The Autobiography of a Southerner Since the Civil War

XIV

WE WHO ARE A PROBLEM

WE decided — my wife and I — when the Spring came, that we would spend the summer farther north. My friend, Cooley, had made us a visit, and I had promised to attend a reunion of our class at Harvard in June.

Thus it came about that we spent most of the summer in New England. My old friends there knew, of course, little about me now. My little struggles and efforts had been made afar off. In those years “the South” was as remote from New England as Australia itself, except for the New England interest in the cotton crop and in the welfare of the Negro. But, as my little career became gradually known to my old acquaintances and to some new ones, they took not only a kindly, but, it seemed to me, an almost morbid interest in it. I discovered that I was invited to dinners with the expectation that I would talk about “conditions in the South.” I was invited to address several clubs on the subject. Of course I declined. I shrank from having myself or my friends at the South regarded as “a problem.” Doubtless we were a problem, but not for parade. I was alternately amused and humiliated. Several times Lee proposed that we go home and “enjoy our sorrows ” by ourselves.

But one day I received an invitation to meet at dinner a number of gentlemen who were particularly interested in the “Southern problem,” and who had much to do with the distribution of a large sum of money for educational work in the South. I soon discovered that I was expected to make an informal address. They were very earnest men. Among them was a bishop. I saw at once that he was among the most difficult to deal with of all the hindrances to human progress. A parasite on a rich community, sleek, satisfied,and self-righteous, — that man’s condescension put the severest tax on my patience that I can recall. He was a member of a missionary board which maintained a number of schools for negroes in the Southern states, most of them theological schools; and he regarded the Southern whites as a race of cutthroats and murderers. He told stories of the oppression of colored friends of his, all true, I have no doubt; but there was a tone in his telling that first suggested murder to me and then gave me a feeling of despair.

Fortunately there were other men, and better,in the company. They frankly confessed that they had not seemed to find a way to give the help they wished. Could I show them how ? Here was a new chance for usefulness. I told them what I knew and what I thought. I pointed out the need of help in educating the blacks,— the needed millions and millions of dollars and of thousands and thousands of men and women. I told them the need also of help to the whites, — the neglected, backward country population. The story of Professor Billy’s college interested them; and before I went away that evening one man gave me a check for a thousand dollars to send to Professor Billy, to “do with as he saw fit.”

One good and definite result came of this dinner. A week later I was asked if I would visit the colored schools in the South that were maintained or helped by this missionary organization, and make a report of my observations and conclusions. My expenses and an honorarium were to be paid by a layman (the man who had given me a check for Professor Billy), and I was to visit and report also on such schools for the training of the rural white population as I thought most worthy of help. For, the written request went on, “we are persuaded, as you have so clearly expressed it, that permanent and normal results can be achieved only by the simultaneous development of both races.”

“Yes,” I said, “I will do that, gladly, but I will accept no money for my services. The work must be my own contribution to the cause.”

I confess that I had not thought to learn anything from these men or from this summer’s experience about “the problem in the South.” I had shown, perhaps, a closed mind. What could they know about it ? But I now began to ask myself the question, what did I know about the training of the negroes ? Surely I had suffered enough for my insistence on fair play to them. But I did not know what chances they had — except certain wholly inadequate chances in my own state — to train their children. More than that, I did not know what was being done in other Southern states for the whites. Outside of my own state, and outside of my personal acquaintance, I knew nothing; and I was now ashamed of my ignorance. Surely I had lived a narrow life not to have thought of these things before. It would be worth while, it seemed to me, to interrupt my work on the history long enough to make this investigation for my own instruction. We soon came home, and I went about it.

During those first weeks after my return, I had a keen longing for New England. Wherever I had been, there were orderliness, thrift, frankness; a clean land, clean towns, open minds, a frank and unaffected interest in public affairs, men and women who read books, who talked well, who knew what other interesting folk were doing in every part of the world. They got pleasure from the arts; they lived an intellectual life; they had frankness of expression and of opinion. Whenever they forgot, or were kind enough to seem to forget, that I was a Southerner and, therefore, a problem, I felt intellectually at home; and I wished that I could stay on among them.

We talked — Lee and I — of going to Massachusetts to live. But, in all truth, we were ourselves a part of the Problem. It enmeshed us. It was the background of our life. There was no escape from it. Duty called; and even more powerful than the sternest sense of duty was the innate feeling of home. We could not get away from our task, because it was a part of ourselves. Dead men’s hands held us, too.

I had my moods when I frankly envied a man born in Massachusetts. He could choose his career, and go about it with directness and energy. The community was organized so as to make no demands on him but the demands of good citizenship; and its orderly ways to achievement were straight, if not easy. Of Ohio or Illinois almost the same thing could be said.

But in the South there was ever the shadow of the Problem. What did I owe the Negro, or the Negro owe me ? Yet old Stover, Doak, Locke, the Daughters, the pressure of dead men’s hands everywhere, thwarted my efforts. The building up of the community superseded every other duty and every private aim. It seemed a hard lot. It is a hard lot, a sad inheritance.

Oh, free men, wherever you live and toil and think, you who believe in the triumph of our democracy, my fellows and I do not ask your pity; but we do ask your sympathy and your understanding, — we of the post-bellum South, who had nothing to do with its old misfortunes, but whose lives must be spent in the struggle out of the shadow of them.

And yet there came other moods. A man who had only his personal career to work out, a mere personal success to achieve, a fortune to build, a professional standing to win, or even a larger problem to solve in an orderly and free community, where public opinion had its normal action, — how unsatisfying seemed so small a task! The glorious thing is to do a larger service, and the greater the difficulties the greater the service. Let us go on, then, for we may be the real builders of the largest House of Freedom in the whole wide reach of democracy.

In the city, the little capital near which I had spent most of my life, was one of the schools for negroes which this missionary society had established and helped to maintain. The state had for several years made a small appropriation to it because teachers for the negro public schools were taught there. I knew the principal of the college, — that is, I spoke to him when I met him on the street. He had been a preacher in New England, and he had taken up this missionary work in a zealous and self-sacrificing spirit. He had won the respect of the community, but, of course, not its social recognition. I felt ashamed that I had not known the man better, and that I had not even been inside his college. I began my investigation there, and — my own education.

Merciful God! the pathos of it!

XV

THE COLONELS’ SUCCESSORS

I confess that I had little stomach for the task I had undertaken; and whenever I visited my brother, indecision renewed itself. There the river ever ran and turned the mill. The spindles and the looms knew no weariness. There was no dark problem in this village. Women and children worked in the mills, but they led their simple, laborious lives without serious problems of any sort. The children had good schools, the people good houses: nor was there any of that sadness that hangs like a cloud over many mill-towns.

Most of all was I cheered by a sight that I had never then seen elsewhere. My brother insisted on cultivating the land, and he was a cotton-grower, as well as a spinner and a weaver. There you could see the cotton planted, see it bloom, open, ripen; see it gathered, ginned, and sent straight into the mill. This pleased him, and his satisfaction was contagious. You could hear his enthusiastic sayings repeated often: “We care not who makes the laws of a people, if we may clothe them.” “We have a monopoly of one of the essential products of the earth.” “Here we grow cloth cheap enough even for the Chinese.” All this was fundamental. He stood on the solid earth, and he got the fullness thereof. Would the cotton plant and the river, after all, not solve all our problems ?

I visited one colored school after another, in half a dozen states. I found many that were better than the pathetic “college” I had first visited; but most of them were too near the pulpit and too far from the cotton field. If the white people were profoundly ignorant of what the colored schools were doing, — and that they certainly were, — the men who conducted most of these schools were equally ignorant of the life that lay about them and of the problem that they had in hand. Their work was in no way related to the present or to the future, but only to a theory.

Inefficient in other respects, and quite as pitiful, were most of the schools for the “common people” of the whites in the rural parts of the South. “Education” was thought of as being chiefly for boys. If a lad was to become a preacher, he went to a church college. If he was to become a lawyer, or a physician, or a public man, or if he were a rich man’s son, he went to the “University.” The rest went to no college. A struggling multitude filled the schools of low grade; but these taught little that a boy would use or hear of after he began to earn his living.

The schools for girls were the “female seminaries,” under church direction. The less said of them, the more we may cherish the memory of our predecessors. Of course, I did not visit the best schools in these states, — schools like Graham’s and the better colleges, — for my task was to find out what schools most needed help in reaching the neglected masses. The first trouble with the masses was the lack of desire to educate their children.

I made my report first to the Sunrise Club; for I wished to hear what other men who thought as I did would say about it. We had previously worked out a plan for a state school that should teach white boys how to grow cotton and bale it, how to run looms, how to mend wagons and to build roads, — plain things that it was the fashion to call “agricultural and mechanical.” The project had been put one side till Professor Billy should get his school for young women established. That had now been done; and the Scrub Legislature, finding cotton warehouses impracticable, had spent its energy for two winters in helping the public-school system. There was the beginning of a real popular awakening. We decided to renew our attack on the legislature for an agricultural and mechanical college.

But something must be done for the negroes also, if what I had learned were to bear fruit at home. We made a plan for a similar school for negro boys and girls; and we called the president of the college at the capital into conference with us. No, he could not, under his aims and instructions, change the character of the college. Its main object was to train young men for the holy ministry.

How time helps to solve all hard problems ! The very next winter both Colonel Stover and Colonel Doak were gathered to their fathers. The wounds of war hastened the death of one I was fond of, Colonel Stover; and this sentence is written in sincere regard for his memory. As for old Doak, strong drink gave time good help in ripening him for the grave. It was hard to feel grief at his passing. Pretty soon Captain Locke, too, showed signs of worry and age, and it looked as if the state might be left to the care of the “incompetent.” His paper had never paid its expenses; and when both Colonel Stover and Colonel Doak were gone, he found it harder to get contributions from public-spirited citizens to keep it going. Important changes seemed imminent.

It is enough to say that the Agricultural and Mechanical College came quickly. The beginnings were pathetic, as the beginnings of the college for women had been. But its beautiful buildings now crown a noble hill; and five hundred youth are in training there, — good training; the state is proud of it; there are good roads; and the cotton fields which these young men work yield twice their former crops.

I reported to my New England missionary friends the sad things that I had seen; and I asked them to take counsel of the one man in the world who was a great master of the subject that they were studying,— a man of imagination and of genius, a man who found the path through universal darkness to everlasting hope, a man who had shown the way to solve the most difficult problem that our democracy has encountered. I reminded them of his name and address, — Samuel C. Armstrong, Hampton, Virginia. For the day I went to Hampton was a day of new hope. There the Negro was and is taught to be a man or a woman, and trained to do something in the world. No one is ignorant of this now.

In a few years the ecclesiastical president of the negro college at the capital died. The honor that was his due was never paid him. But his removal helped the march of events. The aid that death brought us in all our plans suggested the benefits of discriminating assassination to some wag in our increasing company; for the Sunrise Club was now a popular organization, and there was need to be careful lest its membership become unwieldy. The property of the negro college had increased in value as the towm had grown. The society that owned it sold it, and proposed to give its whole fund to the state, if the state would build and maintain an agricultural and mechanical school for colored youth.

Thus came into being three most useful institutions,—Professor Billy’s college for white girls (that, too, is in great measure agricultural and mechanical, and in every way practical), and the two state colleges of the practical arts, one for each race.

There ought to be a thousand schools, it seemed to me, that should have the aim of Hampton. Else how could the negroes — even a small percentage of them — ever be touched by any training at all ? And if they were not to be trained in a way that would make the cotton-fields cleaner and more productive, how should our upbuilding go on ? For it must never be forgotten that the very basis of civilization here is always to be found in cotton.

At no time have there been fewer illiterate negroes in the Southern states than there were in 1865, when they first became freedmen. All the educational activity has not been able to keep up with the increase of the population. The missionary societies and all their schools cannot, then, solve the problem. Let us welcome them, and guide them right. But if the negroes are to be trained by schools at all, the schools must be maintained by the states. No other agency can reach any considerable number of them. The education of the negroes is not a problem by itself, and we shall go wrong if we so consider it. It is part and parcel of the education of the whole Southern people. We might as well, then, turn our full strength at once to the larger and more inclusive problem, maintaining, as must needs be, separate schools for each race, but admitting no distinction in opportunity.

I could not, therefore, become interested in negro education as distinguished from the education of the whites, nor in white education as distinguished from the education of the negroes. Yet this difference had to be considered, that the negroes did not yet anywhere receive equal consideration in the Southern states. Nor will they, for that matter, for a long time to come. The whole problem took its place as a part of the larger problem, — the need of seeing things as they are and of discussing them freely. There must be no closed subjects in Southern life, — that sums it up.

The fate of the News, therefore, now that the old political oligarchy was dying, was a matter of some concern to us. Two rich men, it turned out, held a sort of mortgage on it, one a railroad “ magnate " and the other a successful merchant. They would do whatever was best “for the party.” The party fetich was persistent and powerful. The upshot of it all was that a younger man became editor, of whom we had hope, but in whom we could not place complete confidence.

Objection arose to what had been called such large appropriations to negro schools. The cry was raised: “ Let each race have school money in proportion to the taxes that it pays.” Old Colonel Doak had used the Negro as a card in his game of politics. So, too, had Colonel Stover, and most of the other Colonels. They felt no personal hostility to the Negro. But “what are our niggers for,” they used frankly to ask, “if we can’t beat the enemy by using the nigger as a boogy ? ” And the “enemy” used them simply as tools.

But now came a generation of men who all their lives had read and heard that the Negro wished to subvert our social system; and they believed it. The new editor of the News was one of these. He believed that it was a crime — a dangerous thing — to educate a negro; and he championed the movement for dividing the school taxes in proportion to the sum that each race paid. We had thought that we had gained much. But now we must halt and fight it all over again.

A bitterer feeling grew up between the races, — indeed, was deliberately fomented, it seemed to me and to many other men. And an election was coming on. The cry was taken up of restricting the suffrage, — “putting the nigger out of politics,” as he had been put out in some other Southern states. There was no need of it to keep white ascendency, for the whites had a large majority in the state. But the plan did have advantages. It would prevent ignorant black men from being led, in a mass, to the polls; and it would, it was hoped, cause white men to discuss other political subjects than this wearisome race question.

Very quickly the campaign waxed hot. There were “race riots” (that is, drunken fights) at places where no such things had happened before. One Saturday night there was such a fight at a railroad village not far from my brother’s mill-town. A drunken negro badly cut a white man. He was caught the next morning (Sunday), in a cabin a few miles from my brother’s, and he was brought to the mill-town to be locked up to await trial. The white man was yet alive, but he might die. The doctor gave little hope of his recovery. This enraged the white friends of the wounded man, and the rumor came on Sunday afternoon that a mob would that night take the negro from the flimsy jail which, in that peaceful town, was called a “lockup,” though it had never held a prisoner but once before.

My brother heard the rumor, and he discovered that there was small doubt of its truth. A little branch railroad ran from the mill-town to the county-seat of the next county; but no trains were run on Sunday. The railroad belonged to the owners of the mills. My brother asked the town marshal to bring the prisoner quietly, just as it became dark, to the engine-house. He had a locomotive ready. The engineer, the marshal, the handcuffed negro, and the fireman got into the locomotive and were ready to begin the journey to the county town of the next county. My brother would have no lynching in his town, nor murders to prevent lynching.

In a few minutes the news spread that the lockup was empty, and a crowd gathered. They found their way to the engine-house just as the locomotive came out. In the excitement every man asked every other One, “ Who is taking the nigger away, and where are they carrying him ? ” (due rumor was that he was to be rescued — set free. Any foolish rumor will spread in a gaping crowd. One thing seemed certain to them, — he was in the locomotive, and the locomotive was moving through the dark.

My brother, having seen the prisoner fairly started, jumped from the locomotive as it moved slowly away. A shot was fired, — perhaps it was thought that the negro was making his escape, — and my brother received a mortal wound, from which he died a month later.

XVI

A BUILDER AND HIS DREAM

The horrifying frequency of murder in the Southern states during these years is the most discouraging measure of social wrongness. Life was held so cheap that the death of a man — of any man — was regarded merely as a more or less inevitable incident, as railroad accidents are regarded in other parts of the country.

My father and my brother both had been men without enemies, men who were universally beloved in the community, as they deserved to be. They were men, too, of proved usefulness. Neither had been in public life. Yet both became in their prime the victims of violence. Unreasoning and promiscuous danger stalks in any community where life is held cheap by even a few, and where the laws are enforced by privilege or race. In such a community there is no sufficient defense against a mob, or even against a drunken fool; and the act of a fool may rob the community of its best man. In the bitterness of my grief, I could not forget that the community, and especially those who made the bitter campaign, were responsible for this crime. But, universal and sincere as the sorrow was, nobody put the blame where it really belonged.

Now, surely, I should have gone away,

— for what hope was there even of safety to human life ?—but for a compelling reason. The whole family’s business interests fell to my care. My sister-in-law, unlike my mother, was not an heroic woman in this practical way, though in her own gentle fashion she stood in the forefront. Incompetent as I might turn out to be at such a task, I could not shirk what became my plain duty. The problem was much larger and more difficult than it had ever been before. There were now three mills, a railroad, and many allied enterprises; and the investments of other persons were involved.

As the task became gradually familiar to me, I had moods when I regretted that I had not taken it up with my brother years before. He had done the only wise thing, — stuck to the earth. Yet he had met his death, and I, who had made enemies,

— and had accomplished what ? — was left to reap the fruits of his labors.

I settled down to the task of a millowner and man of affairs. My history of the state was well along toward completion, but I had no time to think more about it now. I soon discovered that my brother had been an even wiser and greater man than I had supposed. He had worked out solutions while I had been studying problems. Plans that he had often talked over with me now took a new meaning when I approached them by work rather than by discussion.

Cotton is King, and will here be King forever. He knew that fact, and he had built securely upon it. He had begun in the fields themselves; and they, I discovered (I must have known this before, but I had not seen its full meaning), were really experimental farms. He had tried selected seeds. He had, in fact, bred what might be called a new variety of upland cotton, very much more productive than the kind usually grown. He had made experiments with much machinery for cultivating the plant; for there is not enough labor to cultivate it in the old wasteful way. From plant to finished garment, he had studied every process, and made improvements and economies wherever he had touched the long series of processes and of crafts. He saw room and healthful work for an enormously increased population; and he would have them avoid the social and sanitary dangers of the great mill-towns in England and in New England. He would have manufacturing villages, not towns; and the village that he had built showed everywhere, as I became more intimately acquainted with it, evidences of his constructive work. If he had not given his time to the discussion of schools, he had done better: he had built a village that was itself a school. He had even foreseen the time when negroes would work in the mills. The objection to them was a social, not an industrial, objection; and he had made a plan for a mill, apart, wherein negro labor only should in time be used. For already there was visible an insufficient supply of mill-workers.

And his mind had wandered to other problems, of a different sort. He had kept an inventor busy for more than two years (he had never spoken to me about this) trying to construct a machine that should gather the cotton from the plant: the one machine that is needed to reduce cotton-culture to a scientific basis.

He had studied markets, too, as well as a man may who spends most of his time at home. Many great markets for cotton products had not yet even been found; and those that were open to the Southern mills were supplied in an awkward and expensive and indirect way. When the best breeds of cotton are grown on lands properly fed for its culture, and when it is worked and gathered by perfected tools and handled intelligently and spun and woven near the fields, and when all the mechanism for the sale and distribution of its products is made smooth and direct, then — such was the plan that he was proving — the South will become one of the most fascinating and prosperous workshops in the world. There will be room here for every pair of hands to earn plenty, and under conditions that make life worth living.

It is a marvelous fact, unmatched anywhere under the sun, that these Southern states have a practical monopoly of one of the most valuable staple products of the earth. No other land has such an advantage. Wheat grows on our great prairies; it grows in many other countries also. So corn; so cattle; so wool; so even the minerals, gold and silver and copper. No one land has a monopoly even of tropical products. But the South is, and always will be, the great source of cotton. And, with all this, it is a fair land to live in, with its forests, — such as are left, — its mountains, its streams, whose falling water would turn mills enough to spin and weave a cotton crop tenfold as great as has yet been grown, and with its fruit, and with a soil that brings forth all growths of the temperate zone. Merciful Heaven, for what sin of our forefathers were they smitten with such blindness as to make the one great structural mistake in building the great House of our Liberties,

— the capital mistake of keeping slavery

— of all conceivable uses— for cotton-culture! Slaves would have done anything else better than they did this. It was a blight of the land; not a mere waste and not a mere delay in its development, but a blight. For, if men of England and of New England had come to the cotton, instead of having slave-grown cotton sent to them, every mill of Old England and of New would have been founded in these states; and the world’s great trade routes would have led to Southern ports. The English race would, by this great industry, have by this time developed here better, perhaps, than it has yet developed anywhere; for in no region of the world has it such an economic advantage as, with an exclusively white population, it would have possessed in the South.

Instead of such a result my brother, who was helping to regain this loss, lies dead; the state is ruled by men who do all they can to keep the kingly staple shackled to ignorant labor; the very social organization reveres the defenders of the greatest error in our history; a sleek bishop in New England condescends to regard the theological needs of a population that is untrained to work; we are a great backward province, apart, without influence or character in the nation. And even the best and wisest men are prating about formal “Education!”

I became ashamed of the little oratorical part that I had played. I was ashamed too, of my whole country. Where are the men who see this great subject in its largest aspects ? A thousand such men as my brother would change the course of history in a generation, for they would be the rebuilders of society, — every sound society must rest on productive work,— the organizers of industry, the emancipators of thought, the pilots of a new worldcommerce.

XVII

THE BROADENING DAY

My sister came home from China, sweetened, saddened, carrying about with her a steady glow of benignity. Hers was a life given to others, without reward except the kindling of her gentle spirit as it gave forth light. No she would not go back. She would help rear my brother’s children. Again the people of the millvillage became her spiritual and social charges. Whenever I have lost courage, I have looked at her and been ashamed. Whenever the sweetest part of the past has become dim, I have looked at her, and seen my mother.

There were other springs of courage, too. Never failing among them were my own wife and children, — there were two now. Sometimes I thought I saw in my boy’s features and motions a hint of my grandfather; for the memory of that old man yet held a strong place in my life. I sometimes drove to the Old Place and spent a night there, telling the children stories of the two old men who lay together in the garden; and Uncle Ephraim and their great-grandfather took places in their minds, as I was glad to see, among their heroes. Sometimes they kept company, in their little memories, with Agamemnon, sometimes with George Washington. No matter: they were safely placed in those galleries of the great, down which we can look all our lives because we looked down them first in childhood.

The river flowed on, and it not only turned the spindles and the looms, but it also lighted every residence in the millvillage, even the humblest. Cards and spindles and looms and sewing-machines, which also the river turned, changed the cotton into garments. So well had my brother laid the foundations of every part of the business that I deserve no credit, except in the matter of industry, for becoming a successful man of affairs. There was a kind of satisfaction, which I had not before felt, that came from doing something that you could see and touch. It must be true, after all, that a man in action is the noblest work of God.

But I discovered, as a new reason for amusement and sometimes for chagrin, that our social organization is a most curious growth. I had spent my early years as a champion of democracy, — for the lack of the better word, — for that state of things wherein every man may have a fair chance. I had faith in the forgotten and neglected man. I worked to enable him to discover his mind, his opinions, his voice, and freedom in the use of them; for it was the suppression of opinion that suppressed men. Cotton had been made a tyrant, while it had itself been shackled and mangled and despoiled of its kingdom. To restore it and its slaves both to freedom, that was the task for which I had labored. I was laboring for it yet.

But during these later years I had not held educational positions or commissions; I had not been a candidate for office; I had not often spoken in public; and I discovered that my early work was soon almost forgotten. It was even taken for granted that I had recanted, that I was no longer especially concerned about the building up of the forgotten and neglected masses; that I was no longer a “fool friend of the nigger.” True, I was now a member of the Board of the University,—the board on which Colonel Stover and Judge Thorne had sat before they had gone to their eternal Confederate campingground. I was a member of the boards also of most of the other state institutions, including the Agricultural and Mechanical College for negroes. And, although I served all these as well as I could, the public regarded me chiefly as “a substantial citizen,” as a man of affairs, even as a rich man, modest as my income was.

The pendulum had swung to the other side. I was become—so the public seemed to think — a pillar of society, one in the row of pillars that holds up the House of Have, rather than, as before, a discarded stone of the House of Must Have. This change in the public toward me was, no doubt, natural. I had quietly given these years to solutions rather than to theories. The men in the public eye were still the oratorical men, an inefficient, noisy group on one side, a wicked and noisier group on the other. I had — I must confess — become tired of noise and oratory, and distrustful of talk; in the men who work constructively and intelligently I saw the best hope of the future.

Besides, I had been much away from home. We had gone abroad one year. Several summers I had spent in New England. I had become much interested in the world-wide organization of the cotton-trade, — or the lack of its proper organization. Although I had never been conscious of losing interest in the deepest needs of the state, — for I was, in fact, more deeply absorbed in the task of developing the people, and more intelligently and effectively absorbed than I had ever been before,—the people did not know it. The problems that I worked at lay outside the range of their talk.

But during those years, wretched as the lowland South yet was, great changes had come in our upland country, changes wrought chiefly by industry. There was now a great system of railroads ; towns had doubled and quadrupled their populations ; schoolhouses had been built everywhere; the colleges, of all sorts, were turning out young men and women who were better trained than their predecessors had been, by far. Poverty had yielded to industry, and men had money. This was a startling change from the days of my boyhood. There were many reasons why we should be hopeful.

But the politics of the state was yet in the hands of a wretched crew. How wretched they were, I confess I did not know till another absorbing public event revealed their character. Everybody knew and felt the shame of the commonplace men who held public office. But they were, at least, not personally corrupt. True, they would steal ballot boxes, if need be; but that was not counted theft. And they would not take bribes; their hands were clean of this low crime. They displayed a fervent state pride. Those of us who believed in revolution through industry had, in fact, paid too little heed to our political matters. Their oratory was tiresome, and we kept to our own tasks.

Liberty of opinion had broadened its area, too. It was well-nigh unthinkable now that a man should be dismissed from the faculty of the University as I had been. Such a thing could not happen in our present free atmosphere. Even the tyranny of the religious sects had been relaxed. The Baptist members of the Legislature were now never called together in caucus to discuss a plan of opposition to the public schools,— “irreligious education,” as they called it. Both in politics and in religion a man might hold almost any opinion he chose, if he expressed it decorously. I could look back and see how very far we had traveled in my lifetime. Time — surely, a little more time — would bring us to ourselves and to our own.

Still two things disturbed us. Many of the best trained youth sought their fortunes elsewhere. The flow of emigrants was steady, but of immigration there was no flow. In spite of our industries, young men went away. I knew why men had gone away in previous years. If I had had more courage, — or less, — I should have gone myself. I should have gone, as I was, but for the accidental change in my career. Did these young men to-day feel the same repression that I had felt ?

And now a new political campaign came on. The man who had been governor had done his task ill. Several state enterprises had been mismanaged, and the state’s representation at Washington had become disgracefully antiquated and inefficient. Two old men sat in the Senate (“two noble Romans,” the party organs and platforms always called them), who did not know that the years had brought changes in the world. The public sentiment of the State had outgrown them. There was a still rising tide of revolt against the old machine, and now a dramatic plan was adopted to save it, a plan that the ghost of old Colonel Doak must have suggested; for “ what are our niggers for if not to win campaigns with ? ”

XVIII

THE SHADOW AGAIN

I pray you now read with patience, if you care to read farther at all; for this is the most tiresome and discouraging chapter in the recent annals of our country. We had, as I said, come to the Mount of Hope, and the prospect was fair in our upland South. We were freeing our old King from the fetters of slovenly work and poor land and primitive manufacture, and we were regaining our own liberties, — prosperity, right training, free thought. A man was a man, white or black. We had our own ways of life, to which custom and convenience had shaped us. But we were men who lived without bitterness and hatred. Under the fairest land, I suppose, if one could dig deep enough, volcanic fires are somewhere smouldering. The hard-pressed political machine was willing to loose even volcanic fires, if it could thereby save itself. And the machine now was not run by the old Colonels; for they were nearly all gone to their eternal rest, or to the half-way house of state pensions. Men of my own generation — some younger than I — were come into political management. They had seemed to us hitherto to be commonplace lawyers without clients, editors of newspapers that did not yield a profit, hangers-on to legitimate industry. They were not thought to be burdened with convictions, nor had they received credit for sleepless vigilance in “saving society.” But suddenly they assured us that they were its most zealous guardians, and they came forth with social and political convictions, which, they declared, they would stand for to the death!

We were about to be engulfed in a flood of African despotism, they said. Our liberties were in peril; our very blood would be polluted; dark night would close over us, — us, degenerate sons of glorious sires, —if we did not rise in righteous might and stem this barbaric flood.

Whatever all this meant, it was certain that the full stream of oratory was again flowing. It was at first received with incredulity. The plain fact was that the Negro did not threaten the white man. Life was going as peacefully as at any time in the history of the state. The negroes did not even take a very active part in politics; and w’hen they did they were defeated, by fair means or foul; and they had lost interest in this form of activity. So, in truth, had many of the whites, too; for politics had become a small section of life. We had larger tasks in hand. But the cry continued that something must be done, unless Anglo-Saxon civilization was to be abandoned, and our homes ruined.

In several lowland states, the negroes had been disfranchised by amendments to state constitutions. There, I think, such an action would have been wise if it had been fairly done, — if the ignorant and the thriftless had been deprived of the ballot without distinction of race. But in our state there was no such necessity. The whites had a large majority of votes, and there was no danger of negro rule. Six months before the time of which I am writing, nobody would have pretended that there was such a danger in our state. But the campaign was precipitated on this “issue:” the white man against the black man. The Negro was a savage, a brute, a constant menace. Educate him ? Then you only make him more cunning for evil. He must be put dowui, and kept down.

The political expression of this crusade was a disfranchising amendment. But the oratorical expression of it became a cry of race-hatred. Men whose faithful servants were negroes, negroes who had shined their shoes in the morning and cooked their breakfasts and dressed their children and groomed their horses and driven them to their offices, negroes who were the faithful servants and constant attendants on their families, — such men spent the day declaring the imminent danger of negro “equality” and “domination.” “We must put them out of politics once and forever.” The old Colonels had been more frank when they said, “What are our niggers for but to win elections with ? ” This was an election that must be won. The governorship and a senatorship were at stake.

And the volcanic fires were found. The race-difference became in many minds a fierce race-hatred. There is no way to know how many crimes were provoked by this outburst of race-feeling. But every crime, little or big, that Avas committed was described again and again, and commented on. The newspapers became unreadable by decent women. Conversation ran to criminal talk. The political orators talked crime. The redcoats of the ku-klux era reappeared. Negroes were threatened and intimidated. Even the pulpit took up the cry, “Our homes must be saved!”

Of course there were protests; but they came too late. Many men who understood the insincerity of it all, and saw the harm that it was doing,—for such a crusade provokes the very evils that it cries out against, and all other evils of social disorder, — such men declared their objection. But they had feeble voices, because they spoke late. The volcano was in eruption. It was too late to say that there was no volcano.

I was thrown into a sort of stupor. A thing had happened that I thought never could happen again. I had deceived myself into a belief in real progress, when we had slipped back whole decades — whole centuries, it seemed to me. I could not sit in silence longer. There was soon to be a big political rally at the capital. When the time for it came, I went. As a “ prominent citizen” I was invited to the platform. Perhaps not a man in the audience recalled my long-ago brief period of political oratory. I had become “ a captain of industry,” a “solid man.” Nor had I for many years been a “ traitor ” or a “ bolter ” in politics. Between two bad parties, I had voted with the one whose hands were at least clean of bribe-money; and I had been silent.

The speaking began. It was inflammatory. Most of it was a horrid lie from beginning to end. A state of society was pictured which every man who heard it knew, when he was in his senses, to be a horrid lie. Yet for the moment they believed it. For there is a dark and unfathomable abyss of race-feeling. Look into it, and you cannot say surely what you see. What may the future contain ? A race that is only a few generations from savagery, — is the savage extinct ? Can you be sure of that ? Men’s fears rise as children’s in the dark. Nothing that they have seen frightens them. It is what they may see.

While the ceiling was resounding with applause of the violent speech of a young fellow who had never known such a man. as old Ephraim nor such a relation as that which he bore to my grandfather, to my father, and to me, I told the presiding officer that I should like to say a few words to the audience before the meeting broke up. After a while he introduced me in his fulsome way. I said frankly, and as quietly as I could, that the best proof of the freedom and strength of a people was their willingness to hear all men speak freely. I told them that I differed from the other speakers, and that perhaps I was not fairly entitled to be heard further. “ Go on! ” they cried. I went on. There were hisses, but there was some applause also. I spoke what I felt, and the wild orgy of race-hatred ceased for one moment, — only for one moment. An “ orator ” came next. He aroused it again.

I was pleased that many men spoke to me afterwards and thanked me. I had pleaded only for moderation. I had even commended a restriction of the suffrage, if no distinction should be made between the races; but I expressed regret that the campaign had taken so violent a turn. The next morning the newspaper grossly misreported what I had said, and reminded its readers that I had been “irregular” before, — “an unpleasant reminder made necessary with great regret.”

I received invitations from “the enemy ”—the frightened Republican machine— to make addresses; but if I accepted them I should have no audiences but negroes. Besides, I should throw away what influence I might have by “going over to the enemy.” But the old oratorical habit was asserting itself. How deep the impulse must be in our Southern blood! I made appointments myself to address the people at several places. They came to hear me, some from respect for me, more from curiosity. What could be my motive ? Was I a candidate for the senatorship ?

The party organs looked up their files of years before. They retold the story of my dismissal from the University, of my campaign (as they now expressed it) “for negro education.” Ever since I had attended Harvard College, I had been “tainted” with a wrong view of the Negro. One paper published this inquiry addressed to me, “in sorrowful emphasis: ” “Would you marry your daughter to a nigger ? ” And it added: “ Until the gentleman answers that test question, we need not pay more attention to what he says.”

Evidently I had mistaken the effect of industry on men’s character and judgment. Or else industry had yet touched too few of them. The same temper prevailed that I had encountered nearly twenty years before; the same or worse. For not only was the election won by the “ white man’s party, ” — for the time that name took the place of all other names,— but the race-feeling that had been stirred up remained. The young had been fired with it. It became a part of the general notion, a kind of creed, that the Negro was likely to efface the white man, if he were not repressed. A literature grew up, explaining the necessity of preserving “Anglo-Saxon civilization.” Men wrote about it in the newspapers; preachers preached about it; young men chose it for the subject of their graduating orations, young women as the subject of their essays. Novels appeared describing the crimes and social aspirations of the Negro, and they became popular; a code of personal conduct toward the Negro was set up, even for Northern men, to which they must conform. While I write, my hope recedes, and the pathos of my country deepens. A large part of the Southern people have persuaded themselves that the Negro must be kept to a level reminiscent of slavery, forgetting that on this level he can be only a burden. Thus they hold down all the people in economic ways. Nor is this the worst result; they hinder the free play of thought.

Yet I cannot get rid of the conclusion, the only conclusion that right reason leads to, that sanity will triumph at last. The Negro is not a menace, at least in the upland South. He is only a burden, and a burden that has become less and less since slavery. But he will forever remain a burden if he is repressed and left without training. Yet. clear as this conclusion is when it is reasoned out, what are we to expect of the emotional qualities of Southern life ? Have slavery and the presence of the Negro caused a permanent loss of white character in the South, so that fear rules where reason ought to sit ? The Negro brought a century-long blight to the land. Did he bring a blight also to the white race here ?

But I will not forget that the river runs, the spindles turn, and the looms are at work; and every year they are fed by better cotton, — better handled, better sold, for a higher price; and unnumbered millions of human creatures wait for the cloth that is woven of it. We weave more and more; and some time, if we are efficient men, Old England and New England may bring all their looms and all their weavers here,—if we are patient and wise. Patience — sweet Heaven, infinite is the patience called for. For we are yet “apart,” oratorical, emotional, “peculiar,” in spite of the incalculable progress that we have made in the little time covered by this story of a life spent without large result. A well-rounded life surely it has not been; for it has been too volcanic. Perhaps there can be no well-rounded life in this land — except a few unusual women’s lives — within a century of slavery.

Patience, then, is the word, — a long, long patience. Changes have come and are coming. In these forty years they have been many. The people rise; our lands become richer; our vision wider; our temper more tolerant. The South is not a “problem.” It is a social and industrial condition. You cannot solve a condition. You can only gradually improve it. And no social condition is either so bad or so good as any one man guesses by the small section of it that he sees. We hope to see great results from one campaign, from one lifetime of effort. Great results are visible only generation by generation.

Thus it is that we who sometimes feel the deepest despair at other times feel the highest hope. We cannot get away from our love of the land and the people. Those that work only for themselves seem to us to miss the larger inspiration of our democracy; and we do get at least — certainly we get at times — the triumphant sense of working at a hard task which is well worth doing. And so we go on, betwixt high hope and weariness, as I dare say men have gone on since human society began. If the bigness of the task is appalling, and the time required to do it indefinitely longer than our day of labor, so have all men found all grave social problems.

XIX

WHERE HOME IS

But, as I was about to say before this last oratorical depression seized me, when my son became old enough to go to college I said to him what my grandfather had said to me. Nicholas Lee—for that was his name — had been about the world, as I had not while I was a lad; but he had so far lived in this corner of a big planet, and I wished his horizon to be wider. He took the cue. I was a Harvard man; so would he be.

He knew of the revival of race-feeling, and of my occasional despair. He, too, felt some repression and lack of companionship ; but he had always known a freedom of opinion that I had won only after many a hard battle. I had made plain to him my own struggles; and I had told him, as well as I could, what he might expect. He must live where he would. He need not inherit our misfortunes. I wished him to be free.

Now he was soon to be graduated. What he would do, and where he would live, I did not know. His mother and I went to see him in his day of bloom. He was now become a man, and he seemed well-balanced and quiet in spirit. Ah, how that wild night of my oratorical triumph, and of my cousin’s presence, came back to me! Had this boy emotions, or was the stock breeding down to calmness ? That night, when I came in from a dinner with some old friends, the boy sat in his mother’s room, at our hotel. “Nicholas Lee tells me,” said his mother, in tears, — I think they were tears of joy, but you cannot always be sure of a woman’s tears, — “Nicholas Lee tells me that he wishes to live in the South; he wishes to serve his own country.”

I fell into a dream — afar off.

“Yes, sir,” he was saying, as I awoke the next second, “there is nothing so noble as the work you have done to build up our people. It is the great task of our time. I should not do my duty to seek a career elsewhere.”

Patience — a long patience! For we do believe that the democratic idea has healing in it for all social conditions. Is it not a proof of a fine quality of manhood that the lad should hear and heed when a hard, long, high task calls him? How long, how hard, no one can tell him.

And the mill-village this very autumn, with the fields about it white with cotton, and in the soft air that invites to easy labor, is a place that much-traveled men might envy us. I hear the falling water in the river. These are fundamental forces, and for us they mean home; and, however far a man may wander, I suspect that his home is where his duty abides.

XX

A SHADOW BEHIND THE HEDGE

Early in the winter, when the quail were plenty on the Old Place, I went there with my son and a group of his friends for a few days’ sport. One day it was dark; I was sure it would rain. The weather did not deter the young fellows, but I decided to remain at home while they went shooting. I had some time before found a copy of Cotton is King and Pro-slavery Arguments, which I had brought to the old house as I might bring back an old piece of furniture that belonged there; and I was sitting by the fire, reading the argument of a once famous bishop to show that slavery was divinely ordained. The colored boy came in, and told me that a lady had driven to the gate and was coming toward the house. I went to the door and met her.

“If I am not obtruding” — she began, in some confusion. “Is this place for sale ?”

“No, madam,” I replied.

“Perhaps — I must have been misinformed. It is the old home, is it not, of Mr. Worth?”

“Yes,” I said; “I am Mr. Worth. Will you come in?”

She had not told me who she was. Her manner was confused. She wore a heavy veil. I confess that I was puzzled. It had, I dare say, been many a year since any strange lady had come here.

“Mr. Nicholas Worth?” she asked. “Yes, I will come in, I thank you. I am Mrs. Wheelwright of Pittsburg. You do not know me ? ” Then, with a sad smile, she lifted her veil, and said, “I am Milly — Jane’s child.”

She had come to see her birthplace, this elegantly dressed woman, and to visit Uncle Ephraim’s grave.

She told me her history. I felt ashamed that I had forgotten her. Tom Warren had again fought fair,as our “code ” goes. He had given her mother money to educate her. They went first, after Uncle Ephraim’s death, to Nashville, Tennessee. There Jane died, soon after Milly had been graduated at Fiske University. Milly then went to Oberlin College, in Ohio, still as a “colored ” girl; but her “ color ” would never be detected outside the South. From Oberlin she had gone to one of the smaller cities of Illinois, where she “passed as white; ” and there she became a teacher in the public schools. The only person who knew her whole career was a good woman in the Fiske faculty. “I tell you,” she said, “what nobody else knows.”

She had married a mechanical engineer, many years older than she, who by an invention had become a man of considerable fortune; and they now lived in Pittsburg. He had gone to Denver on a business errand for several weeks, and she had decided during his absence to visit her birthplace, with no idea that she would reveal her identity to any one. She had arrived at the little capital city the day before: and, after this pilgrimage she was going home the next day.

We talked long, and with the utmost frankness. We went into the garden to see the graves of the two old men. Often her eyes became moist as she recalled this or that incident of her childhood; and so did mine. At dinner time, — we still have dinner in the middle of the day, — we sat down and ate together, the servants wondering who she was. When they were present we talked guardedly.

No sooner had she driven away than I sank into as deep a reverie as ever overwhelmed a man. This was her childhood’s home, and there was no human being but me to whom she could tell so simple a fact without risk of wrecking her own life and her husband’s; she had, in a sense, stolen away from home and made a long journey to see the place once more; and she was the daughter of a man to whom she would not reveal herself, for her own sake as well as his. He had other daughters now, — very like her, I noticed, and, I dare say, no more cultivated,

The young men came in from the hunt. While we were at supper, I told them, so that the servants would hear me, that a strange thing had happened. “A ‘Yankee ’ woman called to ask if the place was for sale; she looked over it, and I kept her to dinner, and found her a very pleasant lady indeed. Shall we sell the Old Place, boys?”

They looked up with wonder at so absurd a question; and we passed from the subject with a laugh, as we pass by many dark tragedies that lurk just behind the hedges of our Southern life. But it may be that all gardens have sad, shadowy dwellers on the other side of their walls of roses.

(The end.)