloyd Garrison had joined him
at Baltimore, Maryland, and would henceforth
be associated with him in the publication at
that city of The Genius of Universal Emanci
pation, the first abolition newspaper in the
United States.
This meeting of Benjamin Lundy and William
Lloyd Garrison and their subsequent association in
Baltimore marks the point in time when the agitation
for the emancipation of the Negro was transferred
from the Southern to the Northern States, and
slavery became for the first time a National issue.
After the Southampton uprising in 1831, the abolition
192

FREE NEGRO IN SLAVERY DAYS 193
societies, which up to that time had existed in dif
ferent parts of the South, almost wholly disappeared.
With the exception of a few individuals like Cassius
M. Clay who, as late as 1845, published an anti-
slavery weekly, the True American, at Lexington,
Kentucky, there was no public opposition to slavery
in any of the Southern States.
Opposition to slavery, though silenced in the South,
never wholly ceased there, and the evidence of its
existence was the Free Negro. In spite of the efforts
that were made to limit and check emancipation of
the slaves, the number of free Negroes continued to
increase in the Southern as well as the Northern
States, and the existence of this class of persons was
the silent protest of the Southern slaveholder
against the system which he publicly defended
and upheld.
Under the conditions of slavery, the position of
the free Negro was a very uncomfortable one. He
was, in a certain sense, an anomaly, since he did not
belong to either class. He was distrusted by the
white people, and looked down upon by the slaves.
In spite of this fact, individual slaveholders — some
times by providing in their wills for the emancipation
and transportation of their slaves to a free state or
to Liberia, sometimes by permitting individual
slaves to buy their own freedom — were constantly
adding to the number of "free persons of colour."
Among the most illustrious of those who freed their

194 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO/
slaves were George Washington, John Randolph,
and Chief-Justice Roger B. Taney, author of the
famous Dred Scott decision.
When a master liberated his slaves by will, it was
frequently with the explanation, expressed or under
stood, that he believed slavery was morally wrong.
Whenhe allowed them to buy their own freedom, it
was a practical recognition that the system was
economically a mistake, since the slave who could
purchase his own freedom was one whom it did not
pay to hold as a slave. This fact was clearly recog
nised by a planter in Mississippi who declared that
he had found it paid to allow the slaves to buy their
freedom. In order to encourage them to do this he
devised a method by which they might purchase their
freedom in instalments. After they had saved a
certain amount of money, by extra labour, he per
mitted them to buy one day's freedom a week. With
this much capital invested in themselves they were
then able to purchase, in a much shorter time, a
second, a third, and a fourth day's freedom, until
they were entirely free.
A somewhat similar method was sometimes
adopted by certain ambitious freedmen for purchas
ing the freedom of their families. In such a case the
father would purchase, for instance, a son or a
daughter. The children would then join with their
father in purchasing the other members ofthe family.
It was in this way, I have been informed by Mr.

FREE NEGRO IN SLAVERY DAYS 195
Monroe Work, who is at present a teacher at Tuske
gee, that his grandfather purchased his wife and ten
of his children, including Mr. Work's father. The
grandfather, Henry Work, after securing his own
freedom, went first to Cincinnati, and then to
Decatur, Michigan, where he owned a farm, and on
this farm he and his children earned the money to
purchase one by one the other members ofthe family.
How much it cost the family to free itself in this way
Mr. Work says he was unable to learn. He knows,
however, that his father sold at one time for $1,400.
When Henry Work died there were still three of his
children in slavery whom he had not been able to
redeem. Ex-President Gibson, of the Negro State of
Liberia, told me that his father purchased himself
and most ofthe other members ofthe family in instal
ments and transported them to Liberia. Two sons,
who did not care to go back to Africa, were left in
slavery in this country, but with the understanding
that after a certain time they were to become free.
In this and other ways, in spite ofthe fact that there
were at this time something like 30,000 fugitives in
Canada and 20,000 colonists in Africa and elsewhere,
the number of free Negroes in the United States
increased from 59,466 in 1790 to 434,495 in i860.
This was about 10 per cent, of the whole Negro
population at that time. Of these free Negroes
considerably more than half — 262,000 — were in the
Southern States. In the South, the three states of

196 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina contained
by far the largest number of the "free citizens of
colour," as they were sometimes called. At the
census of i860, the slave population of Maryland
was something like 87,000 and the number of free
Negroes was 83,942. From 1830 to i860 the 'slave
population of Maryland decreased nearly 16,000
while the population of free Negroes increased some
thing over 31,000.
In estimating the number of slaves who were, in
one way or another, given their freedom by their
masters, some account should be taken of those who
were, for one reason or another, re-enslaved. A free
Negro might be sold into slavery to pay taxes or to
pay fines, and in Maryland free Negroes might be
sold into perpetual slavery for the crime of entering
the state. In 1829 the practice of selling any free
Negro, who could not account for himself, in order
to pay the jail fines, had become such a scandal as to
attract public attention.
There were other means by which a considerable
number of free Negroes were re-enslaved. The
practice of kidnapping, in spite of severe laws against
it in all the Southern states, was carried on to a
very great extent. In his book on the domestic slave-
trade, Professor Collins, of Claremont College,
Hickory, N. C, estimates that the number of free
Negroes kidnapped and sold into slavery "must have
ranged from a few hundred to two or three thousand,"

FREE NEGRO IN SLAVERY DAYS 197
and he adds, "it appears quite certain that as many
were kidnapped as escaped from bondage, if not
more."*
A disposition to free slaves for personal considera
tions of one kind or another began at a very early
period. In York and Henrico counties, Virginia,
as far back as the middle of the seventeenth century,
we find records of the emancipation of Negro slaves.
For example, Thomas Whitehead, of York, emanci
pated his slave John, and bequeathed to him, among
other things, two cows and the use of a house and
as much ground as he could cultivate. He further
showed his confidence in the discretion and the
integrity of this Negro slave by appointing him guar
dian of Mary Rogers, a ward of Mr. Whitehead. He
also made him trustee of her property, but the court
refused to allow him to fill either one or the other of
these positions. f Another instance recorded about
this time was that of John Carter, of Lancaster,
Virginia, who was one of the largest slaveholders in
the colony. He gave freedom to two of his Negro
slaves who were married to each other. To each he
gave a cow and a calf and three barrels of Indian
corn. He also instructed his heirs to allow them
the use of convenient firewood, timber, and as much
land as they could cultivate. He provided that the
* " The Domestic Slave-Trade of the Southern States," Winfield H. Collins
M. A., p. 94.
•*¦ " Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century," Bruce, Vol.
II., p. 123.

198 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
two daughters of this couple should receive their
liberty when they reached their eighteenth year, and,
as a provision for them when they reached that age,
he gave each a yearling with its increase, which was
to be permitted to run with the cattle of his wife after
his death. *
In the interval between 1635 and 1700, although
the Negro slaves were few in number, and most ofthe
labour was performed by white servants, there were
a number of persons of African blood in the colony
of Virginia who raised themselves to positions of
some importance. Several of them were able to
write at a time when there were very few schools
and education was a decided luxury. Several had
obtained patents to land. For instance, in 1654, one
hundred acres of land in Northampton County were
granted to Richard Johnson, a Negro, and in the
description of this tract reference was made to
the contiguous estates of John Johnston and Anthony
Johnson, both Negroes. There are in the records
of Northampton County, also, evidences that a suit
was begun by Anthony Johnson for the purpose
of recovering his Negro servant.
During the early years of slavery, the free Negroes
seem to have had about the same rights under the
law that other free persons had, except, as I have
already stated, they were not allowed to hold persons
of white blood as bond-servants. It appears that,
* " Economic History of Virginia in the Seventeenth Century," Bruce, Vol.
II., p. 124.

FREE NEGRO IN SLAVERY DAYS 199
until after the Revolution, Negro freemen were
allowed to vote in every state, except Georgia and
South Carolina. Between 1792 and 1834 the four
bordering states, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia,
and Kentucky, denied suffrage to the Negro. In
North Carolina, Negroes who paid a public tax
took part in the election until 1835, when a new
constitution excluded them from the suffrage. New
Jersey took away the suffrage of the Negro in 1807,
Connecticut in 1814, and Pennsylvania in 1838.
New York, in 1821, required from them an unusually
high property qualification.* ,
These changes were all evidences of the steady
growth in the United States, both North and South,
of a caste system which excluded the Negro from
the ordinary privileges of citizenship exclusively upon
the ground of his colour. In 1803 Ohio demanded
a bond of five hundred dollars for Negroes who came
into the state. A Negro, even though a free man,
could not at that time testify in a case in which a
white man was a party, and Negroes were not
admitted to the public schools. Similar provisions
were made by Illinois, Indiana, and Iowa when they
became states. Illinois prohibited the entrance of
Negroes to the state at any time. In 1833 Judge
Dagget, of Connecticut, twenty-four years before the
Dred Scott decision, held that a free Negro was a
person and not a citizen. This was in the trial ofthe
*" Slavery and Abolition," Hart, pp. 53, 83.

200 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
case against Prudence Crandall, the young Quak
eress who had established a school for Negroes
in Canterbury, Connecticut, contrary to a law
which provided that no school could be established
for coloured people who were not inhabitants
of Connecticut.
The effect of the agitation for abolition seems to
have made the condition of the free Negroes steadily
worse, particularly in the Southern states. In some
of these states, they were forbidden to sell drugs,
in others they might not sell wheat and tobacco, and
in still others to peddle market produce or own a boat
was against the law. In several states it was
against the law for a free Negro to cross the state
line; in others, a slave who was emancipated was
compelled to immediately leave the state.
Notwithstanding the hardships and difficulties
under which the free Negro population laboured,
both in the North and in the South, those who have
had occasion to study the local history ofthe Southern
States have found that the number of Negroes who
had succeeded in making some impression upon their
community, either by their native qualities or by
their success in business, was more considerable than
is usually imagined. Solomon Humphreys, for
instance, after purchasing his freedom, became a
well-known business man in Georgia. Benjamin
Lundy found at San Antonio a Negro who, after
purchasing his own freedom and that of his wife

FREE NEGRO IN SLAVERY DAYS 201
and family, had become the owner of several
houses and lots.*
The number of free Negroes in North Carolina
was considerable because, in spite of the rigorous
laws against the free coloured people, conditions were
more lenient than those of any other Southern state.
The result was that many free Negroes crossed into
North Carolina and settled, undisturbed, in the
northern or southern counties. Speaking of this
class of people, Professor John Spencer Bassett says:
They were well-diggers, shoemakers, blacksmiths, fiddlers,
hucksters, peddlers, and so forth. Besides, they were easily called
in to help the whites on occasions of need. There were a very
few who accumulated money and some of these became slave
owners. Although it was against the law for them to come into
the state, their arrival was tolerated both because the law was
recognised as severe and because their services were wanted
in the community. Many of them had Indian blood in their
veins, and when such was the case they were a little distant toward
the slaves. ... I have been speaking of free Negroes who
lived in the country districts. In towns they fared better and
accumulated wealth.f
Professor Bassett gives an account of several free
Negroes, of whom he had been able to obtain records,
who were citizens of Newbern, Craven County,
North Carolina. One of the men to whom he refers
was John C. Stanley, the son of an African-born
slave woman, who was liberated by the General
* Cf. Hart's " Slavery and Anti-slavery," p. 90.
t Johns Hoptins University Studies: " Slavery in the State of North Carolina;"
by John Spencer Bassett, p. 43.

202 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
Assembly under the petition of Mrs. Lydia Stewart,
his mistress. Because he got his start in the barber
business, he was generally known as " Barber Jack."
He became the owner of several plantations on which
he employed sixty-four slaves, of which he was the
owner, and as many more bound free Negroes. He
had three sons, John, Alexander, and Charles.
John became an expert book-keeper, and was
employed in that capacity by a prominent firm.
John C. Stanley amassed a fortune, or what was
supposed to be a fortune in those days, of some
thing like $40,000. Speaking of some of the other
successful Negroes of whom he was able to obtain
the records, Professor Bassett says:
Many of the free Negroes were in circumstances of independent
thrift, and from many parts of the state I have had evidence that
some Negroes were slaveholders. In Newbern especially there
were a number of such thrifty coloured men. Notable among
these was John Good. He was a son of his master, and for a long
time a slave. When the master died, his two surviving children,
who were daughters, had but little property besides this boy,
John, who was a barber. John took up the task of supporting
them. He boarded them in good houses and otherwise provided
for them well. His faithfulness won him many friends among
the best citizens, and when both of his mistresses were married
these friends united to persuade the owners to liberate him as a
reward for his services. . . . There were other thrifty and
notable free Negroes in the same place, as, for example, John
Y. Green, a carpenter and contractor; Richard Hazel, a black
smith of means; Albert and Freeman Morris, described as "two
nice young men," and thoroughly respected, tailors by trade;
and Scipio, slave ofDr. Hughes, who was a blacksmith and owner
of a livery stable. Another was Fellow Bragg, a tailor who was

FREE NEGRO IN SLAVERY DAYS 203
thoroughly conscientious and so good a workman that prominent
people were known to move their custom to the shops at which
he was employed in order that he might work on it. Most of
these men moved to Cincinnati sooner or later. What became
of them I do not know. The conditions here recorded for New
bern were not unusual for North Carolina towns in general.
Everywhere there were usually a number of prosperous free
Negroes. Most of them were mulattoes, not a few of them were
set free by their fathers and thus they fell easily into the life around
them.* Among the descendants ofthe free coloured people
of Newbern, North Carolina, with whom I am
personally acquainted is the Hon. John P. Green,
who was for twelve years a justice of the peace
in Cleveland, Ohio, four years a member ofthe Ohio
House of Representatives, two years a member ofthe
State Senate, and for nine years at the head of the
Postage-stamp Distribution Bureau of Washington.
filling in the intervals of his public service with prac
tice at the Cleveland bar. His father was a master
tailor in Newbern, and a member of a family of
free coloured people whose traditions go back some
thing more than one hundred years.
Charles W. Chesnutt, author of "The Conjure
Woman" and other popular stories of Southern life,
was descended from free coloured people in Fayette
ville, North Carolina. Mr. Chesnutt informs me that
a coloured man by the name of Matthew Leary is
still remembered in Fayetteville who, before the war,
was the owner of considerable land, a number of
* Johns Hopkins University Studies: "Slavery in the State of North Carolina,"
by John Spencer Bassett, p. 45.

204 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
slaves, a brick store in the business part of the town,
and a handsome residence in a good neighbourhood.
His sons gained some prominence in North Carolina
during the Reconstruction era. Matthew Leary, Jr.,
went into politics and afterward became a clerk in
one of the Government offices in Washington. A
younger brother, Hon. John S. Leary, was the first
coloured man in North Carolina to be admitted
to the bar, of which he remained a respected member
until he died at Charlotte, N. C. He was, I under
stand, at one time a member of the North Carolina
Legislature. Another of the successful free coloured people of
North Carolina was James D. Sampson, who began
life as a house carpenter and became in the course
of time a man of considerable wealth and some
local distinction. I have been informed that one time
the Legislature passed a bill granting his family spec
ial privileges which were not permitted to other free
people of colour. His children, John, Benjamin, and
Joseph, were all educated in the North. Benjamin
graduated from Oberlin College and afterward
became a teacher at Wilberforce, Ohio. John P.
Sampson published at Cincinnati, during the war,
the Coloured Citizen. After the war he was
commissioned by General Howard to look after the
coloured schools established by the Freedmen's
Bureau in the Third District of North Carolina.
He was elected treasurer and assessor of Wilmington,

FREE NEGRO IN SLAVERY DAYS 205
and was candidate for Congress, but was defeated
because ofthe fact, it is said, that his father had been
the owner of slaves before the war. While it was true
that James D. Sampson owned a number of slaves, it
is said that many, if not all, of them were held in trust
in order to secure them practical freedom. Recently,
George M. Sampson, a grandson of James D. Samp
son, visited Tuskegee. He is now a teacher in the
State Normal School at Tallahassee, Florida.
There is no reason to believe that the coloured
people of North Carolina made more progress in a
material way than they did in some of the other
states in the South. For instance, in the city of
Charleston, South Carolina, there was a colony of
"free persons of colour" who were proud ofthe fact
that they sprang from a generation of free ancestors
going back to before the Revolutionary War. In the
list of taxpayers in the city of Charleston for i860
the names of three hundred and sixty "persons of
colour," whose property was assessed in that year,
are given. They owned real estate which was valued
for taxation at $724,570. Of these three hundred
and sixty taxpayers, one hundred and thirty owned
slaves, aggregating three hundred and ninety in
number. The largest number of slaves held by a
coloured person was fourteen. In this list of "per
sons of colour" thirteen are classed as Indians, but
it is quite certain that these so-called Indians were
largely mixed with Negro blood. Like so many other

206 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
communities, there were Indians in Charleston who
had been but partially absorbed by coloured people
with whom they had been associated.
In i860 the population of Charleston was 48,409,
of whom 26,969 were white, 17,655 slaves, and 3,785
were "free persons of colour." It would appear
from the figures given that these free coloured people
probably owned, including slaves, a million dollars'
worth of property. Among the slaves held by col
oured people of Charleston were a number who were
actually free men, and only nominally slaves. For
instance, Richard Holloway, who was a prominent
man among the free coloured people in Charleston,
owned Charles Benford,who was his friend, and with
him one of the leaders in the Methodist Church, at
that time. The circumstances were these: Charles
Benford had arranged with his white master to pur
chase his freedom, but at that time the laws were such
that it was difficult for a master to free his slaves,
particularly if the slave purchased his own freedom.
In order to get around this law Charles Benford asked
his friend, Richard Holloway, to purchase him,
Benford himself furnishing the money for the
purchase. There were a number of other slaves held in trust
by the free coloured people of Charleston. The
wealthiest family in Charleston, among the free
coloured people, were the Westons. They had
among the various members of the family taxable

FREE NEGRO IN SLAVERY DAYS 207
property to the amount of $80,000. They also
owned thirty-six slaves, nine of whom they held as
trustees. It is said that the number of slaves held
by St. Philip's Church, which was the aristo
cratic church ofthe city, amounted to something over
one hundred. These consisted for the most part of
slaves who had actually bought their freedom and
whom the church held in trust.
Of the free coloured people of Louisiana, of whom
there were a very considerable number before the
war, many were slaveholders and large owners of
land. There were a number of settlements of Creole
Negroes, as they were called, in various parts of
Louisiana. When Frederick Law Olmsted visited
that state in 1853, he visited one of these settlements
in the neighbourhood of Natchitoches. The infor
mation which he obtained in regard to these people
was to the effect that they were "honest and industri
ous and paid their debts quite as promptly as the
white planters, and were, as far as anyone could
judge, good citizens in all respects ! " One of them, he
learned, had lately spent $40,000 in a law suit, and it
is believed that they were increasing in wealth.
Several of these coloured planters were worth four
or five hundred thousand dollars. The little town of
Washington, near Opelousas, in St. Landry Parish,
was formerly called Negroville from the number of
free Negroes living in that village. A number of
them, according to Olmsted, were wealthy and

208 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
thriving. They owned some of the best cotton
and sugar plantations.
"An intelligent man whom I met at Washington,"
he said, "who had been travelling most of the time
for two years in the plantation districts, told me that
the free Negroes in the state in general, so far as he
had observed, were equal in all respects to the white
Creoles. Much the larger part of them were poor,
thriftless, unambitious, and lived wretchedly, but
there were many opulent, intelligent, and educated.
The best house and most tasteful grounds that he
had visited in the state had belonged to a nearly
full-blooded Negro — a very dark man. He and his
family were well educated and, though French in
their habitual tongue, they spoke English with a
liberal tongue and one much more eloquent than
most of the liberally educated whites. They had a
private tutor in their family, and owned, he thought,
a hundred and fifty slaves.
It is near here, in the adjoining parish of St. Martin,
that my friend Paul Chretien lived. His father was
a free coloured man who made his money in the
neighbourhood of Calcasieu, but afterward returned
to St. Martin and built himself a beautiful home there
in which his son, whose name I have mentioned, is
now living.
A considerable portion of the Negro population of
Mobile, Alabama, at the present day are the descend
ants of these Creole Negroes whose freedom was

FREE NEGRO IN SLAVERY DAYS 209
guaranteed to them by the France treaty which
transferred Louisiana to the United States in 1803.
There is an island in Mobile Bay, about twenty miles
below the city, Mon Louis Island, which is owned
by the descendants of two families. The lower end
ofthe island was settled by the veterans ofthe Revolu
tionary War, who lived to a great age; the upper
part of the island was settled by a man known as
Captain Jack Collins, but his real name was Maxi
milian Collins, who settled on this island in 1808.
He left a large tract of land to his descendants with
the injunction that they should sell none of it; it has
remained in their hands up to the present time, and
there has grown up there, as a result, a little patri
archal colony made up of the descendants of the free
Negro, Captain Jack, and the descendants of his
slaves. The oldest living descendant of this patri
arch is the widow of the late Belthair Durette, who
had seventy-two grandchildren, fifty-two great-grand
children, ninety-seven of whom are living in this
community of Mon Louis.
I have mentioned here several cases which indicate
that, even in the South and before the Civil War,
the Negro had made some progress along material
lines. It is impossible to tell, of course, how much
property these people possessed. But the aggregate
value of the property of the 262,000 Negroes in the
South in i860 has been estimated at something like
twenty-five millions of dollars. I should judge,

210 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
from what I have been able to learn, that that
was a low estimate.
The question might very well be asked, considering
the success that individuals were able to make before
the war, why it was that the great mass of the Negro
people who were free did not do better ? In reply to
that I might say that there were the same reasons and
others why the Negro should not get on or succeed
that there were why the class known as the "poor
whites" in the South did not succeed. If the condi
tions of slavery operated to keep the poor white man
in a low stage of civilisation, they certainly operated
to keep the free Negro in a still lower stage.
Not only did the free people of colour have to meet
all the difficulties to which I have referred, but it was
against the law for them to meet together in any large
number in order to cooperate to improve their
condition. The great benefits of cooperation which
go so far to extend to the mass of individuals the
benefits which are obtained by a few were denied
them. In spite of this fact, in Charleston, Baltimore,
Washington, New York, and in other places where
there were large numbers of free Negroes, little
societies for mutual helpfulness were established.
For instance, in 1790 there was formed in Charleston
what was known as the " Brown Fellowship Society."
This society was started at the suggestion ofthe direc
tor of St. Philip's, of which a number of free Negroes

FREE NEGRO IN SLAVERY DAYS 211
were members. Besides cultivating a spirit of fellow
ship among its members, it sought to provide school
privileges for their children and to provide relief
and extend aid to worthy persons of their colour.
One of the first things they did was to purchase
a burial lot for their dead. This organisation
befriended helpless orphans; one of these orphans
was the well-known Bishop Daniel A. Payne, the
founder of Wilberforce University. This organisa
tion still maintains its existence, and celebrated a few
years ago its centennial. The records have all been
preserved, and one of the most interesting of these is
one which commemorates, in a formal way, the
expulsion of one of its members on suspicion of
having assisted in kidnapping and selling into slavery
a free coloured man. The success ofthis first organ
isation led to the establishment of other similar
organisations. "The Humane and Friendly Society"
was established in 1802; "The Friendly Union,"
in 1 8 13; and later still, "The Friendly Moralist,"
and the "Brotherly Association," and the "Unity
and Friendship." Each of these had its own burial
plot and system of mutual benefit.
After the attempted conspiracy of Denmark Vesey,
in 1822, all these organisations came under suspicion,
and there was a time when they were kept up under
the greatest difficulties, but they never ceased to
exist. There were similar organisations, as I have
said, in several of the larger cities of the South.

212 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
Frederick Douglass, while living in Baltimore,
attended one of these societies, known as the "East
Baltimore Mental Improvement Society." This
society was formed by a number of free coloured
young men who, like Frederick Douglass, were en
gaged, as ship caulkers. In this organisation he
frequently took prominent part, although, being a
slave, he would naturally have been excluded. He
has said that the society of the young men he met
there aided him considerably in completing the
education that he had already begun in secret. As
Baltimore probably had more free coloured people
at the time than any other city, with the exception
of Washington, it was natural that there should be
a large number of these societies of a literary and
mutual-benefit and benevolent character. Baltimore,
in fact, seems to have been the home of the Negro
mutual benefit societies, many of which now in
existence date back to 1820.
The New York African Society, for mutual relief,
which has been in existence for over a hundred
years in New York City, held its first meeting in a
coloured school-house in Rose Street in 1808, nearly
twenty years before the final emancipation of the
slaves in New York State. Although it has not
increased its membership in recent years, this society
has become, I understand, comparatively wealthy
as a result of its earlier investments. The first prop
erty owned by this society was on Baxter Street not

FREE NEGRO IN SLAVERY DAYS 213
far from the spot that afterward became notorious
under the name of Five Points. It was purchased
in 1820 for $1,800, and when it was sold later the
funds were used to purchase a five-story flat at No.
43 West Sixty-sixth Street and another building at
No. 27 Greenwich Avenue, both of which the society
still owns.
In Maryland these beneficial organisations were
especially exempt from the general prohibition
against public meetings of free coloured people In
other places in the Southern States there was no
such exemption and, although the law was usually
got around in some way or other, not infrequently
members of these organisations were arrested, fined,
and sometimes sent to prison. Frederick Law
Olmsted records one such instance in Washington,
D. C, in the first chapter of his journals of "In the
Seaboard Slave States."
He says:
The coloured population voluntarily sustain several churches,
schools, and mutual assistance and improvement societies, and
there are evidently persons among them of no inconsiderable
cultivation of mind. Among the police reports of the city news
papers, there was lately (April, 1855) an account of the appre
hension of twenty-four "genteel coloured men" (so they were
described), who had been found by a watchman assembling
privately in the evening, and been lodged in the watch-house.
The object of their meeting appears to have been purely benevo
lent, and, when they were examined before a magistrate in the
morning, no evidence was offered, nor does there seem to have
been any suspicion, that they had any criminal purpose. On

2i4 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
searching their persons there were found a Bible, a volume of
Seneca's "Morals"; "Life in Earnest;" the printed constitution
of a society, the object of which was said to be "to relieve the
sick, and bury the dead"; and a subscription paper "to purchase
the freedom of Eliza Howard," a young woman, whom her owner
was willing to sell at $650. I can think of nothing that would
speak higher for the character of a body of poor men, servants
and labourers, than to find, by chance, in their pockets, just such
things as these.*
Nothing contributed more to keep the free Negroes
from making the great advancement that they did
during the period of slavery than the fact that they
were not allowed to organise and unite their efforts
for their own improvement in any large way. On
the other hand, nothing has more prevented and held
back the progress ofthe coloured people since slavery
than the fact that they have had to learn how to unite
their efforts in order to improve their condition.
*" Seaboard Slave States," by Frederick Law Olmsted, pp. 14, 15.

CHAPTER XI
FUGITIVE SLAVES
IN THE latter part of the year 1852 was organ
ised or rather re-organised, in the rooms of
the Anti-slavery Society, at 107 North Fifth
Street, Philadelphia, what was known as the "Vig
ilance Committee." The chairman of this com
mittee was a coloured man, Robert Purvis. He
was descended from a free coloured woman of
Charleston, whose mother was said to have been
a Moor. His father, Robert Purvis, was an English
man. He was brought to Pennsylvania by his
parents in 1819; was a member ofthe Anti-slavery
Convention in 1833, and was one of the signers of
its declaration of sentiments. When the fiftieth
anniversary of the Anti-slavery Society was held
in Philadelphia, December 4, 1883, he was one
of the three original signers who were present.
The other two were John G. Whittier, the poet,
and Elizur Wright, the anti-slavery editor. The
Secretary of the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee
was William Still.
This Vigilance Committee, which was the suc
cessor of an earlier organisation of the same name
21s

216 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
that dates at least as far back as 1838, soon became
the principal directing body for all the numerous
lines of the Underground Railroad which centred
in Philadelphia at that time. As secretary of
this organisation, William Still kept a record of
all the fugitive slaves who passed through the hands
of this committee from the time of its organisation
until the breaking out of the Civil War. During
the period of the Civil War he kept this record
hidden, but in 1872 it was published in the form
of a book called "The Underground Railroad."
This book is one of the most remarkable records
in existence, concerning the history of slavery. It
is made up in large part of the letters that were
written by the different agents of the Underground
Railroad to the secretary of the Vigilance Com
mittee, and of letters written by fugitive slaves,
sometimes while they were en route to Canada,
and sometimes after they had reached their des
tination. They tell, in words of the fugitives
themselves, of the difficulties, sufferings, fears
of runaway slaves, and of all the various devices
which they used to escape from bondage to freedom.
Of his own motives for keeping this record, Mr.
Still says:
Thousands of escapes, harrowing separations, dreadful longings,
dark gropings after lost parents, brothers, sisters, and identities,
seemed ever to be pressing on my mind. While I knew the danget
of keeping strict records, and while I did not then dream that in
my day slavery would be blotted out, or that the time would come

FUGITIVE SLAVES 217
when I could publish these records, it used to afford me great satis
faction to take them down, fresh from the lips of fugitives on the
way to freedom, and to preserve them as they had given them. *
Sometimes these fugitives reached free soil packed
in boxes, shipped as merchandise by rail or by
steamship, from some of the nearby Southern
ports. This was the case of Henry Box Brown,
who was shipped from Richmond, Va., by James
A. Smith, a shoe dealer, to William H. Johnson,
Arch Street, Philadelphia. He was twenty-six
hours on the road from Richmond to Philadelphia.
Though the box was marked "This side up," in
the course of his journey, Mr. Brown was compelled
to ride many miles standing on his head. When
the box arrived at the anti-slavery office, there
was the greatest apprehension lest, in the course
of the journey, the fugitive had perished and the
society would find itself with a corpse upon its
hands. Mr. Still described, in the following words,
the scene when this box was opened in the presence
of a number of prominent members of the
Anti-slavery Society:
All was quiet. The door had been safely locked. The pro
ceedings commenced. Mr. J. Miller McKim, Secretary ofthe
Pennsylvania Anti-slavery Society, rapped quietly on the lid of
the box and called out, "All right!" Instantly came the answer
from within, "All right, sir!"
The witnesses will never forget that moment. Saw and hatchet
quickly had the five hickory hoops cut and the lid off, and the
marvellous resurrection of Brown ensued. Rising up in his box,
* Quoted in Siebert's "The Underground Railroad," pp. 7, 8.

218 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
he reached out his hand, saying, "How do you do, gentlemen ?"
The little assemblage hardly knew what to think or do at the
moment. He was about as wet as if he had come up out of the
Delaware. Very soon he remarked that, before leaving Richmond,
he had selected for his arrival-hymn (if he lived) the psalm begin
ning with these words: "I waited patiently for the Lord, and He
heard my prayer." And most touchingly did he sing the psalm,
much to his own relief, as well as to the delight of his small audience.
He was then christened Henry Box Brown, and soon afterward
was sent to the hospitable residence of James Mott and E. M.
Davis, on Ninth Street, where, it is needless to say, he met a cordial
reception from Mrs. Lucretia Mott and her household.*
Other attempts were made after that time to
ship fugitive slaves out of the South as express
packages. In 1857, a young woman was shipped
from Baltimore to Philadelphia in a box of freight.
After reaching Philadelphia, this box with its living
freight, after having been turned upside down
several times, was left standing nearly all of one
night at the freight shed, and it was not secured
by the persons to whom it was consigned until
ten o'clock the next day. When the box was
opened the young woman inside was unconscious
and could not speak for some time. She recovered,
however, and eventually escaped to Canada.
Samuel A. Smith, who shipped Henry Box
Brown from Richmond to Philadelphia, attempted,
shortly after this successful venture, to send
two other slaves by express to the anti-slavery
office. The deceit, however, was discovered and
* " The Underground Railroad," William Still, pp. 83, 84.

FUGITIVE SLAVES 219
Smith was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to
eight years in prison, and served out his time in
the penitentiary.
Frequently fugitives were secreted upon steam
ships and sailing vessels. There was usually a
coloured steward on these vessels who was willing
to run the risk of assisting a fugitive to escape.
Men dressed themselves as women, and women
dressed themselves as men in order to escape
from slavery. Sometimes fugitives travelled hun
dreds of miles in skiffs in order to reach free soil.
William Still, the author of the book on "The
Underground Railroad," had a singular experience.
One summer day in 1850, as he was engaged in
mailing the weekly issue of the Pennsylvania
Freeman, two coloured men entered the office.
One of these was a stranger, a man who had pur
chased his freedom and gone to Philadelphia in
the hope of finding his relatives.
"I am from Alabama," he said, speaking slowly
and deliberately. "I have come in search of my
people. My little brother and I were kidnapped
about forty years ago, and I thought by coming
to Philadelphia and having notices published and
read old people would remember about it, and I
could find my mother and people."
"Where were you kidnapped from?" asked
Mr. Still.
"I don't know," was the reply.

220 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
"Don't you know the name of the place?"
"No.""Don't you know the name of any town, river,
neighbourhood or state?"
"No."
"What was your name?"
"Peter.""What was your brother's name?"
"Levin.""What were the names of your father and mother?"
"Levin and Sidney."
By the time the dialogue had reached this point
William Still was so fully convinced that the stranger
was one of his long-lost brothers that he scarcely
knew what to do.
" I allowed a full hour to pass," he says, in relating
the circumstance, "meanwhile plying him with
questions before intimating to my brother the
discovery I had made. Then seating myself by
his side, I said, T think I can tell you about all
your kinsfolk — mother, father, and all,' and then
I went on to say, 'You are an own brother of mine.'"
Such proved to be the case. It seems that Peter
Still had been stolen from his parents when they
were living on a farm in New Jersey, in an obscure
little settlement of Free Negroes and fugitive slaves
called "Springtown," in Cumberland County.*
* Springtown is one of the several little Negro communities still existing in New
Jersey.

FUGITIVE SLAVES 221
The father of William Still and his brother, Peter,
had purchased his own freedom from his master,
about 1800. The mother was a fugitive slave.
Peter had been carried from his mother when he
was six years old and taken to Alabama. After
he had grown to be a young man he made up his
mind to save money by performing extra labour,
to buy his freedom. Fearing that his master
would be unwilling to sell him his freedom, he
secured the friendly offices of a Jew named Friedman
who made the purchase and set him free.
After reaching Philadelphia and finding his
brother William, as has been described, Peter
Still made several attempts to secure the freedom
of his wife and children, whom he left in slavery
in Alabama. It was in an attempt to secure the
freedom of Peter Still's wife and children that
Seth Concklin, the Shaker Abolitionist, lost his
life. Seth Concklin was one of the few white
men who, in their efforts to rescue the slaves, pen
etrated the slave country. He succeeded in bringing
the fugitives by boat down the Tennessee and
up the Mississippi and the Wabash rivers, as far
as Vincennes, when he and they were captured
and taken back. Concklin was killed in an attempt
to escape.*
?Among the other Northern white men who went into the South to abduct
slaves were the Reverend Calvin Fairbank, the Reverend Charles T. Torrey, and
Dr. Alexander M.Ross, of Canada. Mr. Fairbank carried off from the neighbour
hood of Covington, Ky., the Stanton family, father, mother, and six children, by
packing them in a load of straw. The Reverend Charles T. Torrey went to Mary-

222 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
One of the most singular and interesting figures
among the people who were engaged in the work
of the "Underground Railroad" was Harriet
Tubman. She escaped from slavery some time
about 1849, when she was between twenty and
twenty-five years of age. It was the fear that she
and her brothers were to be "sold South" that
finally led her to make the attempt to escape. She
started, with her brothers, from her home in Mary
land, guided, as she said, only by the North Star.
But after the fugitives had made some distance,
the brothers, who feared that they would not suc
ceed, turned back and Harriet went on alone.
After making her own escape, she went back
repeatedly to different parts of the South and aided
in the escape of other fugitives. Many of the
slaves who had escaped to Canada, and who had
learned to have complete faith in "Moses," as
they called her, employed her to secure the freedom
of their friends. The fugitives in Canada believed
that she had a charmed life. As a matter of fact,
Harriet Tubman succeeded, in the course of nine
teen different trips into the South, in bringing more
than three hundred slaves from the South into the
land and from there sent some four hundred slaves over different routes to Canada.
Dr. Alexander M. Ross made extensive tours through various slave states for the
purpose of spreading information about Canada and the routes by which that
country could be reached. He made trips into Maryland, Kentucky, Virginia, and
Tennessee. He went to New Orleans, and from that point set out upon a journey,
in the course of which he visited Vicksburg, Selma, and Columbus, Mississippi,
Augusta, Georgia, and Charleston, South Carolina. — "The Underground Rail
road," Siebert, p. 28.

FUGITIVE SLAVES 223
Northern states and Canada, and in no case was a
fugitive under her care ever captured. During the
Civil War, she was employed in the secret service of
the Federal Army, and, in the last year of the
war, carried papers which admitted her through
the lines of the Union Army in any part of the
country, wherever she cared to go. She was still
living, in 1908, in retirement at Auburn, New York.
The most distinguished fugitive who escaped
from slavery was Frederick Douglass, who secured
a "sailor's protection," which certified that he
was a free American sailor. Armed with this on
Monday, September 3, 1838, he boarded the train
at Baltimore and rode directly to New York City.
From there he went into New Bedford, where he
found refuge in the home of a coloured man by
the name of Nathan Johnson. After Frederick
Douglass went to live in Rochester, New York,
his home there became one of the principal stations
of the "Underground Railroad," which ran from
New York City through Albany to the Great Lakes
and Canada.
He has told, in his autobiography, the manner
in which fugitives were brought to his home, con
cealed there, and then hurried on to the little town
of Charlotte, seven miles from Rochester, and
there placed on board a little lake steamer en route
for Canada.
"On one occasion," he said, "I had eleven

224 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
fugitives at the same time under my roof. And
it was necessary for them to remain with me until
I could collect sufficient money to get them on to
Canada. "But," he added, "it is due to the truth to state
that we seldom called in vain upon a Whig or a
Democrat for help. Men were better than their
theology and truer to humanity than to their politics
or their offices."
He refers here to the fact that at one time,
when a master was in the office of a United States
Commissioner, getting the papers necessary for
the arrest of three young men who had escaped
from slavery in Maryland, the law-partner of the
commissioner, a distinguished Democrat, sought
him out, told him what was going on in his office,
and urged him by all means to get these young
men out of the way of pursuit.
In Syracuse, New York, there was another
station of the "Underground Railroad," conducted
by another fugitive slave. This was the Rev. J. W.
Loguen, afterward a bishop of the A. M. E. Zion
Church. "Jarm" Loguen, as he was called, was
born a slave in Kentucky. His mother came of
free parents in Ohio, but was kidnapped and sold
in Kentucky when she was a child. She seems to
have been a woman of great sense and character,
and after her son grew up he inherited from her,
apparently, a determination to be free.

FUGITIVE SLAVES 225
He and another young man made their escape
on horseback. They reached the Ohio River,
crossed the ice, and finally, after a long series of
adventures, during which they spent some time with
the Indians, and passed several weeks in a settlement
of fugitive slaves in Indiana, crossed the river at
Detroit into Canada. They remained for some time
on British soil, but Loguen finally returned to the
United States and settled in Northern New York.
Although he had no education when he left
Kentucky, young Loguen was industrious, thrifty,
and succeeded in making money. He used the
first money he accumulated to secure for himself an
education at the Oneida Institute, Whitesboro, New
York, a school started for coloured children by
the noted Abolitionist, Beriah Green. Afterward,
he went to Syracuse to live and interested himself,
as a minister and anti-slavery leader, in the welfare
of the coloured people of that city. It was while
he was there that the famous "Jerry Rescue"
took place, in which some of the citizens stormed
the United States Commissioner's Office and forcibly
carried off a fugitive named Jerry, who had been
arrested under the recently enacted Fugitive Slave
Law. At this time, Syracuse was the home of
Samuel J. May and Gerrit Smith, and this first
case under the Fugitive Slave Law was at once a
defiance and a test of the abolitionist temper of
the people of that city.

226 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
Though thousands of fugitive slaves succeeded
in making their escape by routes that led from the
South through Pennsylvania and New York, and
also through New England, by far the larger number
of the fugitives passed through the State of Ohio.
In all the little coloured settlements in Ohio, Indiana,
and Illinois, and in the larger cities like Cincinnati,
there were men who were known to be fugitive
slaves. Some of these men were slowly paying
for their freedom from their earnings in the free
states. In his life of Salmon P. Chase, Prof.
Albert Bushnell Hart, of Harvard University,
refers to a theological student who was known to
have provided for his education "from the instal
ments thus paid by a man for his own flesh, and
to have charged the poor Negro twelve per cent.
on deferred payment." As further illustration of
the number and variety of these cases, he mentions
a Negro child in a charitable school who excused
her absence with the explanation, "I am staying
at home to help buy father."
After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, Sep
tember 26, 1850, large numbers of these fugitive slaves
living in Ohio became frightened for fear that they
were to be sent back into slavery and fled into Canada.
At that time, J. C. Brown, a free man who had paid
$1,800 for his freedom, organised a colonisation
society for the purpose of inducing coloured people to
leave the State of Ohio and settle in Canada.

FUGITIVE SLAVES 227
"At this time," says Mr. Brown, "Cincinnati
was full of women, without husbands, and their
children. These were sent by planters from Louis
iana, Mississippi, and some from Tennessee, who
had got fortunes and had found that white women
could live in those states, and in consequence, they
had sent their slave wives and children to Cincinnati
and set them free."
These people were now, of course, in a state of
terror and their former masters were of course
anxious to get them upon free soil where there
would be no doubt of their security. It was at
this time that a number of refugees in different
parts of Canada, sprang up. Under Mr. Brown's
direction, four hundred and sixty people were
settled in the township of Biddulph, near Little
York. These were joined afterward by fifteen families
from Boston, Mass. They purchased twelve
hundred and twenty acres which were divided
into tracts of from twenty-five to fifty acres to a
family. One of the most romantic of the fugitive slave
stories is that of William and Ellen Craft. William
Craft was a slave on a plantation near Macon,
Georgia. He had learned the trade of cabinet
maker and had become so proficient in that craft
that, in addition to his daily work for his master,
he had been able to earn a considerable sum of
money for himself by work performed in his leisure

228 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
moments. William Craft was a black man, but
on this same plantation there was another slave,
a young woman, who was almost white. They
became acquainted with each other and after a
time they were married. They had not lived
together very long before the fear that they might
at some time be sold and thus parted from one
another, made them think about the possibilities
of escape from slavery. After studying over the
matter for some time, William Craft hit upon a
plan. There were always white people in the slavery
times who were willing for the sake of a little money
to carry on a secret traffic with the slaves. From
one of these white men he secured a suit of men's
clothing that would fit his wife. He had the suit
made in the latest fashion in order to make the dis
guise as complete as possible. He secured shoes,
hat, neckties, all the other pieces of wearing apparel
necessary to complete the wardrobe of a wealthy
young planter. In this disguise, Ellen Craft, having
secured a permit from her mistress for a visit of
a few days to a neighbouring plantation, took the
train at Macon for Savannah. The husband,
William, having secured a similar permit for him
self, boarded the same train and, passing himself
off as the Negro servant of his wife, they made the
journey out of slavery into freedom together.
At Savannah they took the boat for Charleston.

FUGITIVE SLAVES 229
From Charleston they went to Wilmington, North
Carolina, and from there took the train to Phil
adelphia. They had a great many curious and
exciting adventures on the way. The young
"planter" who, in order to more fully disguise
herself, had tied a bandage around her head, as
if she had a toothache, seemed to arouse the interest
and sympathy of a number of people, who gave
her advice how to keep her Negro servant from
running away from her when she reached free
soil. Both at Savannah, when they were boarding
the boat, and at Wilmington, when they were
taking the train to the North, they found it was
the rule to require passengers to register their names.
As neither of them could read and write, Ellen
Craft had put her right hand in a poultice and
supported it with a sling about her neck, pretending
that she was suffering from rheumatism. Even
then, it was with the greatest difficulty that she
was able to persuade the agents of the steamship
and railway companies to sign her name for her.
At length, however, they reached Philadelphia in
safety and for several days found refuge in the
home of philanthropic Quakers in that city. From
there, they went to Boston, where William Craft
secured employment at his trade as cabinet-maker.
They had left their home in Macon in 1848.
Two years later the Fugitive Slave Law was passed
and a determined effort was made by many Southern

230 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
slave-holders to get possession of their runaway
slaves, who were living in freedom in many parts
of the North. It was not long before such an
effort was made to get possession of the two fugitives
from Macon. For some months they lived in daily
apprehension of being seized and carried away.
Finally, upon learning that a warrant had been
issued for their arrest, some of their anti-slavery
friends smuggled them aboard one of the ships
leaving Boston for England. Arriving in Liverpool
they went directly to friends in London. Shortly
after their arrival there they went to live in the
town of Hammersmith, not far from London, which
was their home (or a number of years. William
Craft secured employment in the African trade,
and took several ship-loads of merchandise out
to Africa where he was able to dispose of them
with special advantage because he was of the same
colour and race as the people with whom he sought
to trade.
After emancipation and the Civil War had made
it possible for them to return to the country of
their birth, William and Ellen Craft came back
to Boston and lived for several years in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, where their children were educated.
While they were in England several children were
born to them, one of them, William, is still living
there. Another has since become the wife of Dr.
W. D. Crum, who was collector of customs at

FUGITIVE SLAVES 231
Charleston, South Carolina, under President Roose
velt. A grandson of William and Ellen Craft,
Henry K. Craft, who was graduated from Harvard
University in 1908, is, at the time this is written, in
charge of the electrical plant and the teaching of
Electrical Engineering at Tuskegee Institute.
William and Ellen Craft finally returned to Georgia
and passed their last days in a comfortable home
not far from Savannah. ,
Directly and indirectly, the fugitive slaves prob- >
ably did more to bring about the abolition of slavery
than any other one agency. The Northern people
learned from the lips of these fugitives — from the
strange, romantic, pathetic, and tragic stories they
told — that the slaves, no matter how ignorant
or how different in colour or condition they might
seem, were very much the same kind of human
beings as themselves. They learned from the
sufferings of these fugitives, from the desperate
efforts which they made to escape, that no matter
what might be said to the contrary the slaves wanted
to be free.
At the same time, the fugitive slaves learned in
the United States, in their very efforts to be free,
something about the nature of freedom that they
obuld not have learned in Africa. Slavery, however
h/ard or cruel it might be, appeared to the native
African, as it did to the Greek and Roman, to be
tile natural condition of the majority of men. It

232 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
was only after the African slaves learned the language
of their masters and possessed themselves to some
extent of their masters' ideas that they began to
conceive that the natural condition of man was
I not slavery but freedom.
When the fugitive slaves came in contact with
the anti-slavery people of the North they made
the acquaintance for the first time of a people who
hated slavery in a way and with an intensity which
few of them had ever felt or known. They
learned from these anti-slavery people to believe
in freedom for its own sake, not only for themselves
but for every one. They were transformed in this
way from fugitive slaves to abolitionists. They
became, as a result, the most determiner! of anti-
slavery people, and many of them devoted their
lives most unselfishly to securing the freeNdom of
other members of their race. \
In i860 it was estimated that the numbter of
Negroes that journeyed annually from Cariada
to the slave states to rescue their fellows ffrom
bondage was about five hundred. These persons
carried the Underground Railroad and the Under
ground Telegraph into nearly every Southern state. \*
* " The Underground Railroad," Siebert, p. 28.

CHAPTER XII
NEGRO SETTLEMENTS IN OHIO AND THE
NORTHWEST TERRITORY
A FEW miles west of Xenia, Ohio, is a quiet
little community of which one occasionally
sees the name in the newspapers, but in
regard to which very little is known by the outside
world, even among its immediate neighbours. This is
the Negro town of Wilberforce, which is, however,
not a town in the ordinary sense of the word, but
rather a suburb of Xenia, from which it is distant
an hour's walk and with which it is connected
only by stage.
What distinguishes Wilberforce from other com
munities in the North is the fact that it is the home
of what is, so far as I know, the first permanent
Negro institution of learning established for Negroes
and by Negroes in the United States. A few years
ago, I visited this community in order to take part
in the semi-centennial celebration of the founding
of the University there. During my visit I was
especially impressed with the quiet charm of the
surroundings, the comfort and simplicity of the
homes I visited, and the general air of culture and
233

234 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
refinement which pervaded the whole community. I
doubt if there is any Negro community in the
United States in which, in proportion to the pop
ulation, there is so large a number of beautiful
and well-conducted homes. Besides that, there
was an air of permanence and stability about this
community which one does not meet elsewhere,
even in the quiet and orderly suburbs that one
frequently finds in the neighbourhood of a good
Negro school. Here, at any rate, it seemed to me,
a certain number of coloured people had found
themselves, had made a permanent settlement
on the soil and were at home.
The history of Wilberforce goes back to a time
before the War. In its origin, this is represen
tative of a number of other Negro communities that
were established in different parts of Ohio during
that period. Most of these communities have
disappeared and been forgotten, but there are
many coloured people in all parts of the Northern
states who trace their history back to one or another
of these little Negro settlements that were started
partly by fugitive slaves and partly by free coloured
people, who left the South in order to find a home
in the free soil of the Northwest Territory.
The thing that gives a peculiar and- interesting
character to many of these ante-bellum Negro
settlements is that they were made by Southern
slave-holders who desired to free their slaves and

NEGRO SETTLEMENTS IN OHIO 235
were not able to do so under the restrictions that
were imposed upon emancipation in the Southern
States. Many of the coloured people in these
settlements were the natural children of their
master. For example, John M. Langston, the
first coloured man to represent Virginia in the
Congress ofthe United States, was freed by the terms
of his father's will, in 1834. In his autobiography,
he has given a vivid description of the manner in
which he, in- company with the other slaves who
had been freed at his father's death, made a long
journey across the mountains from Louisa County,
Virginia, to Chillicothe, Ohio. Before his election
to Congress from Virginia, Mr. Langston graduated
in 1849 fr°m Oberlin University, had been admitted
to the bar of Ohio in 1854, and elected clerk of
several Ohio townships. He was the first coloured
man in Ohio, it is said, to be elected to any sort
of office by popular vote.
When John Randolph, of Roanoke, Virginia,
died, he gave freedom to all his slaves and provided
that they should be transported to some other
partof the country, "where not less than two thousand
and not more than four thousand acres of land
should be purchased for them." The Randolph
Freedmen went to Ohio with the purpose of settling
in Mercer County, but they were not allowed to
enter upon the land which had been purchased for
them, because the German settlers in that part of

236 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
the country did not want them there. The com
munity was soon after scattered, but descendants
of the Randolph slaves are still living in the neigh
bourhood of Piqua and Troy, in Miami County,
Ohio. The most noted of them, as I have learned,
is Goodrich Giles, whose father was a member of
the original immigrants. Mr. Giles now owns four
hundred and twenty-five acres of land just out of
Piqua. He is said to be worth something over
$50,000. Two years ago, a sort of family reunion
of the descendants of the Randolph slaves was
held in Ohio, and, as a result of the gathering, an
organisation was formed among a few of the
descendants for the purpose of investigating their
claims to the land in Mercer County which was
purchased for them under the terms of John
Randolph's will, but of which they never secured
possession. The little community at Wilberforce grew out
of a similar effort of a number of Southern planters
to secure a foothold in a free state for their former
slaves. In 1856 there was already a considerable
number of the free Negroes settled at what was
then known as Tawawa Springs. In that year
it was decided to establish at this place a school
for these coloured immigrants and refugees. At
the time of the breaking out of the War this school
had nearly one hundred pupils. Many of them
were the coloured children of the white planters

NEGRO SETTLEMENTS IN OHIO 237
who had been sent North to be educated. With
the breaking out of the Civil War, however, the
support this school received from its Southern
patrons ceased. The institution soon fell into
decay and, in March, 1863, it was sold for a debt
of ten thousand dollars to the African Methodist
Episcopal Church. This was the origin of
Wilberforce. Of the little colony of Negro refugees who settled
in this neighbourhood before 1861, there still remain
a few families. The memories of others are pre
served in the names of some of their descendants
who occupy farms in the neighbourhood. But
the community has continued to grow. A few
farmers, attracted by the advantages of the Uni
versity, have purchased farms in the neighbourhood;
a few former students, who have made a success
elsewhere, have gone back there to make their
home. The rest of the community is made up
of the officers of the school and their families,
together with some four hundred students.
One thing that has given character to this little
town, and made it attractive as a residence for
Negroes, is the number of distinguished men of
the Negro race who have lived and worked there.
Among others whose memories are still preserved
there is Bishop Daniel A. Payne, who was, more
than any one else, responsible for the existence of
the colony. He lived there for many years until

238 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
he died in 1892. Bishop Benjamin W. Arnett,
who was a real force in Ohio affairs during his
connection with Wilberforce, lived in this com
munity for thirty-five years. It is said that he
was the first coloured man in the United States
to represent a constituency where the majority
were white, and the first to be foreman of a jury
where all the other members were white. As
member from Green County to the Ohio Legis
lature in 1886 and 1887, he was largely responsible
for the repeal of the remnant of what were known
as the "Black Laws."
Much was said during the anti-slavery agitation
of the efforts of the Southern Church to justify
African slavery. There was, in fact, a very serious
attempt to find justification in the Bible for slavery,
but any one who will study the history of Christianity
in the South and its influence upon slavery cannot
fail to see that, in spite of all that was said by
individual preachers and in spite of all that was
done by church organisations, there was always
a large number of white slave-holders in the South
who felt deep down in their hearts that slavery
was wrong. In his will, written in 18 19, John
Randolph says: "I give my slaves their freedom,
to which my conscience tells me they are justly
entitled. It has long been a matter of deepest
regret to me that the circumstances under which
I inherited them and the obstacles thrown in the

NEGRO SETTLEMENTS IN OHIO 239
way by the laws of the land have prevented me in
emancipating them in my lifetime, which it is my
full intention to do in case I can accomplish it."
These words pretty well express the deepest
sentiment of a great many people who held slaves
before the Civil War, but owing to the obstacles
thrown in the way of emancipation, did not go
so far as John Randolph and actually free their
slaves. I have often thought that the peculiar
interest which former slave-holders have manifested
in their former slaves was due to this feeling that
they had a special responsibility toward these
people whom they had held at one time under
conditions which their consciences could not entirely
justify. As a matter of fact, the whole character of the
anti-slavery campaign in Ohio differed from the
anti-slavery movements in New York and in New
England from the fact that so large a number of
the people who were engaged in the movement
in Ohio were either themselves men who had
moved into a free territory in order to free their
slaves, or they were the descendants of people who
had been slave-holders.
Benjamin Lundy, the man who first interested
William Lloyd Garrison in the subject of abolition,
was a Southerner who had emigrated from Virginia
to Ohio, and started his first paper, The Genius
of Universal Emancipation, at Mount Pleasant,

240 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
Ohio, a little Quaker settlement. James G.
Birney, who, while he lived at Huntsville, Alabama,
was a member of the American Colonisation Society,
finally freed his slaves and moved with them to
Cincinnati, where he became the leader in the anti-
slavery movement of Ohio. Dr. John Rankin,
the famous pastor of Ripley, Ohio, whose house,
standing on a hill, and visible from the Kentucky
shores, was descended from the Southern abolition
ists of East Tennessee. Among the fugitives who
took refuge in Dr. Rankin's house was the original
of Eliza Harris, the character in "Uncle Tom's
Cabin," who crossed the Ohio River on the drifting
ice with her child, and was sheltered for several
days at this house on the hill.
Another Southerner who became a prominent
abolitionist was the famous Levi Coffin, the Quaker,
representative of a large number of Quakers who
left North Carolina at various times before the
Civil War because they had grown to feel that
slavery was wrong. Levi Coffin was the man who
bore the title of President of the Underground
Railroad, and in his reminiscences he has told
stories of hundreds of fugitives, whom he aided
to escape from bondage. It is said that he aided
no less than two thousand fugitives to make their
way through Ohio to Canada. Quakers coming
from North Carolina settled in an early day near
Steubenville, and in a little town called Smithfield

NEGRO SETTLEMENTS IN OHIO 241
there still live descendants ofthe Negro colonists from
North Carolina settled there by Quaker masters.
Not only in Ohio, but in Indiana and in Michigan
there were scattered settlements of free Negroes,
many of whom had been sent thither by the Quakers
of North Carolina. In Hamilton County, Indiana,
a family named Roberts settled on about a thousand
acres of land in Jackson Township. These were
joined, afterward, by other families, until there
was a considerable settlement there, which finally
gained the name of Robert's Settlement. There
was another settlement very much like this, in
Randolph, and still another in Wayne County.
A recent investigator says:
It is not generally known that in the North there are thousands
of acres of land to which no individual white man has ever held
title; the only title under the Government of the United States has
been in the name of Negroes. But this is a fact and a large part
of these lands exist in Indiana. In Jackson Township, Hamilton
County, the Roberts family entered 960 acres of land between
1835 and 1838, and during the lifetime of its original holders,
added several hundred acres more to it, all of which was
unimproved. In 1907, about 700 acres of the original 960 acres
were owned by Negroes and 627 acres besides, making a total of
1,327, the larger part of which is now under cultivation. In
Randolph County 2,000 were entered between 1822 and 1845 by
a dozen different Negro immigrants, chiefly from North Carolina.
In Grant County was what is known as the Weaver Settlement.
In Vigo County, before 1840, the holdings of Negroes amounted
to 4,000, in this settlement, one man, Dixon Stewart, having
acquired more than 600 acres.*
* Southern Workman, March, 1908; " Rural Communities in Indiana," Richard
R. Wright, Jr., pp. 165, 166.

242 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
The interesting thing about these settlements
scattered throughout the Northwest Territory is,
as I have suggested, that they represented to a
very large extent the efforts of the Southern people
to bring about the emancipation of their own slaves.
This is particularly true in the case of the Quakers.
Early in the eighteenth century the Quakers
began to consider the question of sinfulness of
holding other members of the human race in the
condition of servitude. As early as 1688, a small
body of German Quakers of Germantown, Penn
sylvania, presented a protest to the Yearly Meeting
against the "buying, selling, and holding of men
in slavery," and in 1696, the Yearly Meeting,
although not yet prepared to take action, sent
out the advice that " the members should discourage
the introduction of slaves and be careful of the
moral and intellectual training of such as they
held in servitude." From 1746 to 1767 the Quaker,
John Woolman, of New Jersey, travelled through
the Middle and Southern states teaching that
"the practice of continuing slavery is not right."
And that "liberty is the natural light of all men
equally."* The minutes of the various Yearly Meetings of
the Quaker societies show a steady progress in
respect to the sentiment in regard to slave-holding,
and in 1776 the Eastern Quarterly Meeting of the
* "Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America," Henry Wilson, vol. i, pp. 8-10.

NEGRO SETTLEMENTS IN OHIO 243
North Carolina Yearly Meeting advised Friends
to manumit their slaves. Friends were prohibited
from importing, buying, or selling slaves, and in
1780 they were prohibited by the Yearly Meeting
from hiring them. In 1818, it is recorded regarding
slaves that "none held them."
But under the laws as they then existed, it was
not without considerable difficulty that Friends,
who desired to emancipate their slaves, were per
mitted to do so. In order to evade this law it
became the custom of Friends to confer upon their
slaves practical emancipation, allowing them to
hire themselves out and use for themselves the
money they earned, although their masters still
exercised a nominal control over them. In 18 17,
a case came before the court in which William
Dickinson conveyed a slave to the trustees of the
Quaker Society of Contentnea to be held in a kind
of guardianship until he could be manumitted
under the laws of the state. When this case came
before the Supreme Court of North Carolina,
Chief Justice Taylor declared that this practice
of the Quakers was emancipation in everything
but name, and therefore contrary to the law. A
few years later another case occurred in which
Collier Hill left his slaves to four trustees, one
of whom was " Richard Graves of the Methodist
Church," with the injunction to keep the slaves
for such purposes as "they, the trustees, could

244 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
judge most for the glory of God, and the good
of the said slaves." The court held that, as it
did not appear that "any personal benefit to the
legatees," was intended, the will "was held to
constitute them trustees for the purpose of
emancipation and that such a purpose was illegal."
It was the difficulties which Southern slave-holders
who wanted to ameliorate the condition of their
slaves encountered when they undertook to assist
their servants to freedom that led the Quakers
and so many other Southern people, to found the
settlements I have referred to in Ohio and elsewhere
in the Northwest Territory.
In the early years of the Colonisation Movement
the Quakers, with other Southern abolitionists, had
supported the Colonisation Society, believing that
that was one method of solving the problem. But,
as experience proved that that was a wholly in
adequate remedy, and as many of the coloured
people did not desire to leave the country in which
they had been born and bred, people who desired
to free their slaves were more and more induced to
send them to the Northwest Territory.
In 1835, the Pennsylvania Young Men's Society,
a Quaker organisation, interested themselves in
promoting the emigration of free coloured people
to Africa. They looked at the matter in a very
practical way and sent out twenty-six Negro col
onists, all of whom were proficient in the trades.

NEGRO SETTLEMENTS IN OHIO 245
The emigrants were blacksmiths, carpenters, potters,
brickmakers, shoemakers, and tailors. Altogether
one hundred and twenty-six emigrants were sent
out in this way, and these established themselves
at Port Cresson, on the coast of what is now Liberia.
These Negro colonists were, however, to such an
extent under the influence of the Quaker doctrine
that, when they were attacked by the native chiefs,
the head of the colony refused to resort to arms.
The result was that eighteen of the colonists were
killed, the houses were all destroyed and those
who were not killed were obliged to flee for their
lives.* Some time in the early part of the last century
a number of Quakers, who were dissatisfied with
conditions in the Southern states, moved from
North Carolina to Cass County, Michigan. They
brought with them a number of their former slaves.
And these made the nucleus for a settlement of
free Negroes which was constantly recruited by
fugitives from the other side of the Ohio River. In
1847, tnis Quaker settlement had become so notorious
as a refuge for fugitive slaves that a determined
effort was made on the part of some of the slave
holders to recapture their runaways. A number
of slave-holders, or their representatives, mounted
and well-armed, crossed the Ohio River in that
year and, riding across the intervening states, made
* "Liberia," Sir Harry Johnston, Vol. I, p. 155.

246 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
a bold and determined effort to regain possession
of their property. The effort to recapture the
fugitives was successfully resisted by the Quakers,
coloured people, and the other residents of the
community, and the only result was to advertise
Cass County, Michigan, as a place where Negroes
might live with a reasonable freedom from cap
ture by their former masters. After the raid a
still larger number of fugitives poured into the
county, the majority of them settling in Calvin
Township. In 1847, tne same year in which the Negro com
munities in Cass County were raided, a large slave
holder by the name of Saunders, who lived in
Cabell County, Virginia — now part of West Vir
ginia — died, and when his will was opened it was
found that he had not only freed all his slaves
but had made a generous provision for the purchase
of a tract of land in some free State to be divided
among these people. The Saunders ex-slaves,
forty-one in number, started northward in 1849
and, after a long journey, attended by many
hardships, they finally reached Calvin Town
ship, Cass County, Michigan, a few days before
Christmas. Sometime in the latter part of 1902, or the early
part of 1903, I visited Cass County and had an
opportunity to study, at first hand, the success
which the descendants of these Saunders ex-slaves

NEGRO SETTLEMENTS IN OHIO 247
and the other fugitives had made in that county. At
this time, I found that Calvin Township contained
a population of 759 Negroes and 512 whites. In
addition to these a large Negro population had
overflowed into the adjoining county of Porter, and
to some extent all but two of the towns in the county-
Among the men I met there at that time was a
farmer by the name of Samuel Hawkes, who, I
was informed, on good authority, was worth some
thing like $50,000. Another farmer whose name I
recall was William Allen. He was born in Logan
County, Ohio, but his parents were among that
numerous class of free coloured people who moved
from North Carolina to the free soil, in order to
preserve their freedom. When I visited his farm,
I found he had fifty head of cattle, ten horses,
three hundred sheep, and twenty-five hogs. He
had paid taxes during the previous year to the
amount of $191.00, on property in the two town
ships of Porter and Calvin. He had been a justice
of the peace for eighteen years, but resigned that
office, because, as he said, "it took too much time
away from the farm."
One of the supervisors of Calvin Township
was a farmer by the name of Cornelius Lawson. Of
the eight schools in Calvin, four of them were taught
by coloured teachers. As we drove through the
township, I discovered, posted up beside the road,
a notice of the annual school meeting. It was

248 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
signed by C. F. Northrup, director. Mr. Northrup,
as I was informed, is a Negro.
Among other things which attracted my attention
during my visit was the existence in Calvin of the
Grand Army Post, named after Matthew Artis,
who was one ofthe large number of coloured soldiers
who enlisted from this township during the War.
The commander of the Post at the time of my visit
was Bishop Curtis, who was a member of the 54th
Massachusetts Regiment, took part in the attack on
Fort Wagner and, it is said, was shot with a frag
ment of the same shell which killed his commander,
Robert Gould Shaw.
At the present time, Negroes hold the offices
of supervisor, clerk, road commissioner, and school
director in the township of Calvin. There are
two highway commissioners, two justices of the
peace, two constables, two members of the Board
of Review, who are Negroes. None of these men,
I may add, are professional politicians, and none
of them were elected because of their colour. In
fact, as near as I could learn, there is no question
of colour, but merely of fitness for the duties of
offices in the politics of Cass County.
In a recent study of this township, under the
title of " Negro Governments in the North," Richard
R. Wright, Jr., says:
The Negroes, who make up the township, are, as a rule, land
owners. There are one hundred and sixty-three Negroes on the

NEGRO SETTLEMENTS IN OHIO 249
tax books; they own 8,853.73 acres of land, assessed at $224,062,
and with a market value possibly of $400,000. Some of these were
included among the land-owners mentioned having property in other
townships and counties also; and some own city property. The
wealthiest of them owns about 800 acres in all, several pieces of
city property, and has personal property amounting to more than
$18,000. Several families are reported to be worth from $50,000
to $100,000 and one to be worth more than $150,000.
I have stated the facts in regard to this Negro
colony in Cass County at some length because
they illustrate what has gone on in a number of
other similar colonies in Ohio and neighbouring
states. They show, at any rate, the efforts of those
Southern people, who sought to give to their slaves
the advantage of freedom, were not entirely in vain.
The history of these efforts of Southern white
people and the Southern Negroes to lessen, to some
extent, the evils of slavery by emigration to the
free soil of the Northwest Territory, seems to me
one of the most important chapters in the Story
of the Negro. It should not be forgotten in this
connection that Abraham Lincoln was himself born
in the South and that many, if not most of the
leaders of the abolition movement in Ohio and Indi
ana, were in full sympathy with that portion of the
Southern people who wanted to do away with
slavery. They represented the heart and conscience
of thousands of others whose voices were drowned
in the factional political strife which grew up as
a result of the anti-slavery agitation.

250 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
I feel a peculiar interest in the work of those
men because I believe that the men in the South,
who quietly, earnestly, and unostentatiously are
seeking to better conditions in the South to-day,
are, in a certain sense, the direct descendants of
those Southern anti-slavery people of Ohio and the
Middle West. At any rate, they are following
in the traditions and working in the spirit of these
earlier men.

CHAPTER XIII
THE NEGRO PREACHER AND THE NEGRO CHURCH
ONE of the interesting documents relating to
the early history ofthe Negro in the United
States is a paper, written in the quaint, old-
fashioned style of a hundred years ago, and entitled:
" Narrative of the Proceedings of the Coloured Peo
ple During the Awful Calamity in Philadelphia, in
the Year 1 793 ; and a Refutation of Some of the Cen
sures Thrown Upon Them in Some Publications."
In the year 1792 and 1793, Philadelphia was
stricken with a sort of plague. Hundreds of people
died and hundreds more left the city, frequently
leaving the dead unburied in the houses. It was
believed at this time that Negroes were exempt from
this epidemic and a call was made upon them to act
as nurses and to assist in burying the dead. After
the epidemic was over the terror-stricken inhabitants
returned again to the city and the charge was made
that the coloured people, who had acted as nurses,
had demanded exorbitant prices for their services.
The narrative to which I have referred is an answer
to that charge. In this account of the epidemic, the
authors tell how they were induced to take up this
251

252 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
work, not because of any reward for themselves, but
in answer to an appeal to the coloured people to
come forward and assist "the distressed, perishing,
and neglected sick."
The narrative goes on to describe the distress which
the plague brought on the city; it relates in detail
a number of instances ofthe heroism of Negro nurses
during the period when the city was in a condition
of panic fear; and concludes with a full account of
the way in which the monies, which came into their
hands, were expended. From this report it appears
that one hundred and seventy-seven pounds, of the
four hundred and eleven expended, was contributed
from their own pockets, not counting, as the report
adds, "the cost of hearses, and maintenance ofour
families for seventy days, and the support of five
hired men during the respective times of their being
employed; which expenses, together with sundry
gifts we occasionally made to poor families, might
reasonably and properly be introduced to show our
actual situation in regard to profit."
This narrative of the plague in Philadelphia and
of the services of the coloured people to the citizens
during this trying period is the more interesting
because one of the authors of this account, Richard
Allen, was the founder and first Bishop ofthe African
Methodist Church and the other, Absalom Jones,
established the First African Church of St. Thomas,
which is sometimes called the first Negro church in

THE NEGRO PREACHER 253
America, although it is probable that there were
several churches in some of the Southern states
which were earlier in origin.
Both Allen and Jones, who were the leaders of the
coloured people of Philadelphia at that time, had been
slaves and both had purchased their freedom.
Richard Allen was born February 14, 1760, a slave to
Benjamin Chew, of Philadelphia. He was after
ward sold with his father and mother, and his three
brothers and sisters, to a man by the name of Stoke-
ley, in Delaware. Of his master Richard Allen says,
in his autobiography, " He was more like a father to
his slaves than anything else."
After he purchased his freedom, Allen became
an itinerant preacher, working, meanwhile, as a com
mon labourer at whatever he could get to do. During
the Revolution he was employed as a teamster
hauling salt. He had his regular places of stopping
along the road, where he would preach to who
ever were willing to come together to listen to him.
In 1784, he attended the General Conference, at
Baltimore, Maryland, which was the first General
Conference of the Methodist Church in America,
and in 1786 he came to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
About this time, because of the influx from the
country, the coloured population of Philadelphia was
increasing rapidly and the white congregation of
St. George's Church, where they attended, determined
to force them into the galleries. Allen had already

254 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
made a move in the direction of a separate church,
so that the coloured people were already prepared,
to some extent, for secession. The crisis was reached
one Sunday morning when the attempt was made
to move Jones and Allen from their accustomed
places in the body of the church into the gallery,
whereupon they and their followers rebelled and
walked out. On April 17, 1787, the coloured por
tion ofthis congregation formed, under the leadership
of Allen and Jones, what was known as the Free
African Society. The preamble of the articles of
association, upon which this society was founded,
is interesting as showing the thoughts which were
stirring in the minds of the leaders of the coloured
people at that time. The preamble is as follows:
Whereas, Absalom Jones and Richard Allen, two men of the
African Race who, for their religious life and conversation, have
obtained a good report among men, these persons from a love of
the people of their own complexion whom they beheld with sorrow,
because of their irreligious and uncivilised state, often communed
together upon this painful and important subject in order to form
some kind of religious body; but there being too few to be found
under the like concern, and those who were, differed in their
religious sentiments; with these circumstances they laboured for
some time, till it was proposed after a serious communication
of sentiments that a society should be formed without regard to
religious tenets, provided the persons live an orderly and sober
life, in order to support one another in sickness, and for the benefit
of their widows and fatherless children.
The Free African Society prepared the way for
the African Methodist Episcopal Church, which

THE NEGRO PREACHER 255
may be said to have come into existence four years
later, in 1790, when Allen and a few followers with
drew from the Free African Society and started an
Independent Methodist Church. Allen's congre
gation worshipped at first in a blacksmith shop on
Sixth, near Lombard Street. The other members
of the society then became members of the Episcopal
Church under the leadership of Jones and, in 1794,
built St. Thomas Church, at the corner of Fifth and
Philadelphia streets.
The little society maintained by Allen in the
blacksmith shop grew rapidly in membership.
Some time in 1 794, also, Bethel Church was erected by
Allen and his followers. About this same time the
coloured people withdrew from the white congre
gations in Baltimore and New York, and in 18 16
a conference was held at the Bethel Church in
Philadelphia, which resulted in the establishment of
the African Methodist Episcopal Church, with
Richard Allen as first Bishop.
Six years after Allen withdrew from the Free
African Society in Philadelphia, coloured members
of the Methodist Episcopal Church in New York
decided to hold separate meetings, in which they
"might have an opportunity to exercise their
spiritual gifts among themselves, and thereby be
more useful to one another." They erected a
church, which was dedicated in 1800, and to
which they gave the name, African Methodist

256 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
Episcopal Zion. This congregation formed the
nucleus of what is now known as the "Zion"
Methodist connection. From 1801 to 1820 this
organisation was under the pastoral supervision of
the Methodist Episcopal Church, but during that
time it had its own preachers. In 1820 this arrange
ment was terminated and a union of coloured Meth
odist congregations in New York, New Haven,
Long Island, and Philadelphia was formed. These
churches together became the African Methodist
Episcopal Zion Connection.
Directly after the War the two coloured branches
of the Methodist Church invaded the Southern
states. At that time, there were 207,742 coloured
members of the Methodist Church, South. Within
a few years, much the larger proportion of the
coloured members ofthe Southern Methodist Church
joined either one or the other ofthe African Methodist
connections so that in 1866 the Methodist Church,
South, had only 78,742 coloured members. In that
year, the Church authorised these coloured members,
with their preachers, to organise separate con
gregations, and in 1870 two Bishops were appointed
to organise the coloured conferences into a sepa
rate and independent church. This new connection
took the name of the Coloured Methodist Episcopal
Church. In 1908, representatives of the three coloured
Methodist connections met in the First Council ofthe

THE NEGRO PREACHER 257
United Board of Bishops. This council met in
Washington, D. C. Its purpose was to bring the
three more important organisations among the
coloured Methodists into closer working relations
with each other, in the hope that eventually a com
pact organisation might be formed which would
unite in one body more than 13,000 churches and
over 1,500,000 communicants.
The Negro seems, from the beginning, to have
been very closely associated with the Methodist
Church in the United States. When the Reverend
Thomas Coke was ordained by John Wesley as
Superintendent or Bishop of the American Society
in 1784, he was accompanied on most of his travels
throughout the United States by Harry Hosier, a
coloured minister who was at the same time the
Bishop's servant and an evangelist of the Church.
Harry Hosier, who was the first American Negro
preacher of the Methodist Church in the United
States, was one of the notable characters of his day.
He could not read or write, but he was pronounced
by Dr. Benjamin Rush the greatest orator in
America. He travelled extensively through the
New England and Southern states and shared the
pulpits ofthe white ministers whom he accompanied.
But he seems to have excelled them all in popularity
as a preacher.
It is said that on one occasion, in Wilmington,
Delaware, where Methodism early became popular,

258 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
a number of citizens, who did not ordinarily attend
the Methodist Church, came together to hear Bishop
Asbury. The church was so crowded that they were
not able to get in, so they stood outside and listened,
as they supposed, to the Bishop, but in reality they
heard Harry Hosier. They were greatly impressed,
and before leaving, one of them was heard to remark
that "if all Methodist preachers could preach like
the Bishop, more of us would like to hear him."
Some one replied that "that was not the Bishop, but
his servant." This served to raise the Bishop still
higher in their estimation, for they concluded, if
the servant was so eloquent what must the master
be.* Harry Hosier remained popular as a preacher
to the last. Francis Asbury, Associate-bishop,
stated that the best way to get a large congregation
was to announce that Harry was going to preach.
He died in Philadelphia in 1810.
From the first the Methodist Church was strongly
anti-slavery although the sentiment against slavery
was always stronger in the North than in the South.
The struggle which led to the separation of the
Southern and Northern churches,in i844,was brought
about because of the censure voted against Bishop
Andrew for having married in Georgia a woman who
owned slaves. But even after the separation, the
Southern organisation maintained, at least formally,
* Stevens's "History of the M. E. Church," pp. 174, 175. Quoted in Williams's
"History of the Negro Race in America," p. 467, vol. ii.

THE NEGRO PREACHER 259
its protest against slavery. The first edition of its
discipline, in 1846, declared:
That we are as much as ever convinced of the great evil of slavery.
Therefore, no slave-holder shall be eligible to any official position in
our Church hereafter, where the laws of the state in which he lives
will admit of emancipation and permit the liberated slaves to enjoy
freedom. When any travelling preacher becomes an owner of a
slave or slaves, by any means, he shall forfeit his ministerial charac
ter in our Church, unless he executes, if it be practicable, a legal
emancipation of such slaves, conformable to the laws of the state
in which he lives.*
Methodism had started in England among the
poor and the outcast; it was natural, therefore, that
when its missionaries came to America they should
seek to bring into the Church the outcast and neg
lected people, and especially the slaves. In some
parts of the South the Methodist meeting-houses
were referred to by the more aristocratic denomina
tions as "the Negro churches." This was due to
the fact that the Methodists often began their work
in a community with an appeal to the slaves.
Methodism began in the early part of the nine
teenth century in Wilmington, North Carolina, in
this way. A Methodist preacher by the name of
William Meredith began his work among the slaves.
Through the penny collections which he took from
the black people and the scanty contributions of the
poor whites, he purchased a lot and completed a
building. Bishop Francis Asbury visited the church
?"Slavery in the State of North Carolina." Johns Hopkins University
Studies, John Spencer Bassett, p. 55.

260 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
in 1807, and John Charles, a coloured preacher,
delivered a sermon in the same church at sunrise
the same day.*
The Methodist Church in Fayetteville, North
Carolina, was started earlier than that at Wilming
ton, but in much the same way. The story of the
founding of that church is told in some detail in
Bassett's History of Slavery in North Carolina.
The author says:
Late in the eighteenth century, Fayetteville had but one church
organisation, the Presbyterian, and that had no building. One
day there arrived in town Henry Evans, a full-blooded free Negro
from Virginia, who was moving to Charleston, South Carolina,
where he proposed to follow the trade of shoemaking. He was,
perhaps, free-born; he was a Methodist and a licensed local
preacher. In Fayetteville, he observed that the coloured people
"were wholly given to profanity and lewdness, never hearing
preaching of any denomination." He felt it his duty to stop and
work among them. He worked at his trade during the week and
preached on Sunday. The whites became alarmed and the Town
Council ordered him to stop preaching. He then met his flock in
the "sand hills," desolate places out of the jurisdiction of the
Town Council. Fearing violence, he made his meetings secret
and changed the place of meeting from Sunday to Sunday. He
was particular to violate no law, and to all the whites he showed
the respect which their sense of cast superiority demanded. Public
opinion began to change, especially when it was noticed that slaves
who had come under his influence were more docile for it. Some
prominent whites, most of whom were women, became interested
in his cause. They attended his meetings and through their
influence opinion was reversed. Then a rude frame building was
erected within the town limits and a number of seats were reserved
* "Early Methodism in Wilmington," Dr. A. M. Chreitzberg, in the annual
publication of the Historical Society of the North Carolina Conference, 1897,
quoted in "Slavery in North Carolina," p. 57.

THE NEGRO PREACHER 261
for the whites, some of whom became regular attendants at his
services. The preacher's reputation spread. The white portion
ofthe congregation increased till the Negroes were crowded out of
their seats. Then the boards were knocked from the sides of the
house and sheds were built on either hand and in these the blacks
were seated. By this time the congregation, which had been
unconnectional at first, had been taken into the regular Methodist
connection and a regular white preacher had been sent to it.
But the heroic founder was not displaced. A room was built for
him in the rear of the pulpit, and there he lived till his death in
1810. . . . His last speech to his people is noteworthy.
Directly after the morning sermon for the whites it was customary
to have a sermon for the blacks. On the Sunday before Evans's
death, as the latter meeting was being held, the door of his little
shed room opened and he tottered forward. Leaning on the altar
rail he said: "I have come to say my last word to you. It is this:
None but Christ. Three times I have had my life in jeopardy for
preaching the gospel to you. Three times I have broken the ice
on the edge ofthe water and swam across the Cape Fear to preach
the gospel to you, and if in my last hour I could trust to that, or
anything but Christ crucified, for my salvation, all should be lost
and my soul perish forever." Of these words Bishop Capers justly
says that they were worthy of St. Paul.*
During the Colonial times the Baptists, to which
denomination at the present time the majority of the
Negroes in the United States belong, were a perse
cuted people, not only in New England but in Vir
ginia. At that time this sect drew its followers very
largely from the poorer people who did not own
slaves, and it was therefore natural that its members
should be opposed to slavery. The Baptist Church,
however, did not, as did the Methodists, make
an effort to draw the Negroes into the churches, but
* "Slavery in the State of North Carolina," pp. 57-59.

262 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
took care to bring under religious influence the
slaves of their own members, and paid particular
attention to the relations of the master and slave.
In 1778, it was decided that a marriage between
slaves ought to be respected, even though it was
against the law of the land. In 1783 the Sandy
Creek Association of North Carolina declared that a
master should give his servants the liberty to attend
family prayers in his house, that he should exhort
them to attend, but not use force. Among the
older coloured bishops and ministers, in both the
Methodist and Baptist churches, there are a num
ber who attribute their religious life to the in
fluence and teachings which they received through
this personal contact with their masters and mas
ters' families.
John Jasper, the famous pastor ofthe Sixth Mount
Zion Baptist Church, Richmond, Virginia, always
spoke with the greatest reverence of his former
master. The Reverend John Jasper was known as a
preacher for sixty years in and about Richmond,
twenty-five of which he was a slave. He became a
national figure as a result of his efforts to prove
by the Bible, that " the sun," as he put it, " do move."
Recently, William E. Hatcher, a Southern white
man, who knew Jasper for many years, admired
him for his sincerity and valued him for the influence
that he exercised over his people, has written the
story of John Jasper's life. One of the interesting

THE NEGRO PREACHER 263
incidents related in this book is that of Jasper's
conversion. At the time this took place he was a
slave of Mr. Samuel Hargrove, and was employed
as a tobacco stemmer in a tobacco factory in Rich
mond. One day he fell to shouting, while he was
at work, and nearly started a revival in the tobacco
factory. His master, hearing the uproar, called
him into the office. Jasper explained what had
come over him and that he really did not mean to
make any noise. His own account of what then
happened, which Mr. Hatcher has given in his own
words, is as follows:
Mars' Sam was settin' wid his eyes a little down to de flo' an'
wid a pritty quiv'r in his voice he say very sio': "John, I b'lieve
dat way myself. I luv de Saviour dat you have jes' foun', now as
you did." Den Mars' Sam did er thing dat nearly made me drop
to de flo'. He git out of his chair, an' walk over to me an' giv'
me his han', and he say: "John, I wish you mighty well. Your
Saviour is mine, an' we are bruthers in de Lord." When he say
dat, I turn 'round an' put my arm agin de wall, an' held my mouf
to keep from shoutin'. Mars' Sam well know de good he du me.
Art'r awhile he say: "John, did you tell eny of 'em in thar 'bout
your conversion?" And I say: 'Yes, Mars' Sam, I tell 'em fore
I kno'd it, an' I feel like tellin' everybody in de worl' about it."
Den he say: "John, you may tell it. Go back in dar an' go up-
stars an' tell 'em all 'bout it, an' den downstars an' tell de hogshed
men an' de drivers an' eberybody what de Lord has dun for you."
By dis time Mars' Sam's face was rainin' tears, an' he say: "John,
you needn' work no mo' to-day. I giv' you holiday. Art'r you
git thru tellin"1 it here at de factory, go up to de house an' tell your
folks; go 'round to your neighbours an' tell dem; go enywhere,
you wan' to an' tell de good news. It'll do you good, do dem good,
an' help to hon'r your Lord an' Saviour."

264 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
John Jasper always contended that his master
made a preacher of him. "Oft'n as I preach," he
said in one of his sermons, "I feel that I'm doin'
what my ol' marster tol' me to do. If he was here
now, I think he would fil' up dem kin' black eyes of
his, an' say: 'Dat's right, John; still tellin' it; fly
like de angel, an' wherever you go carry de Gospel
to de people.'"*
John Jasper was born in 1812, and did not secure
his freedom until 1864. He preached, as slave and
freeman, for something over sixty years. When he
died, in 1899, the Richmond Dispatch said of him:
He was a national character, and he and his philosophy were
known from one end of the land to the other. Some people have
the impression that John Jasper was famous simply because he
flew in the face of the scientists and declared that the sun moved.
In one sense, that is true, but it is also true that his fame was due,
in great measure, to a strong personality, to a deep, earnest convic
tion, as well as to a devout Christian character. Some preachers
might have made this assertion about the sun's motion without
having attracted any special attention. The people would have
laughed over it, and the incident would have passed by as a sum
mer breeze. But John Jasper made an impression upon his gener
ation, because he was sincerely and deeply in earnest in all that he
said. No man could talk with him in private, or listen to him
from the pulpit, without being thoroughly convinced of that fact.
His implicit trust in the Bible and everything in it, was beautiful
and impressive. He had no other lamp by which his feet were
guided. He had no other science, no other philosophy. He took
the Bible in its literal significance; he accepted it as the inspired
word of God; he trusted it with all his heart and soul and mind;
* "John Jasper," by W. E. Hatcher, pp. 26-29.

THE NEGRO PREACHER 265
he believed nothing that was in conflict with the teachings of the
Bible — scientists and philosophers and theologians to the con
trary notwithstanding.
John Jasper was a survival of the ante-bellum
days. He was representative of the "old-time"
Negro preacher, of the men who were the natural
leaders of the slaves on the plantation. He lived in
a period, however, when, in many respects, the ante
bellum preacher was oft the decline. In the early
days, before the severe restrictions were put upon
the education of the slaves, many of these men were
educated and some of them preached in the white
churches. Among the most noted ofthe early Negro preachers
was George Lisle, who began preaching to the slaves
at Savannah, Georgia, during the War ofthe Revolu
tion. After the evacuation of the country by the
British in 1782 and 1783 he went with his master to
Jamaica. The existence of the Baptist Church
among the Negroes in Jamaica is due to this man.
Before his departure for Jamaica he baptised a slave
of Mr. Jonathan Bryan, by the name of Andrew.
Andrew Bryan became in after years a great
preacher. At the present time there are two churches
in Savannah, one of them the Bryan Baptist in the
Yamacraw District and the other the First African,
both of which claim descent from the little congrega
tion of slaves which Andrew Bryan drew around him
in the years after his baptism and previous to 1788,

266 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
when he was solemnly ordained to the ministry and
his congregation formally constituted a church.
The story of the struggle of this little congregation
to maintain its existence against the prejudice that
existed at that time is interesting because it shows
the quality of some of these early slave preachers.
In his volume, "The Gospel Among the Slaves," the
Reverend W. T. Harrison, of the Methodist Church,
South, says of the origin of the First Baptist Church
in Savannah:
Their evening assemblies were broken up and those found
present were punished with stripes. Andrew Bryan and Samson,
his brother.converted about a year after him,were twice imprisoned,
and they with about fifty others were whipped. When publicly
whipped, and bleeding under his wounds, Andrew declared that he
rejoiced not only to be whipped, but would freely suffer death for
the cause of Jesus Christ; and that while he had life and oppor
tunity he would continue to preach Christ. He was faithful to his
vow, and by patient continuance in well-doing he put to silence
and shame his adversaries, and influential advocates and patrons
were raised up for him. Liberty was given Andrew by the civil
authority to continue his religious meetings under certain regula
tions. His master gave him the use of his barn at Brampton,
three miles from Savannah, where he preached for two years with
little interruption.
Toward the close of the year 1792, the Church
which Andrew Bryan had founded began to build a
place of worship. The city gave the lot for the
purpose and the building, which still stands on the old
site, though it is not the original structure erected in
1972, has become one of the historic landmarks of
the city.

THE NEGRO PREACHER 267
Among the other famous ante-bellum Negro
preachers was a man known as Jack of Virginia, of
whom Dr. William S. White, ofthe Southern Pres
byterian Church, has written a biography. "Uncle
Jack," as he was popularly known, was an African
preacher of Nottoway County, Virginia. He had
been captured from his parents in Africa and brought
over in one of the last cargoes of slaves admitted to
Virginia. He was sold to a remote and obscure
plantation in Nottoway County which, at that time,
was in the backwoods where there was almost no
opportunity for religious life and instruction. In
some way or other, however, he came under the
influence of the Reverend Dr. John Blair Smith,
President of Hampden-Sydney College, and of Dr.
William Hill, and Dr. Archibald Alexander, of Prince-
1.
ton, both of whom were at that time young theological
students. He learned to read from his master's
children and became, as Professor Ballagh says in
his work on Slavery in Virginia, "so full ofthe spirit
and knowledge of the Bible that he was recognised
among the whites as a powerful expounder of Chris
tian doctrine, was licensed to preach by the Baptist
Church, and preached from plantation to planta
tion within a radius of thirty miles, as he was
invited by overseers or masters."
His freedom was purchased by a subscription of
white people, and he was given a home and a patch
of land for his support. It is said that he exercised

268 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
such remarkable control over the members of his
flock that masters, instead of punishing their slaves,
often referred them to the discipline of their pastor,
of which they stood in greater dread. Professor
Ballagh says that the most refined and aristocratic
people paid tribute to him, and he was instrumental
in the conversion of many whites. He preached for
forty years among blacks and whites alike, but
voluntarily gave up his preaching in obedience
to the law of 1832, which was passed as a result
of the Nat Turner Insurrection. Dr. William S.
White, his biographer, speaking of Jack of Vir
ginia's relations with the white people in his
neighbourhood, says:
He was invited into their houses, sat with their families, took
part in their social worship, sometimes leading the prayer at the
family altar. Many of the most intelligent people attended upon
his ministry and listened to his sermons with great delight. Indeed,
previous to the year 1825, he was considered by the best judges
to be the best preacher in that county. His opinions were
respected, his advice followed, and yet he never betrayed the least
symptoms of arrogance or self-conceit. His dwelling was a rude
log cabin, his apparel of the plainest and coarsest materials.
This was because he wished to be fully identified with his class.
He refused gifts of better clothing, saying, "These clothes are a
great deal better than are generally worn by people of my colour,
and, besides, if I wear them, I find I shall be obliged to think about
them even at meeting."*
Another noted Negro preacher was Ralph Free
man, who was a slave in Anson County, North
*"The African preacher," quoted by Ballagh in "Slavery in Virginia," pp.
110-112.

THE NEGRO PREACHER 269
Carolina, in the neighbourhood of the Rock River.
He was ordained a regular minister and travelled
about, preaching at various places in his own
and adjoining counties. It is said that the Rev.
Joseph Magee, a white Baptist minister, became
much attached to Ralph. They used to travel
and preach together and it was agreed between
them that the survivor should preach the funeral
of the one who died first.
It so happened that the Rev. Joseph Magee died
first and the task of preaching his funeral sermon fell
to Ralph. In the meantime, however, his friend
had moved to the West, and the coloured preacher
was sent for all the way from North Carolina to
come and fulfil the promise he had made in
earlier years. Ralph Freeman continued to preach
for a number of years. At last his lips were
closed also, much to his sorrow, by the law
which forbade Negroes to preach to white congre
gations. Although Negro Baptists did not succeed in
organising an independent National Church until
after the War, coloured Baptists were the first among
the Negroes to set up separate churches for them
selves. In 1836, coloured Baptists in the North
began to draw together. The Providence Baptist
Association was organised in that year in Ohio.
Two years later the Wood River Baptist Association
was organised in Illinois. These local or district

270 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
organisations, as they were afterward called, grew
rapidly after the Civil War. About 1876 the New
England states formed an organisation which aimed
to be national in its character. In 1880 the
Negro Baptists of the Southern states met at Mont
gomery, Alabama, to form a Foreign Mission
Convention. Six years later the Southern states
formed the American National Convention, and
in 1894, at Montgomery, Alabama, measures were
taken to bring together into one organisation all
the coloured Baptist organisations in the United
States, seeking to be national in character. By
1897 this national Baptist organisation had been
completed. According to statistics furnished by the eighty-
nine state organisations and six hundred district
associations there were, in 1908, 18,307 organised
Negro Baptist churches, and 17,088 ordained
preachers in the United States. According to these
same statistics the total membership of these churches
is 2,330,535. The total expenditures of the
coloured Baptist Church for church, Sunday-school
and educational work in 1907 is reported to have been
$2,525,025.66. The two great independent Negro denominations,
the Methodist and the Baptist, were the first to
break away from the older church organisations of
the white people. These two organisations contain
by far the larger number of the Negroes of the

THE NEGRO PREACHER 271
United States. Perhaps this is the reason that they
were the first to seek to establish independent Negro
churches. In all the other religious denominations,
with the exception of the Roman Catholics, Negroes
have separate churches, which stand in a relation of
greater or less dependence upon the denominations
to which they belong.
The Catholics were the first to send missionaries
to Africa. Therefore the Catholic Church is the
First Christian Church into which Negroes were
received as members. As far back as 1490, two
years before the discovery of America, Catholic
missionaries visited the mouth of the Kongo River.
For several centuries after this a Negro Catholic
kingdom existed in that part of Africa. It was
eventually overthrown, as a result of wars with
neighbouring peoples. Saint Benedict, the Moor,
who died in Palermo, Sicily, in 1589, and was after
ward canonised by the Catholic Church, was the
son of a Negro slave woman. Some of the first
Negroes to reach America were Catholics. They
came over with the early Spanish discoverers.
Negro Catholics have never been numerous in the
United States, except in Maryland, which was a
Catholic colony, and in Louisiana. In 1829, a
number of Catholic refugees came to Baltimore from
Santo Domingo, and at this time there was founded,
in connection with the Oblate Sisters of Providence
Convent, the St. Francis Academy for Girls. The

272 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
Sisters of Providence, who founded the convent
and seminary, were coloured women who first came
to Baltimore with the Santo Domingo refugees.
A few years later, in 1842, an order known as the
Sisters of the Holy Family was founded among the
free coloured women of New Orleans. The sisters
of this order now have charge of three asylums,
one of which is the Lafon Boys' Asylum, donated
by Mr. Thorny Lafon, the Negro philanthropist,
in 1893. The same order carries on schools at
Baton Rouge, Mandeville, Madisonville and La
fayette, Louisiana; at Galveston and Houston,
Texas; and Pine Bluff, Arkansas. The same Sis
terhood has a government school at Stann Creek,
British Honduras.
Outside the Catholic Church the first religious
denomination in the United States to receive Negroes
was the Protestant Episcopal Church. In 1624,
only five years after slavery was introduced into
Virginia, a Negro child named William was baptised
and from that time the names of Negroes can be
found upon the register of most of the older churches
in Virginia. The first eminent coloured minister
in the Episcopal Church in the United States was
Alexander Crummell, who was born in New York
City in 18 18, but his father was a native of the Gold
Coast, Africa. After his graduation at Cambridge
University, England, Mr. Crummel went to Africa as
a missionary. He was for a time a professor in the

THE NEGRO PREACHER 273
Liberian College, in Liberia. Later he returned to
the United States and was, for twenty-two years,
rector of the St. Luke's Church, Washington, D. C.
He is the author of several books upon Africa, and
upon the Negro in the United States. In 1897 he
established the American Negro Academy, which
was designed to bring learned men of the Negro race
together and to publish the results of their investiga
tions, particularly upon subjects of interest to the
Negro race.
Something like one hundred and fifty Negroes
have been ordained as ministers in the Episcopal
Church since Alexander Crummell entered that
ministry in 1839. In 1874, James Theodore Holly
was consecrated Bishop of Haiti and eleven
years later Samuel David Ferguson was made Mis
sionary Bishop of Cape Palmas, and adjacent
regions in West Africa. There are several Negro
archdeacons of the Episcopal Church in the South
ern states. One of them is James S. Russell, who
was a student at Hampton Institute, at the time
I was there, and is now principal of the flourishing
Episcopal school for Negroes at Lawrenceville,
Virginia. For some reason or other, probably because its
teachings did not address themselves to the compre
hension of the slaves, or did not appeal to their
emotions, the Presbyterian Church was never as
popular among the coloured people as the Methodist

274 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
and Baptist churches were. Notwithstanding this
fact, there were numerous coloured people v/ho were
members of the Presbyterian Church in the Southern
states before the War. Among them was one free
Negro by the name of John Chavis, who became
famous. He was a full-blooded Negro and was
born in Granville County, North Carolina, about
1763. He early in life attracted the attention of
the white people and was sent to Princeton College
as an experiment, to see if a Negro could take a
collegiate education. The experiment succeeded
and Chavis became so thoroughly educated that he
afterward became a minister and preached with
considerable success until 1831, when he was silenced
by the law forbidding Negroes to preach.
After that he set himself up as a school-teacher,
teaching in Granville, Wake and Chatham counties
in North Carolina. Among his patrons were the
best people in the neighbourhood. Willie P. Man
gum, afterward United States Senator, and Priest
ley Mangum, his brother, Archibald and John
Henderson, sons of Chief- Justice Henderson, Charles
Manly, afterward Governor of the state, Dr. James
L. Wortham, of Oxford, North Carolina, and many
other men who did not become prominent, were his
pupils. Reverend James H. Horner, who is said to
have been one ofthe best teachers in North Carolina,
said of John Chavis: "My father not only went to
school to him, but boarded in his family. The

THE NEGRO PREACHER 275
school was the best at that time to be found in
the state."
In his study of Slavery in the State of North
Carolina, John Spencer Bassett says:
From a source of the greatest respectability I learned that this
Negro was received as an equal socially and asked to table by the
most respectable of the neighbourhood. Such was the position of
the best specimen of the Negro race in North Carolina in the days
before race prejudices were aroused.*
After the Civil War large numbers, as many as
seventy per cent., it is said, ofthe coloured members
of the Presbyterian Church went into the African
Methodist and into the Baptist churches. Others
joined the Northern Presbyterian church, which
had begun to establish schools and missions in the
South among the Negroes directly after the War.
In 1902, the Presbyterian Church, North, had
eleven Presbyteries in the Southern states with
two hundred and nine ministers, only seven of
whom were white.
In spite ofthe large secession from the Presbyterian
Church, South, a considerable number of coloured
people still clung to the Southern branch of that
Church. In the latter part of the Nineties, however,
these coloured churches, at their own request, were
set apart from the white churches and organised
under the title of the Afro-American Presbyterian
Church.

* "Slavery in the State of North Carolina," Johns Hopkins University Studies,
P-75-

276 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
The Congregational Church, through the medium
of the American Missionary Association, began,
directly after the War, to raise large sums of
money and establish schools for the Freedmen. A
number of these schools, like the one at Hampton,
have now become independent of the organisa
tion which started them. But a large number of
schools are still being supported in different parts
of the South by funds of the American Board.
Around these schools there has usually grown up
a coloured Congregational church. At first, these
churches were located, for the most part, in the
cities, but in recent years as the schools in
the country districts have increased, the number
of churches outside the city has multiplied.
In 1902, the number of coloured Congregational
churches was 230; the number of ministers and
missionaries, 139, and the number of church
members, 12,155.*
In 1890, the United States Census Bureau under
took a complete census of the religious denomina
tions. Since that time no complete and systematic
study of all the denominations has been made.
The following table, however, prepared by Dr.
H. K. Carroll, who had charge of the preparation
of the church statistics of the Eleventh Census,
although it does not agree entirely with the statistics
furnished by the religious societies, probably shows
* "The Negro Church, a Social Study," p. 151.

THE NEGRO PREACHER 277
pretty accurately the growth and relative percentage
of strength of the different denominations :
Denomination Ministers Churches Communicants
Regular Baptist  I3,75I 19,030 1,864,877
Church of God (Baptist) ... 71 93 8,500
Christian ... ... 88 34 956
Union American Methodist Epis
copal  138 255 18,500
African Methodist Episcopal . . 6,170 6,920 858,323
African American Methodist Prot
estant  200 125 4,000
African Methodist Episcopal Zion . 3,986 3,280 583,106
Congregational Methodist ... 5 5 319
Zion Union Apostolic (Methodist) . 30 32 2,346
Coloured Methodist Episcopal . 2,727 2,758 224,700
Evangelical Missionary (Methodist) 92 47 5,014
Cumberland Presbyterian . . 80 150 13,020
Total  27,338 32,729 3,583,661
Coloured members in Methodist
Episcopal Churches .... 2,161 3,611 299,985
Coloured members in other bodies
(est'd)  900 1,400 150,000
Grand total . . . 3°»399 37.74° 4>°33>°4°
Grand total in 1890 . . 23,77° 2.674,177
Gains in eighteen years . I3,97° I>359,469
These figures show that nearly half of the Negro
population of the United States are members of one
or the other of the great religious denominations.
This means that, among the Negro population, the
church plays a much more important part than it
does among the white population, since considerably

278 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
more than two-thirds of the white population are
not enrolled in any church organisation. The
influence of the Negro Church is particularly strong
in the Southern states. In fact there is hardly a
community or a plantation in the South so remote,
or so obscure, that it does not possess some sort of
place where the coloured people meet and worship.
These churches are not always what they should
be. The coloured preacher is often ignorant and
sometimes even immoral, but in spite of this fact the
Church remains the centre for all those influences
that are making for the welfare and the upbuilding
of the communities in which they are situated. All
these churches are connected more or less directly
with the larger denominational organisations and
thus serve, to some extent, to connect the people in
them with the life and progress of the outside world.
I shall have something to say in a subsequent
chapter in regard to the social work of the Negro
Church. I wish to emphasise at this point, how
ever, that the Negro Church represents the masses
of the Negro people. It was the first institution to
develop out of the life of the Negro masses and it
still retains the strongest hold upon them. As the
Negro Church grows stronger materially and
spiritually so do the masses of the Negro people
advance. There is no better indication of the
progress of the masses of the people than the growth
and development of these great Negro organisations.

CHAPTER XIV
THE NEGRO ABOLITIONISTS
A GOOD many stories have been told about
John Randolph of Roanoke, and his pecu
liar opinions in regard to slavery. One of
these concerns his reply to a man who asked him
who, in his opinion, was the greatest orator he
had ever heard. John Randolph was a great
orator himself, and he had known Patrick Henry,
but, in reply to this question, he said : " The greatest
orator I ever heard was a woman. She was a
slave. She was a mother, and her rostrum was
the auction block." With that he arose and
imitated the thrilling tones with which this slave
woman had appealed to the sympathy and to the
justice of the bystanders, concluding with an indig
nant denunciation of them and of the traffic in
which they were engaged.
"There," said Mr. Randolph, in conclusion,
"was eloquence. I have heard no man speak like
that." This story will serve to illustrate what was, from
the beginning, the strongest force in the abolition
of slavery in the South. I mean the appeal which
279

280 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
the slaves made, themselves, not merely in words
but in actions, to the sympathy of their masters.
It was the faithful servants of the Southern masters
i who were the first Negro abolitionists.
> This appeal which the Negro made for freedom
merely through his humanity made its deepest
impression, apparently, upon those people who
had come to this country to obtain liberty for them
selves. One of the very earliest of the anti-slavery
men in the country was Anthony Benezet, the son
of Huguenot parents who escaped from France
on account of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
He established and taught an evening school in
Philadelphia for the instruction of Negroes and,
as early as 1780, he made an effort to induce the
Legislature of Pennsylvania to begin the work of
emancipation. Anthony Benezet, after coming to
America, joined the order of Friends, or Quakers
as they were called. The people of this sect, who
were more persecuted than any of the other English
denominations that came to America to obtain
religious freedom, were the first to give and to
demand for the Negro emancipation.
Another thing that early aroused sympathy for
the Negro slave was the sufferings of Americans
who had been carried by the Barbary pirates into
slavery in Africa. This was particularly true
in Massachusetts and in New England, where a
large proportion of the people were engaged in

THE NEGRO ABOLITIONISTS 281
shipping, and consequently suffered more heavily
from these piratical attacks. Among other Amer
icans carried into African slavery was one of the
first graduates of Harvard University, and in 1793,
no less than one hundred and fifteen Americans
were held in slavery in Algiers. The fact of the
sufferings of the white slaves taken to Africa is
frequently mentioned by the early abolitionists in
Massachusetts as a reason for freeing the black
slaves in America. One of the earliest books
written in this country, which obtained any reputa
tion abroad, was the story ofthe " Algerine Captive,"
which describes the hardships of these white slaves
in Africa, and seeks to turn the sentiment aroused
by this foreign white slavery against the black
slavery at home.*
As a rule the Negro was not an anti-slavery
agitator. In the South the free Negroes were
frequently themselves slave-holders. Nevertheless,
free Negroes were known to be in sympathy with
the desire of the slaves to be free. That was one
reason why they were regarded by slave-holders
* In an elaborate State paper John Jay, while Secretary for Foreign Affairs, in
referring to the connection between white slavery in Africa and black slavery in
America said: "If a war should take place between France and A/giers and in the
course of it France should invite the American slaves there to run away from their
masters, and actually receive and protect them in their camp, what would Congress,
and indeed the world, think and say of France, if, on making peace with Algiers,
she should give up those American slaves to their former Algerine masters ? Is
there any other difference between the two cases than this, namely, that the Ameri
can slaves at Algiers are white people, whereas the African slaves at New York were
black people ?" Quoted in a lecture, "White Slavery in the Barbary States,"
before the Boston Mercantile Library Association, 1847. "The Works of Charles
Sumner," vol. i, p. 449.

282 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
with so much distrust. In the North free Negroes
were very largely engaged in the work of the Under
ground Railroad. In his history of that institution,
Professor Wilbur H. Siebert has preserved the names
of more than one hundred and forty coloured
people, who maintained Underground Railroad
stations in different parts of the United States. In
Massachusetts there were Henry Box Brown and
William Wells Brown, both of them fugitive slaves.
Henry Box Brown was so named from the manner
in which he escaped from slavery. William Wells
Brown was born in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1816.
He was taken as a boy to St. Louis, Missouri, and
was employed by Elijah P. Lovejoy, the anti-slavery
agitator, who was at that time editor of the St.
Louis Times. It was here that be got his first
education. After a year in Mr. Lovejoy's printing-
office, young Brown was hired out to a captain of
one of the river steamboats. In 1834 he escaped
from the boat and came North. He obtained a
position as a steward on one of the steamers on
Lake Erie, where he was of great service to fugitive
slaves, making their way to Canada. It was said
that in a single year he gave free passage across
the lake to sixty-five fugitives.
A little later, when he was living in Buffalo, he
organised a "vigilance committee" to protect and
aid fugitive slaves. During all this time he employed
his evenings in study and, in 1843, he was engaged

THE NEGRO ABOLITIONISTS 283
as a lecturer by the Anti-slavery Society, continuing
in that position until 1849, when he went abroad.
Another agent of the Underground Railroad in
Massachusetts was Charles Lenox Remond, who
was born and brought up in Salem, Massachusetts,
and as a consequence had the advantage of excel
lent school training. He became an anti-slavery
lecturer in 1838, and went to England in 1846,
as a delegate to the World's Anti-slavery Con
vention. In New York the principal agents of
the Underground Railroad were Dr. James McCune
Smith, David Ruggles, Bishop J. W. Loguen,
the Rev. James W. C. Pennington, and Frederick
Douglass. David Ruggles was one of the very
early members of the Underground Railroad, and
is said to have been connected with the work almost
from the beginning. He edited for a number of
years a quarterly magazine called the Mirror of
Liberty and died in 1849.
Dr. James McCune Smith was born in New
York, but received his medical education in Scotland.
After his return to America he became an active
writer for the newspapers and magazines and
contributed a number of papers upon the history
and progress of the Negro race. James W. C.
Pennington was born a slave in 1809, on the plan
tation of Colonel Gordon, in Maryland, where he
learned the trade of blacksmith. He joined the
Presbyterian Church, studied in Germany, where

284 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
he received the degree of Doctor of Divinity from
the University of Heidelberg, and, upon his return
to America, became the pastor of the Shiloh Church
in New York City. He died in 1871.
In Pennsylvania, Robert Purvis, the only coloured
man to sign the Declarations of the First American
Anti-slavery Convention in Philadelphia in 1833,
was the most prominent anti-slavery man of the
coloured race. In 1850, he became chairman of
the General Vigilance Committee, of which Wil
liam Still was secretary.* During this time William
Whipper, who afterward took a prominent part
in the anti-slavery agitation, was a lumber merchant
in the little town of Columbia, in the county of
Lancaster, in the southeastern corner of Penn
sylvania. At this time, this county was one of the
principal avenues of escape for fugitive slaves and
the coloured lumber merchants, Smith and Whipper,
* In an article published in The Atlantic Monthly, describing this first anti-
slavery convention, John G. Whittier, the Quaker poet, mentions Robert Purvis
and other coloured members of that convention. He says: "The president, after
calling James McCrummell, one of the two or three coloured members of the con
vention, to the chair, made some eloquent remarks upon those editors who had
ventured to advocate emancipation. At the close of his speech a young man rose
to speak, whose appearance at once arrested my attention. I think I have never
seen a finer face and figure, and his manner, words, and bearing were in keeping.
'Who is he ?' I asked one of the Pennsylvania delegates. 'Robert Purvis, of this
city, a coloured man,' was the answer. He began by uttering his heartfelt thanks
to the delegates who had convened for the deliverance of his people. He spoke of
Garrison in terms of warmest eulogy, as one who had stirred the heart of the nation,
broken the tomb-like slumber of the church, and compelled it to listen to the story
of the slave's wrongs. He closed by declaring that the friends of coloured Ameri
cans would not be forgotten. 'Their memories,' he said, 'will be cherished when
pyramids and monuments have crumbled in dust. The flood of time is sweeping
away the refuge of lies; is bearing on the advocates of our cause to a glorious immor
tality.' " The Atlantic Monthly, vol. ixxiii, pp. 168, 169.

THE NEGRO ABOLITIONISTS 285
were known to be active agents of the Underground
Railroad. From 1847 to ^oo, according to a
letter written to William Still, the author of the
Underground Railroad, Mr. Whipper expended
as much as a thousand dollars a year in assisting
fugitive slaves. After the passage of the Fugitive
Slave Law in 1850, the coloured population at
Columbia decreased from 943 to 487 by emigration
and in 1861, when the War broke out, Mr. Whipper
was preparing to go to Canada himself.
The number of coloured people engaged in the
Underground Railroad was, as I have already said,
much larger in Ohio than in any other of the
Northern states. At Oberlin, Portsmouth, and
Cincinnati, Ohio, and Detroit, Michigan, there were
a number of Negroes who worked with the white
abolitionists of these cities, in assisting fugitives
on their way to Canada. In the neighborhood
of Portsmouth, Ohio, slaves were assisted across
the river by a barber of the town of Jackson, whose
name was Poindexter. At Louisville, Kentucky, there
was a coloured man by the name of Wash Spradley,
who helped many slaves to escape into the free states
across the river. Professor Siebert gives the names
of more than one hundred coloured men who were
known to be actively engaged in assisting in the escape
of fugitive slaves in the State of Ohio. He says:
George W. S. Lucas, a coloured man of Salem, Columbiana
County, Ohio, made frequent trips with the closed carriage of

286 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
Phillip Evans between Barnesville, New Philadelphia, and Cadiz,
and two stations, Ashtabula and Painesville, on the shore of Lake
Erie. Occasionally Mr. Lucas conducted parties to Cleveland
and Sandusky and Toledo, but in such cases he went on foot or by
stage. His trips were sometimes a hundred miles or more in
length. George L. Burroughes, a coloured man of Cairo, Illinois,
became an agent for the Underground Road in 1857 while acting
as porter of a sleeping-car running on the Illinois Central Railroad
between Cairo and Chicago. At Albany, New York, Stephens, a
Negro, was an agent for the Underground Road for a wide extent
of territory. At Detroit there were several agents, among them
George De Baptiste and George Dolarson.*
There were fewer stations of the Underground
Railroad maintained in Illinois by coloured people
than in most of the other Western states. Chicago,
however, was the centre of anti-slavery sentiment
and there early sprang up in that city a small colony
of free Negroes who sometimes assisted fugitive
slaves from Missouri to escape. Among the early
coloured settlers of Chicago was John G. Jones,
who for many years had a tailor shop on Dearborn
Street near Madison and was, at the time of his
death, in 1879, one of the wealthiest Negroes in
Illinois. A few years ago, when Mrs. Jones was
visiting her niece, who is the wife of Lloyd G.
Wheeler, formerly Business Agent of Tuskegee
Institute, I learned that her husband had been
for many years a friend of John Brown and
when, in the winter of 1858 and 1859, he made
his sensational "rescue" of the Missouri slaves,
* "The Underground Railroad," Wilbur H. Siebert, p. 70.

THE NEGRO ABOLITIONISTS 287
Brown stopped at Mr. Jones's house on his way
to Canada.
In addition to those I have already mentioned,
there is evidence that there was a pretty well-
organised body of coloured people engaged in the
Underground Railroad extending the whole length
of the Great Lakes from Detroit, Michigan, to
Buffalo, New York. This organisation was known
as the "Liberty League." John Brown was well
acquainted with the members of this organisation
and, when he held his famous "convention" at
Chatham, Canada, shortly before the raid on
Harper's Ferry, it was from the ranks of this organi
sation that he drew, in all probability, the largest
number of his members. Among these were Dr.,
afterward Major, Martin R. Delany. Dr. Delany,
who was chairman of the Chatham Convention,
was not merely a physician but a traveller, soldier,
lecturer, and editor. He was for a time editor
of the anti-slavery paper published at Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania, called the Mystery. After the passage
of the Fugitive Slave Law he decided to go to
Canada. In association with Professor Campbell
he was a member of the Niger Valley Exploring
Expedition, and afterward lectured upon Africa in
various parts of England. During the Civil
War he served as a soldier and was a member
of General Saxton's staff while the latter was
in command at Port Royal, South Carolina. Dr.

288 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
Delany died January 24, 1885, at the age of
seventy. Among the early Negro abolitionists were Richard
Allen and Absalom Jones, the founders of "The
Free African Society," of Philadelphia. This
society opened a communication with the Negroes
in Boston, Newport, Rhode Island and other
places and cooperated with the abolition societies
in 1790, in studying the conditions of the free
blacks. In 1799 and 1800, Absalom Jones led
the Negroes of Philadelphia to draw up a petition
to the Legislature, praying for the immediate
abolition of slavery, and to send another petition
to Congress against the Fugitive Slave Law, and
in favour of prospective emancipation for all
Negroes. These two men, Richard Allen and Absalom
Jones, were, a little later, supported in their efforts
for abolition by James Forten, a sail-maker by
trade; a man of education, and of considerable
means. James Forten received his education in
the school of the Quaker abolitionist, Anthony
Benezet, and is described as "a gentleman by
nature, easy in manner and easy in intercourse."
In 1 8 14, Mr. Forten, with the assistance of Jones
and Allen, assisted in raising 2,500 coloured volun
teers for the protection of the city of Philadelphia,
which was then threatened by the English war
ships. A battalion was also formed for service in

THE NEGRO ABOLITIONISTS 289
the field, but, before it reached the front, the war
with Great Britain had come to an end.
In 1817, James Forten was chairman of the first
convention of free Negroes held in Philadelphia.
It is said that he drew up the first resolutions of
protest against the work of the Colonisation Society,
which declared "that we never will separate
ourselves voluntarily from the slave population in
this country. They are our brethren by the ties
of blood, of suffering and of wrong, and we feel
that there is more virtue in suffering privations with
them than in gaining fancied advantages for a
season." Mr. Forten was a firm friend and sup
porter of William Lloyd Garrison, who refers to
him as "the greatly esteemed and venerated sail-
maker of Philadelphia." In the early days of
the anti-slavery agitation, when Garrison found so
little support for his paper that he believed he would
have to give it up, James Forten several times
came to his rescue, at one time sending him fifty-
four dollars for twenty-seven subscribers to the
Liberator, and at another time assuming a con
siderable part of the indebtedness which that paper
had incurred.
James Forten was born in 1766, in Philadelphia;
he died in 1842. He was a friend of Whittie'r, the
Quaker poet, among whose uncollected poems
are some verses, written in 1833, but first published
in the New York Independent, November, 1906,

20o THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
entitled, "To the Daughters of James Forten."
Two grandchildren of James Forten are now
riving in Washington, D. C. One of these is the
wife of Dr. Charles B. Purvis, son of Robert Purvis,
and formerly surgeon-in-chief of the Freedman's
hospital; the other is Mrs. Charlotte Forten Grimke,
the wife of the well-known Presbyterian minister,
Rev. Francis J. Grimke.
One of the interesting results of the anti-slavery
agitation was the opening of Oberlin College to
Negroes. This grew out of the anti-slavery dis
cussions which took place among the students of
Lane Seminary, at Cincinnati, Ohio. Out of one
hundred or more students in attendance in 1833,
more than half were Southerners. In 1834, there
was a debate in the Chapel on the subject of
slavery which lasted for eighteen consecutive nights.
During that debate James Bradley, a former slave,
who had purchased his freedom, was allowed to
give his testimony. He made a speech lasting two
hours, speaking in favour of the abolition of slavery
and of the measures of the Colonisation Society.
Bradley was born in Africa, but stolen from that
country when he was a child. His master, who
lived in Arkansas, died when he was eighteen
years old. For some years afterward he acted
as manager of the plantation for his mistress,
and finally purchased his time by the year.
After five years he paid $655 for his freedom

THE NEGRO ABOLITIONISTS 291
and emigrated to free territory with $200 in his
possession. As a result of that debate, two Southern students
became abolitionists, and afterward the students
generally began to start Sunday and day schools
for Negro children in Cincinnati. A report of
the debate, which was written by one of these
Southern students and published in pamphlet, says
of Bradley: "He is now a beloved and respected
member of this institution."
When in August, 1834, the trustees of the school
voted that thenceforth there should be no discussion
of slavery in any public room of the Seminary,
fifty-one of the students left the school in a body.
Just about this time, December, 1833, trie Oberlin
Collegiate Institution had been established, and the
seceding students were invited to come there. The
result was that Oberlin was open to students,
"irrespective of colour." Since that time it is prob
able that nearly as many coloured students have
been graduated from Oberlin as have been graduated
from all other colleges in the North put together,
outside of a few schools exclusively for Negroes. It
is interesting to note that this result was brought
about, to some extent, at least, by the eloquence
of an untutored Negro orator.
Negro anti-slavery agitators, largely because of
their lack of education, were almost always more
influential as speakers than they were as writers.

292 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
Nevertheless, the Negro people were not wholly
without anti-slavery writers during the period of the
struggle for freedom. The first Negro paper pub
lished in the United States was an anti-slavery
sheet called Freedom's Journal." This was pub
lished by John B. Russwurm, a graduate of Bowdoin
College. The circumstances under which it was
established were., these: There was published in
New York City a paper which was violent in its at
tacks upon coloured Americans. Some of the prom
inent coloured men, among them the Rev. Samuel
Cornish, met at the home of Boston Crummell and
determined to establish a paper through which
they could answer these attacks. As a result of
this conference the Freedom's Journal was launched.
Among the contributors was David Walker, the
author of "Walker's Appeal," a little pamphlet
printed in 1829.* The "Appeal" was, so far as
I am able to learn, the first attack upon slavery
made by a Negro through the medium of the press.
Another contributor to this paper was Stephen
Smith, who, as a lumber merchant at Columbia,
Pennsylvania, amassed a considerable fortune, with
which he afterward endowed a home for aged and
* David Walker was born at Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1785, of a free
mother by a slave father. He early went to Massachusetts to live and in 1827, hav
ing obtained a little education, he began business in Brattle Street, Boston. In
1829, he published his "Appeal," which was widely circulated, and stirred the South
as no other anti-slave pamphlet up to that time had done. This pamphlet was the
subject of a message of Governor Giles to the Legislature of Virginia in which he
referred to the "Appeal" as a seditious pamphlet sent from Boston. "History of
the Negro Race in America," Williams, vol. ii, appendix, p. 553.

THE NEGRO ABOLITIONISTS 293
infirm Negroes in Philadelphia, giving the institution
$50,000 during his lifetime and $50,000 more at
his death. This paper seems to have been favour
able to the work of the Colonisation Society. Its
first two numbers contain among other things an
article entitled, "The Memoirs of Paul Cuffe,"
who some years before had taken a ship-load of
free coloured people to Sierra Leone.
John Brown Russwurm was born in 1799, at
Port Antonio, Jamaica. He was taken to Quebec
by his father, who was a white man, and there put
to school. Shortly after, his father came to Maine
and married. After his father died, Mrs. Russwurm,
who had become deeply interested in her stepson,
gave him a college education. After leaving college,
he was for a time the teacher of the coloured public
school in Boston. In 1829, he went to Africa and
became superintendent of the public schools of
Liberia. At the same time he edited the Liberia
Herald. In 1836, he was appointed Governor of
Maryland, at Cape Palmas, and continued in that
position until his death in 1851.
Another paper of some influence, known as the
Coloured American, was started in 1837, by Philip
A. Bell. The editor of this paper, which was
published at 9 Spruce Street, New York City, was
Charles B. Ray. Between the date ofthe publication
of the Coloured American and Frederick Douglass's
North Star, which was started ten years later, in

294 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
1847, several other papers were launched by coloured
men. One of these was the National Watchman,
edited by William G. Allen. He was assisted for
a time by Henry Highland Garnet. Mr. Garnet
had a remarkable career. He was born in slavery
in Kent County, Maryland, December 23, 18 15.
His grandfather had been an African chief but
was captured and sold to the slave-traders, and
afterward became the property of Colonel William
Spencer. His father escaped from slavery and
sought protection with Thomas Garrett a Quaker
and noted anti-slavery man. In 1825, he went to
New York, where Henry Highland Garnet, his son,
entered the African Free School on Mulberry Street.
Among the students at the African Free School
at this time were Charles L. Reason, afterward
head of the coloured high school in Philadelphia,
George T. Downing, at one time a noted caterer
in Washington, D. C, and Ira Aldridge, the coloured
actor. Young Garnet subsequently attended the high
school established for coloured people on Canal
Street, and when this was closed he went to the fam
ous school at Canaan, New Hampshire, and finally
was graduated at the Oneida Institute at Whites-
boro, New York. In 1850 he visited Great Britain,
from there he went as a delegate to the Peace Con
ference, at Frankfort-on-the-Main; was a mis
sionary for some time to Jamaica; chaplain of a

THE NEGRO ABOLITIONISTS 295
coloured regiment during the War; president of
Avery Institute at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; the
first coloured man to hold religious services in
Representatives' Chamber of Congress at Washing
ton, D. C. He finally died as Minister Resident in
Liberia, February 14, 1882.
After Frederick Douglass entered the anti-slavery
field most of the efforts of the coloured people to
secure their freedom centered about him. He was
an orator of unusual gifts and devoted himself
with such singleness of purpose to the task of
securing freedom and recognition for his people
that he soon became the recognised leader of the
coloured people.
Among those who were associated with Frederick
Douglass at this time were Samuel R. Ward, H. Ford
Douglass, John M. Langston, William Howard Day,
and Mifflin W. Gibbs. William C. Nell, the author
of a book on "The Coloured Patriots of the Revo
lution," assisted him for some time in the publi
cation of the North Star. Mr. Nell was a friend
of Garrison and other anti-slavery men, and when
he died in Boston, May 25, 1874, William Lloyd
Garrison was one of the speakers at his funeral.
Contemporaneous with Frederick Douglass's
paper, The North Star, which was published at
Rochester, was the Ram's Horn, published by W.
A. Hodges at 141 Fulton Street, New York City,
and The Alienated American, published by William

296 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
Howard Day, at Cleveland, Ohio. A little later,
in 1855, The Mirror of the Times, published by
Mifflin W. Gibbs, was started at San Francisco,
California. The anti-slavery people to whom I have thus
far referred were for the most part fugitive slaves
or coloured men who were under the influence of
the Northern abolitionists. But there were other
Negroes in the Southern states who, by their lives
and actions, exercised a very positive influence
upon anti-slavery sentiment in the South. In a
"History of the Anti-slavery Leaders of North
Carolina," Professor John Spencer Bassett, of
Trinity College, has given a sketch of one of these
men, Lunsford Lane, whom he reckons among the
four prominent abolitionists of North Carolina.
Lunsford Lane was a slave of Mr. Sherwood Hay
wood, a prominent citizen of Raleigh, North Car
olina. His parents, of pure African descent, were
employed as house-servants in the city of Raleigh.
In this way, Lunsford had an opportunity to hear
the speeches of many prominent men of the day,
among others John C. Calhoun. He waited on
Lafayette, when he passed through Raleigh in 1824,
and was greatly impressed by what he heard this
great man say in regard to his hope of ultimate
freedom for the slave. Once he heard a Presby
terian minister, Dr. McPheeters, say: "It is
impossible to enslave an intelligent people." The

THE NEGRO ABOLITIONISTS 297
words made a great impression upon him. As a
matter of fact, he had early learned to read and
write, for at that time this privilege was not yet
denied slaves in North Carolina.
It was a custom among the coloured boys of the
town, to assemble every Sunday afternoon at a
mineral spring in the outskirts of Raleigh in order
to discuss, in imitation of the white people, the
public questions of the day. At these meetings
the slaves, who had had the advantages of hearing
these questions discussed, would repeat with great
exactness the speeches that they had heard during
the week. Frequently the white people attended
these meetings and a master who owned a par
ticularly bright slave would take great pride in any
exhibition of unusual intelligence his slave showed
at these meetings, and would encourage him to
improve still further. After the Northampton
Insurrection, when it was believed that these
meetings had the effect of turning the minds of
slaves toward freedom, they were very strictly
prohibited. Lunsford Lane grew up, however,
where he had the benefit of these opportunities.
Lane early began to save with the purpose of
purchasing his freedom, the money which was given
him from time to time. He was given considerable
liberty by his master and was able to employ his
leisure time in occupations that increased the sum
of his savings. Young Lane's father had, in some

298 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
way or other, come into possession of a secret
method of making a superior kind of smoking
tobacco, and, as he grew older, father and son now
began to manufacture this kind of tobacco on
their own account. In order to have opportunity
to carry on this trade Lane hired his time, paying
for it from $100 to $120 a year. The demand for
his tobacco grew rapidly; he enlarged his plant
and made arrangements by which he was able to sell
the product in the neighbouring towns of Fayette
ville, Salisbury, and Chapel Hill. At the end of
eight years he had saved a thousand dollars. With
this sum he went to Mr. Benjamin R. Smith, who
was the owner of his wife, and, putting his money
in his hands, engaged him to negotiate with his
mistress for his freedom.
As soon as he had secured his freedom, Lane
was able to extend his business. He added to the
manufacture of tobacco the making of pipes. He
also opened a wood-yard and bought horses and
wagons for use in connection with it. In 1839, he
bought a house and lot, for which he paid $500.
As soon as he had secured his own freedom he made
it the one object of his life to buy his wife, and
children, of whom there were now six. Mr. Smith
offered to sell them for $3,000, but as his wife and
her children had been purchased eight years earlier
for $560 it seemed that $3,000, an advance of
$2,340, was too much to pay. Mr. Smith, after

THE NEGRO ABOLITIONISTS 299
some negotiation, reduced the price to $2,500 and
Lunsford Lane gave five notes for $500 each and
received in return the latter's obligation to sign a
bill of sale for the whole family when the notes
were paid.
"His achievement," says Professor Bassett, "had
been wonderful, and is an indication of what a
policy of gradual emancipation might have done
in developing his race, could circumstances have
been so shaped that it might have been entered
upon. He had paid $1,000 for his freedom, he had
paid $1,000 in yearly wages while he was hiring
his time; had supported himself and helped support
his family in the meantime; and paid $500 for his
home, and had a good business in his own name."*
Although he dressed poorly, fared as simply
as if he were a slave, and had been careful, as he
said, to seem, if possible, to be less intelligent than
he actually was, his prosperity had already begun
to attract the notice of a certain class of whites
and, as several other Negroes in Raleigh were
beginning to make progress in the same way, some
of the white people thought it was likely to have
a bad effect on the slaves. For that reason they
determined to run him out of the community.
The circumstances under which he had obtained
his freedom enabled them to do this without much

* "Anti-slavery Leaders of North Carolina," John Spencer Bassett, Johns
Hopkins Studies, p. 65.

300 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
difficulty. Since, under the laws of North Carohna,
he was not able to buy his own freedom, he. had
gone to New York State to have the articles qf
emancipation executed. As he had, however,
returned to North Carolina, he came under the
provisions of the law which forbade free Negroes
from other states from coming into North Carolina
to live. Free Negroes who violated this act and
did not remove out of the state within twenty days
after notice had been served on them, were liable
to a fine of $500,' in default of which they could
be sold for ten years. About the first of November,
1840, Lane received notification from two justices
of the peace that, unless he left the state within the
twenty days prescribed by the law, he would be
prosecuted under the statute.
At this time Lane was a private messenger and
janitor in the office ofthe Governor ofthe state. He
at once appealed to Mr. C. C. Battle, private sec
retary to Governor Dudley, who took up the matter
with the prosecuting attorney and secured from
him a promise that the prosecution would be sus
pended until January 1. The purpose of this
delay was to get a private law through the Legislature
allowing him to remain in the state until he had
finished paying for his family. Other free Negroes
in the town who were buying their families had
received similar notices and they, too, petitioned
the Legislature. The petitions were referred to a

THE NEGRO ABOLITIONISTS 301
committee which brought in a favourable report.
The bill dragged along, Lane and the other free
Negroes following its course, as well as they were
able, from information they were able to obtain
outside the building, since at the time no Negro
was allowed to enter the Chamber of either of the
Houses when in session. Finally, a member came
out and said: "Well, Lunsford, the Negro bill is
killed." This announcement was a great blow to Lane
and his companions, but they bowed to the inevit
able and made no open complaint against the decision.
Nothing was now left for Lane and his companions
but to emigrate to the North, leaving their families
behind them. Lane had already paid Mr. Smith
$620 on his indebtedness, of which amount $250 was
in payment for one child, whom he took North
with him and left with friends. Mr. Smith now
agreed to accept the house and lot in Raleigh for
$500, provided the balance of $1,380 should be
paid in cash. These arrangements having been
completed, he started for the North.
Lane had made some friends in New York during
his previous visit there to secure his own freedom.
These friends now assisted him to raise the necessary
money to secure the freedom of the remaining
members of his family. Most of this money he
secured by going about the country as a lecturer,
telling in simple and straightforward fashion the

302 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
circumstances under which he had been compelled
to leave his home. Early in 1842 he wrote to his
friend, Mr. Smith, in Raleigh asking him to obtain
from the Government a written permission to return
and get his family. The Governor replied that he
had no authority to grant such a privilege but thought
it would be perfectly safe for him to come to Raleigh,
provided he stayed no longer than twenty days.
So it was that on Saturday, April 23, 1842, the
ex-slave was again in the city of his birth. He
remained with his family during Sunday morning
and on Monday morning went to the store of Mr.
Smith to have a settlement. Before he could transact
his business, however, he was arrested and taken
before the Mayor on a charge of " delivering abolition
lectures in Massachusetts."
In reply to this charge Lunsford Lane made a
statement before the Mayor's court which, because
it was the only abolition speech, so far as I know,
ever made by a coloured man before a Southern
audience, I am disposed to quote at some length.
Lunsford Lane's report of the proceedings was
as follows:
He asked me whether I was guilty or not guilty. Retaining my
self-possession, I replied that I did not know whether I had given
abolition lectures or not; but if it pleased the Court, I would relate
the course I had pursued during my absence from Raleigh. He
then said I was at liberty to speak for myself. "The circumstances
under which I left Raleigh," I said, "are perfectly familiar to you
all. It is well known that I had no desire to remove from this city,

THE NEGRO ABOLITIONISTS 303
but resorted to every lawful means to remain, while in pursuit of
an honest calling. Finding that I could not be permitted to stay,
I went away, leaving behind everything I held dear, with the
exception of one child whom I took with me, after paying two
hundred and fifty dollars for her. You are well aware that previ
ous to this I was a slave, the property of Mr. Sherwood Haywood,
and after many years of faithful labour purchased my freedom
by paying the sum of one thousand dollars. It is also known to
you, and to many other persons here present, that I had engaged
to purchase my wife and children of their master, Mr. Smith, for
the sum of twenty-five hundred dollars, and that I had paid ofthis
sum, including my house and lot, eleven hundred and twenty dol
lars, leaving a balance to be made up of thirteen hundred and eighty
dollars. I could have made up this amount had I been permitted
to remain here. But, being driven away for no crime of which I
am conscious, no longer permitted to raise the balance due for the
liberation of my family, my last resort was to call upon the friends
of humanity in other places to assist me. I went to the city of
Boston, and there I related the story of my persecutions here,
in the same manner that I now state them to you. The people gave
a patient hearing to my statements, and one of them, the Reverend
Dr. Neale, wrote to Raleigh, unknown to me, to Mr. Smith, inquir
ing of him whether the statements made by me were correct.
After Dr. Neale received Mr. Smith's reply, he sent for me,
informed me of his having written and read to me this reply. The
letter fully satisfied Dr. Neale and his friends. He placed it in my
hands, remarking that it would in a great measure do away with
the necessity of using the other documents in my possession. I
then, with that letter in my hands, went from house to house, calling
upon persons at their places of business, going from church to
church, relating, whenever I could gain an ear, the same sad story
of my wrongs to which I am now referring you. In pursuing that
course, the kind people generously came forward and contributed,
the poor as well as the rich, until I had succeeded in raising the
whole amount, namely, thirteen hundred and eighty dollars. I
may have had contributions from abolitionists; but I did not stop
to ask those who assisted me whether they were anti-slavery or

304 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
pro-slavery. I was too thankful to get the money, and it was
immaterial whence it came if it would only accomplish the object
I had in view. These are the simple facts as to the manner of
my proceeding in the Northern states; and now, sir, I humbly
ask whether such a course can be construed into the charge made
against me — that I have been giving abolition lectures. "
After Lane had made this statement Mr. Loring,
the Mayor, held a whispered consultation with
some of the leading men of the city who were present,
and then remarked that he saw nothing criminal in
what had been done. He called upon anyone present
to make a statement, but no one had anything to
say, and Lunsford Lane was therefore discharged.
As Lane was leaving the Mayor's office, however,
he was warned that a crowd was waiting outside
the building for him and that he had better go
directly to the train. He made arrangements
with the Mayor to take his money and settle with
Mr. Smith and send on the liberated wife and
children to Philadelphia. After this was done
he started for the train and succeeded in reaching
the station as the train was about to leave. The
crowd had, however, followed him and refused to
allow the train to depart until they had him in
their hands. The Mayor was present and appealed
in vain to the mob to allow Lane to go. Members
of the crowd demanded the Negro's trunk to be
searched for abolition literature. While their
attention was directed to this task the fugitive was
hurried to the jail for protection.

THE NEGRO ABOLITIONISTS 305
"Looking out from my prison window," said
Lane in his account of the affair, "I could see my
trunk in the hands of officers Scott and Johnston,
and others who were taking it to the city hall for
examination. I learned afterward that they broke
open my trunk and as the lid flew up, the mob
cried out, 'A paper, a paper!' A number seized it
at once and set up a yell of wild delight. Among
the crowd was a young man of profligate character,
a son of one of the most respectable families in the
place. When the paper was discovered, he glanced
upward toward my prison window and by signs
and words expressed his satisfaction.
"The paper proved to be entirely inoffensive, and
as nothing further was found in the carpet bag
which they searched, the crowd was quiet for a
time." At night, acting upon the advice of his friends,
Lane was released from the prison and started for
the home of Mr. William Boylan, who was so highly
esteemed in Raleigh at that time that it was believed
his house would be a safe asylum for the fugitive.
It was nine o'clock at night when he left the jail.
He had only gone a few yards, however, when he
was seized and drawn away to "an old pine field,"
where a gallows stood. At first he thought they
intended to hang him, but finally a bucket of tar
and a feather pillow were brought, and then he
understood that they intended nothing worse than

306 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
a coat of tar and feathers. After he had been daubed
with tar, and the feathers had been poured over
him, his watch and clothes were handed him and
he was allowed to go home. Some of the crowd,
however, continued to follow him and, as they
laughingly watched him remove the tar and feathers,
said he might now remain in town as long as he
chose. By this time his friends had become alarmed
and appealed to the Governor for protection. He
had gone to the home of his friend, Mr. Smith, to
pass the night and a detail of soldiers was furnished
by the Governor as his guard there. In the morning
he settled his business matters and made ready to
start with his family for Philadelphia. He went
to say farewell to his former mistress, who was
then a very old lady. In describing the scene at
the home of his former mistress, Lane says:
My old mistress was affected to tears, as her mind reverted to
the past — my faithfulness to her and to her children, my struggles
and persecutions. In late years she had been kind to me, and,
as I learned, she and her daughter, Mrs. Hogg, then present at her
house, had sent a note to the court before which I was tried,
representing that, in consequence of my good conduct from my
youth up, they could not believe me to be guilty of any offence.
And now, with an attachment for me they could not repress, and
with tears — the offspring, as I believe, of genuine sympathy —
they gave me their parting blessing. My mother was now called
in that I might bid her a final farewell. I was her only child, and
I had no hope of seeing her again in this world. Our old mistress
could not witness this scene of our parting unmoved. Unable to

THE NEGRO ABOLITIONISTS 307
repress her feelings longer, she decided, to my infinite joy, that my
mother should go with me. "Take her, Lunsford, and care for
her as I know you will as a dutiful son. Should you ever become
able to pay me two hundred dollars, you may; otherwise it shall
be my loss."
The story of the treatment which Lane had
received had caused the greatest excitement in the
city and many of the best citizens in the town now
came to his assistance. They gave him food enough
to last on his journey; sent a carriage to take him
and his family to the station and arranged with the
conductor to stop on the edge of the town to take
him on, his family having previously been placed
on the train at the station. This was accomplished
in safety and the whole party started North. A
member of the previous day's mob who happened
to be on the train made an effort to excite bystanders
at the stations at which they stopped to board the
train and to drag out the escaping abolitionist, but
was unsuccessful.
Lunsford Lane went to live first in Boston,
Massachusetts, and after then in Oberlin, Ohio.
Two of his children having died there, however,
he returned to Boston. He was employed for a
time as a lecturer by the Anti-slavery Society but
he seems to have had none of the vehemence of
the average abolitionist and was never entirely
contented with his life in the Northern country.
During the War he acted as a hospital nurse, and
when the question arose as to what would become

308 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
of the freedman, he made several public addresses,
in which he showed great practical sense and
understanding. He emphasised particularly the
need of better education and better agriculture
in the South. Among other things he said:
The wishes of the coloured people are much misunderstood by
their friends, North and South. We desire, in the first place, free
dom in its truest and best sense — not a mere license to do as we
please. Having secured this, we wish to be situated so as to be
profitably employed, so as to benefit the State as well as our
selves. We have no desire to remain in the Northern states,
except as a temporary place of refuge from slavery. This is not
our native climate. We love warmer suns and a more productive
soil. Here our offspring wither and die. They revive and flour
ish under the warmer skies ofthe South. As soon as peace is con
cluded, and security for life and limb is guaranteed, we would
return to a clime so well suiting our constitutions. In North
Carolina alone there are thousands of acres of unoccupied lands
which might be made to flourish under the diligent culture of the
black man. We could occupy these lands as tenants or as owners,
adding largely to the annual productions of cotton, rice, wheat,
and vegetables. . . . We want more freedom for Northern
teachers and religious instructors to visit the South, that they may
spread before us the life-giving passages of God's Word. Hereto
fore, ignorance, and prejudice have almost banished these devoted
men from the holy labours to which they were willing to devote their
lives. We have no desire to leave the United States for a residence
in the British Provinces, under a government with which we are
not acquainted; nor to emigrate to Liberia, nor to the West Indies.
The South is our home; and we feel that there we can be happy
and contribute by our industry to the prosperity of our race, and
leave the generation that succeeds us wiser and better. No greater
mistake can, therefore, be made than to suppose we desire to come
North. We only desire a secure freedom in the South. We hope
not only to support ourselves, but to add greatly to the wealth of

THE NEGRO ABOLITIONISTS 309
the country, in the way of exports of surplus corn, and cotton, rice
and sugar. . . . There is no branch of business or of commerce^
which would not be benefited by our elevation and industry
Millions of acres, now worthless, would be made to bud and blos
som as the rose.*
Lunsford Lane remained, to the end, a true son
of the South. In spite of the fact that he had been
driven out of his native land, he seems to have cher
ished no bitterness against the people of his native
state and city. If he had some enemies there, he
had had many friends, the memory of whose kind
ness he never forgot. Perhaps I can not do better,
in concluding what I have to say about this man,
than to quote the words of Professor Bassett in
regard to him:
The little glimpse that we have of his real self shows what a
promise of hope he was for the race he represented. We know
enough to be certain that it was a most short-sighted policy in his
state that drove him and a number of others out ofthe community,
and made impossible the development of other Negroes like unto
him. Since the war we have sadly missed such strong characters
in our Negro population. Twenty-five years before the war there
were more industrious, ambitious and capable Negroes in the South
than there were in 1865. Had the severe laws against emancipa
tion and free Negroes not been passed, the coming of freedom
would have found the coloured race with a number of superior
individuals who in every locality would have been a core of con
servatism for the benefit of both races. Under such conditions
Lane would have been of great beneficent influence.!
* " Lunsford Lane," Reverend William S. Hawkins, pp. 204-206.
¦f "Anti-slavery Leaders of North Carolina," Johns Hopkins University Studies,
John Spencer Bassett, p. 74.

CHAPTER XV
THE NEGRO SOLDIER'S FIGHT FOR FREEDOM
NEGRO soldiers have fought in every war,
I suspect, that has ever been waged
on the American continent. Negroes
fought at Bunker Hill and all through the Rev
olutionary War. Before that time, Negroes are
known to have been engaged, in one way
or another, in most of the Indian wars.
They were conspicuous in the battles of New
Orleans and of Lake Erie, in the War of 1812.
They fought on both sides in the Civil War, and
from that time on they have been an important
part of the standing army of the United States. In
most of these wars, I may add, the Negro has
fought not merely in the interest of the country
and of the civilisation with which he has become
identified, but also, as in the Revolutionary and
Civil wars, to secure and maintain his own freedom.
It is impossible to tell just how many Negro
soldiers were engaged in the Revolutionary War.
In August, 1778, two months after the battle of
Monmouth, the official returns of Washington's
army showed that there were 755 Negroes scattered
310

THE NEGRO SOLDIER'S FIGHT 311
among the different regiments. But this did not
include the Connecticut, New York, and New
Hampshire troops, in which large numbers of
Negroes, who had been slaves, had been allowed
to take their masters' places in the ranks. It did
not include, either, the regiment of Freedmen,
raised in Rhode Island, which fought so courageously
at the battle of Rhode Island, in August, 1778.*
Three years later, in May, 1781, when Colonel
Green, of this regiment, was surprised at Point
Bridge, New York, his black soldiers, a detachment
of whom accompanied him, defended their leader
until every one of them was dead.
As a rule, the Negro soldiers were not organised
in the Patriot Army into separate organisations,
but were scattered through the different regiments.
A Hessian officer, writing under the date of October
23, 1777, in reference to his march through Massa
chusetts, says: "The Negro can take the field
instead of his master; and therefore no regiment
is to be seen in which there are not Negroes in
abundance; and among them are able-bodied,
strong, brave fellows. Here, too," he adds, "there
are many families of free Negroes who live in good
?At a meeting of the Congregational and Presbyterian Anti-slavery Society,
at Francestown, New Hampshire, Reverend Dr. Harris, a Revolutionary soldier
who had fought in the battle of Rhode Island, said of the service of the Negro
regiment in that battle: "Had they been unfaithful, or given way before the enemy,
all would have been lost. Three times in succession were they attacked, with most
desperate valour and fury, by well-disciplined and veteran troops, and three timet
did they successfully repel the assault, and thus preserved our army from capture."
Quoted from "The History of the Negro Race in America," vol. i, p. 369.

312 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
houses, have property and live just like the rest
of the inhabitants."*
This statement is further confirmed by the official
roll of Massachusetts soldiers, which shows that
there were Negroes in the regiments of that state
from almost every Massachusetts town. Although
no Negro regiment was raised in Connecticut, still
in Meigs's, afterward Butler's regiment, there was
a company made up entirely of coloured men.
George W. Williams, in his "History ofthe Negro
Troops in the War of the Rebellion," after a care
ful study of the rolls of the Continental Army,
reached the conclusion that there were no less than
3,000 Negro soldiers in the Continental army
during the Revolutionary War.f
Fewer Negroes were allowed to enter the Patriot
Army in the Southern colonies, although a stren
uous effort was made by Colonel John Laurens,
of South Carolina, and other patriots, to carry
out the provisions that the Continental Congress
had made for raising a Negro regiment. Free
Negroes enlisted in considerable numbers in the
Virginia regiments, although there was no law by
which their service could be accepted. In 1783,
however, the General Assembly passed a law
directing the emancipation of a certain number
?Quoted from "Schloezer's Briefwechsel," vol. iv, p. 36J, in Williams's "His
tory of the Negro Race in America," vol. i, p. 343.
t George W. Williams, "History of the Negro Troops in the War of the Re
bellion," p. 35.

THE NEGRO SOLDIER'S FIGHT 313
of slaves who had served as soldiers in that state,
and particularly "ofthe slave Aberdeen," who had
worked for a long time in the state lead mines.
The Revolutionary War contributed, in several
ways, toward the emancipation of the slaves. In
the struggle of the colonies to secure liberty for
themselves the sentiments expressed by Thomas
Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence led
many people to feel that Negro slavery was wrong.
It was partly this sentiment and partly the needs
of the Continental Army that led several of the
states to pass laws which provided that slaves
might serve in the Patriot Army and that, at the
end of their service, they should go free. This
was the case in New York where, on March 20,
1 78 1, a law providing for two regiments of Negro
slaves specified that, after three years of service,
these slaves should be free. The Rhode Island
law, which provided for a regiment of black men,
specified, also, that those who took part in the
struggle for freedom of the colonies should have
their own freedom. It was, no doubt, largely
as a result of the services of the Negro troops during
the war that, on February 23, 1784, the General
Assembly of Rhode Island passed a law making
free all Negroes and mulattoes born in that state
after March 1 of that same year.
Negroes not only served in the War of the Rev
olution, but individual coloured men are still remem-

314 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
bered, in the tradition of that time, for the daring
exploits in which they engaged. In Trumbull's
celebrated historic painting of the battle of Bunker
Hill, one of the conspicuous figures is a Negro by
the name of Peter Salem, who is said to have been
responsible for the death of Major Pitcairn, of the
British Marines, who fell just as he mounted the
Patriots' redoubt, shouting, "The day is ours!"
Peter Salem was a private in Colonel Nixon's
regiment He was born in Framingham, and was
held as a slave until the time he joined the army.
Colonel Trumbull, who, at the time of the battle,
was stationed with his regiment in Roxbury, and saw
the action from that point, has introduced the figures
of several other coloured men into his canvas.*
Another coloured man whose name has been
preserved in the records of the Revolutionary War
was Salem Poor, of Colonel Frye's regiment, Cap
tain Ames's company. He took part in the Battle
of Bunker Hill and so distinguished himself that
a petition, signed by some of the principal officers
who took part in that battle, was drawn up and
sent to the General Court of Massachusetts Bay
? A letter written to George Livermore from Aaron White of Thompson, Con
necticut, in regard to the death of Major Pitcairn, says: "About the year 1807 I
heard a soldier of the Revolution, who was present at the Bunker Hill Battle, relate
to my father the story of the death of Major Pitcairn. He said the Major had passed
the storm of our fire without, and had mounted the redoubt, when, waving his
sword, he commanded, in a loud voice, the rebels to surrender. His sudden
appearance and his commanding air at first startled the men immediately before
him. They neither answered nor fired, probably not being exactly certain what
was next to be done. At this critical moment a Negro soldier stepped forward, and,
aiming his musket directly at the Major's bosom, blew him through."

THE NEGRO SOLDIER'S FIGHT 315
in order to secure recognition for his services.
This was less than six months after the battle in
which he had taken part had been fought.
Another incident, which illustrates a trait often
referred to, namely, the fidelity of Negro soldiers
to their officers, has been noticed in the memoir
of Major Samuel Lawrence, who took part in the
Battle of Bunker Hill. At one time, it is related,
Major Lawrence commanded a company, "whose
rank and file were all Negroes, of whose courage,
military discipline, and fidelity he always spoke
with respect." On one occasion, while he and
his company were somewhat in advance of the
other troops, Major Lawrence was surrounded
and on the point of being made prisoner by the
enemy. His men, discovering his peril, hurried
to his rescue " and fought with the most determined
bravery till that rescue was effectually secured."
His biographer says that Major Lawrence never
forgot that circumstance, and ever after took special
pains to show kindness and hospitality to every
individual coloured man who came his way. This
interest and friendship in the coloured man, which
began with Major Lawrence in the way described,
was continued to his distinguished grandson, Amos
A. Lawrence, who took a prominent part in the
struggle for freedom in Kansas, being a member
of the Emigrant Aid Society which did so much
to make Kansas fr«e.

316 THE STOFY OF THE NEGRO
Negroes played a less conspicuous part in the
war in North and South Carolina and Georgia
than they did elsewhere. But in White's "His
torical Collections of Georgia," there is an account
given of a Negro soldier by the name of Austin
Dabney, which is so interesting that I am tempted
to relate the story here at some length.
Austin Dabney had been born, from all that I
can learn, of free parents, but in some way or other,
he had fallen into the hands of a man by the name
of Aycock, who lived in Wilkes County, Georgia.
This man was unable to serve in the Patriot Army
himself, and for that reason offered this slave boy
as a substitute and, after the circumstances of his
birth were explained, he was accepted. Dabney
proved himself a good soldier and took part in
many a skirmish with British and Tories, in which
he acted a conspicuous part. He was with Colonel
Elijah Clark at the Battle of Kettle Creek, February
14, 1779, where he was wounded and made a
cripple for life. He was unable to do further
military duty and was without means to obtain
proper medical attention. In this critical condition
he was taken into the house of a white man by
the name of Harris, where he was kindly cared
for until he recovered. So grateful was he to this
man, Mr. Harris, for taking him into his home at
a time when he was without friends and unable to
assist himself, that he afterward devoted a large

THE NEGRO SOLDIER'S FIGHT 317
part of his life to working for and taking care of
Mr. Harris and his family.
After the close of the war, Austin Dabney acquired
property and became prosperous. He removed
to Madison County, carrying with him his bene
factor, Mr. Harris, and family. Here he became
noted for his great fondness for horses and the
turf. He attended all the races in the neighbour
hood, and, in the words of Mr. White's chronicle,
"his courteous behaviour and good temper always
secured him gentleman backers."
Dabney had been freed for his services in the
Revolutionary War. He was in receipt of a pension
from the Federal Government and in the distribution
of public lands by lottery among the people of Geor
gia, the Legislature gave him a considerable amount
of land in the county of Walton. The Representa
tive from Oglethorpe, the Hon. Mr. Upson, was the
member who moved this passage of the law.
The granting of this land to a coloured man was
strenuously opposed by a number of people and,
at the election of members of the Legislature of
Madison County, the people were divided into an
Austin Dabney and an anti-Austen Dabney party.
It was perhaps because he did not enjoy the results
of this controversy that Dabney soon after removed
to the land given him by the state in Walton County,
taking with him the Harris family, for whom he
continued to labour. Upon his death he left them

318 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
all his property. The eldest son of his benefactor
Harris sent to Franklin College and afterward sup
ported him while he studied law with Mr. Upson
in Lexington. In the account given in White's
" Historical Collections," it is stated that Dabney
was "one of the best chroniclers of events of the
Revolutionary War in Georgia."
As illustrating the character of Austin Dabney
and the good repute which he maintained among
his neighbours the following anecdote is related
in White's "Collections."
He drew his pension at Savannah, where he went once a year for
this purpose. On one occasion he went to Savannah in company
with his neighbour, Colonel Wyley Pope. They travelled together
on the most familiar terms, until they arrived in the streets of the
town. Then the Colonel observed to Austin that he was a man of
sense, and knew that it was not suitable for him to be seen riding
side by side with a coloured man through the streets of Savannah;
to which Austin replied that he understood the matter very well.
Accordingly, when they came to the principal street, Austin checked
his horse and fell behind. They had not gone very far before
Colonel Pope passed by the house of General James Jackson, who
was then Governor of the state. Upon looking back he saw the
Governor run out of the house, seize Austin's hand, shake it as if
he had been his long absent brother, draw him off his horse, and
carry him into his house, where he stayed whilst in town. Colonel
Pope used to tell this anecdote with much glee, adding that he
felt chagrined when he ascertained that whilst he passed his time
at the tavern, unknown and uncared for, Austin was the honoured
guest of the Governor.
It should not be understood from what has
been said here that Negroes were admitted at once

THE NEGRO SOLDIER'S FIGHT 319
and without opposition into the Patriot Army.
There was at first considerable opposition to them,
particularly from the officers in the army. One
incident that hastened their entrance into the army
was the proclamation by Lord Dunmore, the
Royal Governor of Virginia, in November, 1775,
offering freedom to all such Negroes and indentured
white servants as might enlist for the purpose "of
reducing the colony to the proper sense of its duty."
Other proclamations inviting the Negroes to join
the King's armies and fight against their masters
were issued later by Sir Henry Clinton and Lord
Cornwallis. As a matter of fact a great many
slaves were carried off by the British troops during
the war. It is estimated that no less than thirty
thousand of them were taken from the plantations
and employed by the British troops in pioneer
work and in building fortifications, but the greater
part of these slaves died from fever and small-pox
in the British camps. The remainder were sent
to the West Indies, others to Nova Scotia, and
still others to the colony of Sierra Leone. Referring
to this matter in a speech in the United States
House of Representatives, December 12, 1820, the
Hon. Charles Pinckney of South Carolina says:
It is a most remarkable fact that, notwithstanding, in the course
of the Revolution, the Southern states were continually overrun
by the British, and that every Negro in them had an opportunity
of leaving their owners, few did; proving thereby not only a most
remarkable attachment to their owners, but the mildness of the

320 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
treatment, from whence their affection sprang. They then were,
as they still are, as valuable a part of our population to the Union
as any other equal number of inhabitants. They were in numerous
instances the pioneers, and, in all, the labourers, of your armies.
To their hands were owing the erection of the greatest part of the
fortifications raised for the protection of our country; some of
which, particularly Fort Moultrie, gave, at that early period of the
inexperience and untried valour of our citizens, immortality to
American arms; and, in the Northern states, numerous bodies
of them were enrolled into, and fought, by the sides of the whites,
the battles of the Revolution.*
Although Negro soldiers had fought in the Rev
olutionary War and in the War of 1812, it was
some time before the Federal Government was
prepared to enlist Negro soldiers to fight in the
Civil War against the people who were still holding
black men as slaves. As a matter of fact, it was
in the Confederate armies that the first Negro
soldiers were enlisted. During the latter part
of April, 1 86 1, a Negro company at Nashville,
Tennessee, made up of "free people of colour,"
offered its services to the Confederate Government.
Shortly after, a recruiting office was opened for
free Negroes at Memphis, Tennessee. On Novem
ber 23, 1861, there was a grand review ofthe Con
federate troops at New Orleans, Louisiana, one
of the features of which was a regiment of fourteen
hundred free coloured men. Some of these coloured
troops remained in the service of the Confederacy
?George Livermore: "An Historical Research Respecting the Opinions of the
Founders of the Republic on Negroes as Slaves, as Citizens, and as Soldiers," p. Irr.

THE NEGRO SOLDIER'S FIGHT 321
until the close of the war, but in few cases did they
have an opportunity to participate in any of the
important battles.
In the summer of 1862, General Butler organised
a regiment of free coloured people in the city of
New Orleans, under the title of the " First Louisiana
Native Guard." This was the first coloured regi
ment to be mustered into the Federal Army.
General Butler has related in his autobiography,
the circumstances under which this regiment was
formed. It seems that two regiments of free Negroes
called "Native Guards, Coloured," had been
organised in New Orleans, while General Butler
was at Ship Island. After the fall of New Orleans,
many of these coloured soldiers left the city, but
some remained. General Butler learned the names
and residences of some twenty of the coloured
officers of these regiments and sent for them to
call upon him at headquarters. In talking the
situation over with them, he called their attention
to the fact that if the Federal armies were successful
Negro slavery would be abolished, and then asked
them if they would be willing to organise two
regiments of free coloured people to fight for the
freedom of their race. After some further con
sultation, they readily agreed to do this, and fourteen
days later, on August 22, 1862, when General
Butler went down to the place where he had ordered
the recruits to gather, he says he saw such a sight

322 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
as he had never seen before: "Two thousand
men ready to enlist as recruits and not a man of
them who had not a white 'biled shirt* on."
Thus the first regiment of coloured troops was
mustered into the service of the United States. A
short time after this, three regiments of infantry
and two batteries of artillery were equipped and
ready for service. General Butler says of these
soldiers, "They were intelligent, obedient, highly
appreciated their position, and fully maintained
its dignity."
Previous to this time, General Hunter, who was
located at Beaufort, and the Sea Islands, off the
coast of South Carolina, had formed a regiment
from the slaves which he had found on the abandoned
plantations in that district. When this regiment
was first organised the Federal Government was
not prepared to accept the Freedmen in the positions
of soldiers, so that it was not until January 25, 1863,
that the "First South Carolina" regiment was
actually mustered into service, though it had
been in existence as an organisation for some time
before this.
Although these were the first Negro regiments
organised by the Federal Government, they were
not the first coloured soldiers to engage in battle
on the side of the Federal Government. In August
1862, a coloured regiment, composed partly of
fugitive slaves from Missouri, was recruited in

THE NEGRO SOLDIER'S FIGHT 323
Kansas. Although this regiment was not mustered
into the service of the United States until January,
1863, a detachment of it was attacked by Con
federate soldiers at Island Mound, Missouri,
October, 28, 1862, but after considerable fighting
the coloured troops succeeded in beating off their
opponents. This was the first action in which
Negro troops were engaged in the Civil War.
After the emancipation proclamation was issued
on January 1, 1863, the work of enlisting coloured
soldiers was taken in hand in more serious fashion.
Early in the year 1863, Governor John A. Andrews
secured permission to organise a regiment of coloured
troops. On April 12, of that year, the Fifty-fourth
Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, composed of
"persons of African descent," had completed its
quota, and shortly after this two other coloured
regiments were organised. These were the first
soldiers recruited from among the free coloured
people of the North. To complete these regiments,
coloured people were summoned from all of the
Northern states. Governor Andrews was greatly
assisted in the work of recruiting the coloured
people to fill these regiments by Frederick Douglass
and the coloured abolitionists, William Wells Brown
and Charles Lenox Remond. Among the coloured
soldiers who sailed for South Carolina with the
Massachusetts regiments were two sons of Frederick
Douglass, Lewis H. and Charles R. Douglass.

324 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
Among the coloured people who enlisted in the
Federal army at this time there was a large number
who afterward distinguished themselves in some
way in public life. Among others I recall two
bishops of the African Methodist Episcopal Church
and several men who afterward became prominent
in politics, among them P. B. S. Pinchback, who
was in the First Volunteer Louisiana Infantry, and
afterward became Lieutenant, and for a time,
Acting Governor of Louisiana during the stormiest
days of the Republican rule in that state. Charles
E. Nash, who was afterward Representative from
Louisiana in the Forty-fourth Congress, enlisted
as a private in the United States Chasseurs
d' Afrique, and afterward rose to the position of
Acting Sergeant-major of his regiment.
Bishop Henry M. Turner is said to have been the
first coloured chaplain to receive a commission from
the Federal army. Bishop Turner was living at this
time, in 1863, in Washington, District of Columbia,
where he was serving as pastor of Israel Church.
Bishop William B. Derrick, the other A. M. E.
bishop who served in the war, was born in the
Island of Antigua, British West Indies, July 27,
1843, a decade after England had granted freedom
to the slaves in the West Indian colonies. He was
educated in a Moravian school at Graceland. It
was intended that he should be a blacksmith, but
he took to the life of the sea, and became a sailor

THE NEGRO SOLDIER'S FIGHT 325
on vessels travelling between the West Indies and
New York. This led him to enlist in the war
for the freedom of the coloured people in the United
States. He served on the flagship of the North
Atlantic Squadron, the Minnesota, and at the close
of the war became a citizen in the United States.
Among the other coloured men who enlisted
in the Civil War was George Washington Williams,
who afterward served as an officer of artillery
in the Mexican army. Mr. Williams was born in
Bedford Springs, Pennsylvania, October 16, 1849.
After the Civil War was over he studied law for a
time in the office of Judge Alphonso Taft, father
of President Taft, and in the Cincinnati Law
School. In 1879 and 1881, he was a member of
the Ohio Legislature. From 1885 to 1886, he was
Minister to Haiti, and in 1888, was a delegate to
the World's Conference of Foreign Missions at
London. He was a writer and a newspaper man
of some note and is the author of a " History of
the Negro Race in America," to which I have
frequently had occasion to refer, in the preparation
of this book.
Joseph H. Rainey, who was a member of the
Forty-second, Forty-third, the Forty-fourth, and the
Forty-fifth Congress, as Representative from South
Carolina, served for a time in the Confederate
Army. Joseph Rainey was born in Georgetown,;
South Carolina, June 21, 1832. His father and

326 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
mother had been slaves, but had purchased their
freedom. When the war broke out Mr. Rainey
was working at his father's trade of barber.
Being a free man he was drafted into the service
of the Confederate Army and compelled to work
upon the fortifications, until he succeeded in
escaping to the West Indies, where he remained
till the close of the war.
A small number of coloured men, probably as
many as seventy-five, were granted commissions as
officers in the latter part of the war. Major Martin
R. Delany, and Captain O. S. B. Wall, both of
whom were detailed in the Quartermaster's Depart
ment, attained the highest rank of any ofthe coloured
officers in the Army. Dr. A. T. Augusta, who after
ward became one of the leading coloured physicians
of Washington, District of Columbia, and Dr. Charles
B. Purvis, a son of Robert Purvis, the coloured
abolitionist of Philadelphia, were the best known
of the coloured army surgeons during the Civil
War. Dr. Purvis has been for many years a teacher
and officer in the School of Medicine at Howard
University. From first to last no less than 178,975 Negro
soldiers were mustered into the United States
Volunteer Army during the course of the Civil
War. Of this number, 36,847 were reported killed,
wounded, or missing. The coloured troops did
not have an opportunity to participate in many

THE NEGRO SOLDIER'S FIGHT 327
of the great battles of the war. They did, how
ever, serve in nearly every military department
in the United States and took part in four hundred
and forty-nine battles. In addition to the large
military force mentioned there were at least 150,000
Negro labourers employed in the Quartermasters'
and Engineering Department. They were employed
as teamsters and as cooks or in the building of
fortifications. The first general engagement in which coloured
soldiers took part was the assault upon Port Hudson,
Louisiana, made by the troops under General
Banks, May 27, 1863. There were eight regiments
of coloured troops among the forces that took
part in this assault, and among them was the first
Louisiana Native Guard, organised by General
Butler. This regiment is said to have suffered
heavier losses than any other regiment engaged
in the assault, losing in all one hundred and twenty-
nine officers and men.
The soldiers in this same Department did some
desperate fighting a few days after, June 6 and 7,
1863, at Milliken's Bend. This post was defended
by about fourteen hundred men, all of them newly
organised and undisciplined black soldiers, with
the exception of one hundred and sixty men of
an Iowa regiment which chanced to be there. The
battle lasted for eight hours, during which the
soldiers came to close quarters and fought hand

328 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
to hand with bayonets and clubbed muskets.
Although the attacking force was said to have been
considerably superior to that of the black troops,
the latter succeeded in repelling the attack and in
^driving off the enemy.
Two of the most desperate battles of the war
in which coloured troops were engaged were the
assault of Fort Wagner, July 18, 1863, in which
the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts, the first regiment
of coloured soldiers to be recruited in the North,
was engaged, and the battle of Honey Hill, South
Carolina, November 30, 1864, in which the Fifty-
fifth Massachusetts, the second coloured regiment
raised in the North, was engaged. It was in the
assault of Fort Wagner that the gallant Colonel
Robert G. Shaw fell dead at the head of his Negro
regiment and mingled some of the best blood of
New England with that of these black men whom
he had volunteered to lead in the fight for the
freedom of their race. It was in this same battle
that Sergeant William H. Carney ofthe Fifty-fourth
Massachusetts, though wounded in the head and
in the shoulder and in both legs, carried the National
flag of his regiment across the open field which
separated him from safety, where he handed it
over with the words which made him famous:
"Dey got me boys, but de old flag neber touched
de groun!"
After the war, Sergeant Carney returned to

THE NEGRO SOLDIER'S FIGHT 329
Massachusetts, and for a number of years, up to
the time of his death, in the early part of December,
1908, was employed at the Massachusetts State
House in Boston, where the torn flag that he had
kept flying upon the battlefield at Fort Wagner
is still preserved among the other colours of the
Massachusetts regiments.
Following the death of Sergeant Carney, in
Boston, Mr. N. P. Hallowell wrote a communication
to the Boston Transcript in which he gave so accu
rate and concise a description of this battle and
the part that Sergeant Carney had in it that I
have ventured to reproduce it here. Mr. Hallowell
wrote :
Sergeant William H. Carney was one ofthe colour-bearers ofthe
Fifty-fourth Regiment, Massachusetts Volunteers, when the
famous assault upon Fort Wagner, South Carolina, was made at
twilight on the evening of July 18, 1863. In that assault Colonel
Robert Gould Shaw fell dead upon the parapet. Captains Rus
sell and Simpkins and other brave men fell while keeping the
embrasures free from the enemy's gunners and sweeping the crest
of the parapet with their fire. Lieutenant-colonel Edward H.
Hallowell reached the parapet. Desperately wounded, he rolled
into the ditch, was again hit, and with great difficulty managed to
crawl to our lines. An unknown number of enlisted men were
killed within the fort. Forty enlisted men, including twenty
wounded, were captured within the fort. The State flag, tied,
unfortunately, to the staff with ribbons, was lost. The staff itself
| was brought off. The national colours planted upon the parapet
| were upheld and eventually borne off by Sergeant William H.
' Carney, whose wounds in both legs, in the breast and right arm
attest his devotion to his trust. His words, "The old flag never
touched the ground, boys!" are immortalised in the pages of history

330 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
and the verses of poetry. The regiment went into action with
twenty-two officers and six hundred and fifty enlisted men. Four
teen officers were killed or wounded. Two hundred and fifty-
five enlisted men were killed or wounded. Prisoners, not wounded,
twenty. Total casualties, officers and men, two hundred and
sixty-nine, or 40 per cent. The character of the wounds attests
the nature of the contest. There were wounds from bayonet
thrusts, sword cuts, pike thrusts and hand grenades; and there
were heads and arms broken and smashed by the butt-ends of
muskets. It is fit that the last act, the act which cost his life, should be
one of courtesy. In stepping aside to make room for another his
leg was caught and crushed. Sergeant William H. Carney was a
gentleman. Peace to him.
Coloured troops took part February 20, 1864, in
the disastrous battle of Olustee, Florida, in which
the losses were quite as severe, it is said, as in
any other battle of the Civil War. Speaking of
this battle, Colonel J. R. Hawley, who commanded
the First Brigade in this engagement, says: "Old
troops finding themselves so overmatched would
have run a little and reformed with or without
order. The black men stood to be killed or
wounded* losing more than three hundred out of
five hundred and fifty." In the battle of Nash
ville, the coloured troops were under a life-long
Democrat, General James B. Steedman, who was
one of the delegates in i860 to the Charleston
Convention which nominated Breckenridge for
president. It is related that as he rode over the
field immediately after the battle, he said with a
grim smile: "I wonder what my Democratic

THE NEGRO SOLDIER'S FIGHT 331
friends over there would think if they knew I were
fighting them with 'nigger troops.'"
Coloured troops took part in the campaign which
resulted in the fall of Richmond. June 15, 1864,
they captured seven guns in front of Petersburg
.and, on July 30, they took part in the disastrous
attack at the "crater" in which 4,000 men were
lost, wounded or captured in a fruitless and
hopeless assault.
Finally, when General Weitzel took possession
of Richmond on April 3, 1865, he was in command
of a corps made up entirely of Negro soldiers. It
was a Negro soldier who hauled down the Con
federate flag and it was Negro soldiers who assisted
in quenching the fires which had been started,
when the Confederate soldiers evacuated the city,
thus saving the helpless citizens who were left
behind much loss and suffering. It illustrates
to what extent the Negro soldiers had won the
favour of the Federal officers who commanded
them that black troops were called upon to maintain
order in the confusion and anarchy which reigned
at this time in the abandoned capital of the Con
federacy. Two years before, the same General
Weitzel, who was in command of the Negro troops,
who at this time took possession of Richmond, had
written to General Butler to be relieved of his
command in Louisiana because, as he said, he
"could not command Negro regiments." At that

332 THE STORY OF THE NEGRO
time he believed that to employ Negroes in the
army was to bring about a servile insurrection for
which he did not care to be responsible.
The services which the Negro troops performed
in the Civil War in fighting for the freedom of
their race not only convinced the officers who com
manded them and the white soldiers who fought
by their side that the Negro race deserved to be
free, but it served to convince the great mass
of the people in the North that the Negroes were
fit for freedom. It did, perhaps, more than any
other one thing to gain for them, as a result of
the war, the passage of those amendments to the
Constitution which secured to the Negro race the
same rights in the United Stat-., that are granted
to white men.