University of Virginia Library

II. Part II
THE NEGRO AS A SLAVE

CHAPTER V
THE FIRST AND LAST SLAVE-SHIP

SOME time in August of the year 1619 a
strange vessel entered the mouth of the
James River, in what is now the State of
Virginia, and, coming in with the tide, dropped anchor
opposite the little settlement at Jamestown. This
ship, which carried the Dutch flag, had the appearance
of a man-of-war, but its mission, as it turned
out, was peaceful enough, for its purpose was trade,
and among other merchandise it carried twenty
Negro slaves.

This Dutch man-of-war, which brought the first
slaves to the first permanent English settlement
in the new world, is, so far as the United States is
concerned, the first slave-ship, for it was probably
the first slave-trader to visit the North American
continent.

But the twenty Africans were not the first slaves
to reach what is now the territory of the United
States, and the oversea African slave-trade had
been in existence for a century before this time.
In fact, Negro slaves were known in ancient Greece
and Rome and regular accounts of the African slave

trade with Europe are in existence since 990 A. D.
In 1442 Portuguese ships brought back Moorish
prisoners from a voyage to the Coast of Africa. As
ransom the Portuguese accepted a certain amount of
gold and a number of "black Moors" with curled
hair. About this same time the Spanish merchants of
Seville began to import gold and slaves from Western
Africa. As witness to the extent of this traffic,
there is still preserved an interesting letter, written
in 1474 to the celebrated Negro, Juan de Valladolid,
also called the "Negro Count," which not only
shows that the number of these dark-skinned aliens in
Spain was at that time considerable, but gives some
idea, also, of the manner in which they were treated.

"For the many good, loyal, and signal services
which you have done us, and do each day" the
letter begins, "and because we know your sufficiency,
ability, and good disposition, we constitute you
mayoral and judge of all the Negroes and mulattoes,
free or slaves, which are in the very loyal and noble
city of Seville, and throughout the whole arch-bishopric
thereof, and that the said Negroes and
mulattoes may not hold any festivals, nor pleadings
among themselves except before you, Juan de
Valladolid, Negro, our judge and mayoral of the
said Negroes and mulattoes.

"And we command," the letter continues, "that
you, and you only, take cognisance of the disputes,
pleadings, marriages, and other things which may

take place among them, for as much as you are a
person sufficient for that office and deserving of your
power, and you know the laws and ordinances which
ought to be kept, and we are informed that you are
of noble lineage among the said Negroes"[1] The
letter is signed Ferdinand and Isabella, King and
Queen of Spain.

When the Spanish explorers and adventurers came
to America they brought many of these Spanish
Negroes with them as servants and as slaves. It is
probable that a few Negroes were sent out to the
West Indies as early as 1501. Soon after this date,
as shown by a letter of King Ferdinand, dated September
15, 1505, a considerable number of slaves
were introduced into Santo Domingo. In this letter
the following sentence occurs: "I will send you
more Negro slaves as you request. I think there
may be a hundred." Here we have the beginning
of African slavery in America, over a century before
its introduction into Jamestown, Va.

The records show. that Negroes in 1516 worked
with Balboa on the Isthmus of Panama; that Pizarro,

the conqueror of Peru, and Las Casas, the Dominican
Bishop and missionary, had Negro bodyguards.

Negroes also accompanied the expeditions of
Vasquez de Ayllon, Narvaez, Coronado and De Soto.
With the ill-fated expedition of Narvaez was the
Negro Estevan, in English, Stephen. For eleven
years, from 1528 to the year of his death, 1539, this
Negro Stephen was with the Spanish explorers on
the mainland of North America. He wandered
hundreds of miles across what is now the southwestern
part of the United States, two centuries or
more before our western frontier touched that
section of the country. He was a slave of one of
the survivors of the Narvaez expedition and must
have been a man far above the average type. In
one of the folk-tales of the Zuni Indians he lives
to-day, after a lapse of more than three and a half
centuries, and one well-known writer of American
history has called him the discoverer of Arizona.

According to the Spanish historian, Oviedo, Negroes
were among the settlers of the Spanish colony of
Chicora, in 1526, on what is now the coast of South
Carolina, and this, so far as known, was the earliest
appearance of the black man on the soil of the
United States. In 1526, when, under Vasques de
Ayllon, eighty-one years before the English, the
Spaniards tried to found a settlement on the James
River near the present sight of Jamestown, Virginia.
Negro slaves were employed in the work. An

insurrection of the Negro labourer and the death of
Ayllon were among the causes for the failure of the
venture. African slaves accompanied the expedition
of De Soto to Florida in 1539. Negro slaves were
settled at St. Augustine, Florida, by Pedro Menendez,
in 1565. These, however, were Spanish slaves
who had been trained as artisans and cultivators of
the soil and were of a different character from
those fresh levies of labourers who were brought
direct to America from Africa.[2]

Almost nothing is known of the history of the
ship that brought the first slaves, in 1619, to the
settlement of Jamestown; not even its name is
remembered. The coincidence has often been
noted, however, that the Mayflower, which is said
to have brought to America the first seeds of civil
and religious liberty, reached Plymouth a year later,
1620, so that Negro slavery is older than Anglo-Saxon
liberty on the soil of the United States.

In reading the early history of the United States,
I have been impressed with the fact that religious
animosities among European people were largely
responsible for the settlement of America.

The original thirteen states of the Union were
very generally settled by refugees from the religious
wars and religious persecutions of Europe, and three
of them at least, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania,
and Maryland, were settled by religious sects who

had crossed the ocean in order to secure freedom
of religious worship.

The Scotch-Irish, who so widely settled the
southern colonies, left their homes in Ireland to a
large degree because of the oppression that they
suffered in consequence of their religious faith.

North Carolina, which was one of the first of the
English colonies to grant religious liberty to the
persecuted sects of Europe, was frequently referred
to as a "Quaker Colony," because of the number of
those persecuted people who settled there.

South Carolina was also a refuge for a large number
of Huguenots, who were the Calvinists of
France. As an illustration of some of the milder
forms of persecution to which these people were
subjected in their homes, in France, because of
their religious opinions, I may quote the following
paragraph, from Bancroft's History of the United
States:

It is a very curious fact that, at the very same
time ships were leaving Europe with people who
were seeking in America a solution and an escape
from the religious controversies that had for centuries
torn Europe asunder, other ships were leaving

Africa bearing to this continent other people who
were to be the seeds of new conflicts and leave, as
a heritage, a new problem; a problem in many ways
as difficult and perplexing as that which faced
Europe at the beginning of the Protestant
Reformation.

Religious prejudice, transplanted to American
soil, did not at once die out. A study of some of
the older colonial codes will show that Quakers,
who were nonconformists, and Catholics, who were
not always counted as Christians, were subjected to
restrictions which were frequently quite as severe
as those imposed upon the free Negroes before
the war. Under the law of Virginia in existence in
1705, for instance, Catholics, Indians and Negro
slaves were denied the right to appear "as witnesses
in any case whatsoever, not being Christians," but
this was modified somewhat in 1732, when Negroes,
Indians, and mulattoes were admitted as witnesses
in the trial of slaves.[4]

In one particular instance religious prejudice
against the Catholics was curiously associated
with prejudice, on account of race, against the Negro.
I refer to what is known in the history of New York
as the "Negro Plot of 1741."

In this year the city of New York was thrown
into convulsions of excitement by the rumours of a
conspiracy among some of the lower class of Negroes,

supposed to have been instigated by Spanish
Catholics, to burn the city and destroy the inhabitants.
These rumours were confirmed by a letter,
received about this time from General Oglethorpe
of Georgia, which reported that Spain had employed
a number of Catholic priests, who were to go through
the country pretending to be physicians, dancing
masters, "and other such kinds of occupations,"
who were to get the confidence of families and so
further the plans "to burn all the considerable
cities in English North America."

Shortly before this time a Spanish vessel, manned
in part by Spanish Negroes, had been captured
and the Negroes, although they claimed to be free,
sold into slavery in the colony. Suspicion directed
to one of these slaves added to the excitement.
Among other persons arrested was a man supposed
to be a Catholic priest. Circumstances seemed to
connect certain other Catholics in the colony with
the supposed conspiracy. As usual, in such instances
of intense social commotion, fresh rumours and
fresh suspicions added fuel to the excitement and
before it had died away one hundred and seventy-eight
persons were arrested, thirty-six were executed
and seventy-one transported. Among those executed
was the supposed Catholic priest to whom I have
referred. Eighteen Negroes were hanged and
fourteen were burned. They were executed in
sight of the spot where the United States Custom

House now stands in the square that still has the
name of Bowling Green. It occurs to me, as I am
writing this, as an illustration of the progress of the
Negro, that Charles W. Anderson, the United States
Collector of Internal Revenue, who occupies a suite
of offices in this building is a Negro.

In spite of the numerous "confessions" of white
people and black, arrested during the period that
the excitement lasted, there does not seem to have
been any sufficient evidence that any conspiracy to
burn the city existed. The explanation seems to
be that the community was for the time labouring
under one of those strange social delusions, like
that which seized upon the people of New England
during the period of the Salem witchcraft panic.
The situation, as it existed at the height of the
excitement, as well as the circumstances that finally
brought the prosecutions to an end, are summed
up in the following paragraph from Smith's "History
of New York":

I have referred here at some length to these circumstances
because they show that in times past
religious prejudice, like racial prejudice, has often
been the source of those wild fears and vague suspicions
by which one class of people in the community
is sometimes incited to violence against
another and weaker class.

In spite, however, of the bitter animosities that
once divided them, the people of the different
religious creeds have since learned to live side by
side in peace. Is there any sound reason why
the white man and the black man, who, after all,
understand one another here in America pretty
well, should not do as much? I do not believe
there is.

In 1741, at the time of the "Negro Plot," the
population of New York City numbered 10,000, of
which 2,000 were Negroes. At this time the number
of slaves in the whole colony of Massachusetts did
not amount to more than 3,000. The number
in Pennsylvania had reached 11,000 in 1754, but
in some of the more southerly colonies the
number of slaves, particularly in proportion to
the number of inhabitants was considerably
larger. In South Carolina, for instance, the Negroes
were at one time in the proportion of 22 to 12
of the white population.[6] In 1740 this state
had 40,000 slaves.

In spite of restrictions that were put upon it from
time to time the slave-trade continued to flourish
down to the time of the American Revolution, when
for a time it ceased, only to leap into more vigorous
life at the close of the war. At the beginning of the
nineteenth century England held in all her colonies
in the new world 800,000 slaves. France had
250,000; Denmark 27,000; Spain and Portugal
600,000; Holland 50,000; Sweden 600. There were
about 900,000 slaves in the United States and about
2,000,000 in Brazil.[7]

I was much impressed in reading some years ago
Mungo Park's travels with his account of slavery
as he found it in those parts of Africa which he
visited. His description enabled me, as I thought,
to see how easily and naturally the milder form of
domestic slavery, which seems to have existed in
those countries from the earliest times, had grown,
under the influence of contact and commerce with
European people, into foreign slave-trade. In
other ways, also, it seems to me I have learned
something about African slavery in America, from
what I read of African slavery in Africa.

At the time of Park's famous journey he estimated
that the proportion of slaves to the free population,
in the regions through which he travelled, was
about three to one. These slaves were of two
descriptions: those who were born slaves and those

who had become slaves either through capture in
war, insolvency, or as punishment for crime.

There existed at that time in Africa regular markets
for the purchase and sale of slaves, just as they
afterward existed at Alexandria, at Natchez, and
New Orleans in America. Mungo Park noted, also,
the interesting fact that in the eye of an African
purchaser the value of a slave increased in proportion
to his distance from his native kingdom, for the
reason that when slaves were only a few days' journey
from their homes they frequently succeeded in making
their escape. On the other hand, when several
kingdoms intervened, making escape more difficult,
they were more easily reconciled to their situation.

The same thing was true, and for the same reason,
during the existence of slavery in America. For
instance, from 1820 to 1830, slaves were selling at from
$150 to $300 each in Virginia, while during the
same time the same slaves in New Orleans would
be worth from $800 to $1,200. The difference was
due, in large part, to the agricultural conditions,
since at that time an able-bodied Negro could earn
$200 a year for his master on a sugar plantation in
Louisiana, over and above the cost of his keep.
But the difference was due in a considerable degree,
also, to the fact that in Louisiana the slave was, under
ordinary conditions, beyond all hope of freedom.[8]

"The slaves which are purchased by Europeans
on the coast," Mungo Park continues, "are chiefly
of this description" (i.e., from the interior). "A few
of them are collected in petty wars, which take place
near the coast, but by far the greater number are
brought down in large caravans from the inland
countries, of which many are unknown, even by
name, to Europeans."

It was true in Africa, as it was afterward in
America, that slaves of mild disposition and such
as were not disposed to run away were retained by
their masters, while others who showed signs of
discontent or appeared in other ways intractable,
were disposed of in some distant state. Thus the
domestic slave-trade merged easily and naturally
into the foreign slave-trade and the intractable
slaves from the interior were sent to America.

On his way back to the coast, after his long
journey to the interior, Mungo Park joined company
with a party of merchants on their way to the coast,
having among other merchandise a coffle of slaves,
which they exchanged later for European rum and
tobacco.

These long marches of the slave-caravans and
the methods of caring for and confining the slaves
in the part of the country through which Mungo Park
travelled were not unlike those which one might have
seen fifty years ago on one of the old slave-roads,
from Alexandria, Virginia, to Natchez, Mississippi,

although the African journey was in many respects
more difficult.[9]

In the course of this long and tedious journey
from the interior of Africa to the coast, Mungo
Park had an opportunity to become thoroughly
acquainted with all phases of the slave-traffic, as
it then existed, and he has given many intimate and
interesting glimpses into the life, thoughts, and
feelings of the unfortunate captives, whom he seemed
to have an unusual ability to understand and sympathise
with. Of one party of captives which, at
one point in his journey, were added to the caravan,
he said:

At another part of the journey one of the slaves
belonging to the coffle, who had travelled for several
days with great difficulty, was unable to travel farther
and his master therefore determined to exchange him
for a young girl belonging to the townspeople with
whom they were stopping. "The poor girl" Park
continues, "was ignorant of her fate until the bundles
were all tied up in the morning, and the coffle ready
to depart, when, coming with some other young
women to see the coffle set out, her master took her
by the hand and delivered her to the singing man.
Never was a face of serenity more suddenly changed
into deepest distress; the terror she manifested on
having the load put upon her head and the rope
fastened round her neck, and the sorrow with which
she bade adieu to her companions were truly
affecting."

This dread of the African slave of being sent down
to the slave-markets of the coast towns is like the
fear that constantly haunted the slaves in Maryland,
Virginia, and the other border states, that some
day they might be sold into the Far South. The
most heartrending scenes of slave-life in the South

occurred when owners, on account of debt or some
other misfortune, were compelled to separate families
and sell them to the traders. It was not alone the
parting of children from parents, husbands from
wives, that made these scenes sad and memorable, but
frequently it was just as hard for the slaves to part
from their owners and members of his family, to
which, through years of association, they had become
deeply attached. This feeling of sorrow has found
expression in the words of an old plantation song
that originated in Virginia, the words of which
are in part as follows:

The slave-caravan, to which Mungo Park was
attached, finally reached the river Gambia, where
the slaves were set on board a ship and brought down
to the coast. At Goree one hundred and thirty, of
whom about twenty-five had been of free condition

and were able to read and write Arabic, were shipped
to America. There being no other vessel at hand,
Park took passage on the slaver and followed the
slaves, whom he had accompanied from the interior
to their destination in America.

"My conversation with the slaves," he said, "gave
them great comfort and, in truth they had need of
every consolation in my power to bestow; not that
I observed any wanton acts of cruelty practised
either by the master or seamen toward them, but
the mode of confining and securing Negroes in the
American slave-ships made these poor creatures
suffer greatly and a general sickness prevailed among
them. Besides the three who died at Gambia, and
six or eight while we remained at Goree, eleven
perished at sea, and many of the survivors were
reduced to a very weak and emaciated condition."

After 1808, when it became a crime to bring slaves
from Africa to the United States, the conditions under
which the trade was carried on grew worse. In the
course of the next forty years, before the trade with
the United States finally ended in 1862, it seems that
every possibility of cruelty and of suffering, inherent
in the traffic, was exhausted by the experience of
those who were merchants and those who were
merchandise in this iniquitous traffic. Of the
slaves imported from the region at the mouth of the
Niger it was estimated that one-third and often
more perished before they reached the coast, 15

to 20 per cent, more were lost in the voyage on the
middle passage or while they were going under the
process of seasoning, so that the number of slaves
that finally found their way to the plantations did
not, in many cases, represent more than one-third
of those who were originally torn from their homes
by slave-raiders in order to meet the demand for
labour in America.[10]

Sometimes people, enticed down to the coast
by showing them strips of bright coloured calico,
were seized and put on board the slave-ships. In
other cases, after the slave-traders had successfully
got on board a party of slaves, they seized the
native slave-merchants themselves and carried them
off, in turn, into slavery. I have often heard Major
R. R. Moton, of Hampton, relate the story, which
was told him by his grandmother, of the manner in

which his great-grandfather, at that time a young
African chief, was enticed on board a slave-ship and
brought to America. He had successfully brought
down to the coast and sold a party of slaves which
he had taken as captives in one of the tribal wars.
The trade concluded he was himself invited to dinner
on board the slave-ship. He was given something to
drink which put him to sleep. When he awoke he
found himself far out at sea, no longer a prince
but merely one among the number of slaves he
himself the day before had sold.

Some few years ago during a stay of a few days
at Mobile, Alabama, I visited a little colony of
Africans, who local tradition says are the remnants
of the last cargo of the last slave-ship which was
landed in the United States.

Mobile Bay during the latter days of the slave-trade
was a favourite entrance for slave-smugglers
to the United States. At the upper entrance of the
bay, where the Alabama and Tombigbee rivers
pour their waters into it through a number of different
channels, there are many places in which it
was possible to hide a slave-ship. It was in one of
these ships, smuggled in through these channels, by
which the majority of the people in the "African
Colony" were brought to America.

In this community I met native Africans who
still speak the old tribal language and still retain
to some extent, I was told, their ancient tribal

customs. I talked with one of these men who still
passes by his African name. He is called Ossie
Keebe. He told me his were a hill people. They
lived in the uplands of Dahomey, seven days from
the sea. There had been a war—there was always
war in those slave-raiding days, he said—and one
night their village had been captured and all who
were not killed were marched down to the sea and
sold.

When I asked this old man if he ever thought of
returning to Africa, he replied: "Yes, I goes back to
Africa every night, in my dreams." Meeting this
old man whose dreams carry him back to Africa, I
felt as if I had discovered the link by which the old
life in Africa was connected with the new life in
America.

The people I met in the African colony were not,
however, the last slaves brought to the United States.
The famous yacht, Wanderer, which carried 500
slaves into Georgia in 1858, is supposed to have
brought 420 slaves more in 1860. But as late as
1862 a ship ran the blockade of Federal ships and
landed slaves in Mobile. Far up the river in
some remote part of that wilderness of swamp and
water there still may be seen, I have been told, above
the surface of the water portions of the iron work
of the Lawrence, which was possibly the last ship
to bring slaves into the United States. The ship was
burned to keep it from falling into the hands of the

"Yankees" during the war, but there are young men
in the African colony who still remember to have
played about the hull when they were boys. There
are still people living in Mobile who were brought
over as slaves upon it in 1862.

No one will ever know how many thousands of
Africans, during the progress of the slave-trade,
were carried from their homes in Africa to be used
as labourers in the opening up of the new and wild
country in North and South America. It has been
estimated that 270,000 slaves were brought into the
United States between the years 1808 and 1860, from
the time that the slave-trade was legally abolished
to the time when it practically ceased. In view of
the fact that other estimates indicate that fifteen
thousand slaves were smuggled into the United
States in 1858; that at another time fifteen thousand
slaves were brought into Texas alone in one year,
this may be taken as a low estimate.

Even this is no indication of the number of slaves
that were imported during this time and before into
the West Indies and into South America. South
America and the West Indies, like some of the
states of the Far South, were slave-consuming
countries, and it was necessary to constantly bring
in new levies to keep up the supply.

I have taken some pains to examine the different
estimates made by different writers at different
periods of the slave-trade and for different portions

of North and South America, and I have reached
the conclusion that the total number of slaves landed
in the western world from the beginning to the end
of the slave-trade cannot have been less than twelve
millions, and was probably much more.

Perhaps twelve millions more were taken in the
slave-raids, perished on the way to the coast or in the
"middle passage," or in the process of seasoning,
so that no less than twenty-four million human beings
were either brought to America as slaves or perished
on the way hither. I have not examined carefully
the figures of European emigration, but I venture
to say that from the time America was discovered
down to 1860, the number of white people that
have immigrated from Europe to North and South
America is less than the number of black people who
were brought over in slave-ships during the same
period.

CHAPTER VI
THE FIRST SLAVES

DURING a recent visit to Baltimore, Maryland,
chance threw in my way a facsimile
copy of an old Baltimore newspaper, the
Maryland Journal, the first number of which was
published August 20, 1773. This paper contained
one or two items of news, and several advertisements
that were peculiarly interesting to me. One of these
advertisements, which attracted my attention, was
about as follows:

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

It has often been said that the almshouses and the
prisons were emptied to furnish labourers for the
colonies of Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia.
But it was not merely the destitute and the outcast
that were sold into servitude in the English colonies
in America. Many of these persons were political
prisoners and persons of quality.

"So usual," according to the same historian, "was
this manner of dealing in Englishmen that not the
Scots only, who were taken in the field of Dunbar,
were sent into involuntary servitude in New England,
but the Royalist prisoners of the battle of Worcester;
the leaders in the insurrection of Penruddock were
shipped to America."

At other times large numbers of Irishmen were sold
into servitude in different parts of America.
Because the number of slaves brought to America

was so immense, the sufferings which they underwent
has made a profound impression upon the
world, but from all that I have been able to learn, the
sufferings endured by these unfortunate Irish bond-servants
during the course of the long voyages to
America were frequently as hard as those of the
slaves. "The crowded exportation of Irish Catholics,"
Bancroft remarks, "was a frequent event, and
was attended by aggravations hardly inferior to the
usual atrocities of the African slave-trade."

In 1685, when nearly a thousand prisoners were
condemned to transportation for taking part in the
insurrection of Monmouth, "men of influence at
court scrambled for the convicted insurgents as a
merchantable commodity."

Bond-servitude as it existed in the English colonies
was in many respects peculiar and unlike any form
of servitude which had existed among English people.

The first bond-servants were sent out by the London
company, the company by which the Virginia colony
was founded. It was not intended that servants
should be transferred from one master to another.
But the depressed condition of agriculture following
the massacre of 1622, according to James Ballagh,
compelled planters to sell their servants and thereafter
"made the sale of servants a very common practice
among both officers and planters."

For instance, in 1623, George Sandys, the treasurer
of Virginia, was forced to sell the only remaining

servants of the company, the seven men on his
plantation, for one hundred and fifty pounds of
tobacco.

"Gradually," says Mr. Ballagh, "the legal personality
of the servant was lost sight of in the disposition
to regard him as a chattel and a part of the
personal estate of the master, which might be
treated and disposed of very much in the same
way as the rest of the estate. He became thus
rated in inventories of estates, and was disposed
of both by will and deed along with the rest of
the property."[2]

At the same time there grew up a systematic speculation
in servants both in England and in Virginia.
A servant could be transported to America for from six
to eight pounds and sold for from forty to sixty pounds.
London and Bristol were the chief markets for young
men and women who were sold to shipowners who
transported them to America and sold them.[3] The
number of servants imported who were obtained in
this and other ways was, from 1650 to 1675, when the
trade began to decline, considerable. The number

of such white servants imported into Virginia alone
from 1664 amounted to 1,500 a year. And it is
said that the number sent from England to the
colonies and the West Indies amounted to 15,000
a year.

It was surprising to me to learn that a little more
than two hundred years ago Englishmen sold the
prisoners taken in their, civil wars in much the same
way that the African people captured and sold people
of their own race. But the knowledge of these facts
has helped me to understand that when Negro
slavery began in this country the condition of the
African slaves was not so exceptional as it afterward
became and as it now seems.

Under the conditions I have referred to, the gradual
transition from white servitude to Negro slavery,
which took place during the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, came about naturally and easily.
At first the condition of the Negro slave was in most
respects like that of the white servant, except that
one was a servant for a fixed period of years and the
other was a servant for life. As time went on, however,
the two things, black slavery and white servitude,
began to grow apart. The condition of the
white servant was continually improved, and the
condition of the black slave grew steadily worse.
The same thing which took place in Virginia took
place in other Southern colonies. Finally, at the
close of the eighteenth century Negro slavery had

almost entirely replaced white servitude in all the
Southern colonies.[4]

Speaking of the causes which brought white servitude
to an end in North Carolina, Dr. John Spencer
Bassett, formerly Professor of History and Political
Science in Trinity College, N. C., says:

I have referred at some length to conditions of
white servitude in the English colonies before
the introduction of the Negro slaves in order to
illustrate how easily and naturally the transition was

made from slavery in Africa to slavery in America.
But I confess these facts have for me another and a
different interest. It is important that the people
of my race should not gain the idea that, because they
were once in slavery, their situation is wholly exceptional.
It is important that we should bear in mind,
when we are disposed to become discouraged, that
other races have had to face, at some time in their
history, difficulties quite as great as ours. In
America Negro slavery succeeded white servitude
and it seems probable if the Negro had not been
discovered and brought to this country as a labourer
the system of white servitude would have lasted in
this country a great deal longer than it actually did.

I was interested in noting in what I have read concerning
the relations of the races at this early period
that the first distinctions made between the black man
and the white man were not on the ground of race and
colour, but on that of religion. That is no doubt
characteristic of a time when people were divided by
religion rather than by race. The Negroes were
"heathen," and the law distinguished between those
who were Christians and those who were not. For
instance, the law declared that no Christian could be
made a slave for life. The white bondmen were
usually referred to as "servants," or "Christian servants,"
and were in this way distinguished from
slaves. "The right to enslave a Negro" says Professor
Bassett, "seems to have been based on the

fact that he was a pagan." There was a general
notion throughout all Christendom that it was wrong
for one Christian to enslave another, and that as soon
as a pagan was baptised he could be no longer held
as a slave. This prevented, for many years, the
work of Christianising the Negroes. So strong was
this feeling that it was necessary in several of the
colonies to pass laws expressly stating that the condition
of the slave was not changed when he was
taken into church.[6]

On the other hand, as the white servant was a
Christian, the principle was gradually established
that he could only be held in servitude by Christians,
or those "who were sure to give him Christian
usage!" "Thus free Negroes, mulattoes, or Indians,"
says Mr. Ballagh, "although Christians, were
incapacitated from holding white servants, as also
were infidels, 'such as Jews, Moors, and Mohammedans.'
Where a white servant was sold to them,
or his owner had intermarried with them, the servant
became ipso facto free."[7]

It is a curious fact that one of the first laws passed
discriminating against the Negro because of his
race took away from him the right to hold a white
man in bondage.

In Virginia and Maryland it was one hundred and

fifty years before white servitude finally gave way to
Negro slavery. In other Southern colonies, Negro
slavery, introduced from the West Indies, was almost
from the first the only form of labour known on the
plantations.

In South Carolina an effort was made to re-establish
serfdom, as it had existed one hundred years
before in England, and as it still existed in Europe.
In Georgia it was hoped, by prohibiting slavery, to
establish a system of free labour. But in both cases
the effort failed.

General Oglethorpe, the founder of Georgia,
declared that slavery was "contrary to the teachings
of the gospel and opposed to the fundamental law of
England," and when it was proposed to introduce
slavery into the colony he declared that "he declined
to permit so horrid a crime." But within fifteen
years from the founding of the colony slavery was fully
established there and the law against it had been
repealed.

The fact seems to be that the white "servants,"
such as the company was able to obtain from England,
were not fitted to withstand the climate. Rev.
William B. Stevens, formerly Professor of History
in the University of Georgia, says that strenuous
efforts were made to import white servants but
"many escaped to Carolina. . . . Even the
German servants so often pointed to as patterns of
industry and sobriety were complained of as being

'refractory, filled with ideas of liberty and clandestinely
quitting their masters', who 'were compelled
to resort to corporal punishment or other summary
means to bring them to obedience.'"

In one of the several documents prepared at that
time, setting forth "the true state of the colony," it is
said that so general was the sickness during the
summer months that "hardly one-half of the servants
or working people were even able to do their
masters or themselves the least service; and the
yearly sickness of each servant, generally speaking,
cost his master as much as would have maintained
a Negro for four years."

With the introduction of the rice planting the
necessity of employing Africans was doubled. So
difficult did the first settlers find the task of clearing
the land and planting and harvesting the rice that
one writer declares the "white servants would have
exhausted their strength in clearing a spot for their
own graves, and every plantation would have served
no other purpose than a burying ground to its
European cultivators."[8]

No doubt the black man withstood the climate,
particularly in the states of the Lower South and
the West Indies, and did the rough pioneer work
that was required at that time better than the white
man did or could. Even to-day in most of the West
Indies, in many parts of South America, and in some

parts of the United States, as for instance in the rich
lands of the Yazoo Delta, the Negro is almost the
only man who labours with his hands. But even
with Negro labour the work of clearing the forests
and planting the crops was carried on in those early
days with great loss of life. During the whole
period of slavery plantations in the West Indies, in
South America, and in some parts of the United States
the plantations had to be constantly recruited with
fresh levies from Africa to carry on the cultivation
of the soil.

After doing all this pioneer work, making it possible
for other human beings to live and prosper there,
one cannot wonder that the Negro thinks it a little
strange that Italians and people from other parts of
Europe and even Asia are invited into the South and
granted privileges that even the Negro himself does
not enjoy. Having performed a service so necessary
and so important for the white man at a time and
under circumstances such as other persons could
not or would not have performed it, it is not strange
if the Negro feels that, at least, the Southern people
ought to deal more kindly with him than with any
foreign race which, after nearly three hundred years
of occupation by the white man and the black man,
has just begun to enter this country.

Among the early colonists of the Carolinas were the
Moravians and the Salzburgers, who were opposed
to slavery upon religious grounds. These people

withstood for some time the temptation to employ
Negro slaves. At length, however, they received a
message from the head of the church of Europe to
the effect that if they took slaves with the purpose of
receiving them into the church and leading them to
Christ, not only was this not a sin, but it might
prove a blessing.[9]

It is an interesting fact which I learned when I
visited their community a few years ago, that the first
person baptised among the Moravians of Salem,
N. C., was a Negro. The Moravians of Salem
are still among the black man's warmest friends.
I might add that, so far as I know, the Moravian
is the only religious sect whose missionaries ever
voluntarily sold themselves into bondage, as did
Leonard Dober and Tobias Leupoldt at San Crux
in the West Indies, that they might evangelise their
fellow slaves.

This desire to Christianise the African and give him
the benefit of a higher civilisation was frequently,
during slavery, offered as an excuse for importing
African labourers to this country and holding them
in slavery.

People differ, and will always differ no doubt, as
to whether the desire to civilise the African was a
sufficient excuse for bringing him to America, at the
cost of so much suffering and expense. For my own
part, I am disposed to believe that it was worth all

that it had cost. At any rate, now that the black
man is here and permanently settled in the midst of
the white man's civilisation, there can be no good
reason for depriving him of the benefits of being
here. If any race other than the Anglo-Saxon has
earned a right to live in this country and to enjoy
the opportunities of American civilisation, it seems
to me the Negro has earned that right.

One who has not studied the economic conditions
under which the first slaves lived and laboured cannot
understand the enormous service that the Negro
performed for the civilisation of America during these
early and pioneer days.

The Indian, both in North and South America, was
pressed into the service of the white man, but he
was not equal to the task and perished under the
hard conditions in which he was compelled to labour.

Concerning the value of the Negro in Brazil,
Heinrich Handlemann, the German historian of
that country, says: "The service of the African
under conditions as they then existed was, in fact,
indispensable. On the other hand, the Indians,
either as slaves or as free labourers, were always
poor labourers, without industry and without
persistence."

In Brazil, in Cuba, and in other portions of the
West Indies, one Negro as a labourer was counted
equal to four Indians.[10]

It seems to be equally true that no part of the white
race was equal to the task which the Negro performed
in the forests and in the sugar, rice, and cotton fields
of the far South. Repeated attempts were made to
bring in white labourers to perform the work of the
Negro, but without success.

In his history of Louisiana, Gayarré mentions the
fact that about 1718 John Law, the author of the
great speculation in Louisiana lands, agreed to bring
1,600 Germans to Louisiana and settle them on a
concession of twelve miles square granted to him
on the Arkansas River. Other grants were made
upon the same terms. In accordance with the
terms of the grant the Mississippi Company, of which
Law was the head, sent out a number of German
peasants, but they were soon swept away by the
climate. Several different attempts of this kind
were made and when they failed it was determined
to bring Negroes direct from Africa. Vessels were
accordingly sent out and brought back cargoes of
Negro slaves, who were distributed among the
inhabitants. By 1728 there were 2,600 Negroes in
the colony and lands were rising in value.

Early attempts were made to introduce German
labourers into some of the more tropical states of
Brazil, but they "perished wholesale of famine and
hardships of all kinds." In 1764, 400 exiled
Acadians were settled in the region known as St.
Nicholas, Haiti, but they were unable to stand the

climate and were transferred to Louisiana. About
the same time 2,400 Germans founded there the
state of Bombardopolis, but they met the same fate.
Some of them accompanied the Acadians to Louisiana,
where traces of them still remain. The others
who survived were soon absorbed by the black population
about them and it is said that some of their
descendants of mixed blood may still be found
inhabiting the district.[11]

The history of the first attempt to settle German
peasants in Louisiana reminds me of an interesting
story told by George W. Cable in his book of "Strange
True Stories of Louisiana." The incidents to which
I refer occurred in connection with another and later
German immigration, when some poor people were
sent over, not as settlers, but as labourers, to
Louisiana.

Some time early in the last century a shipload of
these Germans arrived in New Orleans. Many of
them were respectable people who had paid their
own way to America. Others had been sent over
with the understanding that they were to work out
their passage after they reached this country. The
journey was a hard one; there had been a great deal
of sickness, and, as was often the case among those
early immigrants, many of them had died. When
they arrived in port they were sold, much after the
fashion of the bond-servants of Virginia, for a period

of service. In the confusion, it is said, many of
those who had paid their way and were entitled to
their freedom were sold with the rest. Among
these was a little girl, who had lost both her father
and mother on the journey to America. She was
sold as a servant, upon the landing of the ship, and
years passed before her friends again got any trace
of her. She was at this time a slave. She had no
memory of her parents, nor of a time when she had
been free. She believed herself to be a Negro and
called herself a "yellow gal." Her resemblance to
her mother was, however, so great that her friends
began proceedings to secure her freedom, and after
a long trial, lasting years, her identity was finally
established and she was freed.

One thing that made it difficult to prove that she
was free was the fact that at this time so many others
of the slaves in Louisiana were as white as she. It
was testified that the man who owned her had
several other slaves upon his plantation who were
white.

I mention this story here because it is one of the
curious facts that have happened in connection with
African slavery and because it illustrates how close
the servitude of the white man brought him to the
condition of the Negro slave. To a very large extent
the curse of slavery rested not merely upon the
African but upon every man who worked with his
hands.

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

VII
THE INDIAN AND THE NEGRO

SHORTLY after I went back to Hampton Institute,
in 1879, to take a further course of
study, General Armstrong, the head of that
institution, decided to try the experiment of bringing
some Indian boys from the Western states and giving
them an opportunity, along with the Negro, to get
the benefits of the kind of education that Hampton
Institute was giving. He secured from the reservations
something over one hundred wild, and for
the most part entirely unlettered, Indians, and then
he appointed me to take charge of these young men.
I was to live in the same building with them, look
after the discipline, take charge of their rooms, and
in general act as a sort of "house father" to them.

This was my first acquaintance with the Indians.
I do not know that I had ever seen an Indian previous
to this time, although I had read something of them
and had become greatly interested in their history.
During the few years that I was in charge of these
Indian boys I had an opportunity to study them close
at hand, and to get an insight into their characters.
At the same time I had an opportunity to compare

them, in their studies, in their deportment, and in
their conduct generally, with the Negro boys by
whom they were surrounded. Within a short time
I noticed that, in spite of the great differences between
them, each race seemed to have acquired a
genuine regard and respect for the other. This is
the more remarkable from the fact that the Indian,
as he comes from the reservations, is very proud;
feels himself superior to the white man, and is very
doubtful about the value of the white man's civilisation
that he has been sent to study. Of course,
he naturally feels very much superior to the Negro,
for one reason because he knows that the Negro
has been at one time held in slavery by the white
man.

At this time I had no idea of the close and intimate
relations into which the Indian and the Negro had
been brought at various times and in various places
during the history of their life together in the Western
world. The association of the Negro with the Indian
has been so intimate and varied on this continent,
and the similarities as well as the differences of their
fortunes and character are so striking, that I am
tempted to enter at some length into a discussion of
the relations of each to the other, and to the white
man in this country.

Recently I heard a story which illustrates to a
certain extent what these relations of the three races
are at the present time. The story was told me by

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

This comparatively trivial incident illustrates, I
suspect, pretty well the relations that now exist in this

country between the three races—the Indian, the
Negro, and the white man. One of the first things
that a student of another race learns, when he begins
to study the history, the literature, and the traditions
of the Anglo-Saxon, is the superiority which that race
has, or feels it has, over all others. No doubt these
boys, both the Indian and the Negro, had been made
to feel this superiority. It had led them, perhaps, to
have a special interest in one another, and given each
a desire to discover and note the qualities that were
rare and valuable in the other. They had never
learned to note the valuable qualities in the white race,
because they had been made to feel that the white
race did not need, and perhaps did not deserve, their
sympathy. It was to me an interesting illustration of
the way in which all the dark-coloured people of this
country, no matter how different in disposition or in
temperament they may be, are being drawn together
in sympathy and interest in the presence of the prejudice
of the white man against all other people of a
different colour from his own.

As a matter of fact, the Negro and the Indian have
been in very close and very intimate association in
America from the first. The Negro was introduced
as a labourer in the West Indies, in the first instance,
to take the place of the native Indian, who was the
first slave in America. But Indian slavery in the
West Indies, South America and in North America
did not by any means cease upon the first appearance

of Negro slavery. After the Spaniards had used up
nearly all the native population of the islands of Cuba
and Haiti, in working the mines, they sent out
slave-raiders to the coasts of Florida, to the other
West Indies, and to the coast of South America to
get Indian slaves, particularly from the stronger
Carib tribes. During the long wars between the
Spanish in Florida and the English in the Carolinas,
in which Indians took part on both sides, many
hundreds of Indian prisoners were shipped as slaves
to the West Indies.

For a long time a price was fixed on every Indian
prisoner that should be brought into Charleston and
the enslavement of the Indians, according to an early
historian of the colony, "was made a profitable
branch of trade." Not only were Indian slaves
shipped to the West Indies but large numbers of
them were sold into the New England colonies from
South Carolina. For instance, in 1708 an Indian boy
brought thirty five pounds, and an Indian girl brought
fifteen pounds at Salem, Massachusetts, in 1710.
So large, in fact, was, at one time, this traffic in
Indian slaves between the southern and the northern
provinces that in 1712 a law was passed in Massachusetts
prohibiting the importation of Indian
servants or slaves; the reason given for this measure
in the preamble to the law is the bad character of
the Indian: "being of malicious, surley, and very
ungovernable." This law was directed especially

against the Southern Indians, the Tuscaroras and
others, of whom 800 were made prisoners as a result
of a war which expelled that tribe from the Carolinas.
Similar laws were passed by Pennsylvania in
1712, New Hampshire in 1714, and Connecticut
and Rhode Island in 1715.[1]

When the French troops fought and destroyed the
Natchez Indians, under Governor Perier, in 1731,
forty male Indians and four hundred and fifty
women and children were sent to San Domingo, where
they were sold as slaves. At the close of the Pequot
War in New England something like two hundred
of the Indians that remained were sent to the Bermuda
Islands and exchanged for Negro slaves. An
extensive trade in Indian slaves was carried on for
many years with the coast of Venezuela.

During all this time, for a hundred years or more,
the Indian and the Negro worked side by side as
slaves. In all the laws and regulations of the Colonial
days the same rule which was applied to the
Indian was also applied to the Negro slaves. For
instance, in Bishop Spangenberg's "Journal of
Travel in North Carolina," written in 1752, it is
stated that the law declared "whoever marries a
Negro, Indian, mulatto, or any other person of
mixed blood, must pay a fine of fifty pounds." In
all other regulations that were made in the earlier
days for the control of the slaves, mention

is invariably made of the Indian as well as the
Negro.

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

traces among them, of remnants of the Indian race
that formerly inhabited these islands, as, for instance,
in the islands of St. Vincent and Dominica.

A number of the Negroes of the United States, I
might add, who have become prominent in one direction
or another, are known to have Indian blood in
their veins. I have heard it said, for instance, though
I do not know it to be true, that Frederick Douglass
had some Indian blood. It is pretty well known
that Crispus Attucks, the leader of the Boston
Massacre, was a runaway slave with considerable
Indian blood in his veins. Paul Cuffe, the noted
Negro skipper, who took the first shipload of Africans
back to Africa, and who therefore deserves the honour
of being the first actual coloniser of Africa by
American Negroes, was a man of Indian ancestry.
Among the Negroes in our day who are of Indian
ancestry I might mention T. Thomas Fortune, who
always speaks with pride of the fact that he has in
his veins the fighting blood of his Seminole ancestors.

I remember hearing Mr. Fortune say that he had
in his veins Negro, Indian, and Irish blood, and that
sometimes these antagonistic strains fell to warring
with each other, with very interesting results.

In many other ways besides their connection with
slavery, the Indian and the Negro have been brought
together in this country. In Louisiana, at different
times, the Negroes fought with the white man against
the Indians. At other times, the Indians conspired

with the Negro slaves against the white man in an
effort to throw off the yoke of slavery. In 1730 the
Chickasaw Indians conspired with some of the slaves
of New Orleans to destroy the whole white population.
The conspiracy was discovered, however, and the
leader, Samba, and seven other Negro leaders were
broken on the wheel to pay the penalty for their
crime. In Alabama the Negroes fought with the
whites against the Indians.

One of the most interesting and picturesque chapters
in the history of the warfare of the white man and
the Indian is that which relates the long struggle of
the Seminoles, who were mixed with and supported
by runaway Negroes from the plantations of Georgia
and the Carolinas, to maintain their independence
and preserve their territory. There is a pretty well
established tradition that the famous Seminole chief
Osceola, who, for a long time, had been their faithful
friend, finally turned against the whites, because his
Negro wife, who was the daughter of a fugitive slave,
was captured and sold across the border into slavery.

In a recent account of the last of the unconquered
Seminoles, who are still living in the Everglades
of Florida, I noticed reference to an Afro-Indian,
who apparently holds a position among these people
corresponding to that of a sheriff, since he is
described as executioner of the tribe.

The Cherokee Indians of Georgia were large slave-owners,
as were also the Creek Indians of Alabama.

When, in 1838, these Indians were compelled to move
westward to the Indian Territory they took a great
many of their Negro slaves with them. During the
Civil War the Indians of the Territory along with
The white people of the South, defended their right
to hold slave property, but the terms of peace freed
these slaves of the Indians as they did those of the
other Southern slave-holders, and since that time
the freedmen have been incorporated in the different
Indian nations of Indian Territory to which they
belonged as slaves.

So thoroughly have the Negroes and the Indians
intermingled in some of the Indian nations that in
travelling through the country nearly every Indian
you meet seems to be, if I may judge by my own
experience, either a Negro, or a white man.

A few years ago I visited that part of Oklahoma
that was formerly known as Indian Territory, and
I recall my feeling of disappointment and surprise
when I saw almost no Indians either at the railway
stations or in the towns that I visited, whereas I had
expected to see the streets thronged with them.
When I asked a man I met quite casually on the street
where the Indians had all gone, he replied that they
"were back in the hills."

"You know," he continued, "as soon as the Indian
sees a whitewashed fence he thinks it is time for him
to get out. He is afraid if he stays he will get civilised."

Now this is one respect in which the Negro, largely,

I believe, because he has passed through the condition
of slavery, differs from the Indian. The Negro
has learned, during his contact with the white man
in slavery, not to be afraid of civilisation. The
result is that as soon as he sees a whitewashed fence
he tries to get next to it.

The two races, the Indian and the Negro, have often
been compared to the disadvantage of the Negro.
I have frequently heard it stated that the Indian
proved himself the superior race by not submitting
to slavery. As I have already pointed out, it is not
exactly true that the Indian never submitted to
slavery. What is nearer the truth is that no race
which has not at some time or other submitted to
slavery of some kind never succeeded in reaching
a higher form of civilisation. It is just as true of
the Bushmen of South Africa, as it is of the Indian,
that they never submitted to slavery. The Bushmen,
like the Indian, were a hunter race that obstinately
refused to adapt themselves to new conditions, and
the result was that when they met a stronger people
in the Kaffir, of South Africa, they were hunted off
the face of the earth. The same thing, or something
like the same thing, happened in America. At the
time that the white people of New England and of
the Southern states were offering a bounty for every
Indian scalp they could obtain, they were sending
ships across the ocean to get Negro slaves to furnish
the necessary labour for opening up the country and

tilling the farm. At the time that the Indians were
fighting the white man in the Ohio valley they
relentlessly killed the white men they captured, and,
it is said, sometimes ate them, but spared the lives
of the Negro prisoners, in order to sell them to the
French settlers in Canada and the Mississippi valley.[2]

The fact is that, so far as the Indian refused to
become a slave of the white man, he deprived himself
of the only method that existed at that time for getting
possession of the white man's learning and the white
man's civilisation. To me it seems that the patience
of the Negro, which enabled him to endure the hardships
of slavery, and the natural human sympathy
of the Negro, which taught him, finally, to love the
white man and to gain his affection in return, was
wiser, if you can speak of it in such terms, than the
courage and independence of the Indian which prevented
him from doing the same.

In the long run it is not those qualities which
make a race picturesque and interesting, but rather
those qualities which make that race useful, that fit
it to survive and profit from contact with a civilisation
higher than its own. So far as I have been able to
learn, the white man, as yet, has never been able to

make the Indian of value, in any large way, in the
great task of civilisation. While the Negro, in
this country, at least, has steadily increased in numbers,
the Indian has steadily decreased, until at the
present time there are nearly ten million Negroes
and less than three hundred thousand Indians in the
United States. Not only has the Indian decreased
in numbers, but he has been an annual tax upon the
Government for food and clothing to the extent of
something like $10,000,000 a year, to say nothing of
the large amount spent in policing him. It has
been estimated that the entire amount expended by
the people of the United States is something more
than a billion dollars.[3]

The Negro, on the contrary, for two hundred and
fifty years, was brought to this country at an enormous
expense, and during that time, judging, at any rate,
by the prices which were paid for him, the value of

his services was constantly increasing. I venture to
predict that when the economic history of the Negro
comes to be written it will be found that, both in this
country and in Africa, the black man has proved himself
superior as a labourer to any other people in the
same stage of civilisation.

In seeking to draw here a comparison between the
red man and my own race I do not believe it is
necessary for me to say that I am not influenced in
any way by racial prejudices against the Indian. I
think that when the first Indians were brought to
Hampton I was disposed to feel, as most of the students
did at that time, that since Hampton was
established for the benefit of the Negro, the Indian
should not have been permitted to come in. But it
did not take me long, after getting in personal contact
with individual Indians, to outgrow that prejudice.
During the time that I had these young men
under my charge, living in intimate daily contact
with them as I did, I learned to admire the Indian.

Perhaps all of us were more kindly disposed toward
the Indians as we learned that they, like ourselves, felt
that they had suffered wrongs and had been oppressed.
In this respect the presence of the Indians at Hampton
has been, I believe, a valuable experience to the
mass of the Negro students of the school. It taught
me at any rate, that other races than the Negro had
had a hard time in this country, and that was, and is, a
valuable thing for the young men of my race to know

and understand. Just so far as we, as a race, learn
that our trials and our difficulties are not wholly
exceptional and peculiar to ourselves; that, on the
contrary, other peoples have passed through the same
period of trials and have had to stand the same tests,
we shall cease to feel discouraged and embittered.
On the contrary, we shall learn to feel that in our
struggles to rise we are carrying the common burden
of humanity, and that only in helping others can we
really help ourselves. It was from my contact with
the Indian, as I remember, that I first learned the
important lesson that if I permitted myself to hate
a man because of his race I was doing a greater
wrong to myself than I could possibly do to him.

What is true of the Negro in comparison with the
Indian is equally true in his comparison with any
other primitive race. The fact seems to be, as I
have said elsewhere, that the Negro is the only race
that has been able to look the white man in the face
during any long period of years and not only live but
multiply.

So much has been said about Negro labour in
this country, and so much has been said about
Negro labour in Africa, that I feel disposed to
quote at some length here a statement of the late
Professor N. S. Shaler, formerly Dean of the
Lawrence Scientific School, of Harvard University.
Professor Shaler was not only a scientific man
of broad and deep culture, but he was also a

Southern man, and had abundant opportunity to
get the facts.

Professor Shaler says:

A little further on Professor Shaler compares the
Indian as a labourer with the Negro, pointing out
the superiority of the black over the red man in
this respect. It should be remembered in this
connection, however, that almost everywhere, in
Africa, the Negro before coming to America had

reached a higher stage of civilisation than the Indian.
He already had possession of some of the fundamental
industries, like agriculture and the smelting of ores,
while the system of slavery existing everywhere in
Africa had long accustomed large portions of the
population to the habit of systematic labour.

The Indians who first met the white man on this
continent do not seem to have held slaves until they
first learned to do so from him. It is interesting to
note also that Indian slavery, as practised by both
the white man and the Indian, seems to have maintained
itself among the French population in the
Mississippi valley and in Canada for a considerable
time after it had begun to die out in the English seaboard
colonies. Speaking of the Indian, as compared
with the Negro slave, Professor Shaler says:

Referring to what he calls "the failure of the white
man to take a larger share in the agriculture of the
South," Professor Shaler says of the Negro as a
farm labourer:

I have written at some length of the relations of the
Negro and the Indian in this country because these
relations are interesting in themselves and because
they show how thoroughly the Negro, by uniting himself
with the indigenous population of the country,
has knitted himself into the life and rooted himself in
the soil of America. I think I am perfectly safe in

saying that the Negro in America has a great deal
more of the blood of the original American in him
than any other race on this continent, other than
the native Indian himself. In fact, if we confine
ourselves to certain parts of the West Indies
and South America, the Negro is the only man who
can still be said to represent, by inheritance of blood,
the original American.

I have taken some pains to find out, as near as I
was able, from the imperfect statistics at hand, the
actual number of people of African descent in the
Western world. Including the ten million persons
of Negro blood in the United States, I believe I am
safe in saying that there are in North and South
America and the West Indies no less than twenty-one
million descendants of the original slaves who
were brought from Africa during the period of two
hundred and fifty years in which the slave-trade
existed.

CHAPTER VIII
THE NEGRO'S LIFE IN SLAVERY

SOME years ago one of the frequent subjects of
discussion among the white people and the
coloured people was the question: Who was
responsible for slavery in America? Some people
said the English government was the guilty party,
because England would not let the colonies abolish
the slave-trade when they wanted to. Others
said the New England colonies were just as deep
in the mire as England or the Southern states,
because for many years a very large share of the
trade was carried on in New England ships.

As a matter of fact there were, as near as I have
been able to learn, three parties who were directly
responsible for the slavery of the Negro in the
United States. First of all there was the Negro
himself. It should not be forgotten that it was the
African who, for the most part, carried on the slave-raids
by means of which his fellow African was
captured and brought down to the coast for sale.
When, some months ago, the Liberian embassy
visited the United States, Vice-President Dossen
explained to me that one reason why Liberia had

made no more progress during the eighty-six years
of its existence was the fact that for many years
the little state had been engaged in a life-and-death
struggle with native slave-traders who had
been accustomed for centuries to ship their slaves
from Liberian ports and were unwilling to give up
the practice. It was only after the slave-trade had
entirely ceased, he said, that Liberia had begun
to exercise an influence upon the masses of the
native peoples within its jurisdiction.

The second party to slavery was the slave-trader
who, at first, as a rule, was an Englishman or a
Northern white man. During the Colonial period,
for instance, Newport, Rhode Island, was the
principal headquarters of the slave-trade in this
country. At one time Rhode Island had one hundred
and fifty vessels engaged in the traffic. Down
to 1860 Northern capital was very largely invested
in the slave-trade, and New York was the port from
which most of the American slave-smugglers fitted
out.

Finally there was the Southern white man who
owned and worked the bulk of the slaves, and was
responsible for what we now ordinarily understand
as the slave-system. It would be just as much a
mistake, however, to assume that the South was
ever solidly in favour of slavery as it is to assume
that the North was always solidly against it. Thousands
of persons in the Southern states were

opposed to slavery, and numbers of them, like James
G. Birney, of Alabama, took their slaves North in
order to free them, and afterward became leaders
in the anti-slavery struggle.

Like every other human thing, there is more
than one side to slavery and more than one way of
looking at it. For instance, as defined in the slave-laws
in what was known as the Slave Code, slavery
was pretty much the same at all times all over the
South. The regulations imposed upon master and
upon slave were, in several particulars, different
for the different states. On the whole, however,
as a legal institution, slavery was the same everywhere.

On the other hand, actual conditions were not
only different in every part of the country, but they
were likely to be different on every separate plantation.
Every plantation was, to a certain extent, a
little kingdom by itself, and life there was what the
people who were bound together in the plantation
community made it. The law and the custom of
the neighbourhood regulated, to a certain extent,
the treatment which the master gave his slave.
For instance, in the part of Virginia where I lived
both white people and coloured people looked with
contempt upon the man who had the reputation of
not giving his slaves enough to eat. If a slave
went to an adjoining plantation for something to
eat, the reputation of his master was damned in that

community. On the whole, however, each plantation
was a little independent state, and one master
was very little disposed to interfere with the affairs
of another.

The account that one gets of slavery from the
laws that were passed for the government of slaves
show that institution up on its worst side. No
harsher judgment was ever passed on slavery, so
far as I know, than that which will be found in the
decision of a justice of the Supreme Court of
North Carolina in summing up the law in a case
in which the relations of master and slave were
defined.

The case I refer to, which was tried in 1829, was
one in which the master, who was the defendant,
was indicted for beating his slave. The decision,
which acquitted him, affirmed the master's right
to inflict any kind of punishment upon his slave
short of death. The grounds upon which this
judgment was based were that in the whole history
of slavery there had been no such prosecution of a
master for punishing a slave, and, in the words of
the decision, "against this general opinion in the
community the court could not hold."

It was a mistake, the decision continued, to say
that the relations of the master and slave were
like that of a parent and child. The object of
the parent in training his son was to render him fit
to live the life of a free man, and, as a means to

that end, he gave him moral and intellectual instruction.
With the case of the slave it was different.
There could be no sense in addressing moral considerations
to a slave. Chief-Justice Ruffin, of
North Carolina, summed up his opinion upon this
point in these words:

In making this decision Justice Ruffin did not
attempt to justify the rule he had laid down on
moral grounds. "As a principle of right," he said,
"every person in his retirement must repudiate it.
But in the actual condition of things it must be
so; there is no remedy. This discipline belongs to
the state of slavery. It constitutes the curse of
slavery both to the bond and free portion of our
population."[1]

This decision brings out into plain view an idea that

was always somewhere at the bottom of slavery—
the idea, namely, that one man's evil is another
man's good. The history of slavery, if it proves anything,
proves that just the opposite is true, namely,
that evil breeds evil, just as disease breeds disease,
and that a wrong committed upon one portion of a
community will, in the long run, surely react upon
the other portion of that community.

There was a very great difference between the
life of the slave on the small plantations in the
uplands and upon the big plantations along the
coasts. To illustrate, the plantation upon which I
was born, in Franklin County, Va., had, as I remember,
only six slaves. My master and his sons all
worked together side by side with his slaves. In
this way we all grew up together, very much
like members of one big family. There was no
overseer, and we got to know our master and he
to know us. The big plantations along the
coasts were usually carried on under the direction
of an overseer. The master and his
family were away for a large part of the year.
Personal relation between them could hardly be
said to exist.

John C. Calhoun, South Carolina's greatest
statesman, was brought up on a plantation not very
much different from the one upon which I was
raised. One of his biographers relates how Patrick
Calhoun, John C. Calhoun's father, returning from

his legislative duties in Charleston, brought home
on horseback behind him a young African freshly
imported in some English or New England vessel.
The children in the neighbourhood and, no doubt,
some of the older people, had never before seen a
black man. He was the first one brought into that
part of the country. Patrick Calhoun gave him the
name of Adam. Some time later he got for him a
wife. One of the children of the black man, Adam,
was named Swaney. He grew up on the plantation
with John C. Calhoun, and was for many years
his playmate. Swaney lived to a great age, and in
after years used to be fond of talking about the early
years that he and John Calhoun had spent together.
They hunted and fished together, and worked
together in the fields.

"We worked in the field," Swaney is reported
to have said, "and many a time in the hot
brilin' sun me and Marse John has ploughed
together."

I have taken these facts from an account of Calhoun's
early life by Colonel W. Pinkney Stark, who
has given, besides, a very excellent account of the
institution of slavery as it existed in the early days
in that part of the country in which he lived. At that
time and in that part of the country the planter
worked his own plantation. The overseer did not
come in until later, and Colonel Stark believes that
"whatever was most harsh in the institution of

slavery was due to the rise of this middleman."
He says:

The faithful discharge of the duties of the proprietor of a
plantation in former times demanded administrative as well as
moral qualities of a high order. There was never a better
school for the education of statesmen than the administration
of a Southern plantation under the former régime. A well-governed
plantation was a well-ordered little independent
state. Surrounded with such environments, Calhoun grew
at this school.[2]

The conditions of the Negro slave were harder on
some of the big plantations in the Far South than
they were elsewhere. That region was peopled
by an enterprising class of persons, of whom many
came from Virginia, bringing their slaves with them.
The soil was rich, the planters were making money
fast, the country was rough and unsettled, and there
was undoubtedly a disposition to treat the slaves as
mere factors in the production of corn, cotton, and
sugar.[3]

And yet there were plantations in this region
where the relations between master and slave
seem to have been as happy as one could ask
or expect under the circumstances. On some
of the large estates in Alabama and Mississippi
which were far removed from the influence of the
city, and sometimes in the midst of a wilderness,
master and slaves frequently lived together under
conditions that were genuinely patriarchal. But
on such plantations there was, as a rule, no
overseer.

As an example of the large plantations on
which the relations between master and slave were
normal and happy I might mention those of the
former President of the Confederacy, Jefferson
Davis, and his brother, Joseph Davis, in Warren
County, Mississippi.

The history of the Davis family and of the way
in which their plantations, the "Hurricane" and
"Brierfield," came into existence is typical. The
ancestors of the President of the Confederacy came
originally from Wales. They settled first in Georgia,
emigrated thence to Kentucky, and finally settled
in the rich lands of Mississippi. In 1818 Joseph
Davis, who was at that time a lawyer in Vicksburg,
attracted by the rich bottom-lands along the
Mississippi, took his father's slaves and went
down the river, thirty-six miles below Vicksburg,
to the place which is now called "Davis's Bend."

There he began clearing the land and preparing
it for cultivation.

At that time there were no steamboats on the
Mississippi River, and the country was so wild
that people travelled through the lonely forests
mostly on horseback. In the course of a few years
Mr. Davis, with the aid of his slaves, succeeded in
building up a plantation of about five thousand
acres, and became, before his death, a very wealthy
man. One day he went down to Natchez and
purchased in the market there a young Negro who
afterward became known as Ben Montgomery.
This young man had been sold South from North
Carolina, and because, perhaps, he had heard, as
most of the slaves had, of the hard treatment that
was to be expected on the big, lonesome plantations,
had made up his mind to remain in the city. The
first thing he did, therefore, when Mr. Davis brought
him home, was to run away. Mr. Davis succeeded
in getting hold of him again, brought him back to
the plantation, and then, as Isaiah, Benjamin Montgomery's
son, has told me, Mr. Davis "came to an
understanding" with his young slave.

Just what that understanding was no one seems
now to know exactly, but in any case, as a result
of it, Benjamin Montgomery received a pretty fair
education, sufficient, at any rate, to enable him in
after years, when he came to have entire charge,
as he soon did, of Mr. Davis's plantation, to survey

the line of the levee which was erected to protect
the plantation from the waters of the Mississippi,
to draw out plans, and to compute the size of
buildings, a number of which were erected at different
times under his direction.

Mrs. Jefferson Davis, in her memoir of her husband,
referring to Benjamin Montgomery and to
the manner in which Joseph Davis conducted his
plantation, says:

Some years after the settlement on the bottom-lands
at Davis's Bend had been made, Mr. Jefferson
Davis joined his brother and lived for several

years upon an adjoining plantation. The two
brothers had much the same ideas about the management
of their slaves. Both of them took personal
supervision of their estates, and Jefferson Davis,
like his brother, had a coloured man to whom he
refers as his "friend and servant, James Pemberton,"
who, until he died, seems to have had
practically the whole charge of the Brierfield plantation
in the same way that Benjamin Montgomery
had charge of the Hurricane. After the war both
of these plantations were sold for the sum of $300,000
to Benjamin Montgomery and his sons, who conducted
them for a number of years until, as a result
of floods and the low price of cotton, they were compelled
to give them up.

Thornton Montgomery afterward moved to North
Dakota, where for a number of years he owned and
conducted a large wheat farm of 640 acres near
Fargo. His brother Isaiah afterward founded the
Negro town of Mound Bayou, Miss., of which I
shall have more to say hereafter.

As illustrating the kindly relations and good will
which continued to exist between the ex-President
of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, and his former
slaves, both during the years that they lived together
on the plantation and afterward, Mrs. Davis has
printed several letters written to her by them after
Mr. Davis's death. The following letter was written
by Thornton Montgomery, who is at present associated

with his brother, Isaiah, in business at
Mound Bayou.

From all that I have been able to learn, the early
slaves, and by these I mean the first generation
which were brought to America fresh from Africa,
seem to have remained more or less alien in customs
and sympathy to their white masters. This
was more particularly the case on the large plantations
along the Carolina coast, where the slaves
came very little in contact with their masters, and
remained to a very large degree and for a considerable
time merely an African colony on American soil.

But the later generations, those who knew Africa
only by tradition, were different. Each succeeding

generation of the Creole Negroes—to use the
expression in its original meaning—managed to
pick up more and more, as it had the opportunity,
the language, the ideas, the habits, the crafts, and
the religious conceptions of the white man, until the
life of the black man was wholly absorbed into that
of the plantation upon which he lived.

The Negro in exile from his native land neither
pined away nor grew bitter. On the contrary, as soon
as he was able to adjust himself to the conditions
of his new life, his naturally cheerful and affectionate
disposition began to assert itself. Gradually the
natural human sympathies of the African began to
take root in the soil of the New World and, growing
up spontaneously, twine about the life of the white
man by whose side the black man now found
himself. The slave soon learned to love the
children of his master, and they loved him in
return. The quaint humour of the Negro helped
to turn many a hard corner. It helped to excuse
his mistakes and, by turning a reproof into a jest,
to soften the resentment of his master for his faults.

Quaint and homely tales that were told around
the fireside made the Negro cabin a place of romantic
interest to the master's children. The simple,
natural joy of the Negro in little things converted
every change in the dull routine of his life into an
event. Hog-killing time was an annual festival,
and the corn shucking was a joyous event which

the whites and blacks, in their respective ways,
took part in and enjoyed. These corn-shucking bees,
or whatever they may be called, took place during
the last of November or the first half of December.
They were a sort of a prelude to the festivities of
the Christmas season. Usually they were held
upon one of the larger and wealthier plantations.

After all the corn had been gathered, thousands
of bushels, sometimes, it would be piled up in the
shape of a mound, often to the height of fifty or
sixty feet. Invitations would be sent around by the
master himself to the neighbouring planters, inviting
their slaves on a certain night to attend.
In response to these invitations as many as one
or two hundred men, women, and children would
come together.

When all were assembled around the pile of corn,
some one individual, who had already gained a
reputation as a leader in singing, would climb on
top of the mound and begin at once, in clear, loud
tones, a solo—a song of the corn-shucking season
—a kind of singing which I am sorry to say has
very largely passed from memory and practice.
After leading off in this way, in clear, distinct tones,
the chorus at the base of the mound would join in,
some hundred voices strong. The words, which
were largely improvised, were very simple and
suited to the occasion, and more often than not they
had the flavour of the camp-meeting rather than

any more secular proceeding. Such singing I have
never heard on any other occasion. There was
something wild and weird about that music, such as
I suspect will never again be heard in America.

One of these songs, as I remember, ran about
as follows:

Little by little the slave songs, the quaint stories,
sayings, and anecdotes of the slave's life began to
give their quality to the life of the plantation. Half

the homely charm of Southern life was made by the
presence of a Negro. The homes that had no
Negro servants were dreary by contrast, and that
was not due to the fact that, ordinarily, the man who
had slaves was rich and the man who had no slaves
was poor.

The four great crops of the South—tobacco, rice,
sugar, and cotton—were all raised by slave labour.
In the early days it was thought that no labour
except that of the Negro was suited to cultivate these
great staples of Southern industry, and that opinion
prevails pretty widely still. But it was not merely
his quality as a labourer that made the Negro
seem so necessary to the white man in the South;
it was also these other qualities to which I have
referred—his cheerfulness and sympathy, his
humour and his fidelity. No one can honestly say
that there was anything in the nature of the institution
of slavery that would develop these qualities
in a people who did not possess them. On the contrary,
what we know about slavery elsewhere leads
us to believe that the system would have developed
qualities quite different, so that I think I am
justified in saying that most of the things that
made slavery tolerable, both to the white man and
to the black man, were due to the native qualities
of the African.

Southern writers, looking back and seeking to
reproduce the genial warmth and gracious charm of

that old ante-bellum Southern life, have not failed to
do full justice to the part that the Negro played in it.
The late Joel Chandler Harris, for instance, has
given us in the character of "Uncle Remus" the
type of the Negro story-teller who delights and
instructs the young children of the "big house"
with his quaint animal stories that have been
handed down to the Negro by his African ancestors.
The "Br'er Rabbit" stories of Uncle Remus are
now a lasting element in the literature, not only
of the South, but of America, and they are
recognised as the peculiar contribution of the
American Negro slave to the folk-lore stories of
the world.

In my own state of Virginia, Mr. Thomas Nelson
Page has given us, in "Uncle Billy" and "Uncle
Sam," two typical characters worthy of study by
those who wish to understand the human side of
the Negro slave on the aristocratic plantations of
that state. In Mr. Page's story, "Meh Lady,"
Uncle Billy was guide, philosopher and friend to
his mistress and her daughter in the trying times of
war and in their days of poverty. He hid their
silver, refused to give information to the Union
soldiers, prayed the last prayer with his dying
mistress, comforted her lonely daughter, and at last
gave her away in marriage. At the close of the
wedding, the old man sits in front of his cabin door
and thinks again of the old days. The musings

of Uncle Billy Mr. Page tells in the following
quaint dialect:

In the story of "Marse Chan" Mr. Page lets
Uncle Sam, the slave bodyguard, tell in the following
language what happened to his young master
during the Civil War on the field of battle:

In the Palace of Fine Arts in St. Louis during the
Exposition of 1904, there was a picture which made
a deep impression on every Southern white man
and black man who saw it, who knew enough of the
old life to understand what it meant. Rev. A. B.
Curry, of Memphis, Tenn., referring to this picture
in a sermon in his home city on November 27,
1904, said:

The slaves in Virginia and the border states
were, as a rule, far superior, or at least they considered
themselves so, to the slaves of the lower
South. Even in freedom this feeling of superiority
remains. Furthermore, the mansion house-servants,
of whom Mr. Page writes, having had an
opportunity to share to a large extent the daily life
of their masters, were very proud of their superior
position and advantages, and had little contact with
the field-hands. It is perhaps not generally understood
that in slavery days lines were drawn among
the slaves just as they were among the white people.
The servants owned by a rich and aristocratic
family considered that the servants of "a poor white
man," one who was not able to own more than
half a dozen slaves, were not in the same social class
with themselves. And yet the life of these more
despised slaves had its vicissitudes, its obscure
heroisms, and its tragedies just like the rest of the
world. In fact, it was from the plantation hands,
as a rule, that the most precious records of slave-life
came—the plantation hymns. The field-hands
sung these songs and they expressed their lives.

I have frequently met and talked with old men
of my race who have grown up in slavery. It is
difficult for these old men to express all that they
feel. Occasionally, however, they will utter some
quaint humorous turn of expression in which there
is a serious thought underneath.

One old farmer, who owns a thousand acres of land
not far from Tuskegee, said: "We 's jes' so ign't out
heah, we don' see no diffarence 'twe'n freedom an'
slav'ry, 'cept den we's workin' fer someone else,
and now we's workin' fer oursel's."

Some time ago an old coloured man who has lived
for a number of years near the Tuskegee Institute,
in talking about his experience since freedom,
remarked that the greatest difference he had found
between slavery and freedom was that in the days
of slavery his master had to think for him, but since
he had been free he had to think and plan for
himself.

At another time out in Kansas I met an old
coloured woman who had left her home in Tennessee,
directly after the war, and settled with a large
number of other coloured people in what is called
"Tennessee Town", now a suburb of Topeka,
Kansas. In talking with her about her experiences
in freedom and in slavery, I asked her if she did not
sometimes feel as if she would like to go back
to the old days and live as she had lived on the
plantation.

"Sometimes," she replied, "I feel as I 'd like to
go back and see my old massa and missus"—
she hesitated a moment and then added, "but
they sold my baby down South."

Aside from the slave-songs very little has come
down to us from slavery days that shows how
slavery looked to the masses of the people.

There are a considerable number of slave narratives,
written by fugitive slaves with the assistance
of abolitionist friends, but as these were composed
for the most part under the excitement of the antislavery
agitation they show things, as a rule, somewhat
out of proportion. There is one of these
stories, however, that gives a picture of the changing
fortunes and vicissitudes of slave-life which
makes it especially interesting. I refer to the story
of Charity Bower, who was born in 1779 near
Edenton, North Carolina, and lived to a considerable
age after she obtained her freedom. She described
her master as very kind to his slaves. He used to
whip them, sometimes, with a hickory switch, she
said, but never let his overseer do so. Continuing,
she said:

Two or three days after he come to me, and says he: "Charity,
how should you like to be sold to Mr. Kinmore?" I told him I
would rather be sold to him than to anybody else, because my
husband belonged to him. Mr. Kinmore agreed to buy us, and
so I and my children went there to live.

Shortly after this her new master died and her new
mistress was not so kind to her as he had been.
Thereupon she set to work to buy the freedom of
her children.

"Sixteen children I've had, first and last," she
said, "and twelve I've nursed for my mistress.
From the time my first baby was born, I always set
my heart upon buying freedom for some of my children.
I thought it was more consequence to them
than to me, for I was old and used to being a slave."

In order to save up money enough for this purpose
she set up a little oyster board just outside her
cabin which adjoined the open road. When anyone
came along who wanted a few oysters and
crackers she would leave her washing and wait
upon them. In this way she saved up $200, but
for some reason or other she never succeeded in
getting her mistress's consent to buy one of the children.
It was not always easy for a master to
emancipate his slave in those days, even if he wanted
to do so. On the contrary, as she says, "One
after another—one after another—she sold 'em
from me."

It was to a "thin, peaked-looking man who used
to come and buy of me," she says, that she finally
owed her freedom. "Sometimes," she continued,
"he would say, 'Aunt Charity, you must fix me up a
nice little mess, for I am poorly to-day.' I always
made something good for him; and if he did n't
happen to have any change I always trusted him."

It was this man, a Negro "speculator," who,
according to her story, finally purchased her with
her five children and, giving her the youngest child,
set her free.

"Well," she ended, "after that I concluded I'd
come to the free states. Here I am takin' in
washing; my daughter is smart at her needle; and
we get a very comfortable living."

There was much in slavery besides its hardship

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

CHAPTER IX
SLAVE INSURRECTIONS AND THE NEGRO "PERIL"

SOMETHING like twenty-five insurrections of
the slaves took place in the United States,
according to Professor Albert Bushnell Hart,
previous to the American Revolution. This is taking
no account of the outbreaks that took place
before that time in Louisiana, nor of those that took
place in the other Spanish, French, and English
colonies in the West Indies.[1]

After the English invasion of Jamaica in 1655, for
instance, the Negro slaves who had fought with
their Spanish masters against the English, betook
themselves to the mountains and maintained a
number of little insurgent governments for nearly
a hundred years until, in 1738, these independent
governments were formally constituted and their
right of existence recognised. They continued until
1796, when their attempt to build roads and
improve the condition of their villages opened
the way for attacks by the English and resulted
in their downfall. It is said, however, that
even to this day some of the wild descendants

of those maroons are still living in the mountainous
passes of Jamaica.

The insurrection of the slaves which finally resulted
in the establishment, in 1804, of the little Black
Republic of Haiti was a part of the revolutionary
movement that began in France in 1789. Much
has been said and written about the frightful cruelties
which characterised the revolution in this
island, but any one who will compare what took
place in Haiti and Santo Domingo with the events
which took place during this period in France will
not find, I believe, much to say, considering all of
the circumstances, in disparagement of these revolting
slaves and their heroic leader, Toussaint
L'Overture.

The most important, because the most far-reaching
in their effects, of these efforts of Negro slaves
to gain their freedom by force, were the attempted
insurrection of Denmark Vesey in 1822 and the
outbreak under Nat Turner in 1831. These two
events, following closely upon the bloody revolution
in Haiti and the disturbances in other parts of
the West Indies, made a profound impression upon
the people of the Southern States.

But even before the memorable insurrection of
Nat Turner, two Negroes, Gabriel and Jack Bowler,
were the leaders, in 1800, of an attempted revolt in
Virginia. These two slaves got together and organised
something like a thousand Negroes in

Henrico County, and with this force marched on the
city of Richmond. A swollen stream, impassable
owing to a recent storm, forced them to halt.
They disbanded, expecting to renew the attempt
the following night, but the plot was discovered
and the citizens of Richmond were aroused before
the attack could be made. A reward was offered
for Gabriel and Jack Bowler. They were caught
and executed.

Twenty-two years later, in Charleston, S. C.,
an extensive conspiracy was organised by a free
Negro, Denmark Vesey. Vesey was known among
his people as a deep student of the Bible and exerted
a marked influence over them, particularly
through their religious meetings which, then as
now, were of the nature of popular assemblies for
the discussion of all questions relating to the welfare
of the race. Vesey's plot failed of its purpose, and
he was caught, duly tried and, with thirty-four
others, put to death.

When a boy in Virginia I recall the stories that
were told around the cabins by the older slave men
and women of the "Prophet" Nat Turner, as he
was called, and of the dreadful incidents that took
place during the insurrection of 1831. Nat Turner
was a slave preacher in Southampton County,
Virginia. During his boyhood days, as I have heard,
his mother, who was known to be a very religious
woman, taught him that, like Moses, he was to be

the deliverer of his race. She took great pains to
give him the advantage of what lore and learning
she possessed, and taught him verses and parts of
chapters from the Bible, particularly from the
Prophets of the Old Testament. He was nursed in
the quaint and primitive theology of the plantation
hymns, which helped to stimulate the belief in his
mission to free his people.

He grew up to be a silent, dreamy kind of
man, going, whenever he could, to the caves of
the mountains to brood over the condition of
the slaves.

It appears to have been Turner's plan to collect a
large number of slaves and take refuge in the Dismal
Swamp, in the extreme southeastern section of
Virginia. On August 21, 1831, with the belief
that he was executing the will of God, Nat Turner
started forth with six companions who were soon
joined by others, making a force of sixty men.
Their plan was to exterminate, as far as they were
able, the white race about them. In a short time
sixty white people on different plantations had been
killed. The local militia and United States troops
were called out. The insurgents resisted, but the
resistance proved useless, and after more than a
hundred of them had been killed the uprising was
crushed. Forty-three Negroes in all were put on
trial, of whom twenty-one were acquitted, twelve
were convicted and sold out of the state, while

twenty others, including Nat Turner and one
woman, were convicted and hanged.

When the John Brown raid took place at Harper's
Ferry in 1859, five coloured men were a part of his
little band. Of the five men, three were free-born
Negroes and two were fugitive slaves. Two of
them, Dangerfield Newby and Lewis Leary, were
killed during the fighting; John A. Copeland and
Shields Green were captured, tried, and executed;
Osborne Anderson was the only one to escape
from the scene of the disaster.

Newby was tall, well-built, and about thirty years
of age, with a pleasing face. Leary came originally
from North Carolina and was a member of
the colony of Southern coloured people at Oberlin,
Ohio. He was twenty-four years of age and quite
well educated.

Copeland, who was related to Leary, was twenty-two
years of age and came from Oberlin. His
letters, written from the jail to relatives, show him
to have been a young man of intelligence and courage.
In a letter to his brother, written shortly before his
execution, were these words, which can be read with
profit to-day after a lapse of nearly fifty years:

On the morning of his execution Copeland wrote
a long letter to his family in Oberlin from which
the following extract is taken:

Shields Green was a fugitive slave from South
Carolina, twenty-four years of age, with no knowledge
of letters, but he is said to have possessed considerable
natural ability and a courage which
showed that, if better trained, he might have become
a man of some importance. He had come to
Chambersburg, Pa., the meeting-place of those who
were to aid Brown, with Frederick Douglass.
Douglass tells how, when he turned to leave the
Chambersburg quarry, where his interview with
John Brown was had, that, on telling Green he
could return with him to Rochester, N. Y., the
Negro turned and looked at the bowed figure of
John Brown, then asked, "Is he going to stay?"

"Yes," was the answer.

Green looked again at Brown, then at Douglass,
and slowly said: "Well, I guess I goes wid de ole
man."

When the fight had begun at Harper's Ferry some
of the men soon saw that resistance was useless and
decided to try to make their escape. Green came
under fire while on his way to the arsenal. One of the
men told Green he had better go with them. He
turned and looked toward the engine-house, before
the door of which stood its few defenders and
asked: "You think der 's no chance?"

"Not one," was the reply.

"And de ole captain can't get away?"

"No," said the men.

"Well," he replied, slowly, with a long, lingering
look, "I guess I 'll go back to de ole man."

In prison Green was constantly sending expressions
of consolation and of devotion to Brown and, on
the morning of John Brown's execution, Green sent
him word that he was glad he came, and that he
waited willingly for his own death.

Anderson, born free in Pennsylvania, was twenty-four
years of age. He was well-educated and by
trade a printer. He was a man of natural ability,
simple in manner and address. He wrote a very
interesting pamphlet of the raid after his escape
entitled, "A Voice from Harper's Ferry." He
served during the latter part of the Civil War in one
of the Negro regiments, and died in Washington in
1871.

The great slave insurrection which, during the
whole period of slavery, was frequently expected

and always feared, never actually took place; but
the fear of such a general outbreak always haunted
the South and helped to harden the hearts of the
Southern people against the Negro race. This fear
was responsible, for instance, for the passage of
laws which made it difficult, if not impossible, in
many of the Southern states, for a master to emancipate
his slaves; made it a crime for him to teach
his slaves to read and write; and imposed such limitations
and burdens on the free Negroes as reduced
that unfortunate class to a condition often counted
worse than that of slavery.

In the relations which existed between the white
man and the black man in slavery, just as in the
relations which exist to-day between the races in
the South, there was much that was strange and
contradictory, much that was and is hard to understand.
For instance, it seems to me that in Virginia,
at any rate, the relations between master and
slave were usually kindly. The master frequently
trusted his slave, usually cared for and protected
him, and had for him, in many instances, a feeling
of genuine affection. And yet the slaveholder was
never able to shake off his sense of danger of an
uprising of the slaves. "The night-bell is never
heard to toll in the city of Richmond," said John
Randolph of Roanoke, referring to this fear, "but
the anxious mother presses her infant more closely
to her bosom."

As a result of his experience in slavery the Southern
white man seems to have learned to make a
pretty complete distinction between the individual
Negro, whom he knows and protects, and the Negro
as a race, whom he denounces in the political campaign
and sometimes flaunts in the faces of strangers
who do not understand the situation in the South.
These two ways of looking upon and dealing with
the Negro are well represented in the cases of ex-Governor
Vardaman, of Mississippi, and Senator
Tillman, of South Carolina, both of whom, ordinarily
so violent in all their public utterances in
regard to the Negro, are frequently spoken of by
coloured men who know them as unusually kind in
all their personal relations with the Negro. Mr.
Vardaman and Mr. Tillman, it would seem, hate
the Negro in the abstract, but they get along
very well with the actual black man who is their
neighbour.

It is sometimes said that the vague, impersonal
sort of fear which the master felt for the Negro during
slavery was due to his knowledge of the savage
instincts of the black man which, unless proper
precautions were taken, might at any moment break
out and overwhelm the country. I am more inclined
to the opinion, however, that the majority
of the Negroes who were brought to this country,
either because of their previous training in Africa
or because of their natural disposition, were more

submissive, more disposed to attach themselves
and remain faithful to their masters, than any other
race or class of people would have been under
similar circumstances.

I am disposed to believe that the real reason why
the white man feared the black man was because
he felt the injustice of the condition of slavery, and
realised that it was but human nature that, when
the slave began to understand his position, he
should seek to become free.

When I hear of a certain type of public man of
the present day, either in the press or on the political
platform, talking about the danger in which
the white race is placed by reason of the presence
of the Negro in this country I cannot but feel that
these men, in their efforts to stir up prejudice
against the Negro, are moved by a bad conscience.
If they really believe there is danger from the Negro
it must be because they do not intend to give him
justice. Injustice always breeds fear.

When I hear people talking about the savage
instincts of the Negro and about the danger with
which they are threatened in consequence, I wish
these people could know and talk, as I have, with
some of the men and women who have gone as
missionaries to Africa and have spent years of
their life alone in the midst of the wildest and most
uncivilised peoples of that continent, with never
so much as a thought of fear. There are scores of

cases in all the Southern States where a few white
people live surrounded by coloured people without
fear of insurrection or murder, because they have
convinced the coloured people that they want to do
the fair thing by them, that they are anxious to
help them, and to see them make progress.
I know personally of a case where for ten years
a half-dozen white women have lived in a
community surrounded by thousands of coloured
people and with no white man near to protect
them, but they have never had the least fear
of violence because they went there to help the
coloured people.

In looking into the history of these insurrections
and conspiracies I have been impressed with the
fact that, so far as concerns the leaders of them,
none of these outbreaks seems to have been inspired
by revenge or to have been due to the ill-treatment
which the slaves had received.

Denmark Vesey was not a slave. In 1822 he
drew a fifteen-hundred-dollar prize in a lottery and
bought his freedom for $600. His real reason for
organising the conspiracy of which he was the
author seems to be revealed in the explanations he
made to some of his fellow-conspirators in inducing
them to join him.

"He said," according to the confession of one
of these men, "he did not go with Creighton
to Africa because he had not a will; he wanted

to stay and see what he could do for his fellow-creatures."

To another witness he stated that "he was satisfied
with his own condition, being free, but, as all
his children were slaves, he wished to see what
could be done for them."

Denmark Vesey was a man of some education.
He had travelled all over the world with his master,
who was a ship captain. In his talks with the
slaves he not only quoted the Bible, citing the
passage about the deliverance of the children of
Israel, but he read the speeches in Congress, particularly
one speech of a certain Mr. King who,
he said, was "the black man's friend," adding that
"he, Mr. King, had declared he would continue to
speak, write, and publish pamphlets against slavery
the longest day he lived, until the Southern States
consented to emancipate their slaves, for that
slavery was a great disgrace to the country."

Nat Turner was a very different type of man.
He was a dreamer, as I have said, and a fanatic.
So deeply was he himself imbued with the belief
that he was inspired, that his presence impressed
with a sense of awe, not merely the Negro slaves,
but many of the white people who came in contact
with him after his arrest and before his execution.

He is described as a man of ordinary stature,
having "the true Negro face, every feature of which
is strongly marked."

Mr. Gray, the gentleman who took his confession,
says of him:

He is a complete fanatic, or plays his part admirably. On
other subjects he possesses an uncommon share of intelligence,
with a mind capable of attaining anything, but warped and
perverted by the influence of early impressions. I shall not
attempt to describe the effect of his narrative, as told and commented
on by himself, in the condemned hole of the prison: the
calm, deliberate composure with which he spoke of his late
deeds and intentions; the expression of his fiend-like face when
excited by enthusiasm; still bearing the stains of the blood of
helpless innocence about him, clothed with rags, and covered
with chains, yet daring to raise his manacled hands to Heaven,
with a spirit soaring above the attributes of man. I looked on
him, and the blood curdled in my veins.

The history of these conspiracies proves that the
very contact of the slave with his master tended to
breed a desire for freedom. Every slave who became
educated sufficiently to read the Bible or to read the
ordinary school books came into contact with the
sentiments and traditions of a people that was

proud of its independence, and the slave learned
from his master the desire to be free. Frederick
Douglass got his first notions of freedom from
reading the great orations of William Pitt, Lord
Chatham, Fox, and Sheridan in a book called
"The Columbian Orator," which he picked up by
chance.

Once this notion of freedom got into the mind of
a slave with a vigorous intellect it never left him.
In Frederick Douglass's "Narrative," published in
1845, he tells us that when he was a slave in Maryland
on the shores of Chesapeake Bay he often
watched the ships as they sailed by, and as they
passed he would express himself in this way:

It is as true to-day as it was before the war that,
while the personal relations of the white man and the
black man in the South are frequently all that
could be desired, the natural development of these
good relations is hindered and held back by the
impersonal fear which the white man seems to
have of the Negro race as a whole. The success
of the Negro as well as that of the white man is,
for that reason, hindered by the efforts to force
upon the South a system which does not fit the

desires or the needs of either race. Ever since
the war, for instance, the normal political development
of the South has been stunted by the fear, or
the ghost of the fear, that the Negro would some
time or other again secure the upper hand in the
South as he was supposed to have done directly
after the war. As a matter of fact, the Negro was
never in control in the South. The people who
were in control were representatives of the Republican
party in the North who came South and used
their influence with the Negro and with the Government
at Washington to control the course of
events. Just such a condition never will
and never can arise again. Even if it were possible, the
Negro does not desire it any more than the white
man. What he desires most is the good will of his
white neighbours and the opportunity for the peaceful
development of those fundamental interests
which are the same for both races.

The Negro gained just as little from the temporary
power which he held during the Reconstruction
time as he did from the successful and unsuccessful
insurrections by which he sought to gain his freedom
before the war. He has no desire to try that
experiment again.

Scarcely a month or a week has passed since the
Negro became free that some newspaper has not
expressed a fear or made a prediction that there
was going to be an uprising or insurrection of the

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

The chances for another such movement, or for
an uprising of any kind, grow less every year, just
in proportion as the Negro himself gains in
property and in intelligence; in proportion as

he enters into the business of the community
in which he lives, and becomes a permanent
and definite factor in its industrial life. The
only possible chance for such an uprising at the
present time would be in a community where the
Negro has little or no interest at stake, and such
communities are now few in the Southern states.

I can best illustrate what I have in mind by
referring to a specific instance which I came across
during a trip of observation through Mississippi in
the fall of 1908. During that visit I spent a day
in Marshall County where, although the Negro
population outnumbers the white more than two
to one, there has not been, with one exception, an
outbreak of any character between the races since
the Civil War. I inquired of the coloured and the
white people there how it was that peace and
harmony prevailed in their community. I received
practically the same answer from both races, which
was in substance this: In that community the
coloured people are large owners of farm land;
they are successful farmers; they own in the principal
town of the county, Holly Springs, valuable
business blocks; they are not only engaged in farming,
but they are engaged in business, selling groceries,
dry-goods, buying and selling cotton.
Besides the coloured people of Mississippi own
several important schools and colleges in Holly
Springs. A racial outbreak would cost the Negroes

of the county quite as much as the white people,
and this fact has helped to bring about racial peace.
What is true in that community is equally true in
others where the Negro is making real progress.

In these places the people of both races have
discovered that their material and moral interests
are so interlaced that if one race suffers the other
must suffer too.

One Negro in Marshall County, Mr. E. H.
McKissack, is the Treasurer of the State Odd
Fellows organisation, which handles practically
$200,000 each year. This money, which is distributed
among the different banks in Holly Springs,
is a visible evidence of the way in which the material
interests of the races are bound together. I
was told during my visit that, whenever the least
danger of racial conflict arose in Marshall County,
the leading coloured men and the leading white
men were in the habit of taking counsel together, in
order to form plans that would result in the maintenance
of peace and friendly relations. On one
occasion, for instance, when the son of a poor
white woman was murdered by a coloured man,
the coloured people were the first to get together
and hold a mass meeting, in which a considerable
sum of money was collected and presented to the
mother of the murdered boy.

In recent years we have had several outbreaks of
mobs, sometimes in the North, sometimes in the

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

In bringing to a close what I have written on
the subject of Negro insurrections I am tempted

to say a word on the subject of Negro courage.
While certain people have fallen into the habit of
denouncing the Negro because he is unduly ambitious,
and because he refuses to remain, as they
say, "in the place for which God made him,"
there are others who claim that the Negro is too
submissive. These latter insist that, if he had the
courage to stand up and denounce his detractors in
the same harsh and bitter terms that these persons
use toward him, in a short time he would win the
respect of the world, and the only obstacle to his
progress would be removed.

It is interesting, sometimes amusing, and sometimes
even pathetic, to note the conception of
"bravery" and "courage" which some coloured
men, who put their faith in this solution of the
Negro problem, occasionally apply to other members
of their race. For a long time after freedom
came, and the same is not infrequently true at the
present time, any black man who was willing,
either in print or in public speech, to curse and
abuse the white man, easily gained for himself
a reputation for great courage. He might spend but
thirty minutes or an hour once a year in that kind
of "vindication" of his race, but he got the reputation
of being an exceedingly brave man. Another
man, who worked patiently and persistently for
years in a Negro school, depriving himself of many
of the comforts and necessities of life, in order to

perform a service which would uplift his race,
gained no reputation for courage. On the contrary,
he was likely to be denounced as a coward by these
"heroes," because he chose to do his work without
cursing, without abuse, and without complaint.

There is an element of white people which has
gained a reputation for courage by abusing the
Negro in the same way that certain of the Negroes
have gained a reputation by abusing the white man.
No account is taken by these people of the kind of
courage shown by the white man in the South who,
in an unostentatious way, is helping to lift the
Negro to a higher plane of usefulness. It requires
no real courage for a man to stand up before a
sympathetic audience and denounce wrongs that
had been committed by people thousands of miles
away. Neither does it require any real courage
for five hundred armed men to march out and kill
one helpless individual.

The encouraging thing about the relations of
the races in the United States is that an increasing
number of white men and black men are learning
that the highest courage is that of the man or the
woman who is helping some one else to be more
useful or more happy; that, in the last analysis,
it is not the courage that hurts some one and
destroys something, but the courage that helps
some one and builds something up which the world
needs most.

CHAPTER X
THE FREE NEGRO IN SLAVERY DAYS

SOME time in the fall of 1828, Benjamin
Lundy, the Quaker abolitionist, met by
accident, in a Boston boarding house, a young
man by the name of William Lloyd Garrison, who
was then publishing a total abstinence newspaper,
the National Philanthropist. The next year, after
returning from a visit to a colony of emancipated
slaves which he had succeeded in settling in the
island of Haiti, Lundy announced in his paper
that William Lloyd Garrison had joined him
at Baltimore, Maryland, and would henceforth
be associated with him in the publication at
that city of The Genius of Universal Emancipation,
the first abolition newspaper in the
United States.

This meeting of Benjamin Lundy and William
Lloyd Garrison and their subsequent association in
Baltimore marks the point in time when the agitation
for the emancipation of the Negro was transferred
from the Southern to the Northern States, and
slavery became for the first time a National issue.
After the Southampton uprising in 1831, the abolition

societies, which up to that time had existed in different
parts of the South, almost wholly disappeared.
With the exception of a few individuals like Cassius
M. Clay who, as late as 1845, published an antislavery
weekly, the True American, at Lexington,
Kentucky, there was no public opposition to slavery
in any of the Southern States.

Opposition to slavery, though silenced in the South,
never wholly ceased there, and the evidence of its
existence was the Free Negro. In spite of the efforts
that were made to limit and check emancipation of
the slaves, the number of free Negroes continued to
increase in the Southern as well as the Northern
States, and the existence of this class of persons was
the silent protest of the Southern slaveholder
against the system which he publicly defended
and upheld.

Under the conditions of slavery, the position of
the free Negro was a very uncomfortable one. He
was, in a certain sense, an anomaly, since he did not
belong to either class. He was distrusted by the
white people, and looked down upon by the slaves.
In spite of this fact, individual slaveholders—sometimes
by providing in their wills for the emancipation
and transportation of their slaves to a free state or
to Liberia, sometimes by permitting individual
slaves to buy their own freedom—were constantly
adding to the number of "free persons of colour."
Among the most illustrious of those who freed their

slaves were George Washington, John Randolph,
and Chief-Justice Roger B. Taney, author of the
famous Dred Scott decision.

When a master liberated his slaves by will, it was
frequently with the explanation, expressed or understood,
that he believed slavery was morally wrong.
When he allowed them to buy their own freedom, it
was a practical recognition that the system was
economically a mistake, since the slave who could
purchase his own freedom was one whom it did not
pay to hold as a slave. This fact was clearly recognised
by a planter in Mississippi who declared that
he had found it paid to allow the slaves to buy their
freedom. In order to encourage them to do this he
devised a method by which they might purchase their
freedom in instalments. After they had saved a
certain amount of money, by extra labour, he permitted
them to buy one day's freedom a week. With
this much capital invested in themselves they were
then able to purchase, in a much shorter time, a
second, a third, and a fourth day's freedom, until
they were entirely free.

A somewhat similar method was sometimes
adopted by certain ambitious freedmen for purchasing
the freedom of their families. In such a case the
father would purchase, for instance, a son or a
daughter. The children would then join with their
father in purchasing the other members of the family.
It was in this way, I have been informed by Mr.

Monroe Work, who is at present a teacher at Tuskegee,
that his grandfather purchased his wife and ten
of his children, including Mr. Work's father. The
grandfather, Henry Work, after securing his own
freedom, went first to Cincinnati, and then to
Decatur, Michigan, where he owned a farm, and on
this farm he and his children earned the money to
purchase one by one the other members of the family.
How much it cost the family to free itself in this way
Mr. Work says he was unable to learn. He knows,
however, that his father sold at one time for $1,400.
When Henry Work died there were still three of his
children in slavery whom he had not been able to
redeem. Ex-President Gibson, of the Negro State of
Liberia, told me that his father purchased himself
and most of the other members of the family in instalments
and transported them to Liberia. Two sons,
who did not care to go back to Africa, were left in
slavery in this country, but with the understanding
that after a certain time they were to become free.

In this and other ways, in spite of the fact that there
were at this time something like 30,000 fugitives in
Canada and 20,000 colonists in Africa and elsewhere,
the number of free Negroes in the United States
increased from 59,466 in 1790 to 434,495 in 1860.
This was about 10 per cent, of the whole Negro
population at that time. Of these free Negroes
considerably more than half—262,000—were in the
Southern States. In the South, the three states of

Maryland, Virginia, and North Carolina contained
by far the largest number of the "free citizens of
colour," as they were sometimes called. At the
census of 1860, the slave population of Maryland
was something like 87,000 and the number of free
Negroes was 83,942. From 1830 to 1860 the slave
population of Maryland decreased nearly 16,000
while the population of free Negroes increased something
over 31,000.

In estimating the number of slaves who were, in
one way or another, given their freedom by their
masters, some account should be taken of those who
were, for one reason or another, re-enslaved. A free
Negro might be sold into slavery to pay taxes or to
pay fines, and in Maryland free Negroes might be
sold into perpetual slavery for the crime of entering
the state. In 1829 the practice of selling any free
Negro, who could not account for himself, in order
to pay the jail fines, had become such a scandal as to
attract public attention.

There were other means by which a considerable
number of free Negroes were re-enslaved. The
practice of kidnapping, in spite of severe laws against
it in all the Southern states, was carried on to a
very great extent. In his book on the domestic slave-trade,
Professor Collins, of Claremont College,
Hickory, N. C., estimates that the number of free
Negroes kidnapped and sold into slavery "must have
ranged from a few hundred to two or three thousand,"

and he adds, "it appears quite certain that as many
were kidnapped as escaped from bondage, if not
more."[1]

A disposition to free slaves for personal considerations
of one kind or another began at a very early
period. In York and Henrico counties, Virginia,
as far back as the middle of the seventeenth century,
we find records of the emancipation of Negro slaves.
For example, Thomas Whitehead, of York, emancipated
his slave John, and bequeathed to him, among
other things, two cows and the use of a house and
as much ground as he could cultivate. He further
showed his confidence in the discretion and the
integrity of this Negro slave by appointing him guardian
of Mary Rogers, a ward of Mr. Whitehead. He
also made him trustee of her property, but the court
refused to allow him to fill either one or the other of
these positions.[2] Another instance recorded about
this time was that of John Carter, of Lancaster,
Virginia, who was one of the largest slaveholders in
the colony. He gave freedom to two of his Negro
slaves who were married to each other. To each he
gave a cow and a calf and three barrels of Indian
corn. He also instructed his heirs to allow them
the use of convenient firewood, timber, and as much
land as they could cultivate. He provided that the

two daughters of this couple should receive their
liberty when they reached their eighteenth year, and,
as a provision for them when they reached that age,
he gave each a yearling with its increase, which was
to be permitted to run with the cattle of his wife after
his death.[3]

In the interval between 1635 and 1700, although
the Negro slaves were few in number, and most of the
labour was performed by white servants, there were
a number of persons of African blood in the colony
of Virginia who raised themselves to positions of
some importance. Several of them were able to
write at a time when there were very few schools
and education was a decided luxury. Several had
obtained patents to land. For instance, in 1654, one
hundred acres of land in Northampton County were
granted to Richard Johnson, a Negro, and in the
description of this tract reference was made to
the contiguous estates of John Johnston and Anthony
Johnson, both Negroes. There are in the records
of Northampton County, also, evidences that a suit
was begun by Anthony Johnson for the purpose
of recovering his Negro servant.

During the early years of slavery, the free Negroes
seem to have had about the same rights under the
law that other free persons had, except, as I have
already stated, they were not allowed to hold persons
of white blood as bond-servants. It appears that,

until after the Revolution, Negro freemen were
allowed to vote in every state, except Georgia and
South Carolina. Between 1792 and 1834 the four
bordering states, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia,
and Kentucky, denied suffrage to the Negro. In
North Carolina, Negroes who paid a public tax
took part in the election until 1835, when a new
constitution excluded them from the suffrage. New
Jersey took away the suffrage of the Negro in 1807,
Connecticut in 1814, and Pennsylvania in 1838.
New York, in 1821, required from them an unusually
high property qualification.[4]

These changes were all evidences of the steady
growth in the United States, both North and South,
of a caste system which excluded the Negro from
the ordinary privileges of citizenship exclusively upon
the ground of his colour. In 1803 Ohio demanded
a bond of five hundred dollars for Negroes who came
into the state. A Negro, even though a free man,
could not at that time testify in a case in which a
white man was a party, and Negroes were not
admitted to the public schools. Similar provisions
were made by Illinois, Indiana, and Iowa when they
became states. Illinois prohibited the entrance of
Negroes to the state at any time. In 1833 Judge
Dagget, of Connecticut, twenty-four years before the
Dred Scott decision, held that a free Negro was a
person and not a citizen. This was in the trial of the

case against Prudence Crandall, the young Quakeress
who had established a school for Negroes
in Canterbury, Connecticut, contrary to a law
which provided that no school could be established
for coloured people who were not inhabitants
of Connecticut.

The effect of the agitation for abolition seems to
have made the condition of the free Negroes steadily
worse, particularly in the Southern states. In some
of these states, they were forbidden to sell drugs,
in others they might not sell wheat and tobacco, and
in still others to peddle market produce or own a boat
was against the law. In several states it was
against the law for a free Negro to cross the state
line; in others, a slave who was emancipated was
compelled to immediately leave the state.

Notwithstanding the hardships and difficulties
under which the free Negro population laboured,
both in the North and in the South, those who have
had occasion to study the local history of the Southern
States have found that the number of Negroes who
had succeeded in making some impression upon their
community, either by their native qualities or by
their success in business, was more considerable than
is usually imagined. Solomon Humphreys, for
instance, after purchasing his freedom, became a
well-known business man in Georgia. Benjamin
Lundy found at San Antonio a Negro who, after
purchasing his own freedom and that of his wife

and family, had become the owner of several
houses and lots.[5]

The number of free Negroes in North Carolina
was considerable because, in spite of the rigorous
laws against the free coloured people, conditions were
more lenient than those of any other Southern state.
The result was that many free Negroes crossed into
North Carolina and settled, undisturbed, in the
northern or southern counties. Speaking of this
class of people, Professor John Spencer Bassett says:

Professor Bassett gives an account of several free
Negroes, of whom he had been able to obtain records,
who were citizens of Newbern, Craven County,
North Carolina. One of the men to whom he refers
was John C. Stanley, the son of an African-born
slave woman, who was liberated by the General

Assembly under the petition of Mrs. Lydia Stewart,
his mistress. Because he got his start in the barber
business, he was generally known as "Barber Jack."
He became the owner of several plantations on which
he employed sixty-four slaves, of which he was the
owner, and as many more bound free Negroes. He
had three sons, John, Alexander, and Charles.
John became an expert book-keeper, and was
employed in that capacity by a prominent firm.
John C. Stanley amassed a fortune, or what was
supposed to be a fortune in those days, of something
like $40,000. Speaking of some of the other
successful Negroes of whom he was able to obtain the
records, Professor Bassett says:

Among the descendants of the free coloured people
of Newbern, North Carolina, with whom I am
personally acquainted is the Hon. John P. Green,
who was for twelve years a justice of the peace
in Cleveland, Ohio, four years a member of the Ohio
House of Representatives, two years a member of the
State Senate, and for nine years at the head of the
Postage-stamp Distribution Bureau of Washington,
filling in the intervals of his public service with practice
at the Cleveland bar. His father was a master
tailor in Newbern, and a member of a family of
free coloured people whose traditions go back something
more than one hundred years.

Charles W. Chesnutt, author of "The Conjure
Woman" and other popular stories of Southern life,
was descended from free coloured people in Fayetteville,
North Carolina. Mr. Chesnutt informs me that
a coloured man by the name of Matthew Leary is
still remembered in Fayetteville who, before the war,
was the owner of considerable land, a number of

slaves, a brick store in the business part of the town,
and a handsome residence in a good neighbourhood.
His sons gained some prominence in North Carolina
during the Reconstruction era. Matthew Leary, Jr.,
went into politics and afterward became a clerk in
one of the Government offices in Washington. A
younger brother, Hon. John S. Leary, was the first
coloured man in North Carolina to be admitted
to the bar, of which he remained a respected member
until he died at Charlotte, N. C. He was, I understand,
at one time a member of the North Carolina
Legislature.

Another of the successful free coloured people of
North Carolina was James D. Sampson, who began
life as a house carpenter and became in the course
of time a man of considerable wealth and some
local distinction. I have been informed that one time
the Legislature passed a bill granting his family special
privileges which were not permitted to other free
people of colour. His children, John, Benjamin, and
Joseph, were all educated in the North. Benjamin
graduated from Oberlin College and afterward
became a teacher at Wilberforce, Ohio. John P.
Sampson published at Cincinnati, during the war,
the Coloured Citizen. After the war he was
commissioned by General Howard to look after the
coloured schools established by the Freedmen's
Bureau in the Third District of North Carolina
He was elected treasurer and assessor of Wilmington,

and was candidate for Congress, but was defeated
because of the fact, it is said, that his father had been
the owner of slaves before the war. While it was true
that James D. Sampson owned a number of slaves, it
is said that many, if not all, of them were held in trust
in order to secure them practical freedom. Recently,
George M. Sampson, a grandson of James D. Sampson,
visited Tuskegee. He is now a teacher in the
State Normal School at Tallahassee, Florida.

There is no reason to believe that the coloured
people of North Carolina made more progress in a
material way than they did in some of the other
states in the South. For instance, in the city of
Charleston, South Carolina, there was a colony of
"free persons of colour" who were proud of the fact
that they sprang from a generation of free ancestors
going back to before the Revolutionary War. In the
list of taxpayers in the city of Charleston for 1860
the names of three hundred and sixty "persons of
colour," whose property was assessed in that year,
are given. They owned real estate which was valued
for taxation at $724,570. Of these three hundred
and sixty taxpayers, one hundred and thirty owned
slaves, aggregating three hundred and ninety in
number. The largest number of slaves held by a
coloured person was fourteen. In this list of "persons
of colour" thirteen are classed as Indians, but
it is quite certain that these so-called Indians were
largely mixed with Negro blood. Like so many other

communities, there were Indians in Charleston who
had been but partially absorbed by coloured people
with whom they had been associated.

In 1860 the population of Charleston was 48,409,
of whom 26,969 were white, 17,655 slaves, and 3,785
were "free persons of colour." It would appear
from the figures given that these free coloured people
probably owned, including slaves, a million dollars'
worth of property. Among the slaves held by coloured
people of Charleston were a number who were
actually free men, and only nominally slaves. For
instance, Richard Holloway, who was a prominent
man among the free coloured people in Charleston,
owned Charles Benford, who was his friend, and with
him one of the leaders in the Methodist Church, at
that time. The circumstances were these: Charles
Benford had arranged with his white master to purchase
his freedom, but at that time the laws were such
that it was difficult for a master to free his slaves,
particularly if the slave purchased his own freedom.
In order to get around this law Charles Benford asked
his friend, Richard Holloway, to purchase him,
Benford himself furnishing the money for the
purchase.

There were a number of other slaves held in trust
by the free coloured people of Charleston. The
wealthiest family in Charleston, among the free
coloured people, were the Westons. They had
among the various members of the family taxable

property to the amount of $80,000. They also
owned thirty-six slaves, nine of whom they held as
trustees. It is said that the number of slaves held
by St. Philip's Church, which was the aristocratic
church of the city, amounted to something over
one hundred. These consisted for the most part of
slaves who had actually bought their freedom and
whom the church held in trust.

Of the free coloured people of Louisiana, of whom
there were a very considerable number before the
war, many were slaveholders and large owners of
land. There were a number of settlements of Creole
Negroes, as they were called, in various parts of
Louisiana. When Frederick Law Olmsted visited
that state in 1853, he visited one of these settlements
in the neighbourhood of Natchitoches. The information
which he obtained in regard to these people
was to the effect that they were "honest and industrious
and paid their debts quite as promptly as the
white planters, and were, as far as anyone could
judge, good citizens in all respects!" One of them, he
learned, had lately spent $40,000 in a law suit, and it
is believed that they were increasing in wealth.
Several of these coloured planters were worth four
or five hundred thousand dollars. The little town of
Washington, near Opelousas, in St. Landry Parish,
was formerly called Negroville from the number of
free Negroes living in that village. A number of
them, according to Olmsted, were wealthy and

thriving. They owned some of the best cotton
and sugar plantations.

"An intelligent man whom I met at Washington,"
he said, "who had been travelling most of the time
for two years in the plantation districts, told me that
the free Negroes in the state in general, so far as he
had observed, were equal in all respects to the white
Creoles. Much the larger part of them were poor,
thriftless, unambitious, and lived wretchedly, but
there were many opulent, intelligent, and educated,
The best house and most tasteful grounds that he
had visited in the state had belonged to a nearly
full-blooded Negro—a very dark man. He and his
family were well educated and, though French in
their habitual tongue, they spoke English with a
liberal tongue and one much more eloquent than
most of the liberally educated whites. They had a
private tutor in their family, and owned, he thought,
a hundred and fifty slaves.

It is near here, in the adjoining parish of St. Martin,
that my friend Paul Chretien lived. His father was
a free coloured man who made his money in the
neighbourhood of Calcasieu, but afterward returned
to St. Martin and built himself a beautiful home there
in which his son, whose name I have mentioned, is
now living.

A considerable portion of the Negro population of
Mobile, Alabama, at the present day are the descendants
of these Creole Negroes whose freedom was

guaranteed to them by the France treaty which
transferred Louisiana to the United States in 1803.
There is an island in Mobile Bay, about twenty miles
below the city, Mon Louis Island, which is owned
by the descendants of two families. The lower end
of the island was settled by the veterans of the Revolutionary
War, who lived to a great age; the upper
part of the island was settled by a man known as
Captain Jack Collins, but his real name was Maximilian
Collins, who settled on this island in 1808.
He left a large tract of land to his descendants with
the injunction that they should sell none of it; it has
remained in their hands up to the present time, and
there has grown up there, as a result, a little patriarchal
colony made up of the descendants of the free
Negro, Captain Jack, and the descendants of his
slaves. The oldest living descendant of this patriarch
is the widow of the late Belthair Durette, who
had seventy-two grandchildren, fifty-two great-grandchildren,
ninety-seven of whom are living in this
community of Mon Louis.

I have mentioned here several cases which indicate
that, even in the South and before the Civil War,
the Negro had made some progress along material
lines. It is impossible to tell, of course, how much
property these people possessed. But the aggregate
value of the property of the 262,000 Negroes in the
South in 1860 has been estimated at something like
twenty-five millions of dollars. I should judge,

from what I have been able to learn, that that
was a low estimate.

The question might very well be asked, considering
the success that individuals were able to make before
the war, why it was that the great mass of the Negro
people who were free did not do better? In reply to
that I might say that there were the same reasons and
others why the Negro should not get on or succeed
that there were why the class known as the "poor
whites" in the South did not succeed. If the conditions
of slavery operated to keep the poor white man
in a low stage of civilisation, they certainly operated
to keep the free Negro in a still lower stage.

Not only did the free people of colour have to meet
all the difficulties to which I have referred, but it was
against the law for them to meet together in any large
number in order to coöperate to improve their
condition. The great benefits of coöperation which
go so far to extend to the mass of individuals the
benefits which are obtained by a few were denied
them.

In spite of this fact, in Charleston, Baltimore,
Washington, New York, and in other places where
there were large numbers of free Negroes, little
societies for mutual helpfulness were established.
For instance, in 1790 there was formed in Charleston
what was known as the "Brown Fellowship Society."
This society was started at the suggestion of the director
of St. Philip's, of which a number of free Negroes

were members. Besides cultivating a spirit of fellowship
among its members, it sought to provide school
privileges for their children and to provide relief
and extend aid to worthy persons of their colour.
One of the first things they did was to purchase
a burial lot for their dead. This organisation
befriended helpless orphans; one of these orphans
was the well-known Bishop Daniel A. Payne, the
founder of Wilberforce University. This organisation
still maintains its existence, and celebrated a few
years ago its centennial. The records have all been
preserved, and one of the most interesting of these is
one which commemorates, in a formal way, the
expulsion of one of its members on suspicion of
having assisted in kidnapping and selling into slavery
a free coloured man. The success of this first organisation
led to the establishment of other similar
organisations. "The Humane and Friendly Society"
was established in 1802; "The Friendly Union,"
in 1813; and later still, "The Friendly Moralist,"
and the "Brotherly Association," and the "Unity
and Friendship." Each of these had its own burial
plot and system of mutual benefit.

After the attempted conspiracy of Denmark Vesey,
in 1822, all these organisations came under suspicion,
and there was a time when they were kept up under
the greatest difficulties, but they never ceased to
exist. There were similar organisations, as I have
said, in several of the larger cities of the South.

Frederick Douglass, while living in Baltimore,
attended one of these societies, known as the "East
Baltimore Mental Improvement Society." This
society was formed by a number of free coloured
young men who, like Frederick Douglass, were engaged,
as ship caulkers. In this organisation he
frequently took prominent part, although, being a
slave, he would naturally have been excluded. He
has said that the society of the young men he met
there aided him considerably in completing the
education that he had already begun in secret. As
Baltimore probably had more free coloured people
at the time than any other city, with the exception
of Washington, it was natural that there should be
a large number of these societies of a literary and
mutual-benefit and benevolent character. Baltimore,
in fact, seems to have been the home of the Negro
mutual benefit societies, many of which now in
existence date back to 1820.

The New York African Society, for mutual relief,
which has been in existence for over a hundred
years in New York City, held its first meeting in a
coloured school-house in Rose Street in 1808, nearly
twenty years before the final emancipation of the
slaves in New York State. Although it has not
increased its membership in recent years, this society
has become, I understand, comparatively wealthy
as a result of its earlier investments. The first property
owned by this society was on Baxter Street not

far from the spot that afterward became notorious
under the name of Five Points. It was purchased
in 1820 for $1,800, and when it was sold later the
funds were used to purchase a five-story flat at No.
43 West Sixty-sixth Street and another building at
No. 27 Greenwich Avenue, both of which the society
still owns.

In Maryland these beneficial organisations were
especially exempt from the general prohibition
against public meetings of free coloured people In
other places in the Southern States there was no
such exemption and, although the law was usually
got around in some way or other, not infrequently
members of these organisations were arrested, fined,
and sometimes sent to prison. Frederick Law
Olmsted records one such instance in Washington,
D. C., in the first chapter of his journals of "In the
Seaboard Slave States."

He says:

Nothing contributed more to keep the free Negroes
from making the great advancement that they did
during the period of slavery than the fact that they
were not allowed to organise and unite their efforts
for their own improvement in any large way. On
the other hand, nothing has more prevented and held
back the progress of the coloured people since slavery
than the fact that they have had to learn how to unite
their efforts in order to improve their condition.

CHAPTER XI
FUGITIVE SLAVES

In the latter part of the year 1852 was organised
or rather re-organised, in the rooms of
the Anti-slavery Society, at 107 North Fifth
Street, Philadelphia, what was known as the "Vigilance
Committee." The chairman of this committee
was a coloured man, Robert Purvis. He
was descended from a free coloured woman of
Charleston, whose mother was said to have been
a Moor. His father, Robert Purvis, was an Englishman.
He was brought to Pennsylvania by his
parents in 1819; was a member of the Anti-slavery
Convention in 1833, and was one of the signers of
its declaration of sentiments. When the fiftieth
anniversary of the Anti-slavery Society was held
in Philadelphia, December 4, 1883, he was one
of the three original signers who were present.
The other two were John G. Whittier, the poet,
and Elizur Wright, the anti-slavery editor. The
Secretary of the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee
was William Still.

This Vigilance Committee, which was the successor
of an earlier organisation of the same name

that dates at least as far back as 1838, soon became
the principal directing body for all the numerous
lines of the Underground Railroad which centred
in Philadelphia at that time. As secretary of
this organisation, William Still kept a record of
all the fugitive slaves who passed through the hands
of this committee from the time of its organisation
until the breaking out of the Civil War. During
the period of the Civil War he kept this record
hidden, but in 1872 it was published in the form
of a book called "The Underground Railroad."

This book is one of the most remarkable records
in existence, concerning the history of slavery. It
is made up in large part of the letters that were
written by the different agents of the Underground
Railroad to the secretary of the Vigilance Committee,
and of letters written by fugitive slaves,
sometimes while they were en route to Canada,
and sometimes after they had reached their destination.
They tell, in words of the fugitives
themselves, of the difficulties, sufferings, fears
of runaway slaves, and of all the various devices
which they used to escape from bondage to freedom.

Of his own motives for keeping this record, Mr.
Still says:

Sometimes these fugitives reached free soil packed
in boxes, shipped as merchandise by rail or by
steamship, from some of the nearby Southern
ports. This was the case of Henry Box Brown,
who was shipped from Richmond, Va., by James
A. Smith, a shoe dealer, to William H. Johnson,
Arch Street, Philadelphia. He was twenty-six
hours on the road from Richmond to Philadelphia.
Though the box was marked "This side up," in
the course of his journey, Mr. Brown was compelled
to ride many miles standing on his head. When
the box arrived at the anti-slavery office, there
was the greatest apprehension lest, in the course
of the journey, the fugitive had perished and the
society would find itself with a corpse upon its
hands. Mr. Still described, in the following words,
the scene when this box was opened in the presence
of a number of prominent members of the
Anti-slavery Society:

The witnesses will never forget that moment. Saw and hatchet
quickly had the five hickory hoops cut and the lid off, and the
marvellous resurrection of Brown ensued. Rising up in his box,

he reached out his hand, saying, "How do you do, gentlemen?"
The little assemblage hardly knew what to think or do at the
moment. He was about as wet as if he had come up out of the
Delaware. Very soon he remarked that, before leaving Richmond,
he had selected for his arrival-hymn (if he lived) the psalm beginning
with these words: "I waited patiently for the Lord, and He
heard my prayer." And most touchingly did he sing the psalm,
much to his own relief, as well as to the delight of his small audience.
He was then christened Henry Box Brown, and soon afterward
was sent to the hospitable residence of James Mott and E. M.
Davis, on Ninth Street, where, it is needless to say, he met a cordial
reception from Mrs. Lucretia Mott and her household.[2]

Other attempts were made after that time to
ship fugitive slaves out of the South as express
packages. In 1857, a young woman was shipped
from Baltimore to Philadelphia in a box of freight.
After reaching Philadelphia, this box with its living
freight, after having been turned upside down
several times, was left standing nearly all of one
night at the freight shed, and it was not secured
by the persons to whom it was consigned until
ten o'clock the next day. When the box was
opened the young woman inside was unconscious
and could not speak for some time. She recovered,
however, and eventually escaped to Canada.

Samuel A. Smith, who shipped Henry Box
Brown from Richmond to Philadelphia, attempted,
shortly after this successful venture, to send
two other slaves by express to the anti-slavery
office. The deceit, however, was discovered and

Smith was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to
eight years in prison, and served out his time in
the penitentiary.

Frequently fugitives were secreted upon steamships
and sailing vessels. There was usually a
coloured steward on these vessels who was willing
to run the risk of assisting a fugitive to escape.
Men dressed themselves as women, and women
dressed themselves as men in order to escape
from slavery. Sometimes fugitives travelled hundreds
of miles in skiffs in order to reach free soil.

William Still, the author of the book on "The
Underground Railroad," had a singular experience.
One summer day in 1850, as he was engaged in
mailing the weekly issue of the Pennsylvania
Freeman, two coloured men entered the office.
One of these was a stranger, a man who had purchased
his freedom and gone to Philadelphia in
the hope of finding his relatives.

"I am from Alabama," he said, speaking slowly
and deliberately. "I have come in search of my
people. My little brother and I were kidnapped
about forty years ago, and I thought by coming
to Philadelphia and having notices published and
read old people would remember about it, and I
could find my mother and people."

"Where were you kidnapped from?" asked
Mr. Still.

"I don't know," was the reply.

"Don't you know the name of the place?"

"No."

"Don't you know the name of any town, river,
neighbourhood or state?"

"No."

"What was your name?"

"Peter."

"What was your brother's name?"

"Levin."

"What were the names of your father and mother?"

"Levin and Sidney."

By the time the dialogue had reached this point
William Still was so fully convinced that the stranger
was one of his long-lost brothers that he scarcely
knew what to do.

"I allowed a full hour to pass," he says, in relating
the circumstance, "meanwhile plying him with
questions before intimating to my brother the
discovery I had made. Then seating myself by
his side, I said, 'I think I can tell you about all
your kinsfolk—mother, father, and all,' and then
I went on to say, 'You are an own brother of mine.'"

Such proved to be the case. It seems that Peter
Still had been stolen from his parents when they
were living on a farm in New Jersey, in an obscure
little settlement of Free Negroes and fugitive slaves
called "Springtown," in Cumberland County.[3]

The father of William Still and his brother, Peter,
had purchased his own freedom from his master,
about 1800. The mother was a fugitive slave.
Peter had been carried from his mother when he
was six years old and taken to Alabama. After
he had grown to be a young man he made up his
mind to save money by performing extra labour,
to buy his freedom. Fearing that his master
would be unwilling to sell him his freedom, he
secured the friendly offices of a Jew named Friedman
who made the purchase and set him free.

After reaching Philadelphia and finding his
brother William, as has been described, Peter
Still made several attempts to secure the freedom
of his wife and children, whom he left in slavery
in Alabama. It was in an attempt to secure the
freedom of Peter Still's wife and children that
Seth Concklin, the Shaker Abolitionist, lost his
life. Seth Concklin was one of the few white
men who, in their efforts to rescue the slaves, penetrated
the slave country. He succeeded in bringing
the fugitives by boat down the Tennessee and
up the Mississippi and the Wabash rivers, as far
as Vincennes, when he and they were captured
and taken back. Concklin was killed in an attempt
to escape.[4]

One of the most singular and interesting figures
among the people who were engaged in the work
of the "Underground Railroad" was Harriet
Tubman. She escaped from slavery some time
about 1849, when she was between twenty and
twenty-five years of age. It was the fear that she
and her brothers were to be "sold South" that
finally led her to make the attempt to escape. She
started, with her brothers, from her home in Maryland,
guided, as she said, only by the North Star.
But after the fugitives had made some distance,
the brothers, who feared that they would not succeed,
turned back and Harriet went on alone.
After making her own escape, she went back
repeatedly to different parts of the South and aided
in the escape of other fugitives. Many of the
slaves who had escaped to Canada, and who had
learned to have complete faith in "Moses," as
they called her, employed her to secure the freedom
of their friends. The fugitives in Canada believed
that she had a charmed life. As a matter of fact,
Harriet Tubman succeeded, in the course of nineteen
different trips into the South, in bringing more
than three hundred slaves from the South into the

Northern states and Canada, and in no case was a
fugitive under her care ever captured. During the
Civil War, she was employed in the secret service of
the Federal Army, and, in the last year of the
war, carried papers which admitted her through
the lines of the Union Army in any part of the
country, wherever she cared to go. She was still
living, in 1908, in retirement at Auburn, New York.

The most distinguished fugitive who escaped
from slavery was Frederick Douglass, who secured
a "sailor's protection," which certified that he
was a free American sailor. Armed with this on
Monday, September 3, 1838, he boarded the train
at Baltimore and rode directly to New York City.
From there he went into New Bedford, where he
found refuge in the home of a coloured man by
the name of Nathan Johnson. After Frederick
Douglass went to live in Rochester, New York,
his home there became one of the principal stations
of the "Underground Railroad," which ran from
New York City through Albany to the Great Lakes
and Canada.

He has told, in his autobiography, the manner
in which fugitives were brought to his home, concealed
there, and then hurried on to the little town
of Charlotte, seven miles from Rochester, and
there placed on board a little lake steamer en route
for Canada.

"On one occasion," he said, "I had eleven

fugitives at the same time under my roof. And
it was necessary for them to remain with me until
I could collect sufficient money to get them on to
Canada.

"But," he added, "it is due to the truth to state
that we seldom called in vain upon a Whig or a
Democrat for help. Men were better than their
theology and truer to humanity than to their politics
or their offices."

He refers here to the fact that at one time,
when a master was in the office of a United States
Commissioner, getting the papers necessary for
the arrest of three young men who had escaped
from slavery in Maryland, the law-partner of the
commissioner, a distinguished Democrat, sought
him out, told him what was going on in his office,
and urged him by all means to get these young
men out of the way of pursuit.

In Syracuse, New York, there was another
station of the "Underground Railroad," conducted
by another fugitive slave. This was the Rev. J. W.
Loguen, afterward a bishop of the A. M. E. Zion
Church. "Jarm" Loguen, as he was called, was
born a slave in Kentucky. His mother came of
free parents in Ohio, but was kidnapped and sold
in Kentucky when she was a child. She seems to
have been a woman of great sense and character,
and after her son grew up he inherited from her,
apparently, a determination to be free.

He and another young man made their escape
on horseback. They reached the Ohio River,
crossed the ice, and finally, after a long series of
adventures, during which they spent some time with
the Indians, and passed several weeks in a settlement
of fugitive slaves in Indiana, crossed the river at
Detroit into Canada. They remained for some time
on British soil, but Loguen finally returned to the
United States and settled in Northern New York.

Although he had no education when he left
Kentucky, young Loguen was industrious, thrifty,
and succeeded in making money. He used the
first money he accumulated to secure for himself an
education at the Oneida Institute, Whitesboro, New
York, a school started for coloured children by
the noted Abolitionist, Beriah Green. Afterward,
he went to Syracuse to live and interested himself,
as a minister and anti-slavery leader, in the welfare
of the coloured people of that city. It was while
he was there that the famous "Jerry Rescue"
took place, in which some of the citizens stormed
the United States Commissioner's Office and forcibly
carried off a fugitive named Jerry, who had been
arrested under the recently enacted Fugitive Slave
Law. At this time, Syracuse was the home of
Samuel J. May and Gerrit Smith, and this first
case under the Fugitive Slave Law was at once a
defiance and a test of the abolitionist temper of
the people of that city.

Though thousands of fugitive slaves succeeded
in making their escape by routes that led from the
South through Pennsylvania and New York, and
also through New England, by far the larger number
of the fugitives passed through the State of Ohio.
In all the little coloured settlements in Ohio, Indiana,
and Illinois, and in the larger cities like Cincinnati,
there were men who were known to be fugitive
slaves. Some of these men were slowly paying
for their freedom from their earnings in the free
states. In his life of Salmon P. Chase, Prof.
Albert Bushnell Hart, of Harvard University,
refers to a theological student who was known to
have provided for his education "from the instalments
thus paid by a man for his own flesh, and
to have charged the poor Negro twelve per cent.
on deferred payment." As further illustration of
the number and variety of these cases, he mentions
a Negro child in a charitable school who excused
her absence with the explanation, "I am staying
at home to help buy father."

After the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, September
26,1850, large numbers of these fugitive slaves
living in Ohio became frightened for fear that they
were to be sent back into slavery and fled into Canada.
At that time, J. C. Brown, a free man who had paid
11,800 for his freedom, organised a colonisation
society for the purpose of inducing coloured people to
leave the State of Ohio and settle in Canada.

"At this time," says Mr. Brown, "Cincinnati
was full of women, without husbands, and their
children. These were sent by planters from Louisiana,
Mississippi, and some from Tennessee, who
had got fortunes and had found that white women
could live in those states, and in consequence, they
had sent their slave wives and children to Cincinnati
and set them free."

These people were now, of course, in a state of
terror and their former masters were of course
anxious to get them upon free soil where there
would be no doubt of their security. It was at
this time that a number of refugees in different
parts of Canada, sprang up. Under Mr. Brown's
direction, four hundred and sixty people were
settled in the township of Biddulph, near Little
York. These were joined afterward by fifteen families
from Boston, Mass. They purchased twelve
hundred and twenty acres which were divided
into tracts of from twenty-five to fifty acres to a
family.

One of the most romantic of the fugitive slave
stories is that of William and Ellen Craft. William
Craft was a slave on a plantation near Macon,
Georgia. He had learned the trade of cabinetmaker
and had become so proficient in that craft
that, in addition to his daily work for his master,
he had been able to earn a considerable sum of
money for himself by work performed in his leisure

moments. William Craft was a black man, but
on this same plantation there was another slave,
a young woman, who was almost white. They
became acquainted with each other and after a
time they were married. They had not lived
together very long before the fear that they might
at some time be sold and thus parted from one
another, made them think about the possibilities
of escape from slavery. After studying over the
matter for some time, William Craft hit upon a
plan.

There were always white people in the slavery
times who were willing for the sake of a little money
to carry on a secret traffic with the slaves. From
one of these white men he secured a suit of men's
clothing that would fit his wife. He had the suit
made in the latest fashion in order to make the disguise
as complete as possible. He secured shoes,
hat, neckties, all the other pieces of wearing apparel
necessary to complete the wardrobe of a wealthy
young planter. In this disguise, Ellen Craft, having
secured a permit from her mistress for a visit of
a few days to a neighbouring plantation, took the
train at Macon for Savannah. The husband,
William, having secured a similar permit for himself,
boarded the same train and, passing himself
off as the Negro servant of his wife, they made the
journey out of slavery into freedom together.

At Savannah they took the boat for Charleston.

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

They had left their home in Macon in 1848.
Two years later the Fugitive Slave Law was passed
and a determined effort was made by many Southern

slave-holders to get possession of their runaway
slaves, who were living in freedom in many parts
of the North. It was not long before such an
effort was made to get possession of the two fugitives
from Macon. For some months they lived in daily
apprehension of being seized and carried away.
Finally, upon learning that a warrant had been
issued for their arrest, some of their anti-slavery
friends smuggled them aboard one of the ships
leaving Boston for England. Arriving in Liverpool
they went directly to friends in London. Shortly
after their arrival there they went to live in the
town of Hammersmith, not far from London, which
was their home for a number of years. William
Craft secured employment in the African trade,
and took several ship-loads of merchandise out
to Africa where he was able to dispose of them
with special advantage because he was of the same
colour and race as the people with whom he sought
to trade.

After emancipation and the Civil War had made
it possible for them to return to the country of
their birth, William and Ellen Craft came back
to Boston and lived for several years in Cambridge,
Massachusetts, where their children were educated.
While they were in England several children were
born to them, one of them, William, is still living
there. Another has since become the wife of Dr.
W. D. Crum, who was collector of customs at

Charleston, South Carolina, under President Roosevelt.
A grandson of William and Ellen Craft,
Henry K. Craft, who was graduated from Harvard
University in 1908, is, at the time this is written, in
charge of the electrical plant and the teaching of
Electrical Engineering at Tuskegee Institute.
William and Ellen Craft finally returned to Georgia
and passed their last days in a comfortable home
not far from Savannah.

Directly and indirectly, the fugitive slaves probably
did more to bring about the abolition of slavery
than any other one agency. The Northern people
learned from the lips of these fugitives—from the
strange, romantic, pathetic, and tragic stories they
told—that the slaves, no matter how ignorant
or how different in colour or condition they might
seem, were very much the same kind of human
beings as themselves. They learned from the
sufferings of these fugitives, from the desperate
efforts which they made to escape, that no matter
what might be said to the contrary the slaves wanted
to be free.

At the same time, the fugitive slaves learned in
the United States, in their very efforts to be free,
something about the nature of freedom that they
could not have learned in Africa. Slavery, however
hard or cruel it might be, appeared to the native
African, as it did to the Greek and Roman, to be
the natural condition of the majority of men. It

was only after the African slaves learned the language
of their masters and possessed themselves to some
extent of their masters' ideas that they began to
conceive that the natural condition of man was
not slavery but freedom.

When the fugitive slaves came in contact with
the anti-slavery people of the North they made
the acquaintance for the first time of a people who
hated slavery in a way and with an intensity which
few of them had ever felt or known. They
learned from these anti-slavery people to believe
in freedom for its own sake, not only for themselves
but for every one. They were transformed in this
way from fugitive slaves to abolitionists. They
became, as a result, the most determined of antislavery
people, and many of them devoted their
lives most unselfishly to securing the freedom of
other members of their race.

In 1860 it was estimated that the number of
Negroes that journeyed annually from Canada
to the slave states to rescue their fellows from
bondage was about five hundred. These persons
carried the Underground Railroad and the Underground
Telegraph into nearly every Southern state.[5]

CHAPTER XII
NEGRO SETTLEMENTS IN OHIO AND THE NORTHWEST TERRITORY

A few miles west of Xenia, Ohio, is a quiet
little community of which one occasionally
sees the name in the newspapers, but in
regard to which very little is known by the outside
world, even among its immediate neighbours. This is
the Negro town of Wilberforce, which is, however,
not a town in the ordinary sense of the word, but
rather a suburb of Xenia, from which it is distant
an hour's walk and with which it is connected
only by stage.

What distinguishes Wilberforce from other communities
in the North is the fact that it is the home
of what is, so far as I know, the first permanent
Negro institution of learning established for Negroes
and by Negroes in the United States. A few years
ago, I visited this community in order to take part
in the semi-centennial celebration of the founding
of the University there. During my visit I was
especially impressed with the quiet charm of the
surroundings, the comfort and simplicity of the homes I visited, and the
general air of culture and

refinement which pervaded the whole community. I
doubt if there is any Negro community in the
United States in which, in proportion to the population,
there is so large a number of beautiful
and well-conducted homes. Besides that, there
was an air of permanence and stability about this
community which one does not meet elsewhere,
even in the quiet and orderly suburbs that one
frequently finds in the neighbourhood of a good
Negro school. Here, at any rate, it seemed to me,
a certain number of coloured people had found
themselves, had made a permanent settlement
on the soil and were at home.

The history of Wilberforce goes back to a time
before the War. In its origin, this is representative
of a number of other Negro communities that
were established in different parts of Ohio during
that period. Most of these communities have
disappeared and been forgotten, but there are
many coloured people in all parts of the Northern
states who trace their history back to one or another
of these little Negro settlements that were started
partly by fugitive slaves and partly by free coloured
people, who left the South in order to find a home
in the free soil of the Northwest Territory.

The thing that gives a peculiar and interesting
character to many of these ante-bellum Negro
settlements is that they were made by Southern
slave-holders who desired to free their slaves and

were not able to do so under the restrictions that
were imposed upon emancipation in the Southern
States. Many of the coloured people in these
settlements were the natural children of their
master. For example, John M. Langston, the
first coloured man to represent Virginia in the
Congress of the United States, was freed by the terms
of his father's will, in 1834. In his autobiography,
he has given a vivid description of the manner in
which he, in company with the other slaves who
had been freed at his father's death, made a long
journey across the mountains from Louisa County,
Virginia, to Chillicothe, Ohio. Before his election
to Congress from Virginia, Mr. Langston graduated
in 1849 from Oberlin University, had been admitted
to the bar of Ohio in 1854, and elected clerk of
several Ohio townships. He was the first coloured
man in Ohio, it is said, to be elected to any sort
of office by popular vote.

When John Randolph, of Roanoke, Virginia,
died, he gave freedom to all his slaves and provided
that they should be transported to some other
part of the country, "where not less than two thousand
and not more than four thousand acres of land
should be purchased for them." The Randolph
Freedmen went to Ohio with the purpose of settling
in Mercer County, but they were not allowed to
enter upon the land which had been purchased for
them, because the German settlers in that part of

the country did not want them there. The community
was soon after scattered, but descendants
of the Randolph slaves are still living in the neighbourhood
of Piqua and Troy, in Miami County,
Ohio. The most noted of them, as I have learned,
is Goodrich Giles, whose father was a member of
the original immigrants. Mr. Giles now owns four
hundred and twenty-five acres of land just out of
Piqua. He is said to be worth something over
$50,000. Two years ago, a sort of family reunion
of the descendants of the Randolph slaves was
held in Ohio, and, as a result of the gathering, an
organisation was formed among a few of the
descendants for the purpose of investigating their
claims to the land in Mercer County which was
purchased for them under the terms of John
Randolph's will, but of which they never secured
possession.

The little community at Wilberforce grew out
of a similar effort of a number of Southern planters
to secure a foothold in a free state for their former
slaves. In 1856 there was already a considerable
number of the free Negroes settled at what was
then known as Tawawa Springs. In that year
it was decided to establish at this place a school
for these coloured immigrants and refugees. At
the time of the breaking out of the War this school
had nearly one hundred pupils. Many of them
were the coloured children of the white planters

who had been sent North to be educated. With
the breaking out of the Civil War, however, the
support this school received from its Southern
patrons ceased. The institution soon fell into
decay and, in March, 1863, it was sold for a debt
of ten thousand dollars to the African Methodist
Episcopal Church. This was the origin of
Wilberforce.

Of the little colony of Negro refugees who settled
in this neighbourhood before 1861, there still remain
a few families. The memories of others are preserved
in the names of some of their descendants
who occupy farms in the neighbourhood. But
the community has continued to grow. A few
farmers, attracted by the advantages of the University,
have purchased farms in the neighbourhood;
a few former students, who have made a success
elsewhere, have gone back there to make their
home. The rest of the community is made up of the
officers of the school and their families,
together with some four hundred students.

One thing that has given character to this little
town, and made it attractive as a residence for
Negroes, is the number of distinguished men of
the Negro race who have lived and worked there.
Among others whose memories are still preserved
there is Bishop Daniel A. Payne, who was, more
than any one else, responsible for the existence of
the colony. He lived there for many years until

he died in 1892. Bishop Benjamin W. Arnett,
who was a real force in Ohio affairs during his
connection with Wilberforce, lived in this community
for thirty-five years. It is said that he
was the first coloured man in the United States
to represent a constituency where the majority
were white, and the first to be foreman of a jury
where all the other members were white. As
member from Green County to the Ohio Legislature
in 1886 and 1887, he was largely responsible
for the repeal of the remnant of what were known
as the "Black Laws."

Much was said during the anti-slavery agitation
of the efforts of the Southern Church to justify
African slavery. There was, in fact, a very serious
attempt to find justification in the Bible for slavery,
but any one who will study the history of Christianity
in the South and its influence upon slavery cannot
fail to see that, in spite of all that was said by
individual preachers and in spite of all that was
done by church organisations, there was always
a large number of white slave-holders in the South
who felt deep down in their hearts that slavery
was wrong. In his will, written in 1819, John
Randolph says: "I give my slaves their freedom,
to which my conscience tells me they are justly
entitled. It has long been a matter of deepest
regret to me that the circumstances under which
I inherited them and the obstacles thrown in the

way by the laws of the land have prevented me in
emancipating them in my lifetime, which it is my
full intention to do in case I can accomplish it."

These words pretty well express the deepest
sentiment of a great many people who held slaves
before the Civil War, but owing to the obstacles
thrown in the way of emancipation, did not go
so far as John Randolph and actually free their
slaves. I have often thought that the peculiar
interest which former slave-holders have manifested
in their former slaves was due to this feeling that
they had a special responsibility toward these
people whom they had held at one time under
conditions which their consciences could not entirely
justify.

As a matter of fact, the whole character of the
anti-slavery campaign in Ohio differed from the
anti-slavery movements in New York and in New
England from the fact that so large a number of
the people who were engaged in the movement
in Ohio were either themselves men who had
moved into a free territory in order to free their
slaves, or they were the descendants of people who
had been slave-holders.

Benjamin Lundy, the man who first interested
William Lloyd Garrison in the subject of abolition,
was a Southerner who had emigrated from Virginia
to Ohio, and started his first paper, The Genius
of Universal Emancipation, at Mount Pleasant,

Ohio, a little Quaker settlement. James G.
Birney, who, while he lived at Huntsville, Alabama,
was a member of the American Colonisation Society,
finally freed his slaves and moved with them to
Cincinnati, where he became the leader in the antislavery
movement of Ohio. Dr. John Rankin,
the famous pastor of Ripley, Ohio, whose house,
standing on a hill, and visible from the Kentucky
shores, was descended from the Southern abolitionists
of East Tennessee. Among the fugitives who
took refuge in Dr. Rankin's house was the original
of Eliza Harris, the character in "Uncle Tom's
Cabin," who crossed the Ohio River on the drifting
ice with her child, and was sheltered for several
days at this house on the hill.

Another Southerner who became a prominent
abolitionist was the famous Levi Coffin, the Quaker,
representative of a large number of Quakers who
left North Carolina at various times before the
Civil War because they had grown to feel that
slavery was wrong. Levi Coffin was the man who
bore the title of President of the Underground
Railroad, and in his reminiscences he has told
stories of hundreds of fugitives, whom he aided
to escape from bondage. It is said that he aided
no less than two thousand fugitives to make their
way through Ohio to Canada. Quakers coming
from North Carolina settled in an early day near
Steubenville, and in a little town called Smithfield

there still live descendants of the Negro colonists from
North Carolina settled there by Quaker masters.

Not only in Ohio, but in Indiana and in Michigan
there were scattered settlements of free Negroes,
many of whom had been sent thither by the Quakers
of North Carolina. In Hamilton County, Indiana,
a family named Roberts settled on about a thousand
acres of land in Jackson Township. These were
joined, afterward, by other families, until there
was a considerable settlement there, which finally
gained the name of Robert's Settlement. There
was another settlement very much like this, in
Randolph, and still another in Wayne County.

A recent investigator says:

The interesting thing about these settlements
scattered throughout the Northwest Territory is,
as I have suggested, that they represented to a
very large extent the efforts of the Southern people
to bring about the emancipation of their own slaves.
This is particularly true in the case of the Quakers.
Early in the eighteenth century the Quakers
began to consider the question of sinfulness of
holding other members of the human race in the
condition of servitude. As early as 1688, a small
body of German Quakers of Germantown, Pennsylvania,
presented a protest to the Yearly Meeting
against the "buying, selling, and holding of men
in slavery," and in 1696, the Yearly Meeting,
although not yet prepared to take action, sent
out the advice that "the members should discourage
the introduction of slaves and be careful of the
moral and intellectual training of such as they
held in servitude." From 1746 to 1767 the Quaker,
John Woolman, of New Jersey, travelled through
the Middle and Southern states teaching that
"the practice of continuing slavery is not right."
And that "liberty is the natural light of all men
equally."[2]

The minutes of the various Yearly Meetings of
the Quaker societies show a steady progress in
respect to the sentiment in regard to slave-holding,
and in 1776 the Eastern Quarterly Meeting of the

North Carolina Yearly Meeting advised Friends
to manumit their slaves. Friends were prohibited
from importing, buying, or selling slaves, and in
1780 they were prohibited by the Yearly Meeting
from hiring them. In 1818, it is recorded regarding
slaves that "none held them."

But under the laws as they then existed, it was
not without considerable difficulty that Friends,
who desired to emancipate their slaves, were permitted
to do so. In order to evade this law it
became the custom of Friends to confer upon their
slaves practical emancipation, allowing them to
hire themselves out and use for themselves the
money they earned, although their masters still
exercised a nominal control over them. In 1817,
a case came before the court in which William
Dickinson conveyed a slave to the trustees of the
Quaker Society of Contentnea to be held in a kind
of guardianship until he could be manumitted
under the laws of the state. When this case came
before the Supreme Court of North Carolina,
Chief Justice Taylor declared that this practice
of the Quakers was emancipation in everything
but name, and therefore contrary to the law. A
few years later another case occurred in which
Collier Hill left his slaves to four trustees, one
of whom was "Richard Graves of the Methodist
Church," with the injunction to keep the slaves
for such purposes as "they, the trustees, could

judge most for the glory of God, and the good
of the said slaves." The court held that, as it
did not appear that "any personal benefit to the
legatees," was intended, the will "was held to
constitute them trustees for the purpose of
emancipation and that such a purpose was illegal."

It was the difficulties which Southern slave-holders
who wanted to ameliorate the condition of their
slaves encountered when they undertook to assist
their servants to freedom that led the Quakers
and so many other Southern people, to found the
settlements I have referred to in Ohio and elsewhere
in the Northwest Territory.

In the early years of the Colonisation Movement
the Quakers, with other Southern abolitionists, had
supported the Colonisation Society, believing that
that was one method of solving the problem. But,
as experience proved that that was a wholly inadequate
remedy, and as many of the coloured
people did not desire to leave the country in which
they had been born and bred, people who desired
to free their slaves were more and more induced to
send them to the Northwest Territory.

In 1835, the Pennsylvania Young Men's Society,
a Quaker organisation, interested themselves in
promoting the emigration of free coloured people
to Africa. They looked at the matter in a very
practical way and sent out twenty-six Negro colonists,
all of whom were proficient in the trades.

The emigrants were blacksmiths, carpenters, potters,
brickmakers, shoemakers, and tailors. Altogether
one hundred and twenty-six emigrants were sent
out in this way, and these established themselves
at Port Cresson, on the coast of what is now Liberia.
These Negro colonists were, however, to such an
extent under the influence of the Quaker doctrine
that, when they were attacked by the native chiefs,
the head of the colony refused to resort to arms.
The result was that eighteen of the colonists were
killed, the houses were all destroyed and those
who were not killed were obliged to flee for their
lives.[3]

Some time in the early part of the last century
a number of Quakers, who were dissatisfied with
conditions in the Southern states, moved from
North Carolina to Cass County, Michigan. They
brought with them a number of their former slaves.
And these made the nucleus for a settlement of
free Negroes which was constantly recruited by
fugitives from the other side of the Ohio River. In
1847, this Quaker settlement had become so notorious
as a refuge for fugitive slaves that a determined
effort was made on the part of some of the slaveholders
to recapture their runaways. A number
of slave-holders, or their representatives, mounted
and well-armed, crossed the Ohio River in that
year and, riding across the intervening states, made

a bold and determined effort to regain possession
of their property. The effort to recapture the
fugitives was successfully resisted by the Quakers,
coloured people, and the other residents of the
community, and the only result was to advertise
Cass County, Michigan, as a place where Negroes
might live with a reasonable freedom from capture
by their former masters. After the raid a
still larger number of fugitives poured into the
county, the majority of them settling in Calvin
Township.

In 1847, the same year in which the Negro communities
in Cass County were raided, a large slave
holder by the name of Saunders, who lived in
Cabell County, Virginia—now part of West Virginia
—died, and when his will was opened it was
found that he had not only freed all his slaves
but had made a generous provision for the purchase
of a tract of land in some free State to be divided
among these people. The Saunders ex-slaves,
forty-one in number, started northward in 1849
and, after a long journey, attended by many
hardships, they finally reached Calvin Township,
Cass County, Michigan, a few days before
Christmas.

Sometime in the latter part of 1902, or the early
part of 1903, I visited Cass County and had an
opportunity to study, at first hand, the success
which the descendants of these Saunders ex-slaves

and the other fugitives had made in that county. At
this time, I found that Calvin Township contained
a population of 759 Negroes and 512 whites. In
addition to these a large Negro population had
overflowed into the adjoining county of Porter, and
to some extent all but two of the towns in the county.
Among the men I met there at that time was a
farmer by the name of Samuel Hawkes, who, I
was informed, on good authority, was worth something
like $50,000. Another farmer whose name I
recall was William Alien. He was born in Logan
County, Ohio, but his parents were among that
numerous class of free coloured people who moved
from North Carolina to the free soil, in order to
preserve their freedom. When I visited his farm,
I found he had fifty head of cattle, ten horses,
three hundred sheep, and twenty-five hogs. He
had paid taxes during the previous year to the
amount of $ 191.00, on property in the two townships
of Porter and Calvin. He had been a justice
of the peace for eighteen years, but resigned that
office, because, as he said, "it took too much time
away from the farm."

One of the supervisors of Calvin Township
was a farmer by the name of Cornelius Lawson. Of
the eight schools in Calvin, four of them were taught
by coloured teachers. As we drove through the
township, I discovered, posted up beside the road,
a notice of the annual school meeting. It was

signed by C. F. Northrup, director. Mr. Northrup,
as I was informed, is a Negro.

Among other things which attracted my attention
during my visit was the existence in Calvin of the
Grand Army Post, named after Matthew Artis,
who was one of the large number of coloured soldiers
who enlisted from this township during the War.
The commander of the Post at the time of my visit
was Bishop Curtis, who was a member of the 54th
Massachusetts Regiment, took part in the attack on
Fort Wagner and, it is said, was shot with a fragment
of the same shell which killed his commander,
Robert Gould Shaw.

At the present time, Negroes hold the offices
of supervisor, clerk, road commissioner, and school
director in the township of Calvin. There are
two highway commissioners, two justices of the
peace, two constables, two members of the Board
of Review, who are Negroes. None of these men,
I may add, are professional politicians, and none
of them were elected because of their colour. In
fact, as near as I could learn, there is no question
of colour, but merely of fitness for the duties of
offices in the politics of Cass County.

In a recent study of this township, under the
title of "Negro Governments in the North," Richard
R. Wright, Jr., says:

I have stated the facts in regard to this Negro
colony in Cass County at some length because
they illustrate what has gone on in a number of
other similar colonies in Ohio and neighbouring
states. They show, at any rate, the efforts of those
Southern people, who sought to give to their slaves
the advantage of freedom, were not entirely in vain.

The history of these efforts of Southern white
people and the Southern Negroes to lessen, to some
extent, the evils of slavery by emigration to the
free soil of the Northwest Territory, seems to me
one of the most important chapters in the Story
of the Negro. It should not be forgotten in this
connection that Abraham Lincoln was himself born
in the South and that many, if not most of the
leaders of the abolition movement in Ohio and Indiana,
were in full sympathy with that portion of the
Southern people who wanted to do away with
slavery. They represented the heart and conscience
of thousands of others whose voices were drowned
in the factional political strife which grew up as
a result of the anti-slavery agitation.

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

CHAPTER XIII
THE NEGRO PREACHER AND THE NEGRO CHURCH

ONE of the interesting documents relating to
the early history of the Negro in the United
States is a paper, written in the quaint, old-fashioned
style of a hundred years ago, and entitled:
"Narrative of the Proceedings of the Coloured People
During the Awful Calamity in Philadelphia, in
the Year 1793; and a Refutation of Some of the Censures
Thrown Upon Them in Some Publications."

In the year 1792 and 1793, Philadelphia was
stricken with a sort of plague. Hundreds of people
died and hundreds more left the city, frequently
leaving the dead unburied in the houses. It was
believed at this time that Negroes were exempt from
this epidemic and a call was made upon them to act
as nurses and to assist in burying the dead. After
the epidemic was over the terror-stricken inhabitants
returned again to the city and the charge was made
that the coloured people, who had acted as nurses,
had demanded exorbitant prices for their services.
The narrative to which I have referred is an answer
to that charge. In this account of the epidemic, the
authors tell how they were induced to take up this

work, not because of any reward for themselves, but
in answer to an appeal to the coloured people to
come forward and assist "the distressed, perishing,
and neglected sick."

The narrative goes on to describe the distress which
the plague brought on the city; it relates in detail
a number of instances of the heroism of Negro nurses
during the period when the city was in a condition
of panic fear; and concludes with a full account of
the way in which the monies, which came into their
hands, were expended. From this report it appears
that one hundred and seventy-seven pounds, of the
four hundred and eleven expended, was contributed
from their own pockets, not counting, as the report
adds, "the cost of hearses, and maintenance of our
families for seventy days, and the support of five
hired men during the respective times of their being
employed; which expenses, together with sundry
gifts we occasionally made to poor families, might
reasonably and properly be introduced to show our
actual situation in regard to profit."

This narrative of the plague in Philadelphia and
of the services of the coloured people to the citizens
during this trying period is the more interesting
because one of the authors of this account, Richard
Allen, was the founder and first Bishop of the African
Methodist Church and the other, Absalom Jones,
established the First African Church of St. Thomas,
which is sometimes called the first Negro church in

America, although it is probable that there were
several churches in some of the Southern states
which were earlier in origin.

Both Allen and Jones, who were the leaders of the
coloured people of Philadelphia at that time, had been
slaves and both had purchased their freedom.
Richard Allen was born February 14, 1760, a slave to
Benjamin Chew, of Philadelphia. He was afterward
sold with his father and mother, and his three
brothers and sisters, to a man by the name of Stokeley,
in Delaware. Of his master Richard Allen says,
in his autobiography, "He was more like a father to
his slaves than anything else."

After he purchased his freedom, Allen became
an itinerant preacher, working, meanwhile, as a common
labourer at whatever he could get to do. During
the Revolution he was employed as a teamster
hauling salt. He had his regular places of stopping
along the road, where he would preach to whoever
were willing to come together to listen to him.
In 1784, he attended the General Conference, at
Baltimore, Maryland, which was the first General
Conference of the Methodist Church in America,
and in 1786 he came to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
About this time, because of the influx from the
country, the coloured population of Philadelphia was
increasing rapidly and the white congregation of
St. George's Church, where they attended, determined
to force them into the galleries. Allen had already

made a move in the direction of a separate church,
so that the coloured people were already prepared,
to some extent, for secession. The crisis was reached
one Sunday morning when the attempt was made
to move Jones and Allen from their accustomed
places in the body of the church into the gallery,
whereupon they and their followers rebelled and
walked out. On April 17, 1787, the coloured portion
of this congregation formed, under the leadership
of Allen and Jones, what was known as the Free
African Society. The preamble of the articles of
association, upon which this society was founded,
is interesting as showing the thoughts which were
stirring in the minds of the leaders of the coloured
people at that time. The preamble is as follows:

The Free African Society prepared the way for
the African Methodist Episcopal Church, which

may be said to have come into existence four years
later, in 1790, when Allen and a few followers withdrew
from the Free African Society and started an
Independent Methodist Church. Allen's congregation
worshipped at first in a blacksmith shop on
Sixth, near Lombard Street. The other members
of the society then became members of the Episcopal
Church under the leadership of Jones and, in 1794,
built St. Thomas Church, at the corner of Fifth and
Philadelphia streets.

The little society maintained by Allen in the
blacksmith shop grew rapidly in membership.
Some time in 1794, also, Bethel Church was erected by
Allen and his followers. About this same time the
coloured people withdrew from the white congregations
in Baltimore and New York, and in 1816
a conference was held at the Bethel Church in
Philadelphia, which resulted in the establishment of
the African Methodist Episcopal Church, with
Richard Allen as first Bishop.

Six years after Allen withdrew from the Free
African Society in Philadelphia, coloured members
of the Methodist Episcopal Church in New York
decided to hold separate meetings, in which they
"might have an opportunity to exercise their
spiritual gifts among themselves, and thereby be
more useful to one another." They erected a
church, which was dedicated in 1800, and to
which they gave the name, African Methodist

Episcopal Zion. This congregation formed the
nucleus of what is now known as the "Zion"
Methodist connection. From 1801 to 1820 this
organisation was under the pastoral supervision of
the Methodist Episcopal Church, but during that
time it had its own preachers. In 1820 this arrangement
was terminated and a union of coloured Methodist
congregations in New York, New Haven,
Long Island, and Philadelphia was formed. These
churches together became the African Methodist
Episcopal Zion Connection.

Directly after the War the two coloured branches
of the Methodist Church invaded the Southern
states. At that time, there were 207,742 coloured
members of the Methodist Church, South. Within
a few years, much the larger proportion of the
coloured members of the Southern Methodist Church
joined either one or the other of the African Methodist
connections so that in 1866 the Methodist Church,
South, had only 78,742 coloured members. In that
year, the Church authorised these coloured members,
with their preachers, to organise separate congregations,
and in 1870 two Bishops were appointed
to organise the coloured conferences into a separate
and independent church. This new connection
took the name of the Coloured Methodist Episcopal
Church.

In 1908, representatives of the three coloured
Methodist connections met in the First Council of the

United Board of Bishops. This council met in
Washington, D. C. Its purpose was to bring the
three more important organisations among the
coloured Methodists into closer working relations
with each other, in the hope that eventually a compact
organisation might be formed which would
unite in one body more than 13,000 churches and
over 1,500,000 communicants.

The Negro seems, from the beginning, to have
been very closely associated with the Methodist
Church in the United States. When the Reverend
Thomas Coke was ordained by John Wesley as
Superintendent or Bishop of the American Society
in 1784, he was accompanied on most of his travels
throughout the United States by Harry Hosier, a
coloured minister who was at the same time the
Bishop's servant and an evangelist of the Church.
Harry Hosier, who was the first American Negro
preacher of the Methodist Church in the United
States, was one of the notable characters of his day.
He could not read or write, but he was pronounced
by Dr. Benjamin Rush the greatest orator in,
America. He travelled extensively through the
New England and Southern states and shared the
pulpits of the white ministers whom he accompanied.
But he seems to have excelled them all in popularity
as a preacher.

It is said that on one occasion, in Wilmington,
Delaware, where Methodism early became popular,

a number of citizens, who did not ordinarily attend
the Methodist Church, came together to hear Bishop
Asbury. The church was so crowded that they were
not able to get in, so they stood outside and listened,
as they supposed, to the Bishop, but in reality they
heard Harry Hosier. They were greatly impressed,
and before leaving, one of them was heard to remark
that "if all Methodist preachers could preach like
the Bishop, more of us would like to hear him."
Some one replied that "that was not the Bishop, but
his servant." This served to raise the Bishop still
higher in their estimation, for they concluded, if
the servant was so eloquent what must the master
be.[1] Harry Hosier remained popular as a preacher
to the last. Francis Asbury, Associate-bishop,
stated that the best way to get a large congregation
was to announce that Harry was going to preach.
He died in Philadelphia in 1810.

From the first the Methodist Church was strongly
anti-slavery although the sentiment against slavery
was always stronger in the North than in the South.
The struggle which led to the separation of the
Southern and Northern churches, in 1844, was brought
about because of the censure voted against Bishop
Andrew for having married in Georgia a woman who
owned slaves. But even after the separation, the
Southern organisation maintained, at least formally,

its protest against slavery. The first edition of its
discipline, in 1846, declared:

Methodism had started in England among the
poor and the outcast; it was natural, therefore, that
when its missionaries came to America they should
seek to bring into the Church the outcast and neglected
people, and especially the slaves. In some
parts of the South the Methodist meeting-houses
were referred to by the more aristocratic denominations
as "the Negro churches." This was due to
the fact that the Methodists often began their work
in a community with an appeal to the slaves.

Methodism began in the early part of the nineteenth
century in Wilmington, North Carolina, in
this way. A Methodist preacher by the name of
William Meredith began his work among the slaves.
Through the penny collections which he took from
the black people and the scanty contributions of the
poor whites, he purchased a lot and completed a
building. Bishop Francis Asbury visited the church

in 1807, and John Charles, a coloured preacher,
delivered a sermon in the same church at sunrise
the same day.[3]

The Methodist Church in Fayetteville, North
Carolina, was started earlier than that at Wilmington,
but in much the same way. The story of the
founding of that church is told in some detail in
Bassett's History of Slavery in North Carolina.
The author says:

During the Colonial times the Baptists, to which
denomination at the present time the majority of the
Negroes in the United States belong, were a persecuted
people, not only in New England but in Virginia.
At that time this sect drew its followers very
largely from the poorer people who did not own
slaves, and it was therefore natural that its members
should be opposed to slavery. The Baptist Church,
however, did not, as did the Methodists, make
an effort to draw the Negroes into the churches, but

took care to bring under religious influence the
slaves of their own members, and paid particular
attention to the relations of the master and slave.
In 1778, it was decided that a marriage between
slaves ought to be respected, even though it was
against the law of the land. In 1783 the Sandy
Creek Association of North Carolina declared that a
master should give his servants the liberty to attend
family prayers in his house, that he should exhort
them to attend, but not use force. Among the
older coloured bishops and ministers, in both the
Methodist and Baptist churches, there are a number
who attribute their religious life to the influence
and teachings which they received through
this personal contact with their masters and masters'
families.

John Jasper, the famous pastor of the Sixth Mount
Zion Baptist Church, Richmond, Virginia, always
spoke with the greatest reverence of his former
master. The Reverend John Jasper was known as a
preacher for sixty years in and about Richmond,
twenty-five of which he was a slave. He became a
national figure as a result of his efforts to prove
by the Bible, that "the sun," as he put it, "do move"
Recently, William E. Hatcher, a Southern white
man, who knew Jasper for many years, admired
him for his sincerity and valued him for the influence
that he exercised over his people, has written the
story of John Jasper's life. One of the interesting

incidents related in this book is that of Jasper's
conversion. At the time this took place he was a
slave of Mr. Samuel Hargrove, and was employed
as a tobacco stemmer in a tobacco factory in Richmond.
One day he fell to shouting, while he was
at work, and nearly started a revival in the tobacco
factory. His master, hearing the uproar, called
him into the office. Jasper explained what had
come over him and that he really did not mean to
make any noise. His own account of what then
happened, which Mr. Hatcher has given in his own
words, is as follows:

Art'r awhile he say: "John, did you tell eny of'em in thar 'bout
your conversion?" And I say: 'Yes, Mars' Sam, I tell 'em fore
I kno'd lt, an' I feel like tellin' everybody in de worl' about it"
Den he say: "John, you may tell it. Go back in dar an' go up-stars
an tell 'em all 'bout it, an' den downstars an' tell de hogshed
men an' de drivers an' eberybody what de Lord has dun for you."

By dis time Mars' Sam's face was rainin' tears, an' he say: "John
you needn' work no mo' to-day. I giv' you holiday. Art'r you'
git thru tellin3 it here at de factory, go up to de house an' tell your
folks; go 'round to your neighbours an' tell dem; go enywhere
you wan' to an' tell de good news. It'll do you good, do dem good,'
an' help to hon'r your Lord an' Saviour."

John Jasper always contended that his master
made a preacher of him. "Oft'n as I preach," he
said in one of his sermons, "I feel that I'm doin'
what my ol' marster tol' me to do. If he was here
now, I think he would fil' up dem kin' black eyes of
his, an' say: 'Dat's right, John; still tellin' it; fly
like de angel, an' wherever you go carry de Gospel
to de people.'"[5]

John Jasper was born in 1812, and did not secure
his freedom until 1864. He preached, as slave and
freeman, for something over sixty years. When he
died, in 1899, the Richmond Dispatch said of him:

John Jasper was a survival of the ante-bellum
days. He was representative of the "old-time"
Negro preacher, of the men who were the natural
leaders of the slaves on the plantation. He lived in
a period, however, when, in many respects, the antebellum
preacher was on the decline. In the early
days, before the severe restrictions were put upon
the education of the slaves, many of these men were
educated and some of them preached in the white
churches.

Among the most noted of the early Negro preachers
was George Lisle, who began preaching to the slaves
at Savannah, Georgia, during the War of the Revolution.
After the evacuation of the country by the
British in 1782 and 1783 he went with his master to
Jamaica. The existence of the Baptist Church
among the Negroes in Jamaica is due to this man.
Before his departure for Jamaica he baptised a slave
of Mr. Jonathan Bryan, by the name of Andrew.

Andrew Bryan became in after years a great
preacher. At the present time there are two churches
in Savannah, one of them the Bryan Baptist in the
Yamacraw District and the other the First African,
both of which claim descent from the little congregation
of slaves which Andrew Bryan drew around him
in the years after his baptism and previous to 1788,

when he was solemnly ordained to the ministry and
his congregation formally constituted a church.

The story of the struggle of this little congregation
to maintain its existence against the prejudice that
existed at that time is interesting because it shows
the quality of some of these early slave preachers.
In his volume, "The Gospel Among the Slaves," the
Reverend W. T. Harrison, of the Methodist Church,
South, says of the origin of the First Baptist Church
in Savannah:

Toward the close of the year 1792, the Church
which Andrew Bryan had founded began to build a
place of worship. The city gave the lot for the
purpose and the building, which still stands on the old
site, though it is not the original structure erected in
1972, has become one of the historic landmarks of
the city.

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

His freedom was purchased by a subscription of
white people, and he was given a home and a patch
of land for his support. It is said that he exercised

such remarkable control over the members of his
flock that masters, instead of punishing their slaves,
often referred them to the discipline of their pastor,
of which they stood in greater dread. Professor
Ballagh says that the most refined and aristocratic
people paid tribute to him, and he was instrumental
in the conversion of many whites. He preached for
forty years among blacks and whites alike, but
voluntarily gave up his preaching in obedience
to the law of 1832, which was passed as a result
of the Nat Turner Insurrection. Dr. William S.
White, his biographer, speaking of Jack of Virginia's
relations with the white people in his
neighbourhood, says:

Another noted Negro preacher was Ralph Freeman,
who was a slave in Anson County, North

Carolina, in the neighbourhood of the Rock River.
He was ordained a regular minister and travelled
about, preaching at various places in his own
and adjoining counties. It is said that the Rev.
Joseph Magee, a white Baptist minister, became
much attached to Ralph. They used to travel
and preach together and it was agreed between
them that the survivor should preach the funeral
of the one who died first.

It so happened that the Rev. Joseph Magee died
first and the task of preaching his funeral sermon fell
to Ralph. In the meantime, however, "his friend
had moved to the West, and the coloured preacher
was sent for all the way from North Carolina to
come and fulfil the promise he had made in
earlier years. Ralph Freeman continued to preach
for a number of years. At last his lips were
closed also, much to his sorrow, by the law
which forbade Negroes to preach to white congregations.

Although Negro Baptists did not succeed in
organising an independent National Church until
after the War, coloured Baptists were the first among
the Negroes to set up separate churches for themselves.
In 1836, coloured Baptists in the North
began to draw together. The Providence Baptist
Association was organised in that year in Ohio.
Two years later the Wood River Baptist Association
was organised in Illinois. These local or district

organisations, as they were afterward called, grew
rapidly after the Civil War. About 1876 the New
England states formed an organisation which aimed
to be national in its character. In 1880 the
Negro Baptists of the Southern states met at Montgomery,
Alabama, to form a Foreign Mission
Convention. Six years later the Southern states
formed the American National Convention, and
in 1894, at Montgomery, Alabama, measures were
taken to bring together into one organisation all
the coloured Baptist organisations in the United
States, seeking to be national in character. By
1897 this national Baptist organisation had been
completed.

According to statistics furnished by the eighty-nine
state organisations and six hundred district
associations there were, in 1908, 18,307 organised
Negro Baptist churches, and 17,088 ordained
preachers in the United States. According to these
same statistics the total membership of these churches
is 2,330,535. The total expenditures of the
coloured Baptist Church for church, Sunday-school
and educational work in 1907 is reported to have been
$2,525,025.66.

The two great independent Negro denominations,
the Methodist and the Baptist, were the first to
break away from the older church organisations of
the white people. These two organisations contain
by far the larger number of the Negroes of the

United States. Perhaps this is the reason that they
were the first to seek to establish independent Negro
churches. In all the other religious denominations,
with the exception of the Roman Catholics, Negroes
have separate churches, which stand in a relation of
greater or less dependence upon the denominations
to which they belong.

The Catholics were the first to send missionaries
to Africa. Therefore , the Catholic Church is the
First Christian Church into which Negroes were
received as members. As far back as 1490, two
years before the discovery of America, Catholic
missionaries visited the mouth of the Kongo River.
For several centuries after this a Negro Catholic
kingdom existed in that part of Africa. It was
eventually overthrown, as a result of wars with
neighbouring peoples. Saint Benedict, the Moor,
who died in Palermo, Sicily, in 1589, and was afterward
canonised by the Catholic Church, was the
son of a Negro slave woman. Some of the first
Negroes to reach America were Catholics. They
came over with the early Spanish discoverers.

Negro Catholics have never been numerous in the
United States, except in Maryland, which was a
Catholic colony, and in Louisiana. In 1829, a
number of Catholic refugees came to Baltimore from
Santo Domingo, and at this time there was founded,
in connection with the Oblate Sisters of Providence
Convent, the St. Francis Academy for Girls. The

Sisters of Providence, who founded the convent
and seminary, were coloured women who first came
to Baltimore with the Santo Domingo refugees.
A few years later, in 1842, an order known as the
Sisters of the Holy Family was founded among the
free coloured women of New Orleans. The sisters
of this order now have charge of three asylums,
one of which is the Lafon Boys' Asylum, donated
by Mr. Thomy Lafon, the Negro philanthropist,
in 1893. The same order carries on schools at
Baton Rouge, Mandeville, Madisonville and Lafayette,
Louisiana; at Galveston and Houston,
Texas; and Pine Bluff, Arkansas. The same Sisterhood
has a government school at Stann Creek,
British Honduras.

Outside the Catholic Church the first religious
denomination in the United States to receive Negroes
was the Protestant Episcopal Church. In 1624,
only five years after slavery was introduced into
Virginia, a Negro child named William was baptised
and from that time the names of Negroes can be
found upon the register of most of the older churches
in Virginia. The first eminent coloured minister
in the Episcopal Church in the United States was
Alexander Crummell, who was born in New York
City in 1818, but his father was a native of the Gold
Coast, Africa. After his graduation at Cambridge
University, England, Mr. Crummel went to Africa as
a missionary. He was for a time a professor in the

Liberian College, in Liberia. Later he returned to
the United States and was, for twenty-two years,
rector of the St. Luke's Church, Washington, D. C.
He is the author of several books upon Africa, and
upon the Negro in the United States. In 1897 he
established the American Negro Academy, which
was designed to bring learned men of the Negro race
together and to publish the results of their investigations,
particularly upon subjects of interest to the
Negro race.

Something like one hundred and fifty Negroes
have been ordained as ministers in the Episcopal
Church since Alexander Crummell entered that
ministry in 1839. In 1874, James Theodore Holly
was consecrated Bishop of Haiti and eleven
years later Samuel David Ferguson was made Missionary
Bishop of Cape Palmas, and adjacent
regions in West Africa. There are several Negro
archdeacons of the Episcopal Church in the Southern
states. One of them is James S. Russell, who
was a student at Hampton Institute, at the time
I was there, and is now principal of the flourishing
Episcopal school for Negroes at Lawrenceville,
Virginia.

For some reason or other, probably because its
teachings did not address themselves to the comprehension
of the slaves, or did not appeal to their
emotions, the Presbyterian Church was never as
popular among the coloured people as the Methodist

and Baptist churches were. Notwithstanding this
fact, there were numerous coloured people who were
members of the Presbyterian Church in the Southern
states before the War. Among them was one free
Negro by the name of John Chavis, who became
famous. He was a full-blooded Negro and was
born in Granville County, North Carolina, about
1763. He early in life attracted the attention of
the white people and was sent to Princeton College
as an experiment, to see if a Negro could take a
collegiate education. The experiment succeeded
and Chavis became so thoroughly educated that he
afterward became a minister and preached with
considerable success until 1831, when he was silenced
by the law forbidding Negroes to preach.

After that he set himself up as a school-teacher,
teaching in Granville, Wake and Chatham counties
in North Carolina. Among his patrons were the
best people in the neighbourhood. Willie P. Mangum,
afterward United States Senator, and Priestley
Mangum, his brother, Archibald and John
Henderson, sons of Chief-Justice Henderson, Charles
Manly, afterward Governor of the state, Dr. James
L. Wortham, of Oxford, North Carolina, and many
other men who did not become prominent, were his
pupils. Reverend James H. Horner, who is said to
have been one of the best teachers in North Carolina,
said of John Chavis: "My father not only went to
school to him, but boarded in his family. The

school was the best at that time to be found in
the state."

In his study of Slavery in the State of North
Carolina, John Spencer Bassett says:

After the Civil War large numbers, as many as
seventy per cent., it is said, of the coloured members
of the Presbyterian Church went into the African
Methodist and into the Baptist churches. Others
joined the Northern Presbyterian church, which
had begun to establish schools and missions in the
South among the Negroes directly after the War.
In 1902, the Presbyterian Church, North, had
eleven Presbyteries in the Southern states with
two hundred and nine ministers, only seven of
whom were white.

In spite of the large secession from the Presbyterian
Church, South, a considerable number of coloured
people still clung to the Southern branch of that
Church. In the latter part of the Nineties, however,
these coloured churches, at their own request, were
set apart from the white churches and organised
under the title of the Afro-American Presbyterian
Church.

The Congregational Church, through the medium
of the American Missionary Association, began,
directly .after the War, to raise large sums of
money and establish schools for the Freedmen. A
number of these schools, like the one at Hampton,
have now become independent of the organisation
which started them. But a large number of
schools are still being supported in different parts of
the South by funds of the American Board.
Around these schools there has usually grown up
a coloured Congregational church. At first, these
churches were located, for the most part, in the
cities, but in recent years as the schools in
the country districts have increased, the number
of churches outside the city has multiplied.
In 1902, the number of coloured Congregational
churches was 230; the number of ministers and
missionaries, 139, and the number of church
members, 12,155.[8]

In 1890, the United States Census Bureau undertook
a complete census of the religious denominations.
Since that time no complete and systematic
study of all the denominations has been made.
The following table, however, prepared by Dr.
H. K. Carroll, who had charge of the preparation
of the church statistics of the Eleventh Census,
although it does not agree entirely with the statistics
furnished by the religious societies, probably shows

pretty accurately the growth and relative percentage
of strength of the different denominations:
                                     

Denomination	Ministers	Churches	Communicants
Regular Baptist	13,751	19,030	1,864,877
Church of God (Baptist)	71	93	8,500
Christian	88	34	956
Union American Methodist Episcopal	138	255	18,500
African Methodist Episcopal	6,170	6,920	858,323
African American Methodist Protestant	200	125	4,000
African Methodist Episcopal Zion	3,986	3,280	583,106
Congregational Methodist	5	5	319
Zion Union Apostolic (Methodist)	30	32	2,346
Coloured Methodist Episcopal	2,727	2,758	224,700
Evangelical Missionary (Methodist)	92	47	5,014
Cumberland Presbyterian	80	150	13,020
Total	27,338	32,729	3,583,661
Coloured members in Methodist Episcopal Churches	2,161	3,611	299,985
Coloured members in other bodies (est'd)	900	1,400	150,000
Grand total	30,399	37,740	4,033,646
Grand total in 1890		23,770	2,674,177
Gains in eighteen years		13,970	1,359,469

These figures show that nearly half of the Negro
population of the United States are members of one
or the other of the great religious denominations.
This means that, among the Negro population, the
church plays a much more important part than it
does among the white population, since considerably

more than two-thirds of the white population are
not enrolled in any church organisation. The
influence of the Negro Church is particularly strong
in the Southern states. In fact there is hardly a
community or a plantation in the South so remote,
or so obscure, that it does not possess some sort of
place where the coloured people meet and worship.

These churches are not always what they should
be. The coloured preacher is often ignorant and
sometimes even immoral, but in spite of this fact the
Church remains the centre for all those influences
that are making for the welfare and the upbuilding
of the communities in which they are situated. All
these churches are connected more or less directly
with the larger denominational organisations and
thus serve, to some extent, to connect the people in
them with the life and progress of the outside world.

I shall have something to say in a subsequent
chapter in regard to the social work of the Negro
Church. I wish to emphasise at this point, however,
that the Negro Church represents the masses
of the Negro people. It was the first institution to
develop out of the life of the Negro masses and it
still retains the strongest hold upon them. As the
Negro Church grows stronger materially and
spiritually so do the masses of the Negro people
advance. There is no better indication of the
progress of the masses of the people than the growth
and development of these great Negro organisations.

CHAPTER XIV
THE NEGRO ABOLITIONISTS

A Good many stones have been told about
John Randolph of Roanoke, and his peculiar
opinions in regard to slavery. One of
these concerns his reply to a man who asked him
who, in his opinion, was the greatest orator he
had ever heard. John Randolph was a great
orator himself, and he had known Patrick Henry,
but, in reply to this question, he said: "The greatest
orator I ever heard was a woman. She was a
slave. She was a mother, and her rostrum was
the auction block." With that he arose and
imitated the thrilling tones with which this slave
woman had appealed to the sympathy and to the
justice of the bystanders, concluding with an indignant
denunciation of them and of the traffic in
which they were engaged.

"There," said Mr. Randolph, in conclusion,
"was eloquence. I have heard no man speak like
that."

This story will serve to illustrate what was, from
the beginning, the strongest force in the abolition
of slavery in the South. I mean the appeal which

the slaves made, themselves, not merely in words
but in actions, to the sympathy of their masters.
It was the faithful servants of the Southern masters
who were the first Negro abolitionists.

This appeal which the Negro made for freedom
merely through his humanity made its deepest
impression, apparently, upon those people who
had come to this country to obtain liberty for themselves.
One of the very earliest of the anti-slavery
men in the country was Anthony Benezet, the son
of Huguenot parents who escaped from France
on account of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.
He established and taught an evening school in
Philadelphia for the instruction of Negroes and,
as early as 1780, he made an effort to induce the
Legislature of Pennsylvania to begin the work of
emancipation. Anthony Benezet, after coming to
America, joined the order of Friends, or Quakers
as they were called. The people of this sect, who
were more persecuted than any of the other English
denominations that came to America to obtain
religious freedom, were the first to give and to
demand for the Negro emancipation.

Another thing that early aroused sympathy for
the Negro slave was the sufferings of Americans
who had been carried by the Barbary pirates into
slavery in Africa. This was particularly true
in Massachusetts and in New England, where a
large proportion of the people were engaged in

shipping, and consequently suffered more heavily
from these piratical attacks. Among other Americans
carried into African slavery was one of the
first graduates of Harvard University, and in 1793,
no less than one hundred and fifteen Americans
were held in slavery in Algiers. The fact of the
sufferings of the white slaves taken to Africa is
frequently mentioned by the early abolitionists in
Massachusetts as a reason for freeing the black
slaves in America. One of the earliest books
written in this country, which obtained any reputation
abroad, was the story of the "Algerine Captive,"
which describes the hardships of these white slaves
in Africa, and seeks to turn the sentiment aroused
by this foreign white slavery against the black
slavery at home.[1]

As a rule the Negro was not an anti-slavery
agitator. In the South the free Negroes were
frequently themselves slave-holders. Nevertheless,
free Negroes were known to be in sympathy with
the desire of the slaves to be free. That was one
reason why they were regarded by slave-holders

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

A little later, when he was living in Buffalo, he
organised a "vigilance committee" to protect and
aid fugitive slaves. During all this time he employed
his evenings in study and, in 1843, he was engaged

as a lecturer by the Anti-slavery Society, continuing
in that position until 1849, when he went abroad.

Another agent of the Underground Railroad in
Massachusetts was Charles Lenox Remond, who
was born and brought up in Salem, Massachusetts,
and as a consequence had the advantage of excellent
school training. He became an anti-slavery
lecturer in 1838, and went to England in 1846,
as a delegate to the World's Anti-slavery Convention.
In New York the principal agents of
the Underground Railroad were Dr. James McCune
Smith, David Ruggles, Bishop J. W. Loguen,
the Rev. James W. C. Pennington, and Frederick
Douglass. David Ruggles was one of the very
early members of the Underground Railroad, and
is said to have been connected with the work almost
from the beginning. He edited for a number of
years a quarterly magazine called the Mirror of
Liberty and died in 1849.

Dr. James McCune Smith was born in New
York, but received his medical education in Scotland.
After his return to America he became an active
writer for the newspapers and magazines and
contributed a number of papers upon the history
and progress of the Negro race. James W. C.
Pennington was born a slave in 1809, on the plantation
of Colonel Gordon, in Maryland, where he
learned the trade of blacksmith. He joined the
Presbyterian Church, studied in Germany, where

he received the degree of Doctor of Divinity from
the University of Heidelberg, and, upon his return
to America, became the pastor of the Shiloh Church
in New York City. He died in 1871.

In Pennsylvania, Robert Purvis, the only coloured
man to sign the Declarations of the First American
Anti-slavery Convention in Philadelphia in 1833,
was the most prominent anti-slavery man of the
coloured race. In 1850, he became chairman of
the General Vigilance Committee, of which William
Still was secretary.[2] During this time William
Whipper, who afterward took a prominent part
in the anti-slavery agitation, was a lumber merchant
in the little town of Columbia, in the county of
Lancaster, in the southeastern corner of Pennsylvania.
At this time, this county was one of the
principal avenues of escape for fugitive slaves and
the coloured lumber merchants, Smith and Whipper,

were known to be active agents of the Underground
Railroad. From 1847 to 1860, according to a
letter written to William Still, the author of the
Underground Railroad, Mr. Whipper expended
as much as a thousand dollars a year in assisting
fugitive slaves. After the passage of the Fugitive
Slave Law in 1850, the coloured population at
Columbia decreased from 943 to 487 by emigration
and in 1861, when the War broke out, Mr. Whipper
was preparing to go to Canada himself.

The number of coloured people engaged in the
Underground Railroad was, as I have already said,
much larger in Ohio than in any other of the
Northern states. At Oberlin, Portsmouth, and
Cincinnati, Ohio, and Detroit, Michigan, there were
a number of Negroes who worked with the white
abolitionists of these cities, in assisting fugitives
on their way to Canada. In the neighborhood
of Portsmouth, Ohio, slaves were assisted across
the river by a barber of the town of Jackson, whose
name was Poindexter. At Louisville, Kentucky, there
was a coloured man by the name of Wash Spradley,
who helped many slaves to escape into the free states
across the river. Professor Siebert gives the names
of more than one hundred coloured men who were
known to be actively engaged in assisting in the escape
of fugitive slaves in the State of Ohio. He says:

There were fewer stations of the Underground
Railroad maintained in Illinois by coloured people
than in most of the other Western states. Chicago,
however, was the centre of anti-slavery sentiment
and there early sprang up in that city a small colony
of free Negroes who sometimes assisted fugitive
slaves from Missouri to escape. Among the early
coloured settlers of Chicago was John G. Jones,
who for many years had a tailor shop on Dearborn
Street near Madison and was, at the time of his
death, in 1879, one of the wealthiest Negroes in
Illinois. A few years ago, when Mrs. Jones was
visiting her niece, who is the wife of Lloyd G.
Wheeler, formerly Business Agent of Tuskegee
Institute, I learned that her husband had been
for many years a friend of John Brown and
when, in the winter of 1858 and 1859, he made
his sensational "rescue" of the Missouri slaves,

Brown stopped at Mr. Jones's house on his way
to Canada.

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

Delany died January 24, 1885, at the age of
seventy.

Among the early Negro abolitionists were Richard
Allen and Absalom Jones, the founders of "The
Free African Society," of Philadelphia. This
society opened a communication with the Negroes
in Boston, Newport, Rhode Island and other
places and coöperated with the abolition societies
in 1790, in studying the conditions of the free
blacks. In 1799 and 1800, Absalom Jones led
the Negroes of Philadelphia to draw up a petition
to the Legislature, praying for the immediate
abolition of slavery, and to send another petition
to Congress against the Fugitive Slave Law, and
in favour of prospective emancipation for all
Negroes.

These two men, Richard Alien and Absalom
Jones, were, a little later, supported in their efforts
for abolition by James Forten, a sail-maker by
trade; a man of education, and of considerable
means. James Forten received his education in
the school of the Quaker abolitionist, Anthony
Benezet, and is described as "a gentleman by
nature, easy in manner and easy in intercourse."
In 1814, Mr. Forten, with the assistance of Jones
and Alien, assisted in raising 2,500 coloured volunteers
for the protection of the city of Philadelphia,
which was then threatened by the English warships.
A battalion was also formed for service in

the field, but, before it reached the front, the war
with Great Britain had come to an end.

In 1817, James Forten was chairman of the first
convention of free Negroes held in Philadelphia.
It is said that he drew up the first resolutions of
protest against the work of the Colonisation Society,
which declared "that we never will separate
ourselves voluntarily from the slave population in
this country. They are our brethren by the ties
of blood, of suffering and of wrong, and we feel
that there is more virtue in suffering privations with
them than in gaining fancied advantages for a
season." Mr. Forten was a firm friend and supporter
of William Lloyd Garrison, who refers to
him as "the greatly esteemed and venerated sail-maker
of Philadelphia." In the early days of
the anti-slavery agitation, when Garrison found so
little support for his paper that he believed he would
have to give it up, James Forten several times
came to his rescue, at one time sending him fifty-four
dollars for twenty-seven subscribers to the
Liberator, and at another time assuming a considerable
part of the indebtedness which that paper
had incurred.

James Forten was born in 1766, in Philadelphia;
he died in 1842. He was a friend of Whittier, the
Quaker poet, among whose uncollected poems
are some verses, written in 1833, but first published
in the New York Independent, November, 1906,

entitled, "To the Daughters of James Forten."
Two grandchildren of James Forten are now
living in Washington, D. C. One of these is the
wife of Dr. Charles B. Purvis, son of Robert Purvis,
and formerly surgeon-in-chief of the Freedman's
hospital; the other is Mrs. Charlotte Forten Grimke,
the wife of the well-known Presbyterian minister,
Rev. Francis J. Grimke.

One of the interesting results of the anti-slavery
agitation was the opening of Oberlin College to
Negroes. This grew out of the anti-slavery discussions
which took place among the students of
Lane Seminary, at Cincinnati, Ohio. Out of one
hundred or more students in attendance in 1833,
more than half were Southerners. In 1834, there
was a debate in the Chapel on the subject of
slavery which lasted for eighteen consecutive nights.
During that debate James Bradley, a former slave,
who had purchased his freedom, was allowed to
give his testimony. He made a speech lasting two
hours, speaking in favour of the abolition of slavery
and of the measures of the Colonisation Society.
Bradley was born in Africa, but stolen from that
country when he was a child. His master, who
lived in Arkansas, died when he was eighteen
years old. For some years afterward he acted
as manager of the plantation for his mistress,
and finally purchased his time by the year.
After five years he paid $655 for his freedom

and emigrated to free territory with $200 in his
possession.

As a result of that debate, two Southern students
became abolitionists, and afterward the students
generally began to start Sunday and day schools
for Negro children in Cincinnati. A report of
the debate, which was written by one of these
Southern students and published in pamphlet, says
of Bradley: "He is now a beloved and respected
member of this institution."

When in August, 1834, the trustees of the school
voted that thenceforth there should be no discussion
of slavery in any public room of the Seminary,
fifty-one of the students left the school in a body.
Just about this time, December, 1833, the Oberlin
Collegiate Institution had been established, and the
seceding students were invited to come there. The
result was that Oberlin was open to students,
"irrespective of colour." Since that time it is probable
that nearly as many coloured students have
been graduated from Oberlin as have been graduated
from all other colleges in the North put together,
outside of a few schools exclusively for Negroes. It
is interesting to note that this result was brought
about, to some extent, at least, by the eloquence of
an untutored Negro orator.

Negro anti-slavery agitators, largely because of
their lack of education, were almost always more
influential as speakers than they were as writers.

Nevertheless, the Negro people were not wholly
without anti-slavery writers during the period of the
struggle for freedom. The first Negro paper published
in the United States was an anti-slavery
sheet called Freedom's Journal." This was published
by John B. Russwurm, a graduate of Bowdoin
College. The circumstances under which it was
established were these: There was published in
New York City a paper which was violent in its attacks
upon coloured Americans. Some of the prominent
coloured men, among them the Rev. Samuel
Cornish, met at the home of Boston Crummell and
determined to establish a paper through which
they could answer these attacks. As a result of
this conference the Freedom's Journal was launched.
Among the contributors was David Walker, the
author of "Walker's Appeal," a little pamphlet
printed in 1829.[4] The "Appeal" was, so far as
I am able to learn, the first attack upon slavery
made by a Negro through the medium of the press.
Another contributor to this paper was Stephen
Smith, who, as a lumber merchant at Columbia,
Pennsylvania, amassed a considerable fortune, with
which he afterward endowed a home for aged and
infirm Negroes in Philadelphia, giving the institution
$50,000 during his lifetime and $50,000 more at
his death. This paper seems to have been favourable
to the work of the Colonisation Society. Its
first two numbers contain among other things an
article entitled, "The Memoirs of Paul Cuffe,"
who some years before had taken a ship-load of
free coloured people to Sierra Leone.

John Brown Russwurm was born in 1799 at
Port Antonio, Jamaica. He was taken to Quebec
by his father, who was a white man, and there put
to school. Shortly after, his father came to Maine
and married. After his father died, Mrs. Russwurm,
who had become deeply interested in her stepson,
gave him a college education. After leaving college,
he was for a time the teacher of the coloured public
school in Boston. In 1829, he went to Africa and
became superintendent of the public schools of
Liberia. At the same time he edited the Liberia
Herald. In 1836, he was appointed Governor of
Maryland, at Cape Palmas, and continued in that
position until his death in 1851.

Another paper of some influence, known as the
Coloured American, was started in 1837, by Philip
A. Bell. The editor of this paper, which was
published at 9 Spruce Street, New York City, was
Charles B. Ray. Between the date of the publication
of the Coloured American and Frederick Douglass's
North Star, which was started ten years later, in

1847, several other papers were launched by coloured
men. One of these was the National Watchman,
edited by William G. Alien. He was assisted for
a time by Henry Highland Garnet. Mr. Garnet
had a remarkable career. He was born in slavery
in Kent County, Maryland, December 23, 1815.
His grandfather had been an African chief but
was captured and sold to the slave-traders, and
afterward became the property of Colonel William
Spencer. His father escaped from slavery and
sought protection with Thomas Garrett a Quaker
and noted anti-slavery man. In 1825, he went to
New York, where Henry Highland Garnet, his son,
entered the African Free School on Mulberry Street.
Among the students at the African Free School
at this time were Charles L. Reason, afterward
head of the coloured high school in Philadelphia,
George T. Downing, at one time a noted caterer
in Washington, D. C., and Ira Aldridge, the coloured
actor.

Young Garnet subsequently attended the high
school established for coloured people on Canal
Street, and when this was closed he went to the famous
school at Canaan, New Hampshire, and finally
was graduated at the Oneida Institute at Whitesboro,
New York. In 1850 he visited Great Britain,
from there he went as a delegate to the Peace Conference,
at Frankfort-on-the-Main; was a missionary
for some time to Jamaica; chaplain of a

coloured regiment during the War; president of
Avery Institute at Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; the
first coloured man to hold religious services in
Representatives' Chamber of Congress at Washington,
D. C. He finally died as Minister Resident in
Liberia, February 14, 1882.

After Frederick Douglass entered the anti-slavery
field most of the efforts of the coloured people to
secure their freedom centered about him. He was
an orator of unusual gifts and devoted himself
with such singleness of purpose to the task of
securing freedom and recognition for his people
that he soon became the recognised leader of the
coloured people.

Among those who were associated with Frederick
Douglass at this time were Samuel R. Ward, H. Ford
Douglass, John M. Langston, William Howard Day,
and Mifflin W. Gibbs. William C. Nell, the author
of a book on "The Coloured Patriots of the Revolution,"
assisted him for some time in the publication
of the North Star. Mr. Nell was a friend
of Garrison and other anti-slavery men, and when
he died in Boston, May 25, 1874, William Lloyd
Garrison was one of the speakers at his funeral.

Contemporaneous with Frederick Douglass's
paper, The North Star, which was published at
Rochester, was the Ram's Horn, published by W.
A. Hodges at 141 Fulton Street, New York City,
and The Alienated American, published by William

Howard Day, at Cleveland, Ohio. A little later,
in 1855, The Mirror of the Times, published by
Mifflin W. Gibbs, was started at San Francisco,
California.

The anti-slavery people to whom I have thus
far referred were for the most part fugitive slaves
or coloured men who were under the influence of
the Northern abolitionists. But there were other
Negroes in the Southern states who, by their lives
and actions, exercised a very positive influence
upon anti-slavery sentiment in the South. In a
"History of the Anti-slavery Leaders of North
Carolina," Professor John Spencer Bassett, of
Trinity College, has given a sketch of one of these
men, Lunsford Lane, whom he reckons among the
four prominent abolitionists of North Carolina.

Lunsford Lane was a slave of Mr. Sherwood Haywood,
a prominent citizen of Raleigh, North Carolina.
His parents, of pure African descent, were
employed as house-servants in the city of Raleigh.
In this way, Lunsford had an opportunity to hear
the speeches of many prominent men of the day,
among others John C. Calhoun. He waited on
Lafayette, when he passed through Raleigh in 1824,
and was greatly impressed by what he heard this
great man say in regard to his hope of ultimate
freedom for the slave. Once he heard a Presbyterian
minister, Dr. McPheeters, say: "It is
impossible to enslave an intelligent people." The

words made a great impression upon him. As a
matter of fact, he had early learned to read and
write, for at that time this privilege was not yet
denied slaves in North Carolina.

It was a custom among the coloured boys of the
town, to assemble every Sunday afternoon at a
mineral spring in the outskirts of Raleigh in order
to discuss, in imitation of the white people, the
public questions of the day. At these meetings
the slaves, who had had the advantages of hearing
these questions discussed, would repeat with great
exactness the speeches that they had heard during
the week. Frequently the white people attended
these meetings and a master who owned a particularly
bright slave would take great pride in any
exhibition of unusual intelligence his slave showed
at these meetings, and would encourage him to
improve still further. After the Northampton
Insurrection, when it was believed that these
meetings had the effect of turning the minds of
slaves toward freedom, they were very strictly
prohibited. Lunsford Lane grew up, however,
where he had the benefit of these opportunities.

Lane early began to save with the purpose of
purchasing his freedom, the money which was given
him from time to time. He was given considerable
liberty by his master and was able to employ his
leisure time in occupations that increased the sum
of his savings. Young Lane's father had, in some

way or other, come into possession of a secret
method of making a superior kind of smoking
tobacco, and, as he grew older, father and son now
began to manufacture this kind of tobacco on
their own account. In order to have opportunity
to carry on this trade Lane hired his time, paying
for it from $100 to $120 a year. The demand for
his tobacco grew rapidly; he enlarged his plant
and made arrangements by which he was able to sell
the product in the neighbouring towns of Fayetteville,
Salisbury, and Chapel Hill. At the end of
eight years he had saved a thousand dollars. With
this sum he went to Mr. Benjamin R. Smith, who
was the owner of his wife, and, putting his money
in his hands, engaged him to negotiate with his
mistress for his freedom.

As soon as he had secured his freedom, Lane
was able to extend his business. He added to the
manufacture of tobacco the making of pipes. He
also opened a wood-yard and bought horses and
wagons for use in connection with it. In 1839, he
bought a house and lot, for which he paid $500.
As soon as he had secured his own freedom he made
it the one object of his life to buy his wife, and
children, of whom there were now six. Mr. Smith
offered to sell them for $3,000, but as his wife and
her children had been purchased eight years earlier
for $560 it seemed that $3,000, an advance of
$2,340, was too much to pay. Mr. Smith, after

some negotiation, reduced the price to $2,500 and
Lunsford Lane gave five notes for $500 each and
received in return the latter's obligation to sign a
bill of sale for the whole family when the notes
were paid.

"His achievement," says Professor Bassett, "had
been wonderful, and is an indication of what a
policy of gradual emancipation might have done
in developing his race, could circumstances have
been so shaped that it might have been entered
upon. He had paid $1,000 for his freedom, he had
paid $1,000 in yearly wages while he was hiring
his time; had supported himself and helped support
his family in the meantime; and paid $500 for his
home, and had a good business in his own name."[5]

Although he dressed poorly, fared as simply
as if he were a slave, and had been careful, as he
said, to seem, if possible, to be less intelligent than
he actually was, his prosperity had already begun
to attract the notice of a certain class of whites
and, as several other Negroes in Raleigh were
beginning to make progress in the same way, some
of the white people thought it was likely to have
a bad effect on the slaves. For that reason they
determined to run him out of the community.

The circumstances under which he had obtained
his freedom enabled them to do this without much

difficulty. Since, under the laws of North Carolina,
he was not able to buy his own freedom, he had
gone to New York State to have the articles of
emancipation executed. As he had, however,
returned to North Carolina, he came under the
provisions of the law which forbade free Negroes
from other states from coming into North Carolina
to live. Free Negroes who violated this act and
did not remove out of the state within twenty days
after notice had been served on them, were liable
to a fine of $500, in default of which they could
be sold for ten years. About the first of November,
1840, Lane received notification from two justices
of the peace that, unless he left the state within the
twenty days prescribed by the law, he would be
prosecuted under the statute.

At this time Lane was a private messenger and
janitor in the office of the Governor of the state. He
at once appealed to Mr. C. C. Battle, private secretary
to Governor Dudley, who took up the matter
with the prosecuting attorney and secured from
him a promise that the prosecution would be suspended
until January 1. The purpose of this
delay was to get a private law through the Legislature
allowing him to remain in the state until he had
finished paying for his family. Other free Negroes
in the town who were buying their families had
received similar notices and they, too, petitioned
the Legislature. The petitions were referred to a

committee which brought in a favourable report.
The bill dragged along, Lane and the other free
Negroes following its course, as well as they were
able, from information they were able to obtain
outside the building, since at the time no Negro
was allowed to enter the Chamber of either of the
Houses when in session. Finally, a member came
out and said: "Well, Lunsford, the Negro bill is
killed."

This announcement was a great blow to Lane
and his companions, but they bowed to the inevitable
and made no open complaint against the decision.
Nothing was now left for Lane and his companions
but to emigrate to the North, leaving their families
behind them. Lane had already paid Mr. Smith
$620 on his indebtedness, of which amount $250 was
in payment for one child, whom he took North
with him and left with friends. Mr. Smith now
agreed to accept the house and lot in Raleigh for
$500, provided the balance of $1,380 should be
paid in cash. These arrangements having been
completed, he started for the North.

Lane had made some friends in New York during
his previous visit there to secure his own freedom.
These friends now assisted him to raise the necessary
money to secure the freedom of the remaining
members of his family. Most of this money he
secured by going about the country as a lecturer,
telling in simple and straightforward fashion the

circumstances under which he had been compelled
to leave his home. Early in 1842 he wrote to his
friend, Mr. Smith, in Raleigh asking him to obtain
from the Government a written permission to return
and get his family. The Governor replied that he
had no authority to grant such a privilege but thought
it would be perfectly safe for him to come to Raleigh,
provided he stayed no longer than twenty days.
So it was that on Saturday, April 23, 1842, the
ex-slave was again in the city of his birth. He
remained with his family during Sunday morning
and on Monday morning went to the store of Mr.
Smith to have a settlement. Before he could transact
his business, however, he was arrested and taken
before the Mayor on a charge of "delivering abolition
lectures in Massachusetts."

In reply to this charge Lunsford Lane made a
statement before the Mayor's court which, because
it was the only abolition speech, so far as I know,
ever made by a coloured man before a Southern
audience, I am disposed to quote at some length.

Lunsford Lane's report of the proceedings was
as follows:

After Lane had made this statement Mr. Loring,
the Mayor, held a whispered consultation with
some of the leading men of the city who were present,
and then remarked that he saw nothing criminal in
what had been done. He called upon any one present
to make a statement, but no one had anything to
say, and Lunsford Lane was therefore discharged.

As Lane was leaving the Mayor's office, however,
he was warned that a crowd was waiting outside
the building for him and that he had better go
directly to the train. He made arrangements
with the Mayor to take his money and settle with
Mr. Smith and send on the liberated wife and
children to Philadelphia. After this was done
he started for the train and succeeded in reaching
the station as the train was about to leave. The
crowd had, however, followed him and refused to
allow the train to depart until they had him in
their hands. The Mayor was present and appealed
in vain to the mob to allow Lane to go. Members
of the crowd demanded the Negro's trunk to be
searched for abolition literature. While their
attention was directed to this task the fugitive was
hurried to the jail for protection.

"Looking out from my prison window," said
Lane in his account of the affair, "I could see my
trunk in the hands of officers Scott and Johnston,
and others who were taking it to the city hall for
examination. I learned afterward that they broke
open my trunk and as the lid flew up, the mob
cried out, 'A paper, a paper!' A number seized it
at once and set up a yell of wild delight. Among
the crowd was a young man of profligate character,
a son of one of the most respectable families in the
place. When the paper was discovered, he glanced
upward toward my prison window and by signs
and words expressed his satisfaction.

"The paper proved to be entirely inoffensive, and
as nothing further was found in the carpet bag
which they searched, the crowd was quiet for a
time."

At night, acting upon the advice of his friends,
Lane was released from the prison and started for
the home of Mr. William Boylan, who was so highly
esteemed in Raleigh at that time that it was believed
his house would be a safe asylum for the fugitive.
It was nine o'clock at night when he left the jail.
He had only gone a few yards, however, when he
was seized and drawn away to "an old pine field,"
where a gallows stood. At first he thought they
intended to hang him, but finally a bucket of tar
and a feather pillow were brought, and then he
understood that they intended nothing worse than

a coat of tar and feathers. After he had been daubed
with tar, and the feathers had been poured over
him, his watch and clothes were handed him and
he was allowed to go home. Some of the crowd,
however, continued to follow him and, as they
laughingly watched him remove the tar and feathers,
said he might now remain in town as long as he
chose.

By this time his friends had become alarmed
and appealed to the Governor for protection. He
had gone to the home of his friend, Mr. Smith, to
pass the night and a detail of soldiers was furnished
by the Governor as his guard there. In the morning
he settled his business matters and made ready to
start with his family for Philadelphia. He went
to say farewell to his former mistress, who was
then a very old lady. In describing the scene at
the home of his former mistress, Lane says:

The story of the treatment which Lane had
received had caused the greatest excitement in the
city and many of the best citizens in the town now
came to his assistance. They gave him food enough
to last on his journey; sent a carriage to take him
and his family to the station and arranged with the
conductor to stop on the edge of the town to take
him on, his family having previously been placed
on the train at the station. This was accomplished
in safety and the whole party started North. A
member of the previous day's mob who happened
to be on the train made an effort to excite bystanders
at the stations at which they stopped to board the
train and to drag out the escaping abolitionist, but
was unsuccessful.

Lunsford Lane went to live first in Boston,
Massachusetts, and after then in Oberlin, Ohio.
Two of his children having died there, however,
he returned to Boston. He was employed for a
time as a lecturer by the Anti-slavery Society but
he seems to have had none of the vehemence of
the average abolitionist and was never entirely
contented with his life in the Northern country.
During the War he acted as a hospital nurse, and
when the question arose as to what would become

of the freedman, he made several public addresses,
in which he showed great practical sense and
understanding. He emphasised particularly the
need of better education and better agriculture
in the South. Among other things he said:

Lunsford Lane remained, to the end, a true son
of the South. In spite of the fact that he had been
driven out of his native land, he seems to have cherished
no bitterness against the people of his native
state and city. If he had some enemies there, he
had had many friends, the memory of whose kindness
he never forgot. Perhaps I can not do better,
in concluding what I have to say about this man,
than to quote the words of Professor Bassett in
regard to him:

CHAPTER XV
THE NEGRO SOLDIER'S FIGHT FOR FREEDOM

NEGRO soldiers have fought in every war,
I suspect, that has ever been waged
on the American continent. Negroes
fought at Bunker Hill and all through the Revolutionary
War. Before that time, Negroes are
known to have been engaged, in one way
or another, in most of the Indian wars.
They were conspicuous in the battles of New
Orleans and of Lake Erie, in the War of 1812.
They fought on both sides in the Civil War, and
from that time on they have been an important
part of the standing army of the United States. In
most of these wars, I may add, the Negro has
fought not merely in the interest of the country
and of the civilisation with which he has become
identified, but also, as in the Revolutionary and
Civil wars, to secure and maintain his own freedom.

It is impossible to tell just how many Negro
soldiers were engaged in the Revolutionary War.
In August, 1778, two months after the battle of
Monmouth, the official returns of Washington's
army showed that there were 755 Negroes scattered

among the different regiments. But this did not
include the Connecticut, New York, and New
Hampshire troops, in which large numbers of
Negroes, who had been slaves, had been allowed
to take their masters' places in the ranks. It did
not include, either, the regiment of Freedmen,
raised in Rhode Island, which fought so courageously
at the battle of Rhode Island, in August, 1778.[1]
Three years later, in May, 1781, when Colonel
Green, of this regiment, was surprised at Point
Bridge, New York, his black soldiers, a detachment
of whom accompanied him, defended their leader
until every one of them was dead.

As a rule, the Negro soldiers were not organised
in the Patriot Army into separate organisations,
but were scattered through the different regiments.
Hessian officer, writing under the date of October
23, 1777, in reference to his march through Massachusetts,
says: "The Negro can take the field
instead of his master; and therefore no regiment
is to be seen in which there are not Negroes in
abundance; and among them are able-bodied,
strong, brave fellows. Here, too," he adds, "there
are many families of free Negroes who live in good

houses, have property and live just like the rest
of the inhabitants."[2]

This statement is further confirmed by the official
roll of Massachusetts soldiers, which shows that
there were Negroes in the regiments of that state
from almost every Massachusetts town. Although
no Negro regiment was raised in Connecticut, still
in Meigs's, afterward Butler's regiment, there was
a company made up entirely of coloured men.
George W. Williams, in his "History of the Negro
Troops in the War of the Rebellion," after a careful
study of the rolls of the Continental Army,
reached the conclusion that there were no less than
3,000 Negro soldiers in the Continental army
during the Revolutionary War.[3]

Fewer Negroes were allowed to enter the Patriot
Army in the Southern colonies, although a strenuous
effort was made by Colonel John Laurens,
of South Carolina, and other patriots, to carry
out the provisions that the Continental Congress
had made for raising a Negro regiment. Free
Negroes enlisted in considerable numbers in the
Virginia regiments, although there was no law by
which their service could be accepted. In 1783,
however, the General Assembly passed a law
directing the emancipation of a certain number

of slaves who had served as soldiers in that state,
and particularly "of the slave Aberdeen," who had
worked for a long time in the state lead mines.

The Revolutionary War contributed, in several
ways, toward the emancipation of the slaves. In
the struggle of the colonies to secure liberty for
themselves the sentiments expressed by Thomas
Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence led
many people to feel that Negro slavery was wrong.
It was partly this sentiment and partly the needs
of the Continental Army that led several of the
states to pass laws which provided that slaves
might serve in the Patriot Army and that, at the
end of their service, they should go free. This
was the case in New York where, on March 20,
1781, a law providing for two regiments of Negro
slaves specified that, after three years of service,
these slaves should be free. The Rhode Island
law, which provided for a regiment of black men,
specified, also, that those who took part in the
struggle for freedom of the colonies should have
their own freedom. It was, no doubt, largely
as a result of the services of the Negro troops during
the war that, on February 23, 1784, the General
Assembly of Rhode Island passed a law making
free all Negroes and mulattoes born in that state
after March 1 of that same year.

Negroes not only served in the War of the Revolution,
but individual coloured men are still remembered,

in the tradition of that time, for the daring
exploits in which they engaged. In Trumbull's
celebrated historic painting of the battle of Bunker
Hill, one of the conspicuous figures is a Negro by
the name of Peter Salem, who is said to have been
responsible for the death of Major Pitcairn, of the
British Marines, who fell just as he mounted the
Patriots' redoubt, shouting, "The day is ours!"

Peter Salem was a private in Colonel Nixon's
regiment. He was born in Framingham, and was
held as a slave until the time he joined the army.
Colonel Trumbull, who, at the time of the battle,
was stationed with his regiment in Roxbury, and saw
the action from that point, has introduced the figures
of several other coloured men into his canvas.[4]

Another coloured man whose name has been
preserved in the records of the Revolutionary War
was Salem Poor, of Colonel Frye's regiment, Captain
Ames's company. He took part in the Battle
of Bunker Hill and so distinguished himself that
a petition, signed by some of the principal officers
who took part in that battle, was drawn up and
sent to the General Court of Massachusetts Bay

in order to secure recognition for his services.
This was less than six months after the battle in
which he had taken part had been fought.

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

Negroes played a less conspicuous part in the
war in North and South Carolina and Georgia
than they did elsewhere. But in White's "Historical
Collections of Georgia," there is an account
given of a Negro soldier by the name of Austin
Dabney, which is so interesting that I am tempted
to relate the story here at some length.

Austin Dabney had been born, from all that I
can learn, of free parents, but in some way or other,
he had fallen into the hands of a man by the name
of Aycock, who lived in Wilkes County, Georgia.
This man was unable to serve in the Patriot Army
himself, and for that reason offered this slave boy
as a substitute and, after the circumstances of his
birth were explained, he was accepted. Dabney
proved himself a good soldier and took part in
many a skirmish with British and Tories, in which
he acted a conspicuous part. He was with Colonel
Elijah Clark at the Battle of Kettle Creek, February
14, 1779, where he was wounded and made a
cripple for life. He was unable to do further
military duty and was without means to obtain
proper medical attention. In this critical condition
he was taken into the house of a white man by
the name of Harris, where he was kindly cared
for until he recovered. So grateful was he to this
man, Mr. Harris, for taking him into his home at
a time when he was without friends and unable to
assist himself, that he afterward devoted a large

part of his life to working for and taking care of
Mr. Harris and his family.

After the close of the war, Austin Dabney acquired
property and became prosperous. He removed
to Madison County, carrying with him his benefactor,
Mr. Harris, and family. Here he became
noted for his great fondness for horses and the
turf. He attended all the races in the neighbourhood,
and, in the words of Mr. White's chronicle,
"his courteous behaviour and good temper always
secured him gentleman backers."

Dabney had been freed for his services in the
Revolutionary War. He was in receipt of a pension
from the Federal Government and in the distribution
of public lands by lottery among the people of Georgia,
the Legislature gave him a considerable amount
of land in the county of Walton. The Representative
from Oglethorpe, the Hon. Mr. Upson, was the
member who moved this passage of the law.

The granting of this land to a coloured man was
strenuously opposed by a number of people and,
at the election of members of the Legislature of
Madison County, the people were divided into an
Austin Dabney and an anti-Austen Dabney party.
It was perhaps because he did not enjoy the results
of this controversy that Dabney soon after removed
to the land given him by the state in Walton County,
taking with him the Harris family, for whom he
continued to labour. Upon his death he left them

all his property. The eldest son of his benefactor
Harris sent to Franklin College and afterward supported
him while he studied law with Mr. Upson
in Lexington. In the account given in White's
"Historical Collections," it is stated that Dabney
was "one of the best chroniclers of events of the
Revolutionary War in Georgia."

As illustrating the character of Austin Dabney
and the good repute which he maintained among
his neighbours the following anecdote is related
in White's "Collections."

He drew his pension at Savannah, where he went once a year for
this purpose. On one occasion he went to Savannah in company
with his neighbour, Colonel Wyley Pope. They travelled together
on the most familiar terms, until they arrived in the streets of the
town. Then the Colonel observed to Austin that he was a man of
sense, and knew that it was not suitable for him to be seen riding
side by side with a coloured man through the streets of Savannah;
to which Austin replied that he understood the matter very well.
Accordingly, when they came to the principal street, Austin checked
his horse and fell behind. They had not gone very far before
Colonel Pope passed by the house of General James Jackson, who
was then Governor of the state. Upon looking back he saw the
Governor run out of the house, seize Austin's hand, shake it as if
he had been his long absent brother, draw him off his horse, and
carry him into his house, where he stayed whilst in town. Colonel
Pope used to tell this anecdote with much glee, adding that he
felt chagrined when he ascertained that whilst he passed his time
at the tavern, unknown and uncared for, Austin was the honoured
guest of the Governor.

It should not be understood from what has
been said here that Negroes were admitted at once

and without opposition into the Patriot Army.
There was at first considerable opposition to them,
particularly from the officers in the army. One
incident that hastened their entrance into the army
was the proclamation by Lord Dunmore, the
Royal Governor of Virginia, in November, 1775,
offering freedom to all such Negroes and indentured
white servants as might enlist for the purpose "of
reducing the colony to the proper sense of its duty."
Other proclamations inviting the Negroes to join
the King's armies and fight against their masters
were issued later by Sir Henry Clinton and Lord
Cornwallis. As a matter of fact a great many
slaves were carried off by the British troops during
the war. It is estimated that no less than thirty
thousand of them were taken from the plantations
and employed by the British troops in pioneer
work and in building fortifications, but the greater
part of these slaves died from fever and small-pox
in the British camps. The remainder were sent
to the West Indies, others to Nova Scotia, and
still others to the colony of Sierra Leone. Referring
to this matter in a speech in the United States
House of Representatives, December 12, 1820, the
Hon. Charles Pinckney of South Carolina says:

Although Negro soldiers had fought in the Revolutionary
War and in the War of 1812, it was
some time before the Federal Government was
prepared to enlist Negro soldiers to fight in the
Civil War against the people who were still holding
black men as slaves. As a matter of fact, it was
in the Confederate armies that the first Negro
soldiers were enlisted. During the latter part
of April, 1861, a Negro company at Nashville,
Tennessee, made up of "free people of colour,"
offered its services to the Confederate Government.
Shortly after, a recruiting office was opened for
free Negroes at Memphis, Tennessee. On November
23, 1861, there was a grand review of the Confederate
troops at New Orleans, Louisiana, one
of the features of which was a regiment of fourteen
hundred free coloured men. Some of these coloured
troops remained in the service of the Confederacy

until the close of the war, but in few cases did they
have an opportunity to participate in any of the
important battles.

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

as he had never seen before: "Two thousand
men ready to enlist as recruits and not a man of
them who had not a white 'biled shirt' on."

Thus the first regiment of coloured troops was
mustered into the service of the United States. A
short time after this, three regiments of infantry
and two batteries of artillery were equipped and
ready for service. General Butler says of these
soldiers, "They were intelligent, obedient, highly
appreciated their position, and fully maintained
its dignity."

Previous to this time, General Hunter, who was
located at Beaufort, and the Sea Islands, off the
coast of South Carolina, had formed a regiment
from the slaves which he had found on the abandoned
plantations in that district. When this regiment
was first organised the Federal Government was
not prepared to accept the Freedmen in the positions
of soldiers, so that it was not until January 25, 1863,
that the "First South Carolina" regiment was
actually mustered into service, though it had
been in existence as an organisation for some time
before this.

Although these were the first Negro regiments
organised by the Federal Government, they were
not the first coloured soldiers to engage in battle
on the side of the Federal Government. In August,
1862, a coloured regiment, composed partly of
fugitive slaves from Missouri, was recruited in

Kansas. Although this regiment was not mustered
into the service of the United States until January,
1863, a detachment of it was attacked by Confederate
soldiers at Island Mound, Missouri,
October, 28, 1862, but after considerable fighting
the coloured troops succeeded in beating off their
opponents. This was the first action in which
Negro troops were engaged in the Civil War.

After the emancipation proclamation was issued
on January 1, 1863, the work of enlisting coloured
soldiers was taken in hand in more serious fashion.
Early in the year 1863, Governor John A. Andrews
secured permission to organise a regiment of coloured
troops. On April 12, of that year, the Fifty-fourth
Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry, composed of
"persons of African descent," had completed its
quota, and shortly after this two other coloured
regiments were organised. These were the first
soldiers recruited from among the free coloured
people of the North. To complete these regiments,
coloured people were summoned from all of the
Northern states. Governor Andrews was greatly
assisted in the work of recruiting the coloured
people to fill these regiments by Frederick Douglass
and the coloured abolitionists, William Wells Brown
and Charles Lenox Remond. Among the coloured
soldiers who sailed for South Carolina with the
Massachusetts regiments were two sons of Frederick
Douglass, Lewis H. and Charles R. Douglass.

Among the coloured people who enlisted in the
Federal army at this time there was a large number
who afterward distinguished themselves in some
way in public life. Among others I recall two
bishops of the African Methodist Episcopal Church
and several men who afterward became prominent
in politics, among them P. B. S. Pinchback, who
was in the First Volunteer Louisiana Infantry, and
afterward became Lieutenant, and for a time,
Acting Governor of Louisiana during the stormiest
days of the Republican rule in that state. Charles
E. Nash, who was afterward Representative from
Louisiana in the Forty-fourth Congress, enlisted
as a private in the United States Chasseurs
d' Afrique, and afterward rose to the position of
Acting Sergeant-major of his regiment.

Bishop Henry M. Turner is said to have been the
first coloured chaplain to receive a commission from
the Federal army. Bishop Turner was living at this
time, in 1863, in Washington, District of Columbia,
where he was serving as pastor of Israel Church.
Bishop William B. Derrick, the other A. M. E.
bishop who served in the war, was born in the
Island of Antigua, British West Indies, July 27,
1843, a decade after England had granted freedom
to the slaves in the West Indian colonies. He was
educated in a Moravian school at Graceland. It
was intended that he should be a blacksmith, but
he took to the life of the sea, and became a sailor

on vessels travelling between the West Indies and
New York. This led him to enlist in the war
for the freedom of the coloured people in the United
States. He served on the flagship of the North
Atlantic Squadron, the Minnesota, and at the close
of the war became a citizen in the United States.

Among the other coloured men who enlisted
in the Civil War was George Washington Williams,
who afterward served as an officer of artillery
in the Mexican army. Mr. Williams was born in
Bedford Springs, Pennsylvania, October 16, 1849.
After the Civil War was over he studied law for a
time in the office of Judge Alphonso Taft, father
of President Taft, and in the Cincinnati Law
School. In 1879 and 1881, he was a member of
the Ohio Legislature. From 1885 to 1886, he was
Minister to Haiti, and in 1888, was a delegate to
the World's Conference of Foreign Missions at
London. He was a writer and a newspaper man
of some note and is the author of a "History of
the Negro Race in America," to which I have
frequently had occasion to refer, in the preparation
of this book.

Joseph H. Rainey, who was a member of the
Forty-second, Forty-third, the Forty-fourth, and the
Forty-fifth Congress, as Representative from South
Carolina, served for a time in the Confederate
Army. Joseph Rainey was born in Georgetown,
South Carolina, June 21, 1832. His father and

mother had been slaves, but had purchased their
freedom. When the war broke out Mr. Rainey
was working at his father's trade of barber.
Being a free man he was drafted into the service
of the Confederate Army and compelled to work
upon the fortifications, until he succeeded in
escaping to the West Indies, where he remained
till the close of the war.

A small number of coloured men, probably as
many as seventy-five, were granted commissions as
officers in the latter part of the war. Major Martin
R. Delany, and Captain O. S. B. Wall, both of
whom were detailed in the Quartermaster's Department,
attained the highest rank of any of the coloured
officers in the Army. Dr. A. T. Augusta, who afterward
became one of the leading coloured physicians
of Washington, District of Columbia, and Dr. Charles
B. Purvis, a son of Robert Purvis, the coloured
abolitionist of Philadelphia, were the best known
of the coloured army surgeons during the Civil
War. Dr. Purvis has been for many years a teacher
and officer in the School of Medicine at Howard
University.

From first to last no less than 178,975 Negro
soldiers were mustered into the United States
Volunteer Army during the course of the Civil
War. Of this number, 36,847 were reported killed,
wounded, or missing. The coloured troops did
not have an opportunity to participate in many

of the great battles of the war. They did, however,
serve in nearly every military department
in the United States and took part in four hundred
and forty-nine battles. In addition to the large
military force mentioned there were at least 150,000
Negro labourers employed in the Quartermasters'
and Engineering Department. They were employed
as teamsters and as cooks or in the building of
fortifications.

The first general engagement in which coloured
soldiers took part was the assault upon Port Hudson,
Louisiana, made by the troops under General
Banks, May 27, 1863. There were eight regiments
of coloured troops among the forces that took
part in this assault, and among them was the first
Louisiana Native Guard, organised by General
Butler. This regiment is said to have suffered
heavier losses than any other regiment engaged
in the assault, losing in all one hundred and twenty-nine
officers and men.

The soldiers in this same Department did some
desperate fighting a few days after, June 6 and 7,
1863, at Milliken's Bend. This post was defended
by about fourteen hundred men, all of them newly
organised and undisciplined black soldiers, with
the exception of one hundred and sixty men of
an Iowa regiment which chanced to be there. The
battle lasted for eight hours, during which the
soldiers came to close quarters and fought hand

to hand with bayonets and clubbed muskets.
Although the attacking force was said to have been
considerably superior to that of the black troops,
the latter succeeded in repelling the attack and in
driving off the enemy.

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

After the war, Sergeant Carney returned to

Massachusetts, and for a number of years, up to
the time of his death, in the early part of December,
1908, was employed at the Massachusetts State
House in Boston, where the torn flag that he had
kept flying upon the battlefield at Fort Wagner
is still preserved among the other colours of the
Massachusetts regiments.

Following the death of Sergeant Carney, in
Boston, Mr. N. P. Hallowell wrote a communication
to the Boston Transcript in which he gave so accurate
and concise a description of this battle and
the part that Sergeant Carney had in it that I
have ventured to reproduce it here. Mr. Hallowell
wrote:

It is fit that the last act, the act which cost his life, should be
one of courtesy. In stepping aside to make room for another his
leg was caught and crushed. Sergeant William H. Carney was a
gentleman. Peace to him.

Coloured troops took part February 20, 1864, in
the disastrous battle of Olustee, Florida, in which
the losses were quite as severe, it is said, as in
any other battle of the Civil War. Speaking of
this battle, Colonel J. R. Hawley, who commanded
the First Brigade in this engagement, says: "Old
troops finding themselves so overmatched would
have run a little and reformed with or without
order. The black men stood to be killed or
wounded, losing more than three hundred out of
five hundred and fifty." In the battle of Nashville,
the coloured troops were under a life-long
Democrat, General James B. Steedman, who was
one of the delegates in 1860 to the Charleston
Convention which nominated Breckenridge for
president. It is related that as he rode over the
field immediately after the battle, he said with a
grim smile: "I wonder what my Democratic

friends over there would think if they knew I were
fighting them with 'nigger troops.'"

Coloured troops took part in the campaign which
resulted in the fall of Richmond. June 15, 1864,
they captured seven guns in front of Petersburg
and, on July 30, they took part in the disastrous
attack at the "crater" in which 4,000 men were
lost, wounded or captured in a fruitless and
hopeless assault.

Finally, when General Weitzel took possession
of Richmond on April 3, 1865, he was in command
of a corps made up entirely of Negro soldiers. It
was a Negro soldier who hauled down the
Confederate
flag and it was Negro soldiers who assisted
in quenching the fires which had been started,
when the Confederate soldiers evacuated the city,
thus saving the helpless citizens who were left
behind much loss and suffering. It illustrates
to what extent the Negro soldiers had won the
favour of the Federal officers who commanded
them that black troops were called upon to maintain
order in the confusion and anarchy which reigned
at this time in the abandoned capital of the Confederacy.
Two years before, the same General
Weitzel, who was in command of the Negro troops,
who at this time took possession of Richmond, had
written to General Butler to be relieved of his
command in Louisiana because, as he said, he
"could not command Negro regiments." At that

time he believed that to employ Negroes in the
army was to bring about a servile insurrection for
which he did not care to be responsible.

The services which the Negro troops performed
in the Civil War in fighting for the freedom of
their race not only convinced the officers who commanded
them and the white soldiers who fought
by their side that the Negro race deserved to be
free, but it served to convince the great mass
of the people in the North that the Negroes were
fit for freedom. It did, perhaps, more than any
other one thing to gain for them, as a result of
the war, the passage of those amendments to the
Constitution which secured to the Negro race the
same rights in the United States that are granted
to white men.