The Southern South Part 6

THE NEGRO AT WORK

n.o.body accepts church or fraternal orders as the measure of the Negro's place in the community, for the gospel which he hears most often is the gospel of work; and that comes less from the preacher than from the reformer; as DuBois says: "Plain it is to us that what the world seeks through desert and wild we have within our threshold--a stalwart laboring force, suited to the semi-tropics." The labor system and labor ideal of the South are very different from those of the North. First of all, there is the old tradition of slavery times that manual toil is ign.o.ble; that it is menial to handle prime materials, and to buy and sell goods across the counter. But somebody must perform hard labor if the community is to go on; and there is an immense field for uneducated men. Besides the so-called "public works"--that is, turpentine, sawmills, building levees and railroads, and clearing land--there is the pulling and hauling and loading in the ports, the rough work of oil mills and furnaces and mines, and above all the raising of cotton, where the demand for labor is always greater than the supply.

Some of this labor is done by white gangs, and many of the blacks are engaged in other and higher pursuits; but the chief function of the Negro in the South is the rough labor which in the North was once chiefly performed by Irishmen, later by Italians, and now in many places by Slavs. This vast industrial system is almost wholly officered by Whites, who are the owners, employers, and managers of nearly every piece of property in the South on which laborers are employed. They set, so far as they can, the terms of employment; but what they get in actual work is settled by the Negroes, notwithstanding a condition of dependence hard to realize in the North. It is firmly fixed in the average white employer's mind that the Negro exists in order to work for him, and that every attempt to raise the Negro must steer clear of any suspicion that it will lead him to abandon work for the white man. The slow drift of Negroes to the towns and cities cannot be prevented, nor some s.h.i.+fting from plantation to plantation; but the white man's ideal is that the Negro is to stay where he is, and hundreds of thousands of them are living within sight of the spot where they were born.

Therefore, whoever wishes to know the conditions of the typical Negro must look for them on the plantation, where he is almost the only laborer, and is at present prodigiously wanted. As a keen Southern observer says: "The protection of the Negro is the scarcity of labor"; for it is literally true that some plantations could profitably employ more than double the hands that they can get. Nevertheless it is an axiom in the South that "the n.i.g.g.e.r will not work." Thus General Stephen D. Lee gives currency to the declaration that "It is a fact known to those best acquainted with the negro race since the war, that more and more of them are becoming idle, and are not giving us as good work as they used to do." Another authority says: "Some few of the race are reliable--many hundreds are not. The farmer cannot get his land turned in the winter, because ninety hundredths of these laborers have not made up their minds as to what they want to do in the coming year. All would go to town if fuel was not high and house rent must be paid." An engineer in charge of large gangs in Galveston says he never would employ Negroes if he could help it, because they cannot be depended upon to rush work in an emergency. A planter met on a Mississippi steamer declares that wage hands at a dollar a day would not actually put in more than two thirds of the hours of labor; and would accomplish no more in two weeks than a cropper working on shares would do in two days. A Negro who employs large numbers of men says: "If a Negro can get what he wants without working he will do it."

Another standard accusation is that the Negro will not work steadily; that he never turns up on Monday, and will leave for frivolous reasons; that if he has been working for five dollars a week and you raise his wages to ten dollars he will simply work the three days necessary to earn the five dollars, having adjusted himself to that scale. In this charge there is a good deal of truth, but the difficulty is not confined to the African race. Northern employers are well acquainted with the hand who never works on Monday; and in the cotton mills of South Carolina, which are carried on solely by white labor, it is customary to have a "Reserve of Labor" of one fourth or one fifth in order to meet the case of the hands who wish to go fis.h.i.+ng, or simply are not willing to work six days a week. Probably the remedy for the Negro is to increase his wants to the point where he cannot satisfy them by less than a whole week's work.

As to the general accusation that the Negro will not work, many white employers scout the suggestion. A brickmaker in St. Louis has for years employed them and likes them better than any other kind of labor. A Florida lumberman says: "I would not give one black man in the lumber camps of the South for three Italians, or three of any other foreigners.

We can't get along without them, and for one, I don't want to try." And planter after planter will tell you that, however it may be with his neighbors, he has no trouble in keeping his people up to their work.

Another reason for skepticism is what one sees as one goes through the country. In the first place, enormous amounts of cotton are raised where there is nothing but negro labor. In the second place, even in winter, the season of the year when the Negro is least busy, there are plenty of evidences that he is at work and likely to keep at it. He may be seen at work on his own little farm, taking care of his stock, picking his cotton, fixing up or adding to his house, his fifteen-year-old girl plowing with one mule. A Negro's farm is generally more slovenly than a white man's, but the crops are raised. You see the hired hands on the great plantations, driving four-mule teams, working in the gins, coming for directions about breaking ground. The truth is that the Negro on the land is doing well, far better than might be expected from people who have so little outlook and hope of improvement, working more intelligently and doing better than the fellahin of Egypt, the ryots of India, the native Filipino, quite as well as the lowest end of the Mountain Whites and the remnants of the lowland Poor Whites. It is a race-slander, refutable by any honest investigator, that the American Negro as a race is unwilling to work.

It is another question how far they are competent to act as foremen or independent workers. An iron manufacturer in Alabama says he has found that the moment Negroes are promoted to anything requiring thinking power they fail disastrously, and ruin all the machinery put in their charge; as miners they handle tools with skill just as long as they are furnished the motive power, but they have little discretion or ambition. On the other hand, the writer has seen in the Richmond Locomotive Works white men working under negro gang bosses without friction; and in many parts of the South the building trades are almost wholly in the hands of blacks.

Why should the belief of the African's incapacity be so widely disseminated? First, because nineteen twentieths of the people who talk about the lazy Negro have no personal knowledge of the field hand at work.

Their impression of the race is gained from the thriftless and irregular Negroes in the towns and cities. If we formed our notions of Northern farm industry from the gypsies, the dock loafers, the idle youths shooting c.r.a.ps behind a board fence, we should believe a generalization that Northern farmers are lazy. The s.h.i.+ftless population living on odd jobs and the earnings of the women as domestic servants, committing petty crimes and getting into rows with the white youths, cannot be more than one tenth of the Negroes, and the poorest tenth at that.

Domestic service is the most exasperating point of contact between the races. It has been reduced to a system of day labor, for not one in a hundred of the house servants spend the night in the place where they are employed. Great numbers of the women are the only wage earners in their family and leave their little children at home day after day so that they may care for the children of white families. Some mistresses scold and fume and threaten, some have the patience of angels; in both cases the service is irregular and wasteful. n.o.body ever feels sure that a servant will come the next morning. Most of the well-to-do families in the South feed a second family out of the baskets taken home by the cook; and in thousands of instances the basket goes to some member of a third family favored by the cook. Hence the little song taken down from a Negro's lips by a friend in Mississippi:

"I doan' has to wuk so ha'd, 'Cause I got a gal in de white folks' ya'd; And ebry ebnin' at half past eight I comes along to de gyarden gate; She gibs me b.u.t.tah an' sugah an' lard-- I doan' has to wuk so ha'd!"

Let one story out of a hundred ill.u.s.trate this trouble. A newly married couple, both accustomed to handsome living, set up their own establishment in a Mississippi town, in a new house, well furnished and abounding in heirlooms of mahogany and china; the only available candidate for waitress is a haughty person who begins by objecting to monthly payments, and shortly announces to her mistress: "I ain't sure I want to stay here, but I will give you a week's trial." The patient and good-natured lady accepts the idea of a week's experience on both sides, but before that time expires the girl comes rus.h.i.+ng up in a fury to announce that "I'm gwine ter leave just now, kase you don't give yo' help 'nough to eat." It develops that she has had exactly the same breakfast as the white family, except that the particular kind of bacon of which she is fond has run short. There is plenty of bacon of another brand, but that will not satisfy her; she will not stay "where people don't get 'nough to eat." She thereupon shakes the dust of the place off her feet and blacklists the family in the whole place, making it almost impossible for them to find another servant; and probably some other white mistress within a week takes up this hungry person as being the best that she can do.

Other people have more agreeable tales of good-tempered and humorous servants; and the negro question would be half solved if the people who undertake domestic service and accept wages would show reasonable interest, cleanliness, and honesty; and a million of the race might find steady employment at good wages in the South within the next six months, and another million in the North, if they would only do faithfully what they are capable of doing.

There is little hope of regeneration by that means; the difficulty is that capable Negroes do not like domestic service and seek to avoid it. The average Southerner sighs for the good old household slaves, and harks back to the colored mammy in the kitchen and stately butler in the drawing-room in slavery times, as evidence that the Negroes are going backward. He forgets that under slavery the highest honorable position open to a colored woman was to be the owned cook in a wealthy family; that Booker T.

Was.h.i.+ngton and DuBois and Kelly Miller in those days would have been fortunate if raised to the lofty pinnacle of the trusted butler or general utility man on the plantation. The house servants in slavery times were chosen for their superior appearance and intelligence, and were likely to be mulattoes; the children and grandchildren of such people may now be owners of plantations, professional men, professors in colleges, negro bankers, and heads of inst.i.tutions; while the domestic servant commonly now comes from the lowest Negroes, is descended from field hands, and chosen out of the most incompetent section of the present race. The problem of domestic service is chiefly one of the village and the city, in which only about a seventh of the Negroes live.

Even many Southerners have very hazy ideas about the subdivisions of plantation laborers; and do not distinguish between the renters and croppers, who are tenant farmers in their way, and the wage hands who are less ambitious and not so steady. There is complaint on many plantations that negro families do not finish their contracts, though the main outcry is against the day laborer; yet on many of the large plantations there is little complaint that even he does not work steadily, and little trouble in securing from him a fair day's work.

Another disturbance of the easy generalization that the Negro will not work is due to the variations from county to county and from place to place. Much more depends than the outside world realizes on the capacity of a plantation manager "to handle n.i.g.g.e.rs"; and the testimony of a perfectly straightforward planter who tells you that he knows that the Negroes as a race run away from work because he has seen it, is no more true of the whole people than the a.s.surance of his near neighbor that he knows the blacks are all industrious because they work steadily for him.

Here we come back to the essential truth that it is unsafe to generalize about any race. There are thousands of good Negroes in the towns and thousands of lazy rascals on the plantations; but the great weight of testimony is that the colored man works tolerably well on the land.

Another of the statements, repeated so often that people believe them without proof, is that the Southern Negro has lost his skilled trades. Two Southern writers say: "Now, most of the bricklayers are white. The same is true with respect to carpenter work. The trade of the machinist is practically in the hands of white men." "They have been losing ground as mechanics. Before the war, on every plantation there were first-cla.s.s carpenters, blacksmiths, wheelwrights, etc. Half the houses in Virginia were built by Negro carpenters. Now where are they?" Nothing could better ill.u.s.trate the fact that Southerners who reprehend the interference of the North in questions which it does not understand, are themselves myopic guides. If the negro trades have disappeared, how does it come about that in Montgomery, Ala., there are practically no other laborers of that type?

that the bricklayers, carpenters, masons, blacksmiths, are all Negroes, and no white boys seem to be learning those trades. The census of 1890 showed in Alabama about 13,000 colored men who had some sort of skilled employment, many of them in trades which did not exist in slavery times, such as iron-working, steam fitting, and service on railroads. It is true that they are shut out of most of the callings in which there is authority over others; there are no negro motormen or trolley conductors, no negro engineers, though plenty of firemen; no negro conductors, though negro brakemen are not uncommon, and in Meridian, Miss., the trains are called in the white waiting room by a buxom negro woman.

In some Southern cities Whites, very often Northern men, have absorbed certain trades supposed to be the peculiar province of the Negro: barber shops with white barbers are found; the magnificent Piedmont Hotel in Atlanta has a corps of white servants; wherever the trades unions get into the South they are likely to work against the Negro; but in some cases he has unions of his own; or there are joint unions of Whites and Negroes.

Considering the great opportunity for white men in callings where blacks are not admitted it does not seem likely that they will ever be excluded from skilled trades, though subject to more compet.i.tion than in the past.

Another employment for which the African has in many ages and countries been found suited is military service. Even in slavery times military companies of free Negroes were not unknown, and some of them actually went to the front for the Confederacy in the first weeks of the Civil War. Then came the enlistment of nearly 200,000 in the blue uniform, and after the war some thousands of men remained in negro regiments. A brief attempt to educate colored officers in West Point and Annapolis was, for whatever reason, not a success; and the negro troops are almost wholly under the command of white officers. Since Reconstruction times negro militia companies have not been encouraged, and in some states have been wholly disbanded. The difficulty in Brownsville, Texas, in 1907, has tended to prevent negro enlistment in the army and navy. In the Spanish War and later in the Philippines negro regiments gave a good account of themselves. There are a few negro policemen in the cities, but in the South they are likely to disappear. The white man resents any a.s.sertion of authority over him by a Negro, and in general considers him unfit to exercise control over people of his own race.

Even in ante-bellum times there were occasional negro business and professional men, some of whom had the confidence of their white neighbors and made little fortunes. Since the Civil War these avenues have much widened. The 16,000 or 17,000 ministers are still to a large degree uneducated persons, as indeed is the case in many white churches. Negro physicians are numerous, educated partly in Northern inst.i.tutions, partly in medical colleges of their own, partly in schools officered by white professors, as, for instance, in Raleigh, N. C. Like the lawyers they cannot practice without the certificate of state officers not very friendly to them or easy to convince of their abilities; and the cream of the practice among colored people goes to the Whites. In business, negro merchants, manufacturers, builders, and bankers have become very numerous.

Recently a Negro Bankers' Convention was held in the South. Most of the transactions of these men are carried on with their own people, though they often find customers and credit with Whites. So far, there are few or no large negro capitalists, but many promising groups of small capital have been brought together; and at the Expositions of Charleston and Jamestown they showed creditable exhibits of their own industries.

Two entirely new professions have opened up since the Civil War. The first is that of journalist, and there are many negro newspapers, none of which has any national circulation, or extended influence. The other is teaching, which has opened up a livelihood to thousands of young men and women. Some of the negro colleges are wholly manned by members of the race, many of them graduates of Northern inst.i.tutions, who seem to make use of the same methods and appeal to the same aspirations as the faculties of white colleges.

Though often accused by his white neighbor of attempts to unite in hostile organizations, the Negroes show little disposition to rally around and support leaders of their own race. Booker T. Was.h.i.+ngton, the man of most influence among them, has encountered implacable opposition, and efforts have even been made by hostile members of his own race to break up his meetings in Boston. Inasmuch as the Negroes are excluded from politics in the South, it is hard for any man to get that reputation for bringing things about which is necessary in order to attract a strong following. As DuBois points out "If such men are to be effective they must have some power,--they must be backed by the best public opinion of these communities, and able to wield for their objects and aims such weapons as the experience of the world has taught are indispensable to human progress."

One of the strong influences is the conferences gathered in part at such inst.i.tutions as Hampton and Tuskegee, and Atlanta University, in part called in other places. A considerable number of Negroes have the money and the inclination to attend these meetings, where they learn to know each other and to express their common wants.

CHAPTER XI

IS THE NEGRO RISING?

That the Negro is inferior to the Whites among whom he lives is a cause of apprehension to the whole land; that his labor is in steadiness and efficiency much below that of his intelligent white neighbors is a drawback to his section. Yet neither deficiencies of character nor of industry really settle his place in the community. A race may be as high as the Greeks and yet go to nothingness; a race may be as industrious as the Chinese, and have little to show for it. The essential question with regard to the Negro is simply: Is the race in America moving downward or upward? No matter if it be low, has it the capacity of rising?

To answer these questions requires some study both of present and past conditions. A very considerable number of Southern Whites are sure that physically and morally the Negro is both low and declining; and some go so far as to a.s.sert that every Negro is physically so different from the white man that he ought not to be considered a member of the human race.

The argument was familiar in slavery times, and has been recently set forth by F. L. Hoffman in his "Race Traits of the American Negro"; from chest measurements, weight, lifting strength, and power of vision, he is convinced that "there are important differences in the bodily structure of the two races, differences of far-reaching influence on the duration of life and the social and economic efficiency of the colored man." Professor Smith, of Louisiana, in his "The Color Line, A Brief for the Unborn," goes much farther in an argument intended to show that the brain capacity of the Negro, the coa.r.s.eness of his features, the darkness of his color, the abnormal length of his arm, his thick cranium, woolly hair and early closing of the cranial sutures, prove that he may be left out of consideration as a member of a civilized community.

The tendency of scientific investigators during the last forty years has been to minimize the distinctions between races; and the argument that the Negro is to be politically and socially disregarded because of structural peculiarities, though the stock in trade of the proslavery writers two generations ago, now seems somewhat forced. To the Northern mind there is a kind of unreality in the whole argument of physical inferiority; it is like trying to prove by anatomy, physiology, and hygiene that the Hungarian laborer is always going to be an ignorant and degraded element in our population.

These technical arguments throw very little light upon the real African problem, which is not, what does the structure of the Negro indicate that he must be, but what is he really and what does he perform? If the Negro can work all day in the cotton field, save his wages, buy land, bring up his children, send them to school, pay his debts, and maintain a decent life, no cranial sutures or prognathism will prevent his being looked upon as a man; and the whole physical argument, much of which is intended to affect the public mind against amalgamation, cannot do away with the plain fact that the white and the black races are so near to each other that some hundreds of thousands of people come of white fathers and negro or mulatto mothers. The Negro is ent.i.tled to be measured, not by brain calipers, nor by two-meter rods, but by what he can do in the world.

What he can do in the world depends upon the inner man and not the outer; and here we approach one of the most serious problems connected with the race. Has the Negro character? Can he conceive a standard and adhere to it? Can he fix his mind on a distant good and for its sake give up present indulgences? Can he restrain the primal impulses of human nature?

That the Negroes as a race are impure and unregulated is the judgment of most white observers whether ill-wishers or fair-minded men. Thomas Nelson Page, for instance, declares that the immorality of the negro race has increased since slavery times. Thomas, himself a Negro, a.s.serts that the s.e.xual impulse "const.i.tutes the main incitement to the degeneracy of the race, and is the chief hindrance to its social uplifting." Kelsey, a Northern observer, says: "Many matings are consummated without any regular marriage ceremony and with little reference to legal requirements." On this subject as on all others the most preposterous exaggerations are rife; a plantation manager will tell you that not two in a hundred couples on his plantation are married; a stock statement, a thousand times repeated, is that there is no such thing as a virtuous negro woman. Yet the truth is gruesome enough; there are plenty of plantations where barely half the families are married; b.a.s.t.a.r.d children are very numerous; and this condition applies not only in the cities and towns where people are put into new and trying environments, but everywhere among the Negroes upon the land. It is the most discouraging thing about the race, because it saps the foundation of civilization. Nor is it an explanation to say that under slavery family ties were disregarded. The race has now had forty years of freedom and undisturbed religious training, such as it is.

Still they ought to show decided improvement in morals if the race is capable of living on a high moral plane.

This is a gloomy and delicate subject, but cannot be allowed to pa.s.s without a few positive ill.u.s.trations. When Kelsey suggested to a Negro that he might go back to the plantation and board in a negro family, he replied: "n.i.g.g.e.rs is queer folks, boss. 'Pears to me they don' know what they gwine do. Ef I go out and live in a man's house like as not I run away wid dat man's wife." A girl whose mistress was trying to put before her a higher standard of conduct said: "It's no use talking to us colored girls like we were white. A colored girl that keeps pure ain't liked socially. We just think she has had no chance." A negro boy twelve years old has been known to reel off two hundred different obscene rhymes and songs. Divorce is frequent, particularly the easy form which consists of the husband throwing his wife out of doors and bringing in another woman.

The negro preachers are universally believed to be the worst of their kind, and very often are. If the things that are regularly told by white people and sometimes admitted by colored people are true, the majority of the Southern Negroes, rural and urban, are in a horribly low state both physically and morally.

The more credit to those members of the race who are pure and upright; who are showing that it is a libel to brand as hopelessly corrupt ten million people, including probably two million mulattoes; to say nothing of the numerous examples of chaste and self-respecting Negroes of both s.e.xes in the Northern states. The most furious a.s.sailant of negro character will usually tell you of one or two Negroes that he knows to be perfectly straightforward; and the writer can bear personal testimony to the apparent wholesomeness of family life in negro homes that he has chanced to visit. Here, a young mother in her scrupulously clean log house hovering over her little children as affectionately as though she and they were white; there, gathered around the hearth of a new house with good furniture and pretty pictures, a family of seven children, neat, clean, attractive, respectful, intelligent, and apparently attached to father and mother. Again, a fine specimen of the thrifty colored man who boasts that he has lived forty-one years with one wife: "I got a good wife, she take keer of me." Where such homes are, all is not vile. It is a favorite Southern delusion that education and Christian teaching have no effect on the animal propensities of Negroes; there are thousands of examples to the contrary.

It would do no good to anybody to minimize the terrible truth that the Negroes as a race are in personal morality far below the Anglo-Saxons as a race, that the heaviest dead weight upon them is their own pa.s.sions; but it would be equally futile to blink at the fact that the Whites do not set them in this respect a convincing example. Anglo-Saxons the world over are not unreasonably virtuous; and the divorce cases of Pittsburg might not be safe reading for impressionable people like the blacks. If the negro race is depraved it cannot but have a demoralizing effect on the white race, most of whom have colored nurses; and the male half of whom have all their life been exposed to a particularly facile temptation. Heaven has somehow s.h.i.+elded the white woman of the South from the noxious influences of a servile race; in slavery times and now there is not a fairer flower that blooms than the white Southern girl; although it is a delusion that she is never pursued by men of her own race. No visitor, no clean Southern man, knows the abysses in both races or can fix the proportion in which both need to rise if the Southland is to be redeemed from its most fearful danger. Great numbers of the Negroes are immoral, and great numbers of white men can testify to their immorality, for the building up of character is a long and weary process in both races.

So far as the future of the Negro is concerned, the real problem is whether he can suppress his bad traits and emphasize his higher nature, but that is a question with regard to all other races. The blacks are ignorant, not only of books, but of the world, of life, of the experience of the race. They are untrustworthy, but at the same time faithful; as one of their own number says: "They'll loaf before your face and work behind your back with good-natured honesty. They'll steal a watermelon, and hand you back your lost purse intact."

In any case, it may safely be affirmed that the Negro is not retrograding.

On the Sea Islands, where it has been reported that the Negroes had sunk to savagery, where on one small island a white face had not been seen for ten years, there is undoubtedly a widespread belief in magic, or what a fluent colored preacher, in a discourse apparently intended for white ears, referred to as "Hindooism." On such subjects the Negroes are reticent; but no evidence of paganism is visible to long-time residents on the islands. When it comes to fortune-telling and charms, and a fetich that will insure you against having your mortgage foreclosed, about the same thing may be found among otherwise intelligent people in any Northern city. Degradation is frequent; and marital relations are loose on the islands, though no more so than on the plantations of Mississippi, or among the Negroes of the cities of Georgia. The population is in general healthier than on the mainland, though much exposed to severe malaria. Two or three of the African superst.i.tions do survive; one is that you must always keep a door open during the day so that you may not shut the bad spirit in with you; but at night doors and shutters must be closed to keep the spirit out. Another superst.i.tion is the "Basket-name," which is the plague of the Northern teachers, who are a long time in learning that Louisa's basket name is "Chug," or that when you call Ezra, "Mantchey"

will come. Churches of various denominations are kept up, and, together with the various lodges, furnish the princ.i.p.al social life of the people.

To be sure they often have African dances at their religious services; but these are very like the Shaker dances, which can hardly be called pagan wors.h.i.+p.

The error as to the progress of the Negro arises both from an unfounded notion of the virtues and the civilization of the Negroes under slavery, and an equally unfounded idea that the average conditions of the Negro to-day are hopeless. The Negro was busier in slavery times than now because there was always the whip in the background, but there is no reason to suppose that his average annual product was as great as that of the present freeman. Falsehood, thriftlessness, and immorality are the charges which were constantly brought against the slaves, both by outsiders and by their own masters. Judged by the standards which the white man most readily applies to himself--namely, the proportion of educated and progressive men and women, the average amount of property, the interest in the welfare of the race--there is no reason to doubt that the Negro is higher up than he was half a century ago.

How far does the desire for uplift extend, and how far is it effective?

The negro population shows a distinct interest in the future of the race.

The field hand who has the ambition to save and improve, to buy his own land, feels that he is benefiting not only himself, but giving an object lesson of the power of his race. Some of the leaders have personal ends to gain, but they all expect to gain them by showing a power to improve the conditions of their fellows. Yet even though the Negro may be working steadily, he may also be gaining nothing from generation to generation; if he gets better wages, he may be squandering them; a small part of the race might conceivably be going forward, while a large part was dropping back.

A piece of testimony on the highest phases of negro character which is too often forgotten in the South is that on the occasion when the race had the best opportunity to show black-heartedness it gave the world a n.o.ble example of patience, forbearance, and forgiveness. As that great Southerner, Grady, wrote: "History has no parallel to the faith kept by the negro in the South during the war. Often five hundred negroes to a single white man, and yet through these dusky throngs the women and children walked in safety, and the unprotected homes rested in peace.

Unmarshalled, the black battalions moved patiently to the fields in the morning to feed the armies their idleness would have starved, and at night gathered anxiously at the big house to 'hear the news from marster,'

though conscious that his victory made their chains enduring. Everywhere humble and kindly. The body guard of the helpless. The rough companion of the little ones. The observant friend. The silent sentry in his lowly cabin. The shrewd counsellor. And when the dead came home, a mourner at the open grave. A thousand torches would have disbanded every Southern army, but not one was lighted." That achievement was a vast advance above the savagery of the native African; and why should the capacity for improvement stop there?