On Tuesday, July 4, the militia company assembled for drill and while thus engaged paraded through one of the least frequented streets of the town. This street was unusually wide, but while marching four abreast the men were interrupted by a horse and buggy driveninto their ranksby Thomas Butler and Henry Getzen, white men who resided about two miles from the town. At the time of this interference the company was occupying a space covering a width of not more than eight feet, so that on either side there was abundant room for vehicles. At the interruption Captain Adams commanded a halt and, stepping to the head of his column, said, "Mr. Getzen, I did not think that you would treat me this way; I would not so act towards you." To this Getzen replied with curses, and after a few more remarks on either side, Adams, in order to avoid further trouble, commanded his men to break ranks and permit the buggy to pass through. The company was then marched to the drill rooms and dismissed.
On Wednesday, July 5, Robert J. Butler, father of Thomas Butler and father-in-law of Getzen, appeared before P.R. Rivers, colored trial justice, and made complaint that the militia company had on the previous day obstructed one of the public streets of Hamburg and prevented his son and son-in-law from passing through. Rivers accordingly issued a summons for the officers to appear the next day, July 6. When Adams and his two lieutenants appeared on Thursday, they found present Robert J. Butler and several other white men heavily armed with revolvers. On the calling of the case it was announced that the defendants were present and that Henry Sparnick, a member of the circuit bar of the county, had been retained to represent them. Butler angrily protested against such representation and demanded that the hearing be postponed until he could procure counsel from the city of Augusta; whereupon Adams and his lieutenants, after consultation with their attorney, who informed them that there were no legal grounds on which the case could be decided against them, waived their constitutional right to be represented by counsel and consented to go to trial. On this basis the case was opened and proceeded with for some time, when on account of some disturbance its progress was arrested, and it was adjourned for further hearing on the following Saturday, July 8, at four o'clock in the afternoon.
On Saturday, between two and three o'clock, General M.C. Butler, of Edgefield, formerly an officer in the Confederate army, arrived in Hamburg, and he was followed by mounted men in squads of ten or fifteen until the number was more than two hundred, the last to arrive being Colonel A.P. Butler at the head of threescore men. Immediately after his arrival General Butler sent for Attorney Sparnick, who was charged with the request to Rivers and the officers of the militia company to confer with him at once. There was more passing of messengers back and forth, and it was at length deemed best for the men to confer with Butler. To this two of the officers objected on the ground that the whole plan was nothing more than a plot for their assassination. They sent to ask if General Butler would meet them without the presence of his armed force. He replied Yes, but before arrangements could be made for the interview another messenger came to say that the hour for the trial had arrived, that General Butler was at the court, and that he requested the presence of the trial justice, Rivers. Rivers proceeded to court alone and found Butler there waiting for him. He was about to proceed with the case when Butler asked for more time, which request was granted. He went away and never returned to the court. Instead he went to the council chamber, being surrounded now by greater and greater numbers of armed men, and he sent a committee to the officers asking that they come to the council chamber to see him. The men again declined for the same reason as before. Butler now sent an ultimatum demanding that the officers apologize for what took place on July 4 and that they surrender to him their arms, threatening that if the surrender was not made at once he would take their guns and officers by force. Adams and his men now awoke to a full sense of their danger, and they asked Rivers, who was not only trial justice but also Major General of the division of the militia to which they belonged, if he demanded their arms of them. Rivers replied that he did not. Thereupon the officers refused the request of Butler on the ground that he had no legal right to demand their arms or to receive them if surrendered. At this point Butler let it be known that he demanded the surrender of the arms within half an hour and that if he did not receive them he would "lay the d—— town in ashes." Asked in an interview whether, if his terms were complied with, he would guarantee protection to the people of the town he answered that he did not know and that that would depend altogether upon how they behaved themselves.
Butler now went with a companion to Augusta, returning in about thirty minutes. A committee called upon him as soon as he got back. He had only to say that he demanded the arms immediately. Asked if he would accept the boxing up of the arms and the sending of them to the Governor, he said, "D—— the Governor. I am not here to consult him, but am here as Colonel Butler, and this won't stop until after November." Asked again if he would guarantee general protection if the arms were surrendered, he said, "I guarantee nothing."
All the while scores of mounted men were about the streets. Such members of the militia company as were in town and their friends to the number of thirty-eight repaired to their armory—a large brick building about two hundred yards from the river—and barricaded themselves for protection. Firing upon the armory was begun by the mounted men, and after half an hour there were occasional shots from within. After a while the men in the building heard an order to bring cannon from Augusta, and they began to leave the building from the rear, concealing themselves as well as they could in a cornfield. The cannon was brought and discharged three or four times, those firing it not knowing that the building had been evacuated. When they realized their mistake they made a general search through lots and yards for the members of the company and finally captured twenty-seven of them, after two had been killed. The men, none of whom now had arms, were marched to a place near the railroad station, where the sergeant of the company was ordered to call the roll. Allan T. Attaway, whose name was first, was called out and shot in cold blood. Twelve men fired upon him and he was killed instantly. The men whose names were second, third, and fourth on the list were called out and treated likewise. The fifth man made a dash for liberty and escaped with a slight wound in the leg. All the others were then required to hold up their right hands and swear that they would never bear arms against the white people or give in court any testimony whatsoever regarding the occurrence. They were then marched off two by two and dispersed, but stray shots were fired after them as they went away. In another portion of the town the chief of police, James Cook, was taken from his home and brutally murdered. A marshal of the town was shot through the body and mortally wounded. One of the men killed was found with his tongue cut out. The members of Butler's party finally entered the homes of most of the prominent Negroes in the town, smashed the furniture, tore books to pieces, and cut pictures from their frames, all amid the most heartrending distress on the part of the women and children. That night the town was desolate, for all who could do so fled to Aiken or Columbia.
Upon all of which our only comment is that while such a process might seem for a time to give the white man power, it makes no progress whatever toward the ultimate solution of the problem.
The Negro Exodus of 1879 was partially considered in connection with our study of Liberia; but a few facts are in place here.
After the withdrawal of Federal troops conditions in the South were changed so much that, especially in South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas, the state of affairs was no longer tolerable. Between 1866 and 1879 more than three thousand Negroes were summarily killed.201The race began to feel that a new slavery in the horrible form of peonage was approaching, and that the disposition of the men in power was to reduce the laborer to the minimum of advantages as a free man and to none at all as a citizen. The fear, which soon developed into a panic, rose especially in consequence of the work of political mobs in 1874 and 1875, and it soon developed organization. About this the outstanding fact was that the political leaders of the last few years were regularly distrusted and ignored, the movement being secret in its origin and committed either to the plantation laborers themselves or their direct representatives. In North Carolina circulars about Nebraska were distributed. In Tennessee Benjamin ("Pap") Singleton began about 1869 to induce Negroes to go to Kansas, and he really founded two colonies with a total of 7432 Negroes from his state, paying of his own money over $600 for circulars. In Louisiana alone 70,000 names were taken of those who wished to better their condition by removal; and by 1878 98,000 persons in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Texas were ready to go elsewhere. A convention to consider the whole matter of migration was held in Nashville in 1879. At this the politician managed to put in an appearance and there was much wordy discussion. At the same time much of the difference of opinion was honest; the meeting was on the whole constructive; and it expressed itself as favorable to "reasonable migration." Already, however, thousands of Negroes were leaving their homes in the South and going in greatest numbers to Kansas, Missouri, and Indiana. Within twenty months Kansas alone received in this way an addition to her population of 40,000 persons. Many of these people arrived at their destination practically penniless and without prospect of immediate employment; but help was afforded by relief agencies in the North, and they themselves showed remarkable sturdiness in adapting themselves to the new conditions.
Many of the stories that the Negroes told were pathetic.202Sometimes boats would not take them on, and they suffered from long exposure on the river banks. Sometimes, while they were thus waiting, agents of their own people employed by the planters tried to induce them to remain. Frequently they were clubbed or whipped. Said one: "I saw nine put in one pile, that had been killed, and the colored people had to bury them; eight others were found killed in the woods.... It is done this way: they arrest them for breach of contract and carry them to jail. Their money is taken from them by the jailer and it is not returned when they are let go." Said another: "If a colored man stays away from the polls and does not vote, they spot him and make him vote. If he votes their way, they treat him no better in business. They hire the colored people to vote, and then take their pay away. I know a man to whom they gave a cow and a calf for voting their ticket. After election they came and told him that if he kept the cow he must pay for it; and they took the cow and calf away." Another: "One man shook his fist in my face and said, 'D—— you, sir, you are my property.' He said that I owed him. He could not show it and then said, 'You sha'n't go anyhow.' All we want is a living chance." Another: "There is a general talk among the whites and colored people that Jeff Davis will run for president of the Southern states, and the colored people are afraid they will be made slaves again. They are already trying to prevent them from going from one plantation to another without a pass." Another: "The deputy sheriff came and took away from me a pair of mules. He had a constable and twenty-five men with guns to back him." Another: "Last year, after settling with my landlord, my share was four bales of cotton. I shipped it to Richardson and May, 38 and 40 Perdido Street, New Orleans, through W.E. Ringo & Co., merchants, at Mound Landing, Miss. I lived four miles back of this landing. I received from Ringo a ticket showing that my cotton was sold at nine and three-eighths cents, but I could never get a settlement. He kept putting me off by saying that the bill of lading had not come. Those bales averaged over four hundred pounds. I did not owe him over twenty-five dollars. A man may work there from Monday morning to Saturday night, and be as economical as he pleases, and he will come out in debt. I am a close man, and I work hard. I want to be honest in getting through the world. I came away and left a crop of corn and cotton growing up. I left it because I did not want to work twelve months for nothing. I have been trying it for fifteen years, thinking every year that it would get better, and it gets worse." Said still another: "I learned about Kansas from the newspapers that I got hold of. They were Southern papers. I got a map, and found out where Kansas was; and I got a History of the United States, and read about it."
Query: Was it genuine statesmanship that permitted these people to feel that they must leave the South?
Of all of the stories of these epoch-making years we have chosen one—an idyl of a woman with an alabaster box, of one who had a clear conception of the human problem presented and who gave her life in the endeavor to meet it.
In the fall of 1862 a young woman who was destined to be a great missionary entered the Seminary at Rockford, Illinois. There was little to distinguish her from the other students except that she was very plainly dressed and seemed forced to spend most of her spare time at work. Yes, there was one other difference. She was older than most of the girls—already thirty, and rich in experience. When not yet fifteen she had taught a country school in Pennsylvania. At twenty she was considered capable of managing an unusually turbulent crowd of boys and girls. When she was twenty-seven her father died, leaving upon her very largely the care of her mother. At twenty-eight she already looked back upon fourteen years as a teacher, upon some work for Christ incidentally accomplished, but also upon a fading youth of wasted hopes and unfulfilled desires.
Then came a great decision—not the first, not the last, but one of the most important that marked her long career. Her education was by no means complete, and, at whatever cost, she would go to school. That she had no money, that her clothes were shabby, that her mother needed her, made no difference; now or never she would realize her ambition. She would do anything, however menial, if it was honest and would give her food while she continued her studies. For one long day she walked the streets of Belvidere looking for a home. Could any one use a young woman who wanted to work for her board? Always the same reply. Nightfall brought her to a farmhouse in the suburbs of the town. She timidly knocked on the door. "No, we do not need any one," said the woman who greeted her, "but wait until I see my husband." The man of the house was very unwilling, but decided to give shelter for the night. The next morning he thought differently about the matter, and a few days afterwards the young woman entered school. The work was hard; fires had to be made, breakfasts on cold mornings had to be prepared, and sometimes the washing was heavy. Naturally the time for lessons was frequently cut short or extended far into the night. But the woman of the house was kind, and her daughter a helpful fellow-student.
The next summer came another season at school-teaching, and then the term at Rockford. 1862! a great year that in American history, one more famous for the defeat of the Union arms than for their success. But in September came Antietam, and the heart of the North took courage. Then with the new year came the Emancipation Proclamation.
The girls at Rockford, like the people everywhere, were interested in the tremendous events that were shaking the nation. A new note of seriousness crept into their work. Embroidery was laid aside; instead, socks were knit and bandages prepared. On the night of January 1 a jubilee meeting was held in the town.
To Joanna P. Moore, however, the news of freedom brought a strange undertone of sadness. She could not help thinking of the spiritual and intellectual condition of the millions now emancipated. Strange that she should be possessed by this problem! She had thought of work in China, or India, or even in Africa—but of this, never!
In February a man who had been on Island No. 10 came to the Seminary and told the girls of the distress of the women and children there. Cabins and tents were everywhere. As many as three families, with eight or ten children each, cooked their food in the same pot on the same fire. Sometimes the women were peevish or quarrelsome; always the children were dirty. "What can a man do to help such a suffering mass of humanity?" asked the speaker. "Nothing. A woman is needed; nobody else will do." For the student listening so intently the cheery schoolrooms with their sweet associations faded; the vision of foreign missions also vanished; and in their stead stood only a pitiful black woman with a baby in her arms.
She reached Island No. 10 in November. The outlook was dismal enough. The Sunday school at Belvidere had pledged four dollars a month toward her support, and this was all the money in sight, though the Government provided transportation and soldiers' rations. That was in 1863, sixty years ago; but every year since then, until 1916, in summer and winter, in sunshine and rain, in the home and the church, with teaching and praying, feeding and clothing, nursing and hoping and loving, Joanna P. Moore in one way or another ministered to the Negro people of the South.
In April, 1864, her whole colony was removed to Helena, Arkansas. The Home Farm was three miles from Helena. Here was gathered a great crowd of women and children and helpless old men, all under the guard of a company of soldiers in a fort nearby. Thither went the missionary alone, except for her faith in God. She made an arbor with some rude seats, nailed a blackboard to a tree, divided the people into four groups, and began to teach school. In the twilight every evening a great crowd gathered around her cabin for prayers. A verse of the Bible was read and explained, petitions were offered, one of the sorrow-songs was chanted, and then the service was over.
Some Quaker workers were her friends in Helena, and in 1868 she went to Lauderdale, Mississippi, to help the Friends in an orphan asylum. Six weeks after her arrival the superintendent's daughter died, and the parents left to take their child back to their Indiana home to rest. The lone woman was left in charge of the asylum. Cholera broke out. Eleven children died within one week. Still she stood by her post. Often, she said, those who were well and happy when they retired, ere daylight came were in the grave, for they were buried the same hour they died. Night after night she prayed to God in the dark, and at length the fury of the plague was abated.
From time to time the failing health of her mother called her home, and from 1870 to 1873 she once more taught school near Belvidere. The first winter the school was in the country. "You can never have a Sunday school in the winter," they told her. But she did; in spite of the snow, the house was crowded every Sunday, whole families coming in sleighs. Even at that the real work of the teacher was with the Negroes of the South. In her prayers and public addresses they were always with her, and in 1873 friends in Chicago made it possible for her to return to the work of her choice. In 1877 the Woman's Baptist Home Mission Society honored itself by giving to her its first commission.
Nine years she spent in the vicinity of New Orleans. Near Leland University she found a small, one-room house. After buying a bed, a table, two chairs, and a few cooking utensils, she began housekeeping. Often she started out at six in the morning, not to return until dark. Most frequently she read the Bible to those who could not read. Sometimes she gave cheer to mothers busy over the washtub. Sometimes she would teach the children to read or to sew. Often she would write letters for those who had been separated from friends or kindred in the dark days. She wrote hundreds and hundreds of such letters; and once in a while, a very long while, came a response.
Most pitiful of all the objects she found in New Orleans were the old women worn out with years of slavery. They were usually rag-pickers who ate at night the scraps for which they had begged during the day. There was in the city an Old Ladies' Home; but this was not for Negroes. A house was secured and the women taken in, Joanna Moore and her associates moving into the second story. Sometimes, very often, there was real need; but sometimes, too, provisions came when it was not known who sent them; money or boxes came from Northern friends who had never seen the workers; and the little Negro children in the Sunday schools in the city gave their pennies.
In 1878 the laborer in the Southwest started on a journey of exploration. In Atlanta Dr. Robert at Atlanta Baptist Seminary (now Morehouse College) gave her cheer; so did President Ware at Atlanta University. At Benedict in Columbia she saw Dr. Goodspeed, President Tupper at Shaw in Raleigh, and Dr. Corey in Richmond. In May she appeared at the Baptist anniversaries, with fifteen years of missionary achievement already behind her.
But each year brought its own sorrows and disappointments. She wanted the Society to establish a training school for women; but to this objection was raised. In Louisiana also it was not without danger that a white woman attended a Negro association in 1877; and there were always sneers and jeers. At length, however, a training school for mothers was opened in Baton Rouge. All went well for two years; and then a notice with skull and crossbones was placed on the gate. The woman who had worked through the cholera still stood firm; but the students had gone. Sick at heart and worn out with waiting, she at last left Baton Rouge and the state in which so many of her best years had been spent.
"Bible Band" work was started in 1884, andHopein 1885. The little paper, beginning with a circulation of five hundred, has now reached a monthly issue of twenty thousand copies, and daily it brings its lesson of cheer to thousands of mothers and children in the South. In connection with it all has developed the Fireside School, than which few agencies have been more potent in the salvation and uplift of the humble Negro home.
What wisdom was gathered from the passing of fourscore years! On almost every page of her tracts, her letters, her account of her life, one finds quotations of proverbial pith:
The love of God gave me courage for myself and the rest of mankind; therefore I concluded to invest in human souls. They surely are worth more than anything else in the world.
Beloved friends, be hopeful, be courageous. God can not use discouraged people.
The good news spread, not by telling what we were going to do but by praising God for what had been done.
So much singing in all our churches leaves too little time for the Bible lesson. Do not misunderstand me. I do love music that impresses the meaning of words. But no one climbs to heaven on musical scales.
I thoroughly believe that the only way to succeed with any vocation is to make it a part of your very self and weave it into your every thought and prayer.
You must love before you can comfort and help.
There is no place too lowly or dark for our feet to enter, and no place so high and bright but it needs the touch of the light that we carry from the Cross.
How shall we measure such a life? Who can weigh love and hope and service, and the joy of answered prayer? "An annual report of what?" she once asked the secretary of her organization. "Report of tears shed, prayers offered, smiles scattered, lessons taught, steps taken, cheering words, warning words—tender, patient words for the little ones, stern but loving tones for the wayward—songs of hope and songs of sorrow, wounded hearts healed, light and love poured into dark sad homes? Oh, Miss Burdette, you might as well ask me to gather up the raindrops of last year or the petals that fall from the flowers that bloomed. It is true that I can send you a little stagnant water from the cistern, and a few dried flowers; but if you want to know the freshness, the sweetness, the glory, the grandeur, of our God-given work, then you must come and keep step with us from early morn to night for three hundred and sixty-five days in the year."
Until the very last she was on the roll of the active workers of the Woman's American Baptist Home Mission Society. In the fall of 1915 she decided that she must once more see the schools in the South that meant so much to her. In December she came again to her beloved Spelman. While in Atlanta she met with an accident that still further weakened her. After a few weeks, however, she went on to Jacksonville, and then to Selma. There she passed.
When the Son of Man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory.... Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungered, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink? When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee? Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee? And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, you have done it unto me.
Footnote 198:(return)DuBois:The Souls of Black Folk, 32-37.
Footnote 199:(return)George W. Cable:The Southern Struggle for Pure Government: An Address. Boston, 1890, included inThe Negro Question, New York, 1890.
Footnote 200:(return)Fleming, in his latest and most mature account of reconstruction,The Sequel of Appomattox, has not one word to say about the matter. Dunning, inReconstruction Political and Economic(306), speaks as follows: "July 6, 1876, an armed collision between whites and blacks at Hamburg, Aiken County, resulted in the usual slaughter of the blacks. Whether the original cause of the trouble was the insolence and threats of a Negro militia company, or the aggressiveness and violence of some young white men, was much discussed throughout the state, and, indeed, the country at large. Chamberlain took frankly and strongly the ground that the whites were at fault." Such a statement we believe simply does not do justice to the facts. The account given herewith is based upon the report of the matter in a letter published in a Washington paper and submitted in connection with the debate in the United States House of Representatives, July 15th and 18th, 1876, on the Massacre of Six Colored Citizens at Hamburg, S.C., July 4, 1876; and on "An Address to the People of the United States, adopted at a Conference of Colored Citizens, held at Columbia, S.C., July 20th and 21st, 1876" (Republican Printing Co., Columbia, S.C., 1876). The Address, a document most important for the Negro's side of the story, was signed by no less than sixty representative men, among them R.B. Elliott, R.H. Gleaves, F.L. Cardozo, D.A. Straker, T. McC. Stewart, and H.N. Bouey.
Footnote 201:(return)Emmett J. Scott: Negro Migration during the War (in Preliminary Economic Studies of the War—Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: Division of Economics and History). Oxford University Press, American Branch, New York, 1920.
Footnote 202:(return)SeeNegro Exodus(Report of Colonel Frank H. Fletcher).
By 1876 the reconstruction governments had all but passed. A few days after his inauguration in 1877 President Hayes sent to Louisiana a commission to investigate the claims of rival governments there. The decision was in favor of the Democrats. On April 9 the President ordered the removal of Federal troops from public buildings in the South; and in Columbia, S.C., within a few days the Democratic administration of Governor Wade Hampton was formally recognized. The new governments at once set about the abrogation of the election laws that had protected the Negro in the exercise of suffrage, and, having by 1877 obtained a majority in the national House of Representatives, the Democrats resorted to the practice of attaching their repeal measures to appropriation bills in the hope of compelling the President to sign them. Men who had been prominently connected with the Confederacy were being returned to Congress in increasing numbers, but in general the Democrats were not able to carry their measures over the President's veto. From the Supreme Court, however, they received practical assistance, for while this body did not formally grant that the states had full powers over elections, it nevertheless nullified many of the most objectionable sections of the laws. Before the close of the decade, by intimidation, the theft, suppression or exchange of the ballot boxes, the removal of the polls to unknown places, false certifications, and illegal arrests on the day before an election, the Negro vote had been rendered ineffectual in every state of the South.
When Cleveland was elected in 1884 the Negroes of the South naturally felt that the darkest hour of their political fortunes had come. It had, for among many other things this election said that after twenty years of discussion and tumult the Negro question was to be relegated to the rear, and that the country was now to give main attention to other problems. For the Negro the new era was signalized by one of the most effective speeches ever delivered in this or any other country, all the more forceful because the orator was a man of unusual nobility of spirit. In 1886 Henry W. Grady, of Georgia, addressed the New England Club in New York on "The New South." He spoke to practical men and he knew his ground. He asked his hearers to bring their "full faith in American fairness and frankness" to judgment upon what he had to say. He pictured in brilliant language the Confederate soldier, "ragged, half-starved, heavy-hearted, who wended his way homeward to find his house in ruins and his farm devastated." He also spoke kindly of the Negro: "Whenever he struck a blow for his own liberty he fought in open battle, and when at last he raised his black and humble hands that the shackles might be struck off, those hands were innocent of wrong against his helpless charges." But Grady also implied that the Negro had received too much attention and sympathy from the North. Said he: "To liberty and enfranchisement is as far as law can carry the Negro. The rest must be left to conscience and common sense." Hence on this occasion and others he asked that the South be left alone in the handling of her grave problem. The North, a little tired of the Negro question, a little uncertain also as to the wisdom of the reconstruction policy that it had forced on the South, and if concerned with this section at all, interested primarily in such investments as it had there, assented to this request; and in general the South now felt that it might order its political life in its own way.
As yet, however, the Negro was not technically disfranchised, and at any moment a sudden turn of events might call him into prominence. Formal legislation really followed the rise of the Populist party, which about 1890 in many places in the South waged an even contest with the Democrats. It was evident that in such a struggle the Negro might still hold the balance of power, and within the next few years a fusion of the Republicans and the Populists in North Carolina sent a Negro, George H. White, to Congress. This event finally served only to strengthen the movement for disfranchisement which had already begun. In 1890 the constitution of Mississippi was so amended as to exclude from the suffrage any person who had not paid his poll-tax or who was unable to read any section of the constitution, or understand it when read to him, or to give a reasonable interpretation of it. The effect of the administration of this provision was that in 1890 only 8615 Negroes out of 147,000 of voting age became registered. South Carolina amended her constitution with similar effect in 1895. In this state the population was almost three-fifths Negro and two-fifths white. The franchise of the Negro was already in practical abeyance; but the problem now was to devise a means for the perpetuity of a government of white men. Education was not popular as a test, for by it many white illiterates would be disfranchised and in any case it would only postpone the race issue. For some years the dominant party had been engaged in factional controversies, with the populist wing led by Benjamin R. Tillman prevailing over the conservatives. It was understood, however, that each side would be given half of the membership of the convention, which would exclude all Negro and Republican representation, and that the constitution would go into effect without being submitted to the people. Said the most important provision: "Any person who shall apply for registration after January 1, 1898, if otherwise qualified, shall be registered; provided that he can both read and write any section of this constitution submitted to him by the registration officer or can show that he owns and has paid all taxes collectible during the previous year on property in this state assessed at three hundred dollars or more"—clauses which it is hardly necessary to say the registrars regularly interpreted in favor of white men and against the Negro. In 1898 Louisiana passed an amendment inventing the so-called "grandfather clause." This excused from the operation of her disfranchising act all descendants of men who had voted before the Civil War, thus admitting to the suffrage all white men who were illiterate and without property. North Carolina in 1900, Virginia and Alabama in 1901, Georgia in 1907, and Oklahoma in 1910 in one way or another practically disfranchised the Negro, care being taken in every instance to avoid any definite clash with the Fifteenth Amendment. In Maryland there have been several attempts to disfranchise the Negro by constitutional amendments, one in 1905, another in 1909, and still another in 1911, but all have failed. About the intention of its disfranchising legislation the South, as represented by more than one spokesman, was very frank. Unfortunately the new order called forth a group of leaders—represented by Tillman in South Carolina, Hoke Smith in Georgia, and James K. Vardaman in Mississippi—who made a direct appeal to prejudice and thus capitalized the racial feeling that already had been brought to too high tension.
Naturally all such legislation as that suggested had ultimately to be brought before the highest tribunal in the country. The test came over the following section from the Oklahoma law: "No person shall be registered as an elector of this state or be allowed to vote in any election herein unless he shall be able to read and write any section of the Constitution of the State of Oklahoma; but no person who was on January 1, 1866, or at any time prior thereto, entitled to vote under any form of government, or who at any time resided in some foreign nation, and no lineal descendant of such person shall be denied the right to register and vote because of his inability to so read and write sections of such Constitution." This enactment the Supreme Court declared unconstitutional in 1915. The decision exerted no great and immediate effect on political conditions in the South; nevertheless as the official recognition by the nation of the fact that the Negro was not accorded his full political rights, it was destined to have far-reaching effect on the whole political fabric of the section.
When the era of disfranchisement began it was in large measure expected by the South that with the practical elimination of the Negro from politics this section would become wider in its outlook and divide on national issues. Such has not proved to be the case. Except for the noteworthy deflection of Tennessee in the presidential election of 1920, and Republican gains in some counties in other states, this section remains just as "solid" as it was forty years ago, largely of course because the Negro, through education and the acquisition of property, is becoming more and more a potential factor in politics. Meanwhile it is to be observed that the Negro is not wholly without a vote, even in the South, and sometimes his power is used with telling effect, as in the city of Atlanta in the spring of 1919, when he decided in the negative the question of a bond issue. In the North moreover—especially in Indiana, Ohio, New Jersey, Illinois, Pennsylvania, and New York—he has on more than one occasion proved the deciding factor in political affairs. Even when not voting, however, he involuntarily wields tremendous influence on the destinies of the nation, for even though men may be disfranchised, all are nevertheless counted in the allotment of congressmen to Southern states. This anomalous situation means that in actual practice the vote of one white man in the South is four or six or even eight times as strong as that of a man in the North;203and it directly accounted for the victory of President Wilson and the Democrats over the Republicans led by Charles E. Hughes in 1916. For remedying it by the enforcement of the Fourteenth Amendment bills have been frequently presented in Congress, but on these no action has been taken.
Within fifteen years after the close of the war it was clear that the Emancipation Proclamation was a blessing to the poor white man of the South as well as to the Negro. The break-up of the great plantation system was ultimately to prove good for all men whose slender means had given them little chance before the war. At the same time came also the development of cotton-mills throughout the South, in which as early as 1880 not less than 16,000 white people were employed. With the decay of the old system the average acreage of holdings in the South Atlantic states decreased from 352.8 in 1860 to 108.4 in 1900. It was still not easy for an independent Negro to own land on his own account; nevertheless by as early a year as 1874 the Negro farmers had acquired 338,769 acres. After the war the planters first tried the wage system for the Negroes. This was not satisfactory—from the planter's standpoint because the Negro had not yet developed stability as a laborer; from the Negro's standpoint because while the planter might advance rations, he frequently postponed the payment of wages and sometimes did not pay at all. Then land came to be rented; but frequently the rental was from 80 to 100 pounds of lint cotton an acre for land that produced only 200 to 400 pounds. In course of time the share system came to be most widely used. Under this the tenant frequently took his whole family into the cotton-field, and when the crop was gathered and he and the landlord rode together to the nearest town to sell it, he received one-third, one-half, or two-thirds of the money according as he had or had not furnished his own food, implements, and horses or mules. This system might have proved successful if he had not had to pay exorbitant prices for his rations. As it was, if the landlord did not directly furnish foodstuffs he might have an understanding with the keeper of the country store, who frequently charged for a commodity twice what it was worth in the open market. At the close of the summer there was regularly a huge bill waiting for the Negro at the store; this had to be disposed of first,and he always came out just a few dollars behind. However, the landlord did not mind such a small matter and in the joy of the harvest might even advance a few dollars; but the understanding was always that the tenant was to remain on the land the next year. Thus were the chains of peonage forged about him.
At the same time there developed a still more vicious system. Immediately after the war legislation enacted in the South made severe provision with reference to vagrancy. Negroes were arrested on the slightest pretexts and their labor as that of convicts leased to landowners or other business men. When, a few years later, Negroes, dissatisfied with the returns from their labor on the farms, began a movement to the cities, there arose a tendency to make the vagrancy legislation still more harsh, so that at last a man could not stop work without technically committing a crime. Thus in all its hideousness developed the convict lease system.
This institution and the accompanying chain-gang were at variance with all the humanitarian impulses of the nineteenth century. Sometimes prisoners were worked in remote parts of a state altogether away from the oversight of responsible officials; if they stayed in a prison the department for women was frequently in plain view and hearing of the male convicts, and the number of cubic feet in a cell was only one-fourth of what a scientific test would have required. Sometimes there was no place for the dressing of the dead except in the presence of the living. The system was worst when the lessee was given the entire charge of the custody and discipline of the convicts, and even of their medical or surgical care. Of real attention there frequently was none, and reports had numerous blank spaces to indicate deaths from unknown causes. The sturdiest man could hardly survive such conditions for more than ten years. In Alabama in 1880 only three of the convicts had been in confinement for eight years, and only one for nine. In Texas, from 1875 to 1880, the total number of prisoners discharged was 1651, while the number of deaths and escapes for the same period totalled 1608. In North Carolina the mortality was eight times as great as in Sing Sing.
At last the conscience of the nation began to be heard, and after 1883 there were remedial measures. However, the care of the prisoner still left much to be desired; and as the Negro is greatly in the majority among prisoners in the South, and as he is still sometimes arrested illegally or on flimsy pretexts, the whole matter of judicial and penal procedure becomes one of the first points of consideration in any final settlement of the Negro Problem.204
Meanwhile proscription went forward. Separate and inferior traveling accommodations, meager provision for the education of Negro children, inadequate street, lighting and water facilities in most cities and towns, and the general lack of protection of life and property, made living increasingly harder for a struggling people. For the Negro of aspiration or culture every day became a long train of indignities and insults. On street cars he was crowded into a few seats, generally in the rear; he entered a railway station by a side door; in a theater he might occupy only a side, or more commonly the extreme rear, of the second balcony; a house of ill fame might flourish next to his own little home; and from public libraries he was shut out altogether, except where a little branch was sometimes provided. Every opportunity for such self-improvement as a city might be expected to afford him was either denied him, or given on such terms as his self-respect forced him to refuse.
Meanwhile—and worst of all—he failed to get justice in the courts. Formally called before the bar he knew beforehand that the case was probably already decided against him. A white boy might insult and pick a quarrel with his son, but if the case reached the court room the white boy would be freed and the Negro boy fined $25 or sent to jail for three months. Some trivial incident involving no moral responsibility whatever on the Negro's part might yet cost him his life.
Lynching grew apace. Generally this was said to be for the protection of white womanhood; but statistics certainly did not give rape the prominence that it held in the popular mind. Any cause of controversy, however slight, that forced a Negro to defend himself against a white man might result in a lynching, and possibly in a burning. In the period of 1871-73 the number of Negroes lynched in the South is said to have been not more than 11 a year. Between 1885 and 1915, however, the number of persons lynched in the country amounted to 3500, the great majority being Negroes in the South. For the year 1892 alone the figure was 235.
One fact was outstanding: astonishing progress was being made by the Negro people, but in the face of increasing education and culture on their part, there was no diminution of race feeling. Most Southerners preferred still to deal with a Negro of the old type rather than with one who was neatly dressed, simple and unaffected in manner, and ambitious to have a good home. In any case, however, it was clear that since the white man held the power, upon him rested primarily the responsibility of any adjustment. Old schemes for deportation or colonization in a separate state having proved ineffective or chimerical, it was necessary to find a new platform on which both races could stand. The Negro was still the outstanding factor in agriculture and industry; in large numbers he had to live, and will live, in Georgia and South Carolina, Mississippi and Texas; and there should have been some plane on which he could reside in the South not only serviceably but with justice to his self-respect. The wealth of the New South, it is to be remembered, was won not only by the labor of black hands but also that of little white boys and girls. As laborers and citizens, real or potential, both of these groups deserved the most earnest solicitude of the state, for it is not upon the riches of the few but the happiness of the many that a nation's greatness depends. Moreover no state can build permanently or surely by denying to a half or a third of those governed any voice whatever in the government. If the Negro was ignorant, he was also economically defenseless; and it is neither just nor wise to deny to any man, however humble, any real power for his legal protection. If these principles hold—and we think they are in line with enlightened conceptions of society—the prosperity of the New South was by no means as genuine as it appeared to be, and the disfranchisement of the Negro, morally and politically, was nothing less than a crime.
Footnote 203:(return)In 1914 Kansas and Mississippi each elected eight members of the House of Representatives, but Kansas cast 483,683 votes for her members, while Mississippi cast only 37,185 for hers, less than one-twelfth as many.
Footnote 204:(return)Within recent years it has been thought that the convict lease system and peonage had practically passed in the South. That this was by no means the case was shown by the astonishing revelations from Jasper County, Georgia, early in 1921, it being demonstrated in court that a white farmer, John S. Williams, who had "bought out" Negroes from the prisons of Atlanta and Macon, had not only held these people in peonage, but had been directly responsible for the killing of not less than eleven of them.
However, as the present work passes through the press, word comes of the remarkable efforts of Governor Hugh M. Dorsey for a more enlightened public conscience in his state. In addition to special endeavor for justice in the Williams case, he has issued a booklet citing with detail one hundred and thirty-five cases in which Negroes have suffered grave wrong. He divides his cases into four divisions: (1) The Negro lynched, (2) The Negro held in peonage, (3) The Negro driven out by organized lawlessness, and (4) The Negro subject to individual acts of cruelty. "In some counties," he says, "the Negro is being driven out as though he were a wild beast. In others he is being held as a slave. In others no Negroes remain.... In only two of the 135 cases cited is crime against white women involved."
For the more recent history of peonage see pp. 306, 329, 344, 360-363.
In the two decades that we are now to consider we find the working out of all the large forces mentioned in our last chapter. After a generation of striving the white South was once more thoroughly in control, and the new program well under way. Predictions for both a broader outlook for the section as a whole and greater care for the Negro's moral and intellectual advancement were destined not to be fulfilled; and the period became one of bitter social and economic antagonism.
All of this was primarily due to the one great fallacy on which the prosperity of the New South was built, and that was that the labor of the Negro existed only for the good of the white man. To this one source may be traced most of the ills borne by both white man and Negro during the period. If the Negro's labor was to be exploited, it was necessary that he be without the protection of political power and that he be denied justice in court. If he was to be reduced to a peon, certainly socially he must be given a peon's place. Accordingly there developed everywhere—in schools, in places of public accommodation, in the facilities of city life—the idea of inferior service for Negroes; and an unenlightened prison system flourished in all its hideousness. Furthermore, as a result of the vicious economic system, arose the sinister form of the Negro criminal. Here again the South begged the question, representative writers lamenting the passing of the dear dead days of slavery, and pointing cynically to the effects of freedom on the Negro. They failed to remember in the case of the Negro criminal that from childhood to manhood—in education, in economic chance, in legal power—they had by their own system deprived a human being of every privilege that was due him, ruining him body and soul; and then they stood aghast at the thing their hands had made. More than that, they blamed the race itself for the character that now sometimes appeared, and called upon thrifty, aspiring Negroes to find the criminal and give him up to the law. Thrifty, aspiring Negroes wondered what was the business of the police.
It was this pitiful failure to get down to fundamentals that characterized the period and that made life all the more hard for those Negroes who strove to advance. Every effort was made to brutalize a man, and then he was blamed for not being a St. Bernard. Fortunately before the period was over there arose not only clear-thinking men of the race but also a few white men who realized that such a social order could not last forever.
Early in the nineties, however, the pendulum had swung fully backward, and the years from 1890 to 1895 were in some ways the darkest that the race has experienced since emancipation. When in 1892 Cleveland was elected for a second term and the Democrats were once more in power, it seemed to the Southern rural Negro that the conditions of slavery had all but come again. More and more the South formulated its creed; it glorified the old aristocracy that had flourished and departed, and definitely it began to ask the North if it had not been right after all. It followed of course that if the Old South had the real key to the problem, the proper place of the Negro was that of a slave.
Within two or three years there were so many important articles on the Negro in prominent magazines and these were by such representative men that taken together they formed a symposium. In December, 1891, James Bryce wrote in theNorth American Review, pointing out that the situation in the South was a standing breach of the Constitution, that it suspended the growth of political parties and accustomed the section to fraudulent evasions, and he emphasized education as a possible remedy; he had quite made up his mind that the Negro had little or no place in politics. In January, 1892, a distinguished classical scholar, Basil L. Gildersleeve, turned aside from linguistics to write in theAtlantic"The Creed of the Old South," which article he afterwards published as a special brochure, saying that it had been more widely read than anything else he had ever written. In April, Thomas Nelson Page in theNorth Americancontended that in spite of the $5,000,000 spent on the education of the Negro in Virginia between 1870 and 1890 the race had retrograded or not greatly improved, and in fact that the Negro "did not possess the qualities to raise himself above slavery." Later in the same year he publishedThe Old South. In the same month Frederick L. Hoffman, writing in theArena, contended that in view of its mortality statistics the Negro race would soon die out.205Also in April, 1892, Henry Watterson wrote of the Negro in theChautauquan, recalling the facts that the era of political turmoil had been succeeded by one of reaction and violence, and that by one of exhaustion and peace; but with all his insight he ventured no constructive suggestion, thinking it best for everybody "simply to be quiet for a time." Early in 1893 John C. Wycliffe, a prominent lawyer of New Orleans, writing in theForum, voiced the desires of many in asking for a repeal of the Fifteenth Amendment; and in October, Bishop Atticus G. Haygood, writing in the same periodical of a recent and notorious lynching, said, "It was horrible to torture the guilty wretch; the burning was an act of insanity. But had the dismembered form of his victim been the dishonored body of my baby, I might also have gone into an insanity that might have ended never." Again and again was there the lament that the Negroes of forty years after were both morally and intellectually inferior to their antebellum ancestors; and if college professors and lawyers and ministers of the Gospel wrote in this fashion one could not wonder that the politician made capital of choice propaganda.
In this chorus of dispraise truth struggled for a hearing, but then as now traveled more slowly than error. In theNorth Americanfor July, 1892, Frederick Douglass wrote vigorously of "Lynch Law in the South." In the same month George W. Cable answered affirmatively and with emphasis the question, "Does the Negro pay for his education?" He showed that in Georgia in 1889-90 the colored schools did not really cost the white citizens a cent, and that in the other Southern states the Negro was also contributing his full share to the maintenance of the schools. In June of the same year William T. Harris, Commissioner of Education, wrote in truly statesmanlike fashion in theAtlanticof "The Education of the Negro." Said he: "With the colored people all educated in schools and become a reading people interested in the daily newspaper; with all forms of industrial training accessible to them, and the opportunity so improved that every form of mechanical and manufacturing skill has its quota of colored working men and women; with a colored ministry educated in a Christian theology interpreted in a missionary spirit, and finding its auxiliaries in modern science and modern literature; with these educational essentials the Negro problem for the South will be solved without recourse to violent measures of any kind, whether migration, or disfranchisement, or ostracism." In December, 1893, Walter H. Page, writing in theForumof lynching under the title, "The Last Hold of the Southern Bully," said that "the great danger is not in the first violation of law, nor in the crime itself, but in the danger that Southern public sentiment under the stress of this phase of the race problem will lose the true perspective of civilization"; and L.E. Bleckley, Chief Justice of Georgia, spoke in similar vein. On the whole, however, the country, while occasionally indignant at some atrocity, had quite decided not to touch the Negro question for a while; and when in the spring of 1892 some representative Negroes protested without avail to President Harrison against the work of mobs, theReview of Reviewsbut voiced the drift of current opinion when it said: "As for the colored men themselves, their wisest course would be to cultivate the best possible relations with the most upright and intelligent of their white neighbors, and for some time to come to forget all about politics and to strive mightily for industrial and educational progress."206
It is not strange that under the circumstances we have now to record such discrimination, crime, and mob violence as can hardly be paralleled in the whole of American history. The Negro was already down; he was now to be trampled upon. When in the spring of 1892 some members of the race in the lowlands of Mississippi lost all they had by the floods and the Federal Government was disposed to send relief, the state government protested against such action on the ground that it would keep the Negroes from accepting the terms offered by the white planters. In Louisiana in 1895 a Negro presiding elder reported to theSouthwestern Christian Advocatethat he had lost a membership of a hundred souls, the people being compelled to leave their crops and move away within ten days.
In 1891 the jail at Omaha was entered and a Negro taken out and hanged to a lamp-post. On February 27, 1892, at Jackson, La., where there was a pound party for the minister at the Negro Baptist church, a crowd of white men gathered, shooting revolvers and halting the Negroes as they passed. Most of the people were allowed to go on, but after a while the sport became furious and two men were fatally shot. About the same time, and in the same state, at Rayville, a Negro girl of fifteen was taken from a jail by a mob and hanged to a tree. In Texarkana, Ark., a Negro who had outraged a farmer's wife was captured and burned alive, the injured woman herself being compelled to light the fire. Just a few days later, in March, a constable in Memphis in attempting to arrest a Negro was killed. Numerous arrests followed, and at night a mob went to the jail, gained easy access, and, having seized three well-known Negroes who were thought to have been leaders in the killing, lynched them, the whole proceeding being such a flagrant violation of law that it has not yet been forgotten by the older Negro citizens of this important city. On February 1, 1893, at Paris, Texas, after one of the most brutal crimes occurred one of the most horrible lynchings on record. Henry Smith, the Negro, who seems to have harbored a resentment against a policeman of the town because of ill-treatment that he had received, seized the officer's three-year-old child, outraged her, and then tore her body to pieces. He was tortured by the child's father, her uncles, and her fifteen-year-old brother, his eyes being put out with hot irons before he was burned. His stepson, who had refused to tell where he could be found, was hanged and his body riddled with bullets. Thus the lynchings went on, the victims sometimes being guilty of the gravest crimes, but often also perfectly innocent people. In February, 1893, the average was very nearly one a day. At the same time injuries inflicted on the Negro were commonly disregarded altogether. Thus at Dickson, Tenn., a young white man lost forty dollars. A fortune-teller told him that the money had been taken by a woman and gave a description that seemed to fit a young colored woman who had worked in the home of a relative. Half a dozen men then went to the home of the young woman and outraged her, her mother, and also another woman who was in the house. At the very close of 1894, in Brooks County, Ga., after a Negro named Pike had killed a white man with whom he had a quarrel, seven Negroes were lynched after the real murderer had escaped. Any relative or other Negro who, questioned, refused to tell of the whereabouts of Pike, whether he knew of the same or not, was shot in his tracks, one man being shot before he had chance to say anything at all. Meanwhile the White Caps or "Regulators" took charge of the neighboring counties, terrifying the Negroes everywhere; and in the trials that resulted the state courts broke down altogether, one judge in despair giving up the holding of court as useless.
Meanwhile discrimination of all sorts went forward. On May 29, 1895, moved by the situation at the Orange Park Academy, the state of Florida approved "An Act to Prohibit White and Colored Youth from being Taught in the same Schools." Said one section: "It shall be a penal offense for any individual body of inhabitants, corporation, or association to conduct within this State any school of any grade, public, private, or parochial, wherein white persons and Negroes shall be instructed or boarded within the same building, or taught in the same class or at the same time by the same teacher." Religious organizations were not to be left behind in such action; and when before the meeting of the Baptist Young People's Union in Baltimore a letter was sent to the secretary of the organization and the editor of theBaptist Union, in behalf of the Negroes, who the year before had not been well treated at Toronto, he sent back an evasive answer, saying that the policy of his society was to encourage local unions to affiliate with their own churches.
More grave than anything else was the formal denial of the Negro's political rights. As we have seen, South Carolina in 1895 followed Mississippi in the disfranchising program and within the next fifteen years most of the other Southern states did likewise. With the Negro thus deprived of any genuine political voice, all sorts of social and economic injustice found greater license.
Such were the tendencies of life in the South as affecting the Negro thirty years after emancipation. In September, 1895, a rising educator of the race attracted national attention by a remarkable speech that he made at the Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta. Said Booker T. Washington: "To those of my race who depend on bettering their condition in a foreign land, or who underestimate the importance of cultivating friendly relations with the Southern white man who is their next door neighbor, I would say, 'Cast down your bucket where you are'—cast it down in making friends in every manly way of the people of all races by whom we are surrounded.... To those of the white race who look to the incoming of those of foreign birth and strange tongue and habits for the prosperity of the South, were I permitted I would repeat what I say to my own race, 'Cast down your bucket where you are.' Cast it down among 8,000,000 Negroes whose habits you know, whose fidelity and love you have tested in days when to have proved treacherous meant the ruin of your fire-sides.... In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress."
The message that Dr. Washington thus enunciated he had already given in substance the previous spring in an address at Fisk University, and even before then his work at Tuskegee Institute had attracted attention.207The Atlanta Exposition simply gave him the great occasion that he needed; and he was now to proclaim the new word throughout the length and breadth of the land. Among the hundreds of addresses that he afterwards delivered, especially important were those at Harvard University in 1896, at the Chicago Peace Jubilee in 1898, and before the National Education Association in St. Louis in 1904. Again and again in these speeches one comes upon such striking sentences as the following: "Freedom can never be given. It must be purchased."208"The race, like the individual, that makes itself indispensable, has solved most of its problems."209"As a race there are two things we must learn to do—one is to put brains into the common occupations of life, and the other is to dignify common labor."210"Ignorant and inexperienced, it is not strange that in the first years of our new life we began at the top instead of at the bottom; that a seat in Congress or the State Legislature was worth more than real estate or industrial skill."211"The opportunity to earn a dollar in a factory just now is worth infinitely more than the opportunity to spend a dollar in an opera house."212"One of the most vital questions that touch our American life is how to bring the strong, wealthy, and learned into helpful contact with the poorest, most ignorant, and humblest, and at the same time make the one appreciate the vitalizing, strengthening influence of the other."213"There is no defense or security for any of us except in the highest intelligence and development of all."214
The time was ripe for a new leader. Frederick Douglass had died in February, 1895. In his later years he had more than once lost hold on the heart of his people, as when he opposed the Negro Exodus or seemed not fully in sympathy with the religious convictions of those who looked to him. At his passing, however, the race remembered only his early service and his old magnificence, and to a striving people his death seemed to make still darker the gathering gloom. Coming when he did, Booker T. Washington was thoroughly in line with the materialism of his age; he answered both an economic and an educational crisis. He also satisfied the South of the new day by what he had to say about social equality.
The story of his work reads like a romance, and he himself has told it better than any one else ever can. He did not claim the credit for the original idea of industrial education; that he gave to General Armstrong, and it was at Hampton that he himself had been nurtured. What was needed, however, was for some one to take the Hampton idea down to the cotton belt, interpret the lesson for the men and women digging in the ground, and generally to put the race in line with the country's industrial development. This was what Booker T. Washington undertook to do.
He reached Tuskegee early in June, 1881. July 4 was the date set for the opening of the school in the little shanty and church which had been secured for its accommodation. On the morning of this day thirty students reported for admission. The greater number were school-teachers and some were nearly forty years of age. Just about three months after the opening of the school there was offered for sale an old and abandoned plantation a mile from Tuskegee on which the mansion had been burned. All told the place seemed to be just the location needed to make the work effective and permanent. The price asked was five hundred dollars, the owner requiring the immediate payment of two hundred and fifty dollars, the remaining two hundred and fifty to be paid within a year. In his difficulty Mr. Washington wrote to General J.F.B. Marshall, treasurer of Hampton Institute, placing the matter before him and asking for the loan of two hundred and fifty dollars. General Marshall replied that he had no authority to lend money belonging to Hampton Institute, but that he would gladly advance the amount needed from his personal funds. Toward the paying of this sum the assisting teacher, Olivia A. Davidson (afterwards Mrs. Washington), helped heroically. Her first effort was made by holding festivals and suppers, but she also canvassed the families in the town of Tuskegee, and the white people as well as the Negroes helped her. "It was often pathetic," said the principal, "to note the gifts of the older colored people, many of whom had spent their best days in slavery. Sometimes they would give five cents, sometimes twenty-five cents. Sometimes the contribution was a quilt, or a quantity of sugarcane. I recall one old colored woman, who was about seventy years of age, who came to see me when we were raising money to pay for the farm. She hobbled into the room where I was, leaning on a cane. She was clad in rags, but they were clean. She said, 'Mr. Washington, God knows I spent de bes' days of my life in slavery. God knows I's ignorant an' poor; but I knows what you an' Miss Davidson is tryin' to do. I knows you is tryin' to make better men an' better women for de colored race. I ain't got no money, but I wants you to take dese six eggs, what I's been savin' up, an' I wants you to put dese six eggs into de eddication of dese boys an' gals.' Since the work at Tuskegee started," added the speaker, "it has been my privilege to receive many gifts for the benefit of the institution, but never any, I think, that touched me as deeply as this one."