BEFORE EMANCIPATION AND AFTER.

First Importation of Negro Slaves into America--The Original Abolitionists--A Colored Enthusiast and a Coward--Origin of the word “Secession”--John Brown’s Fanaticism--Uncle Tom’s Cabin--Faithful unto Death--George Augustus Sala on the Negro who Lingered too long in the Mill Pond.

The American negro is such a distinct character that he cannot be overlooked in a work of this nature. Some people think he is wholly bad, and that although he occasionally assumes a virtue, he is but playing a part, and playing it but indifferently well at that. Others place him on a lofty pedestal, and magnify him into a hero and a martyr.

But the Afro-American, commonly called a “nigger” in the South, is neither the one nor the other. He is often as worthless as the “white trash” he so scornfully despises, and he is often all that the most exacting could expect, when his surroundings and disadvantages are taken into consideration. Physiologists tell us that man is very largely what others make him, many going so far as to say that character and disposition are three parts hereditary and one part environment. If this is so, a good deal of allowance should be made. It is less than 300 years since the first negroes were brought over to this country, and it is but little more than thirty years since slavery was abolished. Hence, from both the standpoints of descent and environment, the negro is at a great disadvantage, and he should hardly be judged by the common standard.

It was in the year 1619 that a Dutch ship landed a cargo of negroes from Guinea, but that was not really the first case of slavery in this country. Prior to that time paupers and criminals from the old world had voluntarily sold themselves into a species of subjection, in preference to starvation and detention in their own land; but this landing in 1619 seems to have really introduced the colored man into the labor world and market of America.

We need not trace the history of the negro as a slave at any length. That he was occasionally abused goes without saying, but that his condition was approximately as bad as a majority of writers have attempted to prove is not so certain. It was the policy of the slave owner to get as much work out of his staff as he possibly could. He knew from experience that the powers of human endurance were necessarily limited, and that a man could not work satisfactorily when he was sick or hungry. Hence, even on the supposition that all slave owners were without feeling, it is obvious that self-interest must have impelled them to keep the negro in good health, and to prevent him from losing strength from hardship and want.

On some plantations the lot of the slave was a hard one, but on others there was very little complaining or cause for complaint. Thousands of slaves were better off by far than they have been subsequent to liberation, and it is a fact that speaks volumes for the much discussed and criticized slaveholders, that numbers of emancipated slaves refused to accept their freedom, while many more, who went away delighted at the removal of withstraint, came back of their own option very soon after, and begged to be allowed to resume the old relations.

The average negro obeys, literally obeys, the divine instruction to take no thought for the morrow. If he has a good dinner in the oven he is apt to forget for the time being that there is such a meal as supper, and he certainly does not give even a passing thought to the fact that if he has no breakfast in the morning he will be “powerfu’ hungry.” This indifference as to the future robbed slavery of much of its hardship, and although every one condemns the idea in the abstract, there are many humane men and women who do not think the colored man suffered half as much as has so often and so emphatically been stated.

Abolition was advocated with much earnestness for many years prior to Lincoln’s famous emancipation proclamation. The agitation first took tangible shape during the administration of General Jackson, a man who received more hero worship than has fallen to the lot of any of his successors. To a zealous, if perhaps bigoted, Quaker belongs the credit of having started the work, by founding a newspaper, which he called the “Genius of Universal Emancipation.” William Lloyd Garrison, subsequently with “The Liberator,” was connected with this journal, and in the first issue he announced as his programme, war to the death against slavery in every form. “I will not equivocate; I will not excuse; I will not retreat a single inch, and I will be heard,” was the announcement with which he opened the campaign, which he subsequently carried on with more conspicuous vigor than success.

Garrison handled the question of the relation between the white and colored people of the country without gloves, and his very outspoken language occasionally got him into trouble. The people who supported him were known as Abolitionists, a name which even at that early date conjured up hard feeling, and divided household against household, and family against family. Among these Garrison was regarded as a hero, and to some extent as a martyr, while the bitterness of his invective earned for him the title of fanatic and crank from the thousands who disagreed with him, and who thought he was advocating legislation in advance of public sentiment.

The debates of the days of which we are speaking were full of interest. Many of the arguments advanced teemed with force. The Abolitionists denounced the Republic for inconsistency, in declaring that all men were equal, and then keeping 3,000,000 colored people in enforced subjection. In reply the Bible was freely quoted in defense of slavery, and the fight was taken up by ministers of religion with much zeal. It was not, by any means, a sectional question at that time. While the slaves were owned by Southern planters and landed proprietors, they were purchased and kept on borrowed capital, and many of the men in the North, who were supposed to sympathize with the Abolitionists, were as much interested in the perpetuation of slavery as those who actually owned the slaves themselves.

In the year 1831, a negro named Turner, supported by six desperate and misguided fellow countrymen, started out on what they regarded as a practical crusade against slavery. Turner professed to have seen visions such as inspired Joan of Arc, and he proceeded to fulfill what he regarded as his divine mission, in a very fanatical manner. First, the white man who owned Turner was murdered, and then the band proceeded to kill off all white men in sight or within convenient reach. Within two days nearly fifty white men were destroyed by those avenging angels, as they were called, and then the insurrection or crusade was terminated by the organizing of a handful of white men who did not propose to be sacrificed as had been their fellows.

Turner’s bravery was great when there was no resistance, but he recognized that discretion was the better part of valor the moment organized resistance was offered. Taking to the woods, he left his followers to shift for themselves. For more than a week he lived on what he could find in the wheat fields, and then, coming in contact with an armed white man, he speedily surrendered. A week later he was hanged, and seventeen other colored men suffered a like penalty for connection with the conspiracy. The murderous outbreak had other dire results for the negro, and caused many innocent men to be suspected and punished.

A year later, Garrison started the New England Anti-Slavery Society, which was followed by many similar organizations. So intense did the feeling become that President Jackson thought it advisable to recommend legislation excluding Abolition literature from the mails. The measure was finally defeated, but in the Southern States, particularly, a great deal of mail was searched and even condemned. Rewards were offered in some of the slave-holding States for the apprehension of some of the leading Abolitionists, and feeling ran very high, every outbreak being laid at the doors of the men who were preaching the new gospel of equal rights, regardless of color.

Mobs frequently took a hand in the proceedings, and several men were attacked and arrested on very flimsy pretexts. In 1836, the Pennsylvania Hall, in Philadelphia, was burned, because it had been dedicated by an anti-slavery meeting. So bitter did the feeling become that every attempt to open schools for colored children was followed by disturbance, the teachers being driven away and the books destroyed. Numerous petitions on the subject were sent to Congress, and there was an uproar in the House when it was proposed to refer a petition for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia to a committee. The Southern Congressmen withdrew from the House as a formal protest, and the word “secession,” which was subsequently to acquire such a much more significant meaning, was first applied to this action on their part.

A compromise, however, was effected, and the seceding members took their seats on the following day. Feeling, however, ran very high. Some people returned fugitive slaves to their owners, while others established what was then known as the underground railway. This was a combination between Abolitionists in various parts, and involved the feeding and housing of slaves, who were passed on from house to house and helped on their road to Canada. Much excitement was caused in 1841 by the ship “Creole,” which sailed from Richmond with a cargo of 135 slaves from the Virginia plantation. Near the Bahama Islands one of the slaves named Washington, as by the way a good many thousand slaves were named from time to time, headed a rebellion. The slaves succeeded in overpowering the crew and in confining the captain and the white passengers. They forced the captain to take the boat to New Providence, where all except the actual members of the rebelling crowd were declared free.

Joshua Giddings, of Ohio, offered a resolution in the House of Representatives claiming that every man who had been a slave in the United States was free the moment he crossed the boundary of some other country. The way in which this resolution was received led to the resignation of Mr. Giddings. He offered himself for re-election, and was sent back to Congress by an enormous majority. As Ohio had been very bitter in its anti-negro demonstrations, the vote was regarded as very significant. The Supreme Court decided differently from the people, and a ruling was handed down to the effect that fugitive slaves were liable to re-capture. The court held that the law as to slavery was paramount in free as well as slave States, and that every law-abiding citizen must recognize these rights and not interfere with them. Feeling became very intense after this, and for a time it threatened to extend far beyond rational limits. In the church the controversy waxed warm, and in more than one instance division as well as dissension arose.

In 1858, a new phase was given to the controversy by John Brown. Every one has heard of this remarkable man, who was regarded by some as a martyr, and by others as a dangerous crank. As one writer very aptly puts it, John Brown was both the one and the other. That his intentions were in the main good, few doubt, but his methods were open to the gravest censure, and according to some deep thinkers he was, in a large degree, responsible for the bitter feeling which made war between the North and the South inevitable. Probably this is giving undue importance to this much-discussed enthusiast, who regarded himself as a divine messenger sent to liberate the slaves and punish the slave-holders.

He conceived the idea of rallying all the colored people around him in the impregnable mountains of Virginia, and having drafted a constitution, he proceeded to unfurl his flag and call out his supporters. In October, 1859, he took possession of the United States Armory at Harper’s Ferry, interfered with the running of trains, and practically held the town with a force of some eighteen men, of whom four were colored. Colonel Robert E. Lee quickly came on the scene with a detachment of troops and drove the Brown following into an engine-house. They declined to surrender, and thirteen were either killed or mortally wounded. Two of Brown’s sons were among those who fell, and the leader himself was captured. He treated his trial with the utmost indifference, and went to the scaffold erect and apparently unconcerned. His body was taken to his old home in New York State, where it was buried.

Abraham Lincoln must not be included in the list of enthusiastic Abolitionists, although he eventually freed the slaves. In speeches made prior to the war he expressed the opinion that in slave States general emancipation would be ill-advised, and although his election was looked upon as dangerous to slave-holders’ interests, the fear seems to have been prophetic in a large measure. It was not until the war had lasted far longer than originally anticipated that Lincoln definitely threatened to liberate the colored slaves. That threat he carried into execution on January 1st, 1863, when 3,000,000 slaves became free. The cause of the Confederacy had not yet become the “lost cause,” and the leaders on the Southern side were inclined to ridicule the decree, and to regard it rather as a “bluff” than anything of a serious order. But it was emancipation in fact as well as in deed, as the colored orator never tired of explaining.

Such in outline is the history of the colored man during the days of enforced servitude. Of his condition during that period volumes have been written. Few works printed in the English language have been more widely circulated than “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” which has been read in every English-speaking country in the world, and in many other countries besides. It has been dramatized and performed upon thousands of stages before audiences of every rank and class. As a descriptive work it rivals in many passages the very best ever written. Much controversy has taken place as to how much of the book is history how much of it is founded upon fact and how much is pure fiction. The ground is a rather dangerous one to touch. It is safest to say that while the brutality held up to scorn and contempt in this book was not general in the slave States or on plantations in the South, what is depicted might have taken place under existing laws, and the book exposed iniquities which were certainly perpetrated in isolated cases.

That all negroes were not treated badly, or that slavery invariably meant misery, can be easily proved by any one who takes the trouble to investigate, even in the most superficial manner. When the news of emancipation gradually spread through the remote regions of the South, there were hundreds and probably thousands of negroes who declined absolutely to take advantage of the freedom given them. Many most pathetic cases of devotion and love were made manifest. Even to-day there are numbers of aged colored men and women who are remaining with their old-time owners and declining to regard emancipation as logical or reasonable.

Not long ago, a Northern writer while traveling through the South found an aged negro, whom he approached with a view to getting some interesting passages of local history. To his surprise he found that the old man had but one idea. That idea was that it was his duty to take care of and preserve his old master’s grave. When the war broke out, the old hero was the body-servant or valet of a man, who, from the very first, was in the thick of the fight against the North. The colored man followed his soldier-master from place to place, and when a Northern bullet put an end to the career of the master, the servant reverently conveyed the body back to the old home, superintended the interment, and commenced a daily routine of watching, which for more than thirty years he had never varied.

All the relatives of the deceased had left the neighborhood years before, and the faithful old negro was the only one left to watch over the grave and keep the flowers that were growing on it in good condition. As far as could be learned from local gossip, the old fellow had no visible means of subsistence, securing what little he needed to eat in exchange for odd jobs around neighboring houses. No one seemed to know where he slept, or seemed to regard the matter as of any consequence. There was about the jet black hero, however, an air of absolute happiness, added to an obvious sense of pride at the performance of his self-imposed and very loving task.

Instances of this kind could be multiplied almost without end. The negro as a free man and citizen retains many of the most prominent characteristics which marked his career in the days before the war. Now and again one hears of a negro committing suicide. Such an event, however, is almost as rare as resignation of an office-holder or the death of an annuitant. Indifference to suffering and a keen appreciation of pleasure, make prolonged grief very unusual among Afro-Americans, and in consequence their lives are comparatively joyous.

One has to go down South to appreciate the colored man as he really is. In the North he is apt to imitate the white man so much that he loses his unique personality. In the Southern States, however, he can be found in all his original glory. Here he can be regarded as a survival of preceding generations. In the South, before the war, the truism that there is dignity in toil was scarcely appreciated at its full worth. The negro understood, as if by instinct, that he ought to work for his white master, and that duties of every kind in the field, on the road and in the house, should be performed by him. For a white man who worked he entertained feelings in which there was a little pity and a great deal of contempt. He has never got over this feeling, or the feeling which his father before him had. Down South to-day the expression “po’ white trash” is still full of meaning, and the words are uttered by the thick-lipped, woolly-headed critics with an emphasis and expression the very best white mimic has never yet succeeded in reproducing.

George Augustus Sala, one of England’s oldest and most successful descriptive writers, talks very entertainingly regarding the emancipated slave. The first trip made to this country by the versatile writer referred to was during the war.

He returned home full of prejudices, and wrote up the country in that supercilious manner European writers are too apt to adopt in regard to America. Several years later he made his second trip, and his experiences, as recorded in “America Revisited,” are much better reading, and much freer from prejudice.

“For full five and thirty years,” he writes, “had I been waiting to see the negro ‘standing in the mill pond.’ I saw him in all his glory and all his driving wretchedness at Guinneys, in the State of Virginia. I own that for some days past the potential African, ‘standin’ in de mill pond longer than he oughter’ had been lying somewhat heavily on my conscience. My acquaintance with our dark brethren since arriving in this country had not only been necessarily limited, but scarcely of a nature to give me any practical insight into his real condition since he has been a free man free to work or starve; free to become a good citizen or go to the devil, as he has gone, mundanely speaking, in Hayti and elsewhere. Colored folks are few and far between in New York, and they have never, as a rule, been slaves, and are not even generally of servile extraction. In Philadelphia they are much more numerous. Many of the mulatto waiters employed in the hotels are strikingly handsome men, and on the whole the sable sons of Pennsylvania struck me as being industrious, well dressed, prosperous, and a trifle haughty in their intercourse with white folks.

“In Baltimore, where slavery existed until the promulgation of Lincoln’s proclamation, the colored people are plentiful. I met a good many ragged, shiftless, and generally dejected negroes of both sexes, who appeared to be just the kind of waifs and strays who would stand in a mill pond longer than they ought to in the event of there being any convenient mill pond at hand. But the better class darkeys, who have been domestic slaves in Baltimore families, seemed to retain all their own affectionate obsequiousness of manner and respectful familiarity. Again, in Washington, the black man and his congeners seemed to be doing remarkably well. At one of the quietest, most elegant and most comfortable hotels in the Federal Capital, I found the establishment conducted by a colored man, all of whose employes, from the clerks in the office to the waiters and chambermaids, were colored. Our chambermaid was a delightful old lady, and insisted ere we left that we should give her a receipt for a real old English Christmas plum pudding.

“But these were not the mill pond folk of whom I was in quest. They were of the South, as an Irishman in London is of Ireland, but not in it. I had a craving to see whether any of the social ashes of slavery lived their wonted fires. Away down South was the real object of my mission, and in pursuit of that mission I went on to Richmond.”

Mr. Sala proceeds to give a most amusing account of his ride from New York to Richmond, with various criticisms of sleeping-car accommodation, heartily endorsed by all American travelers who have read them. Arriving at Richmond he asked the usual question: “Is not the negro idle, thriftless and thievish?” From time immemorial it has been asserted that the laws of meum and tuum have no meaning for the colored man. It is a joke current in more than one American city, that the police have standing orders to arrest every negro seen carrying a turkey or a chicken along the street. In other words, the funny man would have us believe that the innate love of poultry in the Ethiopian’s breast is so great that the chances are against his having been possessed of sufficient force of character to pass a store or market where any birds were exposed for sale and not watched.

It is doubtless a libel on the colored race to state that even the majority of its members are chicken thieves by descent rather than inclination, just as it is a libel on their religion to insinuate that a colored camp meeting is almost certain to involve severe inroads into the chicken coops and roosts of the neighboring farmers. Certain it is, however, that chicken stealing is one of the most dangerous causes of backsliding on the part of colored converts and enthusiastic singers of hymns in negro churches. The case of the convert who was asked by his pastor, a week after his admission to the church, if he had stolen a chicken since his conversion, and who carefully concealed a stolen duck under his coat while he assured the good man that he had not, is an exaggerated one of course, but it is quoted as a good story in almost every State and city in the Union.

Mr. Sala objects very much to judging a whole class of people by a few street-corner or cross-road loungers. The negro he found to be superstitious, just as we find them to-day. Even educated negroes are apt to give credence to many stories which, on the face of them, appear ridiculous. The words “Hoodoo” and “Mascot” have a meaning among these people of which we have only a dim conception, and when sickness enters a family the aid of an alleged doctor, who is often a charlatan of the worst character, is apt to be sought. It will take several generations to work out this characteristic, and perhaps the greatest complaint the colored race has against those who formerly held them in subjection, is the way in which voodoo and supernatural stories were told ignorant slaves with a view to frightening them into obedience, and inciting them to extra exertions.

For absolute ignorance and apparent lack of human understanding, the negro loafer to be found around some of our Southern towns and depots may be quoted as a signal and quite amusing example. The hat, as Mr. Sala humorously puts it, resembles an inverted coal scuttle or bucket without handles, and pierced by many holes. It is something like the bonnet of a Brobdingnagian Quakeress, huge and flapped and battered, and fearful to look upon.

“Hang all this equipment,” this interesting writer goes on to say, “on the limbs of a tall negro of any age between sixteen and sixty, and then let him stand close to the scaffold-like platform of the depot shanty and let him loaf. His attitude is one of complete and apathetic immobility. He does not grin. He may be chewing, but he does not smoke. He does not beg; at least in so far as I observed him he stood in no posture and assumed no gestures belonging to the mendicant. He looms at you with a dull, stony, preoccupied gaze, as though his thoughts were a thousand miles away in the unknown land; while once in every quarter of an hour or so he woke up to a momentary consciousness that he was a thing neither rich nor rare, and so wondered how in thunder he got there. He is a derelict, a fragment of flotsam and jetsam cast upon the not too hospitable shore of civilization after the great storm had lashed the Southern sea to frenzy and the ship of slavery had gone to pieces forever. Possibly he is a good deal more human than he looks, and if he chose to bestir himself and to address himself to articulate discourse, could tell you a great many things about his wants and wishes, his views and feelings on things in general which, to you, might prove little more than amazing. As things go, he prefers to do nothing and to proffer no kind of explanation as to why he is standing there in a metaphorical mill pond very much ‘longer than he oughter.’”

One turns with pleasure from the severe, but perhaps not overdrawn, character sketch of the colored loafer, to the better side of the modern negro. The intense desire for education, and the keen recognition of the fact that knowledge is power, point to a time when utter ignorance even among the negroes will be a thing of the past. Prejudice is hard to fight against, and the colored man has often a considerable amount of handicap to overcome. But just as Mr. Sala found the typical negro, “standing in the mill pond longer than he oughter,” a sad memento of the past, so the traveler can find many an intelligent and entertaining individual whose accent betrays his color even in the darkest night, but whose cute expressions and pleasant reminiscences go a long way towards convincing even the sternest critic that the future is full of hope for a race whose past has in it so little that is either pleasing or satisfactory.