LIBERIA. A republic founded by black men, reared by black men, maintained by black men, and which holds out to our hope the brightest prospects.—Henry Clay. BULLETIN No. 4. FEBRUARY, 1894. ISSUED BY THE AMERICAN COLONIZATION SOCIETY. CONTENTS. FRONTISPIECE—ARTHUR BARCLAY. SEVENTY-SEVENTH ANNUAL REPORT OF THE AMERICAN COLONIZATION SOCIETY i ARTHUR BARCLAY, Postmaster General of Liberia. io TWO AFRICAS PI. C. POTTER n OF ARTHINGTON J. Ormond Wii.son 13 THE NEGRO OF THE UNITED STATES, James H. Beodgett 16 THE COMMON SCHOOLS 01' LIBERIA . . J. C. .Stevens 59 SECOND INAUGURAL ADDRESS OF PRESIDENT CHEESEMAN OF LIBERIA, JANUARY 1, 1894 62 LETTER FROM HERR J. BTJTTIKOFER 69 LIBERIA ASSERTING HERSELF 70 THE DOMESTICATION AND INTRODUCTION OF NEW ANIMALS 73 MISSIONS IN AFRICA 75 BRITISH POLICY IN AFRICA -77 COMMON SENSE PRECAUTIONS IN TROPICAL COUNTRIES . .79 MARKET IN EAST AFRICA . . . 80 THE KOLA .... 81 ISLAM AND DAHOMEY ... . .85 ITEMS 87 WASHINGTON, O COLONIZATION BUILDING, 450 PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE. THE AMERICAN COLONIZATION SOCIETY. President: 1892 Right Rev. HENRY C. POTTER, D. D., New York. Vice-Presidents : 1851 Rev. Robert Ryland, D. D., Ky. 1851 Hon. Frederick P. Stanton, Va. 1866 Hon. James R. Doolittle, Wis. 1867 Mr. Samuel A. Crozer, Pa. 1870 Mr. Robert Arthington, England. 1874 Rev. Bishop R. S. Foster, D. D., Mass. 1874 Rt. Rev. Gregory T. Bedell, D. D., O. 1875 Rt. Rev. M. A. DeW. Howe, D. D., Pa. 1875 Mr. Samuel K. Wilson, N. J. 1876 Rev. Samuel E. Appleton, D. D., Pa. 1876 Rev. H. M. Turner,. D. D., LL. D., Ga. 1877 Rev. E. G. Robinson, D. D., R. I. 1877 Rev. William E. Schenck, D. D. Pa. 1878 Hon. Richard W. Thompson, Ind. 1878 Admiral Robert W. Shufeldt, U. S. X. 1880 Rev. Samuel D. Alexander, D.D., N.Y. 1881 Rev. Bishop II. W. Warren, D. D., Col. 1882 Mr. Henry G. Marquand, N. Y. 1884 Rev. George D. Boardman, D. D., Pa. 1884 Rev. Bishop E. G. Andrews, D.D., N.Y. 1884 Prof. Edw.W. Blyden, LL.D., Liberia. 1886 Hon. Alexander B. Hagner, D. C. 1887 Hon. Robert S. Green, N. J. 1885 Hon. William Strong, D. C. 1888 Rev. J. Aspinwall Hodge, D. D., Ct. 1888 Mr. Arthur M. Burton, Pa. 1891 Rev. Leighton Parks, Mass. 1892 Hon. John Scott, Pa. 1892 Rev. Edward W. Appleton, D. I>., Pa. 1892 Rev. William A. Bart'ett, D. D., D. C. 1892 Mr. Osmun Latrobe, Md. 1893 Rt. Rev. Thos. U. Dudley, Ky. 1893 Hon. J. C. Bancroft Davis, D. C. EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE 1878 Mr. Reginald Fendali.. 1878 Rev. Thomas G. Addison, D. D. 1881 Judge Charles C. Nott. 1881 Rev. Byron Sunderland, D. D., Chairman. 1886 Dr. William W. Godding. 1888 Rev. A. J. Huntington, D. D. 1892 Mr. J. Ormond Wilson. The figures before each name indicate the year of first election. UFE DIRECTORS. 18C8 Mr. Edward Coles, Pa. 1869 Rev. Joseph F. Tuttle, D. D., Ind. 1870 Mr Daniel Price, N. J. 1S71 Rt. Rev. H. C. Potter, D D., X. Y. 1873 Rev. George W. Samson, D. D., N. V. 1878 Rev. Edw’d W. Appleton, D. D., Pa. 1885 Mr. William Evans Guy, Mo. SECRETARY. Mr. J. Obmond Wilson. TREASURER. Mr. Reginald Fendali.. general agent. Mr. Henry 1. Buell. Colonization _y,A 4.V, ponnsyh ania I "enue, Washington, D. C. 16 THE NEGRO OF THE UNITED STATES. fifty families and with them found a new settlement such as has been described, and it is believed that in no other way or place in all Africa can that amount be invested with a prospect of so great and lasting results. Where is the philanthropist, another Robert Arthington, whose name shall be given to a distinct unitin the settlement of Liberia and the civilization and Christianization of Africa? J. Ormond Wilson. THE NEGRO OF THE UNITED STATES. THE IMPORTED NEGRO. Beginning with 1619 and ending perhaps in 1861, or for over 240 years, almost two and a half centuries, there was a more or less continuous importation of laborers from Africa to this coun- try. For the present purpose we are less interested in the nationality of the traders, and the annual statistics of a traffic which has hardly lost its hold among civilized nations, than in the people who were transported and their descendants. The merest outline will be adequate regarding the traffic. At first it involved far less moral censure than dealing in ardent spirits does today, and whether the Dutch, who brought the first cargo, the English, who had an active part later, the enterprising Yankee merchants, who came into the lucrative pursuit, or the Spanish and the Portuguese, whose countries were convenient to the source of supply and whose colonies in the West Indies and South America enlarged the market, the business had at first almost free endorsement of nominally Christian nations and it had a long lease of life. A clause in the Federal Constitution provided that the importation of slaves should not be prohibited before 1808. The anticipation of that prohibition stimulated importations to a wonderful degree as the limit of guaranteed allowance approached. The moral sense of civilization was growing against the traffic. The northern States of our Union, in which plantation methods were not profitable, began to rid themselves of the slave system. In 1807 England abolished her slave trade. In 1808 the United States followed, and the traffic, which had gradually been sinking in respectability, passed into THE NEGRO OF THE UNITED STATES. 17 the hands of desperate adventurers, unscrupulous and cruel, ready to face the risks of outlawry and to sacrifice human life freely for gain or to avoid detection or capture. Under its piratic form the traffic had a varying activity, and came to an end only when the whole slave system of the country was on the eve of dissolution. It seems to be as well authenticated as incidents not of official record can be that some smuggled importations were landed in this country after the breaking out of the war of the rebellion. A cargo is believed to have been landed direct from Africa in 1857 in South Carolina, one in Alabama in the same year, and one in Louisiana in 1861. The English colonies near the coast of the United States were made free in 1834, but slavery continued in the Spanish islands, and there is no ques- tion but that the convenient proximity of the West India islands and the existence there of a Negro population added to the facility of keeping the labor market supplied in the plantation States of this country. The Negroes imported varied greatly in character from mild- mannered people captured in man-stealing forays to warriors of unyielding courage, born rulers of men, overcome in fierce con- flict with enemies to whom the value of marketable captives was more important than the destruction of their foes. From the civilized standpoint all were ignorant and superstitious heathens ; but there was a wide range in moral power between the black born to slavery in Africa and the captured chief or priest of a warrior tribe, though few such men survived battle with slave dealers. The mass of the importations was from the Guinea coast and Its vicinity, and whatever civilization they had was on a basis very different from that of modern Christian nations, if common to our ancestors. Tribes differed from each other in some par- ticulars. In many there was polygamy ; in some there was polyandry; what we sanctify as marriage ranged from a tem- porary to a permanent union. Man was the warrior, always armed for hunt or battle; woman generally did all other work and was the head of the family. The homes and the children were hers or belonged to her tribe. There was no marriage within the clan. The husband retained his membership in his own clan or tribe. With so broad a sweep as the slave trade took, instances occurred where just these statements would not 18 THE NEGRO OF THE UNITED STATES. hold true, but the exceptions are insignificant beside the general truth. Cannibalism existed, the sacrifice of slaves or even wives'about the grave of a chief was common, fetichism and sorcery were essentially universal, and devil worship was common. Fetichism attaches a spiritual quality and power to everything mysterious. The stone that bruises the foot has a spirit to conciliate, the thorn that pierces the hand may be made a fetich, and so on without limit, including animals. Some spirit or other controls everything. The fortune in fishing or in pursuit of game is good or bad, according as some witchery or fetich influence is quiet or active. Very similar beliefs exist in the remnant of our In- dians, as shown by Captain John G. Bourkeand others. What- ever difference of opinion there may be as to detail, the general truths of these paragraphs have a very great importance in all our study of the Negro in the United States. It must be emphati- cally remembered that most aboriginal Negroes attributed every mishap and adversity to a malicious influence and every death to conjuring or witchery. The priests or priestesses, if such terms be not too extreme for these personages, designated some- body as having caused the death. It might end in a sacrifice of a slave or it might serve to turn revenge upon a rival. A universal disbelief in natural death and a universal belief in the power of fetiches and in the powers of the sorcerers, now popu- larly known as Voodoo doctors, male and female, for the most part characterized the imported African. THE NEGRO DURING SLAVERY. We will now consider what was the condition of the Negro in this country under the institution of slavery. This cannot he done without continual reference to the dominant race because of the close association and direct influence. It will he con- venient to anticipate a third division of the discussion, namely, the condition of the Negro since slavery, sufficiently to give census tables that cover both periods at this point, with an explana- tion that the general term colored is so little affected by any other race in the regions of which we have specially to treat that it means persons of Negro descent wherever it occurs in citations here given. 19 THE NEGRO OF THE UNITED STATES. Many of the major statements here presented rest upon docu- mentary evidence for which direct credit can be given, but many incidental and minor statements cannot be so fortified. No such incident or allegation of fact is here given that is not either a matter of personal knowledge or a current belief in a communit y where the occurrence had a reputed existence. The rule of slavery that the child followed the condition of the mother was but the rule of a stage of primitive society in which the child belonged to his mother’s clan or tribe, no matter who his father was, and was not new to the Negro. This resulted in a multitude of light-colored people, legally and socially Negroes. The Anglo-American counts all with any mixture of Negro blood in the same category without stopping at maternal descent. The following table gives the number of white and of Negro descent in the United States at each national census and the rate of increase of each : Relation of White and Negro Population in the United States at each Census. Census years. Number. Per cent. Per cent, of in- crease from last census. White. Colored.* White. Colored* White. Colored* 1790 1800 3,172,006 4,306,446 757,208 1,002,037 80.73 81.12 19.27 18.88 35.76 32.33 1810 5,862,073 1,377,808 80.97 19.03 36.12 37.50 1820 7.862,166 1,771,656 81.61 18.39 34.12 28.59 1830 10,537,378 2,328,642 81.90 18.10 34.03 31.44 1840 14,195,805 2,873,648 83.16 16.84 34.72 23.40 1850 19,553,068 3,638,808 84.31 15.69 37.74 26.63 I860 26,922,537 4,441,830 85.62 14.13 37.69 22.07 1870 33,589,377 4,880,009 87.11 12.66 24.76 9.86 1880 43,402,970 6,580,793 86.54 13.12 29.22 34.85 1890 54,983,890 7,470,040 87.80 11.93 26.68 13.51 Owing to the social confusion, the first census after the war, that of 1870, is generally regarded as untrustworthy as to the Negro population at the South. The preceding and the follow- ing tables are from the Compendium of the Eleventh Census, ex- cept that Missouri is added to the next table, it having been a recent slave State. * Includes all persons of Negro descent. 20 THE NEGRO OF THE UNITED STATES. States and Territories. 1890. 1880. 1870. 1860. 1850. 1840. 1830. 1820. 1810. 1800. 1790. South Atlantic division 38.71 37.87 38.37 39.77 40.69 41.95 41.60 40.41 37.60 36.37 16.85 18.04 18.23 19.27 22.25 25.00 24.95 24.01 23.82 22.44 21.64 20.69 22.49 22.46 24.91 28.32 32.30 34.88 36.12 38.22 36.66 34.74 District of Columbia 32.80 33.55 32.96 19.07 26.59 29.87 30.81 31.55 33.07 28.57 41.76 41.86 34.39 37.06 40.23 42.69 43.38 43.41 41.57 40.86 AVest Virginia 4.29 4.19 4.07 84.67 87.96 36 42 36.36 35.64 35.93 34.38 32.24 29.35 26.81 no jn 58 93 nK 59 58 93 56 41 48.40 43.21 43.72 Georgia 46.74 47.02 46.04 44.05 42.44 41.03 42.57 44.41 42.40 37.14 35.93 Florida 42.46 47.01 48.84 44.63 46.02 48.71 47.06 South Central division 33.18 34.25 35.34 34.65 34.53 30.68 27.20 23.91 17.49 14.92 Kentucky 14.42 1 ti. 46 16.82 20.44 22.49 24.31 24.73 22.95 20.24 18.59 17.03 Tennessee 24.37 26.14 25.61 25.50 24.52 22.74 21.43 19.60 17.52 13.16 10.59 Alabama 44.84 47.53 47.69 45.40 44.73 43.26 38.48 33.19 Mississippi 57.58 57.47 53.65 55.28 51.24 52.33 48.44 44.10 42.94 41.48 Louisiana 49.99 51.46 50.10 49.49 50.65 55.04 58.54 52.01 55.18 Texas 21.84 24.71 30.97 30.27 27.54 Oklahoma 4.81 27.40 25 9.9. 25.55 22.73 20.91 15.52 11.76 Missouri 5.65 6.75 6.86 10.03 13.20 15.59 18.37 15.87 17.36 PERCENTAGE OF COLORED* OF TOTAL POPULATION, 1790 TO 1890. * Includes all persons of Negro descent. THE NEGRO OF THE UNITED STATES. 21 The mass of the colored population is in the Southern States. The numbers in Northern States are relatively small, and they are so distributed in the general population that little need be said of them here except that the most independent characters were the ones to make homes for themselves in slave days as well as now. They are employed as porters on sleeping cars, waiters in hotels, barbers, cooks, and at general service, as well as in coal mines and iron works. There are a few farmers, and in the great cities an occasional lawyer or other professional man, besides preachers who are some times scholarly men. There are localities in some of the northern cities in which degraded poverty has settled where one may find black as well as white. The small beginnings of the importation of black, superstitious savages were relatively important, since the Virginia colony into which they came was not only small, but it was the sole representative on this continent of English institutions in 1619, although the Dutch, the parents of modern English political ideas, had some hold about the mouth of the Hudson river. The first Negroes were valued for their capacity for labor, and not much thought was given to the humanity embodied in their forms; yet even at Jamestown the conflict of opinion began which lasted as long as the institution of slavery. Some general facts must be carried in mind in all the consid- eration of the history of the Negro in our Republic to explain conditions which appear contradictory and inharmonious. It would be tedious to follow, in rigid sequence of dates, events that had great influence on the condition of the Negro at eman- cipation. The popular erroneous impression in the United States and abroad is, that a group of free states gave a unani- mous support to universal freedom, and a group of slave states gave a unanimous support to slavery, illustrating that impres- sions are sometimes stronger than convictions, as facts showing that no such unanimity existed are generally known. Passing by any .dissent at the reception of the first cargo, fifteen years later the Swedes who settled along the Delaware river came pledged to have no slavery in their colony. The Swedish colony Avas the beginning of a flow of Scandinavians to this country, iioav of great proportions, and, few or many, the Swedes are en- titled to a leading place on the anti-slavery side. Although slavery for a time had a footing in all the colonies, 22 THE NEGRO OF THE UNITED STATES. Massachusetts and Rhode Island were early on record against it, and gradually it essentially disappeared from all states north of Maryland and the Ohio river. Mason and Dixon’s line, run as the southern boundary of Pennsylvania, became a famous po- litical mark of separation. The Huguenots, from France, in the Carolinas; Oglethorpe, the English founder of Georgia, with his Lutheran followers; the Wesleys, founders of Methodism, who visited Georgia; the Quakers, who from time to time found homes in North Carolina, Maryland, and Virginia, into which latter State they flowed along the mountain valleys from Penn- sylvania in influential numbers in the latter part of the last and the beginning of this century; the Dunkards, who overflowed from Pennsylvania into Virginia and Maryland about a century ago, and whose tenacious adherence to the hooks and eyes of their ancestors instead of modern buttons is but a minor mark by which certain of them are still recognizable at sight, particu- larly on the table-lands of what has become West Virginia; the Scotch Presbyterians that in part, like Quakers and Dunkards, followed down the mountain valleys—all these represented defi- nite historical forces on the side of universal freedom. The Huguenots became blended in the general population. The Lutherans (Saltzburgers) became separated into two groups— one would not buy or sell negroes or rum for generations, hut would provide for slaves if they came into their possession by inheritance or course of law without their own volition; the other would have nothing to do with slavery. Thus it occurred that in 1861 a Lutheran owned two slaves, while his brother would not own nor hire one. The Presbyterians carne to repre- sent a very wide range of belief and practice on this question. We find a Lutheran, a Quaker, and a Dunkard as well as a Moravian element infused into the anti-slavery sentiment of the slave States that was unwavering to the end, and we find a Huguenot, a Methodist, and a Presbyterian element that, though modified, was never wholly lost as an anti-slavery sentiment. It is very difficult to trace the history so as to do justice to all, and other important facts exist to demand recognition, hut the facts named are established beyond dispute. There were, besides, multitudes of individuals opposed at heart to the system under which they lived. When any in all this mass of people yielded to the con- ditions in which they lived and participated in slavery, their THE NEGRO OF THE UNITED STATES. 23 sympathies were far more with their work-people than is the case with the average employer of laborers. This tended to ameliorate slavery; it tended to build up the religious instruc- tion of the Negroes, and in the process of time the situation developed incongruous facts incomprehensible at a superficial glance. For public safety very stringent laws hedged in the action of slaves and of owners. In some of the States one could not free his slaves without removing them from the State, and certain free States would not admit them without a bond guarantee- ing their permanent support. There were many who consid- ered slavery wrong who had not energy or property enough to go through the struggle of setting their slaves free, hut the Negroes’ condition was modified by that element among the masters. Many could be named who left their native home and its institutions and making new homes for themselves set their Negroes free. One of these was Edward Bates, a devout Presbyterian, claim- ing a Quaker ancestry identified with Jamestown, Attorney- General of the United States through part of President Lincoln’s administration, who was born in Virginia, at his majority, in 1814, went to St. Louis, in Missouri, then likely to be a free State, and freed his slaves. There was a group of Presbyterians, who probably represented something of the southern migration along the mountain valleys, who took their slaves from northern Ala- bama and set them free in Illinois in 1837. One of these Presby- terians became a prominent anti-slavery lecturer and secured more than once the characteristic egging with which unpopular ideas were met in sundry places. The position of a multitude, of whom these are but instances, had a great bearing upon the development of the Negro from savagery to civilization. Generally in slave States it was unlawful to teach slaves to read ; no marriage of slaves had a legal character; the slave had no standing before the law except in certain cases where slave testimony might have weight if no white testimony was balanced against it; he had no surname, and was simply Judge Brown’s Sam or Colonel Smith’s Tom. On the plantations the Negro was mainly valued as a laboring animal, yet even when the planter was non-resident it was neces- sary to have nurses and cooks and body servants of various de- 24 THE NEGRO OF THE UNITED STATES. grees, and inevitably humanitarian sympathies would make themselves felt. In 1801 a accompanied a relative to his plantation, a little back of one of the cities of Louisiana, and she believed that she was the first white woman some of the Negroes had ever seen. She could not understand the jargon or language some of them used. She may have erred as to being the first white woman some had seen, but this seems certain: these Negroes had but little impress of Anglo-American surroundings; they habitually saw no w'hite person except an overseer and rarely saw their owner. There were occasionally owners who built chapels for their Negroes to hold service, and it was a general custom to have a portion of the church of the whites appropriated to the slaves. Of oral religious teaching they had quite as large a share as falls to the lot of mere laborers in free communities. In the sparsely-settled conditions preachers were not numerous and con- gregations were not readily gathered, and so grew the custom of gathering for a two or three weeks’ meeting in the leisure season and concentrating people and preachers from a considerable region. That is the camp-meeting of the West and South or the bush-meeting of the South, primarily a great gathering of the devout under conditions named, but drawing to it a multitude of peddlers and others with lower motives, so that in densely settled regions with abundant facilities for weekly and even daily public worship the camp-meeting is but a memento of the past and must be guarded by stringent police regulations to pre- vent its being overwhelmed by those who come for other than religious ends. Sometimes Negroes hired their time of their masters and went forth to work for wages. These often bought themselves and re- mained as freedmen in the States where they had been slaves, or went north. Such men had elements of strong character. One may wonder why this movement and the ransom of members of families left behind did not assume larger proportions. The encouragement was relatively small. It was not desirable to build up a class of free Negroes beside the slaves, and the north did not welcome them. This leads to a showing of the condition of sentiment at the north as contrasted with the popular idea of a uniform anti- THE NEGRO OF THE UNITED STATES. 25 slavery spirit. The pro-slavery mobs of northern cities need but be mentioned as reminders to any one who knows his country’s history. The national laws favored the owner in cases of run- aways and made the situation of a kidnapped freedman perilous. New Jersey did not really get the name of bondman off her records till a late day ; the name slaves appears in the census of I860, though covering but eighteen persons. It was hardly till the general abolition of slavery that every form of black bondage ceased. A condition somewhat like that terminated sooner, in Illinois, as mentioned below. Black laws, as they were called, putting special disadvantages upon Negroes, remained upon the statute books of several northern States till after the abolition of slavery; for example, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Kansas, and Oregon. In 1807 Indiana Territory, whose laws continued in that part which became Illinois Territory in 1809, passed laws authorizing bringing in Negroes to be bound to service; those over fifteen years to any agreed time; those under fifteen, men till thirty- five and women till thirty-two years of age. It was enacted that slaves might be brought into Illinois Territory temporarily to work at salt works near Shawneetown, and the right of the French settlers about Kaskaskiato hold their slaves was allowed. It was not till 1846 that Illinois was freed by a Supreme Court decision from all these shades of slavery. In 1813 it was enacted that free Negroes coming into the Territory should be whipped. The experience of the second governor of the State of Illinois was an illustration of anti-slavery sentiment among slave-holders and pro-slavery sentiment on free soil, of political complica- tion and manipulation rarely surpassed in kind. When his slaves were manumitted Edward Coles, an immi- grant from Virginia, by the election of 1822 governor of Illinois, had not filed the required bond to guarantee their support. He was prosecuted for the omission and fined $200 in each of ten counts in the Madison county court on a jury verdict, from which an appeal was taken to the State circuit court. While that was pending the legislature passed a law releasing him from the penalty. The circuit judge declared the law of release uncon- stitutional and void. The case went to the supreme court of the State, where the law of release was sustained. All this happened on soil consecrated to freedom by the ordinance of 1787. It was 26 THE NEGRO OF THE UNITED STATES. not a very cordial welcome to those who would go north to manumit slaves, or to slaves who would free themselves. Issues in Illinois and other northern States were discussed along with the proposition that arose from time to time to abolish slavery in the District of Columbia, and the servants of gentlemen in the south and the Negro families in the border States whose freed members were ever and anon passing back and forth to buy another member or to visit, caught some sense of it all, and even the dull roustabouts on the steamboats felt an influence at Cincinnati and St. Louis which they could not fail to convey to Memphis and Vicksburg and New Orleans* It is noticeable that in the last great popular debate, that of Lincoln and Douglas, from one point of view only a contest for a Senator’s seat, really a battle of champions for the preservation of free soil on one side and for the extension of slavery on the other, the advocate for slavery extension was a native of Vermont, an extreme northern State, while the argument for freedom was maintained by a native of slave-holding Kentucky, who later, as President, issued the emancipation proclamation. When the armed struggle came the border States furnished men to both armies. The people of the Southern States occupying the moun- tain regions were never seriously pro-slavery and sympathized with the national Government, while classes in the Northern States extended their pro-slavery sympathies to the Southern, and brothers were often found in the opposing armies. Personal servants enough came to Saratoga Springs, New York, to make influential centers of new light on their return, and this was but a single point for southern visitors who would take the risk of the fidelity of a slave to insure her return when her mis- tress was ready to go home with the children. Dense as dark- ness was on plantations given over absolutely to mammon, even there was liable to be a revelation through the restocking of the place by purchases from border States, either in the usual course of the traffic or when some fellow of mental vigor unyielding to such discipline as could be used in border States, was sold to the plantation as a white offender would be sent to prison. *The leading statements as to Illinois can be verified partly in Ford s History of Illinois, partly in the life and letters of Ninian Edwards. Ninian Edwards was the territorial governor of Illinois, and he, as well as Thomas Ford, was once governor of the State. THE NEGRO OF THE UNITED STATES. 27 There was a constant stream of Negroes from the border States to the plantations for punishment, to prevent loss by their escape to free States or Canada, a foreign land to which a few followed the north star, or in a deliberate traffic for gain. Every trans- portation of a border slave, or, in less degree, of a house servant from any part of the slave States to plantations run solely for cash returns, let some light into the minds of the heathen im- portations or the dullest of native-born Negroes. In the midst of all the agitation the Negro was rising from savagery. Every discussion of gentlemen at their dinners when a colored waiter stood behind them, every expression in a coach with a colored driver, every political conversation in the pres- ence of a body servant was a direct information of the importance he was assuming in national affairs. As Negroes sat in the white churches they caught the story of Moses and the Hebrew children, which was hardly second with them to the grace of Christ. The Negro who bought himself was a leading type of thrift even as compared with white men, but the mass of the Negroes had no training in thrift. A soldier to whom a stated amount of food is given at fixed intervals is liable to lose the sense of forethought and care that is developed in men who have to plan to secure an abundance in harvest and make it last over the barrenness of winter. The plantation Negro was fed much like the soldier. The house servants and servants in the towns drew much of their living from the materials broken on the masters’ tables. With the swarm of servants and children supplies were mainly kept under lock and key, to be released as wanted, whether in the house pantry or the smoke-house. It was discouraging to attempt to have the incidental relishes and toothsome variety of households of the well-to-do in free communities, so that gar- dens were limited, and the cooking which made certain families and localities famous was for the multitude but the rude prepara- tion of meat fat enough to fry itself and a plain corn cake. Even the poultry was mainly the perquisite of the slaves by whose attention alone fowls could live. A party of summer excursionists in the Canada woods away from their headquarters for two or three days, with Indian guides and cooks, must watch them closely that they do not eat the 28 THE NEGRO OF THE UNITED STATES. three days’ supply in one, or make a full meal of cheese or other articles to be used only as accessory to staple food. This was every-day experience in slavery and it resulted in settling down to a monotonous diet for white and black over vast tracts of country capable of furnishing a most agreeable variety for the table. The occasional variation with game exalted the appre- ciation of the opossum, which taste the slave had the best oppor- tunity to indulge. In the plantation States plowing for planting and tilling, seed- ing and harvesting were seasons of active work when every available hand must be utilized every available moment. Even there the work was often given out in tasks, so that energetic, strong slaves gained hours of leisure. It is the pressure of these busy months that makes the basis for stories of hard task-masters, especially for slaves who found their tasks beyond their strength, but even on the best-adjusted plantation it must have been essentially impossible to arrange to keep the hands steadily employed through the year. With rare exception there must have been a slack time on the rice, the sugar, and the cotton plantations when the Negro did not lie down at night so tired but that he could spare a little sleep if he wished. The Sundays were observed as days of rest as fully as any- where, and the week between Christmas and New Years was almost absolutely free to the Negroes. Some persons had more slaves than they could keep busy, and others who did not own any or enough for their needs depended on slaves hired of their masters. Occasionally large numbers were hired in a single contract. At the Christmas holidays the ordinary hired Negroes were free to canvass for a change of employers. The police system of the plantation was rigid. No Negro could go off the place without a pass, and the control of the quarters was in its way as complete as in a prison or a military camp. The same idea lay in the border States, where a strict plantation system could not hold and where individual ownership usually gathered but small groups. A thousand men in a military body with forty commissioned officers may impress one with an idea of perfect discipline, cleanliness, and order; but “ chuck-a-luck ” or some other gambling game may have its votaries there, and some venturesome fellow is quite likely to get by guards and sentries between roll-calls, when sleep is on the camp. Reduce THE NEGRO OF THE UNITED STATES. 29 the forty officers to one, and that one alien to his men; he may keep the field hands at work, through Negro drivers acting like non-commissioned officers, and he may know that all lie down in their quarters at dark ; he may be ready to note the first sign of movement by noise or lights, but he cannot know all that goes on within those quarters, nor every case of absenteeism in the night. Away from the plantations, and especially in the border States, restless Negroes would for considerable intervals manage to visit at night and gather for various purposes until something aroused the community to the knowledge that the Negroes were too sleepy in the daytime for service and were in mischief at night. Then there would be an energetic revival of the patrol, who would ride the roads at night to deal with every Negro found unlawfully abroad. Mount Vernon, Virginia, is known to more persons than any other old home in this country, so that a rough outline will at once suggest its value as preserving the type of the very best style of an old-time southern home. The pictures in general circulation give as a front view what was the rear so far as ordi- nary approach was concerned. The family dwelling had no dormitories for servants and no place for cooking. The build- ings were arranged on a simple plan, so that the mansion, some ninety feet long, occupied a side of a quadrangle. The sides of the quadrangle stretching from the mansion each began with kitchen buildings, on one side protracted by a smoke-house and other buildings, below which were grouped the stables ; on the other extended a garden and its greenhouse, with the Negro quarters still beyond. The fourth side of the quadrangle was open toward the country road. In the olden time saddle-horses were the general mode of conveyance, and one would ride in at the open end of the quadrangle, and a few rods from the house he would come to a horse-rack, no longer perpetuated at the Washington mansion, but still common at the south, made by setting two posts, some six feet high, joined at the top by a cross- bar, some ten feet long, having wooden pins set in it at an angle upward and with a lower cross-bar as a brace. A rider could dismount and pass the looped bridle reins under the top bar and back over a pin that sloped toward him, and his horse would have the freedom of his head with no risk of getting the reins 30 THE NEGRO OF THE UNITED STATES. under his feet. He could then walk up to the big knocker which still is on the door and make his presence known, if all this had not been anticipated by servants who, perceiving his approach, took his horse as he alighted and warned the master, so that the guest had no opportunity to knock. Each mansion was surrounded by an estate of hundreds of acres, and guests did not come over the long distances between their homes for a call. It was a proverb that one had not visited if he did not eat, and in suitable weather at Mount Vernon a part of the time was quite likely to be spent on the quiet side of the house, under the portico fronting the river, seen in the usual pictures. The Lee mansion at Arlington has essentially the same out- line of building arrangement. The door with its knocker has given way to a door without a knocker, and the once open space between the kitchens contains a modern water tank. These two mansions still retain features that indicate the old social life of master and slave, so far as slaves were employed about the house. Such complete establishments were not very common, and in the destruction of recent years most of them have perished, and such gardens as that at Mount Vernon were rare. They represent, however, the pattern on which wealthy planters endeavored to maintain their establishments, followed according to ability. Visits and entertainments were for all the adult members of the families interested far more than in our modern town society. Parents and young people rode together, and any acceptable admirer of a young lady joined the cavalcade of her family. As the guests arrived at the home of the host, were ready to take the horses as well as others to look after the riders. At a large gathering, servants of guests were likely to he conveniently at hand to render neighborly aid. If the darkness came on and the young people made up a dance, while their elders sat about and looked on, the servants peered in through the door and the fiddle was often in a Negro’s hands. It would sometimes occur that a family of young people had a more wholesome fear of impropriety when a family servant was looking on than in the simple presence of their parents. The old squire’s girls acknowl- edged that they were on their good behavior when Uncle Gabe, their preacher slave, was in the doonvay. This was but one of the anomalies of the system. THE NEGRO OF THE UNITED STATES. 31 On Sunday friends, especially young men, used to ride to their neighbors and to the homes where there was young company. In this at least one meal was involved. It was quite the custom of hospitality to welcome a guest for the night. This developed a quiet method of indicating disallowance to an undesired visitor. If his horse was promptly taken to the stable he was in good standing, but if the horse was left at the horse-rack his rider might mount as soon as he saw fit. “ They let his horse eat post oats ” came to be a saying to denote this social hint. All these phases of social life touched the Negro house servants. The darky boy was quickened into activity of mind as well as of body when the guests were riding up and he was catching the bridle reins or leading out the animals for the remount, and his elders in the cook-house or serving in the mansion had their wits quickened by every movement before them. It was not an important education for every one, but it was a mighty influ- ence in educating heathen Negroes toward citizenship in a re- public. There is a Greek story of a slave who was asked Who should obey, the master or the slave? and he replied, “ If a slave is a pilot or a physician, you must obey the slave.” The Negro slave was not a physician ; he was rarely a pilot; but the race track put many Negroes in supreme control over a limited circle of facts. The trainer, and in a more restricted way the rider, had a sphere of absolute authority. The boy that rode a Kentucky horse to victory in a four-mile heat before the assembled multi- tude got a revelation of power in himself as well as in the animal, and even the jockey who changed masters in the settlement of bets could never again be crowded down to the standard of a Guinea savage. THE NEGRO SINCE SLAVERY. Property.—No satisfactory statistical statement can be made of the property held by Negroes, as it is to so limited a degree that records of deeds give the race of the parties interested. In the States of Georgia and Virginia a separate return is made for property held by the colored people. The total population of Georgia at the census of 1890 was 1,837,353 ; Negro population, 858,815 ; the total valuation of property by the comptroller 32 THE NEGRO OF THE UNITED STATES. general’s report for 1892 is $421,149,509; the Negroes hold $14,869,575, or near (one-twenty-ninth) of the whole. For Virginia, in 1890, the population was 1,655,980; Negro population, 635,438; in 1892 the total valuation of property was $300,717,366, according to the auditor’s report; property held by Negroes, $9,425,085, near fa (one-thirty-second) of the whole. In the city of Richmond, Virginia, the Negroes are about two-fifths of the population. They pay near (one-forty- first) of the tax on real estate; one-third of the capitation tax ; one-eighty-sixth of the personal property tax ; one twenty-four- thousand-two-hundredth of the income tax, practically no in- come tax, which is collected on excess of net incomes of $600. The States of Virginia and Georgia are exceptional in making definite account of property of colored people. At the close of the war, in 1865, the Negro had very little he could claim in fee—too little to form a basis of comparison. A small number of churches devoted to the use of the Negroes may have had titles to their advantage, hut for the most part the titles to churches then in use, as well as those since built, are recent acquirements. The property in the Negro churches stands at nearly twenty-seven million dollars. In the city of Washington some highly valuable real estate is owned by Ne- groes, and the aggregate held by them amounts in value to some millions of dollars. It is an impression among a large class of observers that the young colored people are not as thrifty as the former slaves—an impression quite as prevalent about young white men whose fathers held the plow or hoed the corn. The financial distress brought upon the country by our extravagance and speculative ventures has found the black man more provi- dent in certain respects than the white man of like resources, at least in the National Capital. The Negro has fewer notes and mortgages on lots bought for a rise, and he has had a very small share in the attempt to turn the farms adjacent to railroad sta- tions into town lots at city prices. He has been pinched in the lack of employment, but he often takes care of his rent better than a white man of like income. In the south it was the custom of planters to borrow money upon the growing crop, and that has been perpetuated by the small cultivators of today. Supplies in the early season are bought and the crop is pledged in advance. With the poor THE NEGRO OF THE UNITED STATES. 33 everything tangible is likely to be under a lien. The land is likely to be mortgaged; the tools, if of any value, are as likely to be under a chattel mortgage, and in expressive terms it has been said there’s hardly a mule in certain districts without a plaster on his back in the shape of a lien. Cotton crops or any others whose future can be estimated are pledged, especially whatever cannot be eaten or used at home. Corn crops are not so much pledged, as the amount to be harvested for sale is wholly guesswork, with roasting ears and a readiness for home consumption by men and mules to be considered. The poor Negro is likely to have the enjoyment of a corn crop, but at best it is not the crop of a corn-belt State, and often is but a patch. Negroes and whites alike are under the weight of crop liens, and ignorance and poverty rather than blood determine the relative weight of the burden. The Negro sometimes escapes the grind of debt by being too poor to pledge anything for credit. The Negro just now is peculiarly open to the persuasions of emigrant agents, and yet it would be hard to say whether whites or Negroes have been most open to the allurements of better prospects by change. Voluntary migration is less a habit with the Negro of the United States than with the white, so that the readiness to migrate from State to State or out of the country attracts more attention. There is an incessant change of loca- tion going on in narrower limits that does not tend to accumu- lation of resources or strength in social organizations. At the same time there are spots where truck gardening is pursued as a new industry to the great advantage of both races. Such are the vicinity of Norfolk, Virginia, where lies one of the most noted districts of miscellaneous production ; the vicinity of Augusta, Georgia, where one might say a county wTas a melon patch; points in the Carolinas and Florida convenient for shipping; points in North Carolina and near Little Rock, in Arkansas, superior for strawberries, and others for raising early vegetables along the line of the direct rail connection between the cities of the Gulf and western Tennessee, Alabama, and Missis- sippi and the cities of the north. Many individuals can be found like a former Virginia black slave who lives on the heights overlooking the Potomac. No better native persimmons grow than on a tree which he planted. He has a comfortable home, chickens, fruit, and vegetables, and, 34 THE NEGRO OF THE UNITED STATES. in his own words, lie “ never paid twenty-five cents for all you see on this place; I built the house and planted everything with these two hands.” The conditions of service favor a class quite the opposite. A very large proportion of the house servants go home to sleep. They are generally allowed to carry home any- thing of food or clothing broken or worn so that the employers would make no further use of it, and there is a constant tempta- tion to encroach on good family supplies. A set of indifferent Negro men will work in the busy season and settle down very comfortably in the dull season to live on the earnings of their wives and sweethearts at service or washing and the more or less broken victuals they bring home. One housekeeper says it is necessary not only to consider the quality of a servant one hires, but also the size of the family left at her home, as a gauge of the food that will be carried off as broken victuals. Throughout the south there is a large element, perhaps, in the first instance, simply negligent and without care for the morrow in the most literal sense, content to drop work when enough has been earned to meet immediate want, without reflection upon the advantages of providing when one has opportunity to earn for the days in which one cannot earn. It is a very old custom to allow part or all of Saturday for going to the country town or the market place, and many fairly industrious people take two days of rest in the week. The earnestly thrifty ones are content with Sunday and the time that must he spent in marketing, but many others gather who have no errand except the general sociability of the Satur- day crowd. Peaceable and good-natured in the morning, lean- ing in groups against the sunny side of a building or the awning- posts of the stores in boisterous good feeling, a little whisky will fire the passions so as to put some feeling of danger in all the isolated households of the vicinity, at least till Sunday is over. These conditions are attracting thoughtful attention of public men, and it is seriously proposed to check the vagabondish element by calling every one found hanging about without occupation to account or putting him under penalty as a vagrant. The south has been wonderfully free from the white tramps that now trouble so many civilized countries; but with the multiplication of rail- roads and the growing density of population it will be more difficult to guard quiet homes without providing against both the THE NEGRO OF THE UNITED STATES. 35 tramp and the loafer. It requires but a very small number of such characters to terrorize a community. It is not probable that all the mail and express train robbers in the country amount to more than a few score, yet every train must be run on the pre- sumption that it may be attacked next. Poverty in itself is no disgrace, hut it may become a foundation for crime when it is the result of rejection of every opportunity of acquisition, and statesmen and philanthropists are finding one of the most diffi- cult questions for the immediate future just at this point. The plantation policing and the patrol almost absolutely vanished with the abolition of slavery, and a substitute adapted to present conditions is an instant need. The mass of the Negroes are still tenants of mere huts, without the responsibility that restrains owners from lawlessness, and nine hundred and ninety orderly? industrious tenants will not prevent the sense of fear that ten positive loafers, drunk once a week, will create in a Men frightened and maddened by outrages add to the terror by retaliatory outrages, and a stigma rests upon the community as far as telegraphs can tell the shocking details. Education.—School records are but a superficial index of the forces that educate a people, yet, as they are tangible, we can gain something from them in estimating general conditions. In 1890 there were in private schools in the south, Missouri included, 50,723 colored pupils, and in the parochial schools of the country 10,993 colored pupils, all but a few hundred in the former slave States ; so that for round numbers we may say 61,000 are to be added to the public school enrollment of Negro pupils in those States, bringing the total enrollment up to a little over 1,349,000, which maybe more easily remembered as just under 1,350,000, who were at school at some time in 1890 in the States where the mass of the Negro population is. Of those in professional schools, 813 were in theological semi- naries, 65 in law schools, 274 in medical schools, 29 in schools for training nurses, 3 in schools of technology, 2,166 in schools for pedagogy. Of those studying theology, law, and medicine, all but twelve were men; of those studying for nurses, all were women; of those training for teachers, about 54 per cent, were women. About five-sixths of the pupils in the schools other than public were in those under the control of religious bodies. In the parochial schools the Catholics have about three-fifths of 36 THE NEGRO OF THE UNITED STATES. the pupils ; the Protestant Episcopal church has nearly one-fifth ; the Lutheran church the largest portion of those remaining. In all forms of denominational schools the prominent denomina- tions named in the order of their pupils are: Congregationalist, Presbyterian, Methodist, Catholic, Baptist, Protestant Episcopal, Lutheran. There are a number of large industrial training schools included among these private enterprises, some of which receive help from public funds and are therefore, by some persons, considered as public schools. The peculiar conditions under which public and private efforts are combined, generally in the south and exceptionally in the north, where a similar custom was general within the memory of middle-aged men, are unknown to most of the younger people in the States where free-school systems prevailed before the civil war. It became necessary in the census to lay down as a rule that a school should he counted as public that was responsible to public officers, and that a school should be counted as private that was controlled by private in- dividuals or corporations, though the public school might eke out its funds by tuition bills and the private school might re- ceive support from public funds. This was not a complete solution of the difficulty, since in the same house those teaching a public school till the public money was exhausted might have a private school part of the year, especially if they owned the whole property and took the children for free tuition only for an agreed term. It is not necessary to extend the explanations to be found in the census report on education here further than is necessary to understand the situation of the Negroes. The policy nearly uniform at the south is that the community shall provide the house and the State will aid in paying the ex- pense of teaching the school. In the open country fuel is an insignificant item. The county is the general unit of local gov- ernment instead of the town or township, as at the north. Local taxation by the town or by the school district, as now generally practiced at the north, to make good all deficiencies of other public funds to render the schools wholly free of direct expense to the pupils for tuition, is far less customary at the south. Com- pact bodies of population forming cities or independent districts are very often empowered to levy local taxes for school purposes, so that the school systems of these compact groups can now he compared more fairly with those of like groups in other parts of THE NEGRO OF THE UNITED STATES. 37 the country. The whites and the blacks have separate schools, but they are treated alike in the distribution of public money unless in some exceptional and illegal instances. The owner- ship of property lies mainly with the whites, a greater share of whom are stable residents. In some localities there are bodies of Negro owners, but the greater part are shifting tenants, with- out much property and without the zeal of local interest. Take, for example, a community large enough to maintain a large white and a similar Negro school. The State has as much money for one as for the other, but not enough to maintain them to the full nine or ten months called for by urban, or city, standards. The white proprietors may manage to collect a subscription ade- quate for a good building and for rounding out the sum needed to pay expenses for the required time. A frequent form of public benevolence at the south is the donation by an individual of a property for a public school. The Negro in his poverty cannot contribute much either for building anything better than his cabin or for extending the term when the public money is spent. The comparisons of school property north and south and of funds raised for schools fail to do full justice when they omit to note that a large part of the property used by the public for schools at the south does not appear as school property in any public record, and the funds used in lengthening out public school terms by subscription or tuition do not usually appear in the record. At present such sums cannot be definitely ascer- tained, but they form an important part of the expense to the community that maintains the school. The south is relatively sparsely settled ; the recuperation from the destruction of war, wonderful as it has been, has not yet brought the south to the ability of the old free-school States in raising money. Poor, sparse communities in any State will make an indifferent show- ing of figures when compared with dense, wealthy localities, though the very trials of their situation may develop some superior characters. It is customary for white or black in large portions of the south to put up buildings which may cost no money beyond what is paid for glass and hinges, and sometimes even those are omitted. Some one gives permission for erecting a building on his land, 38 THE NEGRO OF THE UNITED STATES. the adjacent forest supplies logs, a bee of those interested gets up a hut roofed against rain and the hot sun, and the value of school property stands at zero in public records, though it may mean much to the people who use it. Any sort of available semi-pub- lic building is likely to be utilized for the school. In Kentucky alone 140 Negro churches are recorded as thus used for public schools. If we look at the figures of professional students and search the record of the neighborhood schools, with their brief terms and their poor teachers, we may well sympathize with those leaders of organized effort for the Negro who doubt whether all that is done makes a gain in proportion to the gain of population. On the other hand, if we consider that only exceptional individuals in the Negro race at the south had education enough to read and write forty years ago, we may take courage and hope confidently for further improvement. The report on education for the eleventh census gives the fol- lowing figures for the recent slave States, showing the apparent relation of public common school enrollment to population, white and colored, 1890: Population—white, 15,493,823; colored, 6,944,915. Public common school enrollment—white, 3,358,527 i colored, 1,288,229. Per cent, of enrollment to population—white, 21.68; colored, 18.55. The apparent relative gain in public common school enroll- ment, white and colored, in the same States, 1880 and 1890, is given as, gain in number—white, 1,056,723; colored, 490,943. Per cent, of gain—white, 45.91; colored, 61.58. These figures are slightly modified by the omission of pupils under eight and over sixteen years of age in one State for the computation, they hav- ing apparently been omitted in 1880 from the account. The most serviceable work in the education of the Negro is in those efforts which aim to teach him thrift and connected in- dustry while showing him the use of books, and the Negro students who go out to teach brief terms between the planting and harvest and harvest and planting, in which they themselves participate on their little properties, have great promise of good before them. Health.—The Negro is a tropical man and he is in a hostile climate in cold regions. A very small part of the United States THE NEGRO OF THE UNITED STATES. 39 approaches his natural surroundings in annual temperature. It may be roughly outlined as a belt reaching from the mouth of the Chesapeake bay southward, embracing the coast of the Gulf of Mexico and extending inland as far as the tide flows up the rivers, or to what is called the fall line—that is, the line from which the rivers flow to salt water without falls. In general this will not be more than eight}' miles from the coast, but there are exceptional cases where the lowlands of river valleys furnish a semi-tropical climate at a greater distance from the coast. The true fall line of the Mississippi and that of the Ohio are a few miles up each river from their junction at a geological anticlinal known as the grand chain, although the tide does not reach so far. The overflow of lowlands in flood time restricts the area of river valleys available for habitation. The extreme southeast counties of Missouri and the western counties of Tennessee are good cotton counties, but they are the outposts of its cultivation as a staple, though under the stimulus of war prices thousands of bales were raised in southern Illinois, and in early days settlers in the Sangamon country, as it was called, in the central part of Illinois, raised cotton for home- made thread. As we approach the highlands, of which the Appalachian chain of mountains is the culmination, stretching from the ungenial north like a back-bone down into the Gulf States east of the Mississippi, or go back to the highlands of Missouri, occupying almost all the State south of the Missouri river and east of the Osage, or the highlands of Arkansas and of Texas, the Negro is uncomfortable. In the eighty-mile strip mentioned along the coast, in almost all Louisiana, southeastern Texas, half of Arkansas, and exceptional counties of Missouri and Tennessee, he may be regarded as comfortable, though the cold presses him at times within these bounds. It requires powerful reasons to carry the Negroes out of these limits, and for the most part those who have gone to northern States have kept near the valleys of the rivers that flow out to the south. New Jersey has a considerable colored population compared with other northern States; but two-thirds of the State may be deemed as a valley along tide-water, compensating for a northern latitude by low altitude and a sandy soil. Neither in New Jersey, however, nor in Kansas, to which Negroes were induced to go in 40 THE NEGRO OF THE UNITED STATES. hope of a relatively superior social standing, is the number great, except as compared with the ratio in other northern States. All other things being equal, the Negro tends to the warm regions, w'here frost is seldom known. All this has to do with the diseases that befall him. He has not only to endure the relative hardship which he shares with whites of like worldly possession, but, like the magnolia and the sweet-scented shrub of the Gulf States, he may go far north, but with a continually increasing risk of overstepping the power of endurance and with an increased necessity of artificial provision against inclement conditions. The so-called “ black belts ” are inevitable. Just as Scandi- navians push to the northern parts of our country to find a climate to which they are inured by generations of hereditary training, so the Negro tends to lands adjacent to the Gulf of Mexico and the lower Mississippi river, and indications already warn us that we may lose his help in our fields and workshops as he swarms into the islands about the Gulf and to the shores of the mainland beyond, the counterparts tropical Africa. The city of Washington, District of Columbia, capital of the nation, with its wide streets and lines of shade trees, with a water supply of unwonted excellence, and a drainage system, even if faulty, far better than that of many other cities, is popularly re- garded as a model city for beauty and health. Its population may be roughly stated to be two-thirds white and one-third Negro. The deaths of Negros and the deaths of whites may he roughly stated as equal for a series of years—that is, the rate of mortality is twice as great among Negroes as among whites. In Baltimore there are about one-fifth as many Negroes as whites. The report of the board of health of the State of Alabama for the year 1892 cannot be deemed as of high value for minute comparison by reason of imperfect returns, but it represents the effort of the State to build up a trustworthy system of records and gives us a view of the rural conditions. The population is given as 782,233; white, 429,625; colored, 352,608, or five negroes to six whites. There are reported births—white, 10,819; colored, 8,237; stillbirths, white, 310; colored, 350. The deaths reported are 7,820; white, 3,720; colored, 4,100. Death rates—white, 8.65 per 1,000 persons ; colored, 11.60. The returns published by the THE NEGRO OF THE UNITED STATES. 41 State of Virginia show a higher rate of mortality for the Negroes as compared with that of the whites. The following table of the comparative annual number of deaths in each thousand of the population for the two races in southern cities is from vital statistics of the District of Columbia and Baltimore, prepared for the eleventh census by Dr. John S. Billings, U. S. A.: Cities. Death rates , stillborn included. Aggregate. White. Colored. Average 27.45 22.66 37.98 Atlanta, Ga 24.84 18.28 33.57 Augusta, Ga 27.42 18.63 37.03 Baltimore, Md 24.75 22.61 36.41 Birmingham, Ala 42.94 35.15 53.24 Charleston, S. C 41.23 24.75 53.94 Chattanooga, Tenn 27.87 21.36 36.42 District of Columbia 25.85 19.79 38.22 Galveston, Tex 24.58 24.37 25.28 Knoxville, Tenn 37.72 34.89 44.80 Lynchburg, Ya 28.77 13.53 44.16 Memphis, Tenn 26.31 23.37 29.97 Mobile, Ala 33.82 26.05 43.75 Nashville, Tenn 18.07 14.39 23.92 New Orleans, La 28.40 25.41 36.61 Petersburg, Va 33.47 23.72 41.80 Raleigh, N. C 32.02 26.87 37.16 Richmond, Va 29.62 22.25 40.80 Savannah, Ga 35.66 29.04 41.47 Wherever we turn, whether to the tide-water cities or the mountain valleys, the cities of the uplands or the rural districts, we are confronted with a record unfavorable to the vitality of the Negro as he is now situated in the United States. If it were possible to take blacks and whites and set all those of mixed blood out of the comparison it might be more favorable to the Negro or it might not, but our statistics are, with rare exceptions, based upon a classification that places all wfith traces of Negro blood through either father or mother among Negroes. If it were pos- sible to take whites of the same pecuniary standing as Negroes, person for person, there is little doubt that the showing would be more favorable for the Negro ; and some years hence, if the 42 THE NEGRO OF TIIE UNITED STATES. Negro increases his average command of resources and poor whites crowd him up out of the lowest alley tenements, as already importations from the south of Europe begin to do in certain localities, the Negro showing may be relatively better. It is best here to limit ourselves to specific conditions at Charleston, South Carolina, a city noted for the high average of its scientific and sanitary reports for a long term of years, adding some bits of explanation from Savannah, Georgia, that we may have a hint of the interpretation put upon the circumstances by those longest and most intimately acquainted with them. Percentages and items vary as we go from point to point, but the great fact of disproportionate mortality of the whole Negro group as now counted, when compared with the white group as now counted, remains uniform. The fourteenth annual report of the State board of health of South Carolina for the fiscal year ending October 31, 1893, con- tains the annual report, 1892, department of health of the city of Charleston. The following table is taken from that report, with columns of death rates added to make the facts comparable at a glance with the other tables quoted : Comparative Mortality (Charleston, S. C). Whites. Blacks and colored. o 1 a <4- 'tr §c- ears. o C QC _T © O co _r o *■£ b 5 T? u u ® •rs £ s- bZ c *- cu £ £ i is o' £ iz c - - Ml Ph is — 1892 .... 28,870 586 1 in 49 20.41 36,295 1,3i 7 1 in 27 37.03 1891 .... 28,870 553 1 in 52 19.23 36,295 1,371 1 in 26 38.46 1890 .... 28,870 511 1 in 56 17.86 36,295 1,310 1 in 28 35.71 1889 .... 27,605 516 1 in 52 19.23 32,540 1,431 1 in 23 43.48 1888 .... 27,605 492 1 in 56 17.86 32,540 1,375 1 in 23 43.48 1887 .... 27,er 1,000. White. Colored. White. Colored. White. Colored. 1879 17,493 15,163 416 686 23.7 45.1 1880 18,229 15,019 462 885 25.3 58.8 1881 19,114 15,765 557 903 25.3 57.2 1882 20,514 16,819 375 740 18.2 43.9 1883 23,839 16,652 488 659 20.4 39.5 1884 25,362 19,150 466 703 17.9 36.7 1885.. .. '... 25,720 19,111 333 659 13.7 35.4 1886 26,675 19,111 458 953 17.1 49.8 1887 29,136 23,691 458 798 15.71 33.68 1888 32,000 25,000 366 665 11.45 26.60 1889 33,000 27,000 384 685 11.65 25.37 THE NEGRO OF THE UNITED STATES. 45 In Savannah the Negro population has varied from 10 to 25 per cent, less than the white in the different years, but the deaths of the Negroes have every year greatly outnumbered those of the whites, and the average ratio per thousand population has been over twice as great for Negroes as for whites. This city, in a latitude that we would deem more favorable than that of Washington, has a higher colored mortality than that of Wash- ington. The explanation of the high mortality among Negroes in Savannah may be given essentially as stated by Dr. William F. Brunner, health officer. His report contains an item—unde- fined causes of death, white, G; colored, 133. With this as a text Dr. Brunner says : “ The great number of deaths among the colored people com- ing under the head of undefined is a subject for serious consid- eration. All deaths coming under this head occur where there are no attending physicians and no satisfactory explanations are made concerning the sickness of the decedents. “ It will be noticed that two hundred and thirty persons have died without medical attention. “ In the majority of such deaths the relatives of the deceased person are to blame, as they often neglect to seek medical advice. “ In some cases that I have carefully examined I have detected the most inhuman neglect on the part of Negro parents. “ While it is a disagreeable duty to perform, I would also say that many Negroes die because they are unable to secure medi- cal advice. “ Provision has been made by ordinances of the city to provide medical attention for those persons who are unable to pay for medical attendance. “ Of the two hundred and thirty (230) deaths occurring where no physician was in attendance seventy-three were east of a line drawn from north to south, using Bull street as the line, and one hundred and fifty-seven west of that line. “ I have before spoken of this matter. I now reluctantly embody the above facts in this my annual report.” Under the head of “ Fruits ” Dr. Brunner says : “ The crops of fruits indigenous to this country were in super- abundance last summer, and, as a consequence, the market was often glutted with the overripe fruit, eagerly sought after by the Negro population. “A new fruit trade having been opened up with Central America, much of the refuse bananas and oranges are ravenously devoured by loafing Negroes. “As far as it is possible to do so the firms importing the fruit have driven these crowds from their vessels. 46 THE NEGRO OF THE UNITED STATES. “During the watermelon season it is a hard matter to keep River street clear of the melon rinds, and at times the market dock is-covered with decaying melon refuse.” The rate of still-births among the Negroes is higher at Savan- nah than at Charleston. Dr. Brunner throws light on the exces- sive mortality connected with births in this wise : “ The medical profession, always glad to cooperate with the city authorities in carrying out laws which touch their profession, have aided me by promptly reporting cases coming under their notice. Most of the intelligent midwives have also reported cases happening under their care, but there is a small army of ignorant ‘grannies ’ or Negro midwives who carry on a large and nefari- ous business, killing many infants among the colored people who, if left alone, would survive. “ These persons can neither read nor write, and when I find them attending Negro women plead ignorance of the new law and afterwards carefully conceal their work. “ There were, as will be seen by the table, one hundred and fifty-six (156) still and premature births among the Negro women during the year 1889. “A Negro woman by nature is a good breeder of children ; strong and healthy, not malformed by fashionable methods of dressing, so prevalent among the whites, she should be less apt to bear a dead child than a white woman. * * * It will continue to grow until measures are taken to prevent the killing of colored infants in utero. “A midwife law requiring all persons practicing the calling of midwifery to pass a satisfactory examination before a medical board should be passed, with a heavy penalty for violations of that law.” For comparison, let it he observed that the death rate for Eng- land and Wales in 1891 varied from 16.5 for 1,000 living in the best parts of rural England to 21.1 in the city of London. Scot- land reached a death rate of 20.7 in the same year, which was the highest since 1878, and the city of Glasgow had a death rate of 23. Religious and Humanitarian Societies.—So far as figures go, the Negro is as fully imbued with religion as the white man. It is very difficult to gain any clear idea of the moral force of religion. At one extreme there is the latest imported African superstition perpetuated in the degradation of abandoned plantations, where the Negroes have been essentially left to themselves since the THE NEGRO OF THE UNITED STATES. 47 war broke up their owners and ended the residence even of the white overseers, who used to brave miasma for their em- ployers, who were resident at most only during the winter season. At the other extreme are those whose Christian experience, faith, and worship are evidently of the most exalted character. Be- tween these extremes are all possible shades, and every one who studies the condition of the race in this country is liable to a bias in estimating the relative power of any grade of belief or practice. Two men may form widely different opinions in the matter, each of whom has a line of absolute facts as his foundation. Statistics are but superficial indices of religion, a sort of counting of badges and professions, that helps a little to judge what men are trying to do, but at the best giving very far short of a clear view. To know the lowest depth of religious ideas one must recall the worst things he ever read in the works of African travelers and remember that the devotees of these rites were transported to our plantations, in the most isolated of which their barbarisms would continue except that spectacular features, liable to attract the hostile attention of an overseer, would be driven into con- cealment. There is hardly an abomination named in the Hebrew and Christian scriptures as existing somewhere in some stage of society in thousands of years that did not find a place in heathen Africa and come over the Atlantic ocean in the slave ships. The facts cannot be commonly spoken of here with greater propriety than we could discuss the operations of the dissecting-room in the parlor. Paul, writing of a higher civilization, had to say, “ It is a shame even to speak of those things which are done of them in secret.” At the National Capital a Voodoo doctor is one of the person- ages occasionally developed in the police court. A Negro in Maryland of such aggressive religious character that he could not eat a meal where he was at work without asking a blessing so loud as to be heard over the premises was taken sick and pres- ently became frightened at his condition. A Voodoo doctor was called from Washington. After various mummeries a quantity of black bugs were shown in a bottle, which the Voodoo claimed to have taken from the sick man, who did not, however, recover. This Negro had been born and brought up in one of the most favored spots imaginable. A prisoner at the jail in the District of Columbia was found to 48 THE NEGRO OF THE UNITED STATES. have a human hand which had been exhumed and the fingers sold for amulets. That hand is still preserved. A feather hall is in the Smithsonian Institution which was used in North Caro- lina to lay on doorsteps to produce ill luck. A gentleman at Memphis had a cook, Mary, and a waiter, William. Mary ordered William about till he resented it and refused to do her bidding. She gave him a peculiar look with certain mutterings. Shortly afterwards he found a little bag in his overcoat pocket) which he dropped as quickly as possible, and to avoid touching it further kicked it out doors. He took Mary to task for an attempt to conjure him, which she denied, hut demanded that he should bring her the bag, which he would not touch again- Coming to the house in the dark, he found Mary down on her hands and knees, mumbling and sprinkling a powder across the doorsteps. His master found that he was about the premises and called him, but the line of powder had been laid to bring ill luck to him when he crossed it to enter the house, and he could not be induced to come in until his master called for a broom and swept off’ the powder line before a door. Snakes and lizards and the lower animals generally have great importance in the moral world of a very large number of Negroes. Even a devout Methodist cook in Virginia, kneading her bread, picked up a pinch of salt to throw over her shoulder to ward off ill luck when a cock flew upon the fence and crowed. The grosser forms of Voodoo belief and practice are not to be learned by direct approach. Nobody could be apparently more ignorant of their existence than the very men who carry horrid objects for luck or depend upon charms to conjure their enemies, but a search of an arrested person lets in occasional light. The emotional nature of the Negroes finds expression in their religious services. There is all the variety of worship found among white churches, with relatively more zeal in the singing and prayer. The preachers are still very ignorant as a body, although there is an increasing number of educated men. The Negroes are peculiarly liable to imposition by shrewd rascals who find the office of preacher a means of power, and many of the Negroes have come to consider this class of preachers as a demoralizing element. A devout Negro preacher seems to have special perception of biblical promises, parables, and prophecies, so far as they touch THE NEGRO OF THE UNITED STATES. 49 daily life. A missionary who lived on the Gaboon river more than a generation and who reduced the Mpwongwe language to writing said that the Mpwongwes could understand perfectly the prophecies of Isaiah when read to them because the poetic dis- guise was so completely in harmony with their own modes of thought and expression. No white doctor of divinity could make a more graphic presentation of the return of the prodigal son or treat its moral teaching better than was done by a black man whose formal education hardly extended beyond an ability to read and speak with general accuracy. There are colored preachers who do not hesitate at themes that demand the highest scholarship. A black preacher who had enjoyed better privileges than the one just cited took up the sub- ject of evolution. After the fashion of some white clergy who advertise obnoxious material which their hearers would never find without their help, this preacher warned the young men not to read the works of certain evolutionists. In a strain of eloquent reasoning he settled one point more clearly than white clergy generally succeed in doing when they take the subject into the pulpit. Referring to the difficulty in making an un- broken series of development from protoplasm up to man, he said, “ They tell us, brethren, there’s a missing link. I tell you, brethren, there’s no missing link; there’s a whole chain gone.” The Negro took his Christianity from the white man, and while the educated white man has built up his worship with such elements of education as the printed Bible, prayer book, and the hymn book the Negro in his illiteracy was making more of those elements not requiring ability to read. The Negroes now have professional evangelists, white and black, to some extent. On recent nights while the great Convention hall in Washington was packed to hear a white evangelist there were similar meet- ings in Negro churches. At least one Negro preacher was direct- ing his ushers that the room contained as many as could be comfortably accommodated and they must close the doors against any more. Every spot of standing room was crowded, so that when the mourners filled the front seats and the preacher made a further appeal it had a very familiar sound to those who have been in similar white meetings, “ If there’s one here who wants to be offered in this prayer—we are so crowded that you can’t well get down here amongst these mourners—just hold up 50 THE NEGRO OF THE UNITED STATES. your hand right where you are.” Some were shouting and gestic- ulating in their rapture, while moans and lamentations at times almost drowned prayer and exhortation. As the hour grew late the preacher said, “ Now, you don’t want to think that Christ is down under the benches, hut get right up off your knees and remember that Christ is in the heavens. Wo exhorted you and sang with you and prayed with you last night till it was very late and tried to pull you through, but we can’t stay here so late tonight and be disorderly; just let Christ come right into your hearts.” Prayer and song and exhortation occurred much as the needs of the moment dictated. The singing was without books, in part standard hymns, such as Cowper’s “There’s a fountain filled with blood,” to which a chorus was appended: Savior wash me, wash me in that flood, And I’ll be whiter’n snow. In much of the singing an improvising leader sang a line ap- parently partly recalled from familiar sources, partly phrased on the inspiration of the moment, with a vast amount of repeti- tion, and return to the same lines that recalled a night in slave days when a good old black man, about to start to Kentucky to buy another of his daughters, came in from his work to sing a little, and after singing many lines derived from various hymns excused himself, saying, “ There are forty-eight verses in that hymn, but I disremember the rest.” The congregation joined in the leading line more or less fully, according to the readiness with which they could anticipate its words, but the response on the chorus was hearty. One song ran like this : If you love my Lord, if you love my Jesus, I want to know, I want to know. repeated till chorus and leading line were indistinguishable, varied by the interjection of such lines as— Catch on salvation, catch on salvation, Give me your hand, give me your hand. This latter line calls up the hand-shake exercise of a stirring Florida meeting, not confined to Florida, however. The whole audience is in motion, the men moving in a circuit in one direc- tion and the women in the other, swinging and shaking hands THE NEGRO OF THE UNITED STATES. 51 with those opposite as they pass, shouting and falling in ex- haustion or “ the power,” with occasional extravagancies that would not be credited on the statement of a stranger. Fancy the feelings of a good Baptist clergyman who was in the habit of spending his winters South and preaching as he had oppor- tunity, in the days before the war, when his city congregation took the start of him with this movement up and down the aisles of the church and he turned to the pastor at his side, exclaim- ing, “ Why, I can’t do anything with them.” The song which seemed to take hold of the audience most fully, every one seeming to anticipate the cadence and swaying in harmony with it, had this chorus: Death comes creeping everywhere. Some of the leading lines in this last-named song were: In the valleys, in the valleys of the mountains.—C/to. Satan’s a liar and a conjurer, too.—Clio. If you don’t repent, he’ll conjure you. — Cho. Satan’s mad and I am glad.—Cho. Satan shot a ball at me.—Cho. He missed me and hit my sin.—Cho. There is a trace of the witchcraft, sorcery, Voodoo belief in the conjurer of the second and third lines, and this not among ignorant, neglected descendants of late importations of African heathen, but in a church with an excellent choir for stated serv- ices and worshipping in a good city edifice less than a mile from the residence of the President of the United States. A change of methods among the Negroes is seen in their man- agement of baptism in the District of Columbia. Ten years ago as spring came on there were great gatherings at the river or one of its branches, and immense crowds covered the banks and ad- jacent roofs to look on when scores were baptized in succession. Now the Negro churches in Washington are either equipped with baptisteries or they generally arrange for the use of baptis- teries in sister churches, so that from 20 to 150 in succession have been dipped or immersed this year on many occasions to an ag- gregate exceeding 1,500, with services almost wholly in the build- ings, some of which are equipped with apparatus ‘to warm the water. The gains in Methodist churches have been large, but they do not attract so much public attention. The conditions at the Na- 52 THE NEGRO OF THE UNITED STATES. tional Capital illustrate what is going on elsewhere in some de- gree. The congregations more and more depend on hymn books, and it is not easy to get a modern Negro city choir to sing plan- tation melodies made famous to English-speaking people on both sides of the Atlantic by the Jubilee Singers. They seek another style of music. The Negroes have at the National Capital a Catholic, an Episcopal, and a Presbyterian church, certain Bap- tist, Congregational, and Methodist churches, in which the casual attendant would see only a high excellence in all the exercises, devoutness of demeanor, and excellent music. The Baptist and Methodist Negro churches embrace many very humble and poor congregations, so that one may find a great variety of conditions in the pews and in the pulpits. Nearly every humanitarian or benevolent effort of the white churches finds its counterpart in the Negro churches. The Negro delights in organizations and the decorations of membership and the parades of celebrations and funerals, though some, like some white men, leave the organizing, the parades, and the marching to others. Many of the societies might be called semi-religious. They are not part of the church, yet they are quite likely to hold committee meetings in churches, and their notices are often among those given out from the pulpit. They have Young Men’s and Young Women’s Christian Asso- ciations, Young People’s Societies of Christian Endeavor, and Epworth Leagues, Mission Bands, and Temperance Legions. The Lyceum meeting Sunday afternoon is very popular as an attachment to a church as a means of occupying and instruct- ing the young men and women. Papers are read and addresses delivered by the best speakers obtainable, including devout members of Congress. A partial list of mutual aid and benevo- lent societies related to the churches, yet not considered religious societies, is— Young Men’s Immediate Relief, 130 members; Good Samari- tans, 1,500 members; monthly dues in each, 25 cents; tax in case of death, $1 for the first, $0.05 for the last; endowment paid on death of member, $50 in the first, $100 in the second ; sick benefit, in the first, $4; in the second, $3; entrance fee, $6 in the first, $10 in the second. Ladies’ Unity Beneficial Society, Ladies’ United Reapers’ Society, Ladies’ Reliable Immediate Relief, Ladies’ Golden Leaf THE NEGKO OF THE UNITED STATES. 53 Immediate Relief Society, Ladies’ Mutual Immediate Relief Society. In each of these the entrance fee is $10; tax in case of death, $0.40; sick benefit for five weeks from $1 to $3, in one case reaching $4; death claim varying from $50 to $85. The Ladies’ Unity Beneficial Society is twenty years old; the youngest named is three years old. The humanitarian orders, Masons and Odd Fellows, with affiliated societies for women, have a large membership among the Negroes. The business affairs of these organizations are matters of zealous care. The contribution in a church is a prominent feature. Sometimes the pastor keeps, as it were, in the background and leaves the announcement of notices and the needs of the church to a church steward or other official, but on occasion the preacher urges on the collection. To some extent the plate or basket is passed, but that will often be only as a gleaning or to help out two or three distinct collections at the same meeting. The sum desired is announced and then all are called on to come forward and lay their gifts on the altar. The church officers count the money, and when the procession of givers stops the amount col- lected is announced, and if it falls short another appeal is made, singing is renewed, and with more or less zeal additional offer- ings are brought up. The facts connected with the moral, humanitarian, and re- ligious organization are among the most encouraging one finds in all the Negro record. These people, taken singly, seem often unthrifty and improvident, but black poor, in some localities at least, are more helpful to each other in churches or societies than whites of the same annual earnings. The white poor are more likely to turn their backs on the churches and social or- ganizations, certainly so far as any sort of active service therein is concerned, but a poor black man is active in his church even though it have but a mean hovel for a place of worship, and the social element is better preserved and the wasting gnawings of solitary, morose suffering and a growing sense of injustice from all who are better off are less with the poor Negro than with the poor white, who is very apt to withdraw himself more and more as he sinks in means or opportunity. So far as church member- ship will shuw, the religious status of the Negro appears in the following tables: 54 THE NEGRO OF THE UNITED STATES. SUMMARY OF COLORED ORGANIZATIONS * Colored Denominations. Denominations. Organi- zations. Church edifices. Value of church property. Communi- cants. Regular Baptist (colored) 12,533 11,987 $9,038,549 1,349,189 Union American Methodist Episcopal 42 35 187,600 2,279 African Methodist Episcopal.. 2,481 4,124 6,468,280 452,725 African Union Methodist Prot- estant 40 27 54,440 3,415 African Methodist Episcopal Zion 1,704 1,587 2,714,128 349,788 Congregational Methodist (col- ored) 9 5 525 319 Colored Methodist Episcopal.. 1,759 1,653 1,713,366 129,383 Zion Union Apostolic 32 27 15,000 2,346 951 Evangelist Missionary 11 3 2,000 Cumberland Presbyterian (col- ored) 224 183 195,826 12,956 Total 18,835 19,631 $20,389,714 2,303,351 Colored Organizations in Other Denominations. Regular Baptist (North) 400 324 $1,087,518 35,221 Regular Baptist (South) 7 5 3,875 651 Freewill Baptist 5 3 13,300 271 Primitive Baptist Old-two-Seed-in-the-Spirit Pre- 323 291 135,427 18,162 destinarian Baptist 15 4 930 265 Roman Catholic Christians (Christian Connec- 31 27 237,400 14,517 tion) 63 54 23,500 4,989 Congregational 85 69 246,125 6,908 Disciples of Christ Lutheran (Synodical Confer- 277 183 176,795 18,578 ence) Lutheran 'United Svnod in the 5 5 13,400 211 South) 5 3 1,750 94 Methodist Episcopal 2,984 2,800 3,630,093 246,249 Methodist Protestant 54 50 35,445 3,183 Independent Methodist 2 2 4,675 222 Presbyterian (Northern) 233 200 391,650 14,961 Presbyterian (Southern) 45 29 22,200 1,568 Reformed Presbyterian(Synod). 1 1 1,500 76 Protestant Episcopal 49 53 192,7.50 2,977 Reformed Episcopal 37 36 18,401 1,723 Total 4,627 4,139 $6,236,734 370,826 * “ The Religious Forces of the United States,” by H. K. Carroll, D. D. 55 THE NEGRO OE THE UNITED STATES. Denominations. Organi- zation. Church edifices. Value of church property. Communi- cants. Colored denominations 18,835 19,631 $20,389,714 2,303,351 Colored organizations in other denominations 4,627 4,139 6,236,734 370,826 Total 23,462 23,770 $26,626,448 2,674,177 RECAPITULATION. Contrasts.—It sometimes occurs that the visitor to a city park where flowering plants have been set in great masses thinks he has found new varieties and considers himself fortunate if he can procure a slip or a cutting of some beautiful geranium, it may be, to take home. After his wife has carefully nurtured it till it blooms both are disappointed to find it just like plants they had before, but which blooming singly made no such im- pression as when grouped in landscape gardening. If one were to select an individual Negro and think of his qualities as peculiar he might find nearly every trait reproduced in some white man already well known. The Negro was a recent heathen ; he is a Christian. Here he differs from some white men more in dates than in present con- dition. He came into forced contact with Christianity less than five hundred years ago, more than a thousand years after Christianity was the religion of the Roman Empire, from whose fragments his masters came. Is the white today, with all the advantages of heredity and long-established custom, ready for a comparison, man by man, with these modern Gentiles ? The Negro forty years ago was at the bottom of the social scale, unless, forsooth, the poor white, despised alike by master and slave, was below him. It would be fair, were it possible, to set all the whites of the nation in a row and over against them all the Negroes, and then, beginning at the very foot of the lines, take off the lowest Negro and a white man of like quality for new rows, leaving every Negro that could not be matched by a similar white man. Would the selection be based on supersti- tion? Ask the police of New Orleans who were lately the best customers of the sorcerers or remember the current jokes of the newspapers about the feet of rabbits caught in a graveyard 56 THE NEGRO OF THE UNITED STATES. carried for luck by prominent white men. Individual poor whites, as well as poor blacks, believe in witchcraft and the value of hideous amulets. Shall the matching be made on brutality ? The white fiends might outnumber the black brutes, especially if the barbarism of hazing in the so-called best institutions bad to come into the line. Does the Negro have a low sense of property rights? He might, like a child, take a bright ribbon, a gay bit of jewelry, or even a chicken a little quicker than some whites, but for serious crime he would have a better show- ing if he did not carry the burden of the white men who disguise themselves as Negroes, as shown in this clipping: “ The police are now under the opinion that some of the recent pocket-book snatchings are the work of a white man who blacks bis face like a Negro, and they have secured a good description of him and hope to secure his arrest.”—Evening Star, Washington, D. C., February 5, 1894. No thoughtful woman will leave her beautiful decorations, her jewelry, or her spending money lying about loose to tempt white servants, and, except where market gardening or other common interest has developed a different popular sentiment for general protection, white men do not regard it as much but a bit of fun to take another man’s property in melons or fruit or put him to expense to repair wanton damage at Hallowe'en. On whatever basis the matching of the seven and a half mil- lion of Negroes against seven and a half million to be selected from the white row was made, the unmatchable blacks, if any, would be unexpectedly few. It would be necessary to take some whites toward the head of the line to match some black individuals, since a Negro has led his class at Harvard Uni- versity. Now, if we could take the seven and a half million Negroes and the whites picked out to match, we would have a clearer idea of the relative position of the Negro in our civilization. The slave Negro had no legal family life, no name of his own, no legitimacy for his children forty years ago. He had by cus- tom a better family life than the law recognized. Some good masters even recorded the slave marriages in the family Bible, but that meant little in the forced sales of insolvent estates. Grant the truth of all alleged sexual offenses by Negroes, it is strange that it is no worse. The late civil war was remarkable THE NEGRO OF THE UNITED STATES. 57 beyond all other great wars in the rarity of offenses against women, either by soldiers, once an element of dread to an occu- pied district, or from such a body of people as the slaves freed from old restraints. It was hut the other day, as it were, when the possession of the women was the perquisite of a conquering army. The cases of violence in the late war were only numerous enough to prevent an absolute denial of their occurrence. They were exceptional beyond all previous history. Is a Negro shiftless? One of the cartoons of Avar times was a soldier and a contraband rolling a hogshead of bacon up the landing at Acquia creek, below Washington. The soldier, from a climate where he must stir himself to keep warm, Avas tugging aAvay, saying “Why don’t you Avork like I do?” and Sambo, deliberately getting ready to help, Avas replying, “ Massa, time you’s been doAvn here long’s I has you’ll work like I do.” The Negro generally says “boss” iioav. A Northern man goes to Florida; the first Avinter he Avonders at the people avIio enjoy a fire, but in tAvo or three Avinters he may Avant a fire morning or night, and tAvo generations bring him to something of the condition of Sambo at Acquia creek. The Avhite tramp is a great menace to society, more dangerous today than the Negro, Avho is more accessible to Avholesome in- fluences than the Avhite man Avho does not mean to work under any circumstances. The Negro millions Avere practically Avith- out property forty years ago. Today they have a little. They are so far on the gain. As to education, the Negro Avho can barely read and Avrite has taken a greater interest in his citizenship than the Avhite man of like literacy, and if a match could be made betAveen such whites and blacks for an examination upon the principles of our gov- ernment, its departments and their functions, the white side would run serious risk of defeat. No caricature of the abso- lutely ignorant Negro politician can be an exaggeration, but one of the first subjects with Negroes A\'ho aim at improvement is their relation as citizens. The general Avhite population has occasion for great anxiety lest its loAvest seven and a half millions sink beloAV the Negroes. There is an element of danger from the clannishness into which climatic and other causes tend to push the Negro, yet it is not necessary to treat him as a hostile element. He may here be 58 THE NEGRO OF THE UNITED STATES. more helpful to us than if he feels too severely crowded and goes like bees when they swarm to light in the valley of the Amazon, as some have predicted he would. Not a peculiarity of belief or practice has been named herein that might not have been named had the poor whites been the subject, and some of the seeming peculiarities are only unaccus- tomed combinations. Does the Negro shout in meeting? Does he repeat in his songs? Probably there has been an interchange of influences, but most of it is imitation of whites, though, as a boatman on African rivers, he chanted all the facts he knew to guide the stroke of oars and thereby opened a way to learn his secrets that direct inquiry could not discover. The 136th Psalm has the same chorus line twenty-six times, and the soloist in a fashionable church choir is proverbial for repetition. The Negroes are massed more than poor whites, and their qual- ities are brought out as with comnon plants bedded in masses. Our great cities are beginning to have masses of whites low as any black masses can be, and squares can be named where the races blend in undistinguishable degradation. At least two of our greatest and proudest cities have changed the names of certain streets when they began to be respectable after becoming famous for the wickedness of their white popu- lation, in order that their history might begin anew and their old history sink out of sight with the old name. It is really hardly thirty years since the Negroes were turned loose like a lot of children to shift for themselves. What will the showing be at the end of thirty years more? Who will fill the alley and tenement houses of the cities? Who will fill the lockups and the police stations ? History can be written more truly than prophecy, but the indications warn us not to forget the debased and the ignorant of any race within our borders. James H. Blodgett. Africa in London.—We note that of the seventeen land and explora- tion companies quoted on the London exchange thirteen or more are African, and of the seventy-eight mining companies nearly or quite one- half are located on that continent, while of the innumerable American securities but twenty are quoted.