Dixie After the War

The two reasons given – undue prejudice against the Southern white and overweening pity for the negro – were the grand disposing cause of Northern indifference to the white child and abnormal sensibility about everything concerning the black. But at the bottom was ignorance of actual conditions here. The one story was put before them, the other was not. It was not to the interests of Freedmen’s Bureau agents to let the other be known; and, of course, the business of teachers and missionaries was to make out the strongest case possible in order to draw funds for negro education. The negro’s ignorance, in a literary sense, could hardly be exaggerated, nor his poverty; but he was a laborer and an artisan and held recuperative power in his hands.

It was not in the thought of the proud old planter to cry for help; it was his habit to give, not take; he and his wife and children made as little parade as possible of their extremities to their nearest neighbour; such evidences as would not down were laughed over with a humour inherent as their spirit of independence.

In 1867, Mrs. Sarah Hughes said: “Since leaving Kentucky last December, I have travelled many thousand miles in the South; I have seen spreading out before me in sad panorama solitary chimneys, burned buildings, walls of once happy homes, grounds and gardens grown with weeds and briers; groups of sad human faces; gaunt women and children; old, helpless men; young men on crutches, and without arms, sick, sad, heart-broken. Words cannot describe the destitute condition of the orphaned children. It excites my deepest commiseration. The children of the dead soldiers are wandering beggars, hand in hand with want. Except in large cities, there are no schools or homes for the fatherless. An attractive academy has been built near Atlanta by citizens of Northern cities for the children of the freedmen; and it is in a flourishing condition,” etc. An editorial in a newspaper of the day reads: “The white children of the South are growing up in pitiful neglect, and we are wrong to permit it.”

General Pope, commanding Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Florida, wrote General Grant, April 14, 1867: “It may be safely said that the remarkable progress made in the education of these people (the negroes), aided by noble charitable institutions of Northern societies and individuals, finds no parallel in the history of mankind. If the white people exhibit the same indisposition to be educated that they do now, five years will have transferred intelligence and education so far as the masses are concerned, to the coloured people of the district.” Does it not seem incredible that an Anglo-Saxon should regard with complacency a situation involving the supreme peril of his race, should consider it cause of congratulation? The state of affairs was urged as argument that the negro was or quickly would be qualified for exercise of the franchise with which he had been invested and his late master deprived.

The Sunday School acquired new interest and significance. I remember one that used to be held in summer under the trees near a blacksmith’s shop, in which Webster’s Spelling Book divided attention with the New Testament. The school was gotten up by a planter in kindly effort to do what he could for the poor children in the neighbourhood. There were grown girls in it who spelled out rather than read Bible verses. On weekdays, the planter’s daughter received and taught free of charge a class of poor whites. A Georgia friend, who was a little boy at the close of the war, tells me: “The Sunday Schools made more impression upon me than any other institution of the period. There were, I suppose, Sunday Schools in plenty before and during the war, but somehow they seemed a new thing thereafter.”

This movement was at once an expression of a revival of religious sentiment (there was a strong revival movement at the time), the desire for social intercourse, and an effort to advance the educational interests of the young, who in countless instances were deprived of ordinary means of instruction. Hon. Henry G. Turner wrote of the conditions of that day: “Cities and great tracts of country were in ashes. Colleges and schools were silent, teachers without pupils, pupils without teachers. Even the great charities and asylums were unable to take care of lunatics, the deaf and the blind… Repudiation by States of bonds, treasury notes, and other obligations issued during the war reduced to penury thousands of widows and orphans, and many people too old to start life over again.” Congress demanded this repudiation at the point of the bayonet.

The South was not unmindful of her orphans; there were early organised efforts such as the land was capable of making; the churches led in many of these. And there were efforts of a lighter order, such as the bazaar which the Washington and Lee Association held in Norfolk. The Baltimore Society for the Liberal Education of Southern Children was a notable agency. Individual effort was not lacking. Few did more according to their might than Miss Emily V. Mason, who provided for many orphans gravitating towards her at a time when she was paying for her nieces’ board with family silver, a spoon or a fork at a time. One of her most sympathetic aides was a Miss Chew, of the North, with whom during the entire war she had maintained an affectionate correspondence begun in times of peace. Illustrative of a rather odd form of relief is this extract from a letter by Mrs. Lee to Miss Mason:

“My dear Miss Em, did I ever write you about a benevolent lady at the North who is anxious to adopt two little ‘rebel’ children, five or six years old – of a Confederate officer – and she writes General Lee to recommend such a party to her. She wants them of gentle blood. I have no doubt there are a great many to whom such an offer would be acceptable. Do you know of any?” In regard to Baltimore’s work, she says: “How can we ever repay our kind friends in Baltimore for all they have done for us?” When the Confederate General, John B. Hood, died, he left a number of very young children in poor circumstances; one of their benefactors was the Federal General McClellan, I have heard.

Doubtless many hands were outstretched from the North in some such manner as is indicated in Mrs. Lee’s letter. Thousands would have extended help in every way had the truth been known. What the Southern white child really needed, however, was the removal of an oppressive legislation which was throttling his every chance in life, and a more temperate view on the part of the dominant section of the negro question – a question that was pressing painfully at every point upon his present and future. He had a right to an equal chance in life with the negro.

That quality in Northern people which made them pour out money for the freedmen, would have stirred their sense of justice to the white child had the situation been clear to them. One of the earliest homes for orphans of Confederate soldiers was established at Macon by William H. Appleton, of New York, at the suggestion of his friend, Bishop Beckwith, of Georgia. Vanderbilt and Tulane Universities, the Seney benefactions to Emory and Wesleyan Colleges, and other evidences of awakening interest in the South’s white youth, will occur at once to my readers. Chief of all was the Peabody Fund, in which white and black had share. Dr. Sears, of Boston, first administrator, was sharply blamed by William Lloyd Garrison and others because he did not make mixed schools a condition of bestowal upon whites; his critics grew quiet when shown that, under the terms of the gift, such a course would divert the whole fund to white children.

To illustrate white need: Late as 1899, I heard, through Miss Sergeant, Principal of the Girls’ High School, Atlanta, of a white school in the Georgia mountains where one short shelf held all the books – one grammar, one arithmetic, one reader, one history, one geography, one spelling-book. Starting at the end of the first bench, a book would pass from hand to hand, each child studying a paragraph. There are schools of scrimped resources now, where young mountaineers make all sorts of sacrifices and trudge barefoot seemingly impossible distances to secure a little learning. Nobody in these communities dreams of calling for outside help and sympathy, and when help is tendered, it must be with the utmost circumspection and delicacy, or native pride is wounded and rejects. Appalachia is a region holding big game for people hunting chances to do good.

The various Constitutional Conventions adopted public school systems for their commonwealths. In Virginia, it was not to go into operation until 1871, after which there was to be as rapid extension as possible and full introduction into all counties by 1876. The convention made strenuous efforts, as did that of every other State, to force mixed schools, in which, had they succeeded, the white child’s chance of an education would have suffered a new death.

Early text-books used in public schools grated on the Southerner; they were put out by Northern publishing houses and gave views of American history which he thought unjust and untrue. The “Southern Opinion” printed this, August 3, 1867: “In a book circulating in the South as history, this occurs: ‘While the people of the North were rejoicing because the war was at an end, President Lincoln, one of the best men in the world, was cruelly murdered in Washington by a young man hired by the Confederates to do the wicked deed.’ It calls Lee ‘a perjured traitor;’ says ‘Sherman made a glorious march to the sea;’ prints ‘Sheridan’s Ride’ as a school recitation.” To comprehension of the Southern mind as it was then and is now in some who remember, it is essential that we get its view of the “Ride” and the “March.”

“Have you seen a piece of poetry,” a representative Southern woman wrote another in the fall of 1865, “called ‘Sheridan’s Ride’? If you can get it, do send it to me. I want to see if there isn’t some one smart enough to reply to it and give a true version of that descent of armed ruffians upon store-rooms, stables, hen-roosts and ladies’ trunks – even tearing the jewelry from their persons – even robbing the poor darkies of their watches and clothing. Not a single Confederate soldier did they encounter. They ought to live in history! My Vermont friend, Lucy Adams, says these things ‘are not true, no one at the North believes them, they are impossible.’ But we know they are true. I was very anxious to send you Sherman’s speech at Cincinnati – perhaps you have seen it – in which he unblushingly sanctions all the outrages committed by his men. I really think some notice ought to be taken of it, but our papers, you see, are all ruined now; and in New York, only ‘The News’ dares publish anything true… I have found a copy, but this says at ‘Lancaster, Ohio’; perhaps he said the same thing twice; it was at the close of a grand speech: ‘Soldiers, when we marched through and conquered the country of the rebels, we became owners of all they had; and I don’t want you to be troubled in your consciences for taking, while on our great march, the property of the conquered rebels – they had forfeited their right to it.’”

“For several years since the nineties it has been my privilege to serve a large charitable institution here,” a Southern friend writes me from a Northern city. “On the Fourth of July I join with as much fervor as anybody in the flag salute, in singing ‘America’ and all the other patriotic songs, until they come to ‘Marching Through Georgia.’ That takes the very heart out of me! Sometimes it is all I can do to keep from bursting into tears! Then again I feel as if I must stand up and shout: ‘We should not teach any American child to sing that song!’ You know the home of one of my dearest friends was in the way of that march; it was burned to the ground and she, a little girl, and her aged grandfather wandered homeless in the night. I wonder, O, I wonder, if our soldiers in the Philippines, Northern and Southern boys, are giving grounds for any such songs as that! I’d rather we’d lose the fight!”

A cause operating against education of both races remains to be cited. The carpet-bag, scalawag and negroid State Governments made raids on educational funds. In North Carolina, $420,000 in railroad stock belonging to the Educational Fund for the Benefit of Poor Children were sold for $158,000, to be applied in part payment of extended per diems of legislators. These legislators gave at State expense lavish entertainments, and kept a bar and house of prostitution in the Capitol; took trips to New York and gambled away State funds by thousands; war had left a school fund, taxation increased it; but for two years no child, white or black, received benefits. There was money enough for the Governor to raise and equip two regiments, one of negroes, for intimidation of whites, but none for education. Of Georgia’s public school fund of $327,000, there seems not to have been a penny left to the State when her million-dollar legislature adjourned in 1870.

Louisiana’s permanent school fund for parishes vanished with none to tell where it went. Attention was called to its disappearance by W. E. Brown, the negro State Superintendent of Education. When Warmouth, was inaugurated (1868), the treasury held $1,300,500 for free schools. “Bonds representing this,” states Hon. B. F. Sage, “the most sacred property of the State, were publicly auctioned June, 1872, to pay warrants issued by Warmouth.” Warmouth, like Holden of North Carolina, and Scott and Moses of South Carolina, raised and maintained at State expense a black army. In 1870, the Radical Governor of Florida made desperate efforts to lay hands on the Agricultural Land Scrip, property of the Agricultural College of that State; to save it from his clutches C. T. Chase, President of Public Instruction, asked President Grant’s intervention. A forger, embezzler and thief presided over Mississippi’s Department of Education. In every State it was the same story of public moneys wasted by nefarious tricksters who had ridden to power on the negro ballot; the widow and the orphan robbed, the gray-beard and the child; the black man and the white.

SCHOOLMARMS AND OTHERS

CHAPTER XXVII

Schoolmarms and Other Newcomers

Many good people came down to do good to us and the negroes; we were not always so nice to these as we ought to have been. But very good people can try other very good people sorely sometimes. Besides, some who came in sheep’s clothing were not sheep, and gave false ideas of the entire flock.

Terms of professional philanthropy were strange in the Southerner’s mouth. It never occurred to the men, women and maidens who visited all the poor, sick, old and feeble negroes in their reach, breaking their night’s rest or their hours of recreation or toil without a sense of sacrifice – who gave medicines, food, clothing, any and everything asked for to the blacks and who ministered to them in neighbourly ways innumerable – that they were doing the work of a district or parish visitor. Southerners have been doing these things as a matter of course ever since the negroes were brought to them direct from Africa or by way of New England, making no account of it, never organizing into charitable associations and taking on corresponding tags, raising collections and getting pay for official services; the help a Southerner gave a darkey he took out of his own pocket or larder or off his own back; and that ended the matter till next time.

Yet, here come salaried Northerners with “Educator,” “Missionary,” or “Philanthropist” marked on their brows, broidered on their sleeves; and as far as credit for work for darkeys goes, “taking the cake” from the Southerner, who had no warm welcome for the avalanche of instructors pouring down upon him with the “I am holier than thou” expression, and bent as much upon teaching him what he ought to have been doing as upon teaching the negro to struggle indecorously for the semblance of a non-existent equality.

Newcomers were upon us like the plagues of Egypt. Deserters from the Federal Army, men dismissed for cause, followers in its wake, political gypsies, bums and toughs. Everybody in New York remarked upon the thinning out of the Bowery and its growing orderliness during enlistments for the Spanish-American War; and everybody knew what became of vanishing trampdom; it joined the army. The Federal Army in the sixties was not without heavy percentage of similar element; and, when, after conquest, it returned North, it left behind much riff-raff. Riff-raffs became politicians and intellectual and spiritual guides to the negroes. From these, and from early, unwise, sometimes vicious Freedmen’s Bureau instructors, Southerners got first ideas of Yankee schoolmasters and schoolmarms.

“Yankee schoolmarms” overran the country. Their spirit was often noble and high as far as the black man’s elevation – or their idea of it – was concerned; but towards the white South, it was bitter, judicial, unrelenting. Some were saints seeking martyrdom, and finding it; some were fools; some, incendiaries; some, all three rolled into one; some were straight-out business women seeking good-paying jobs; some were educational sharps.

Into the Watkins neighbourhood came three teachers, a male preacher and two women teachers. They went in among the negroes, ate and slept with them, paraded the streets arm-in-arm with them. They were disturbed to perceive that, even among negroes, the familiarity that breeds contempt is not conducive to usefulness; and that they were at a disadvantage in the eyes of the negroes because white people failed to recognise them.

Mr. Watkins, master of the manor, was a shining light to all who knew him. In summer his verandah, in winter his dining-room, was crowded Sunday afternoons with negroes on his invitation: “I will be glad to have you come to sing and pray with me.” He would read a chapter from the Bible, lead the opening prayer, then call upon some sable saint to lead, himself responding with humble “Amens.” White and black would sing together. When the newcomers found how things were, they felt aggrieved that they had not his countenance.

He had seen one of them walk up to his ex-hostler and lay her hand on his coat-collar, while she talked away archly to him. I hardly believe a gentleman of New York, Boston or Chicago would conclude that persons making intimates of his domestic force could desire association with his wife and daughters or expect social attentions from them; I hardly believe he would urge the ladies of his family to call upon these persons. Mr. Watkins did not send his women-kind to see the newcomers; at last, the newcomers took the initiative and came to see his family. His daughters did not appear, but Mrs. Watkins received them politely. They went straight to the point, lodging complaint against the community.

“We had no reason to suppose,” said she, quietly, “that you cared for the coöperation of our white people. You acted independently of us; you did not advise with us or show desire for affiliation. We would have been forcing ourselves upon you. I will be as frank as you have been. Had you started this work in a proper spirit and manner, my husband for one would have responded to the limit of his power to any call you made upon him.”

They dragged in the social equality business and found her adamant. When they charged “race prejudice,” she said promptly: “Were I to visit relatives in Boston, the nice people there would, I doubt not, show me pleasant attentions. Were I to put myself on equal terms with their domestics, I could hardly expect it. The question is not altogether one of race prejudice, but of fitness of things.” “But we are missionaries, not social visitors.” “We do not feel that you benefit negroes by teaching them presumption and to despise and neglect work and to distrust and hate us.”

A garrulous negress was entertaining one of these women with hair-raising accounts of cruelties practiced upon her by whites when, as a slave, she cooked for them. The schoolmarm asked: “Why didn’t you black people poison all the whites and get your freedom that way? You’re the most patient people on earth or you would have done so.” A “mammy” who overheard administered a stinging rebuke: “Dat would ha’ been a sin even ef our white folks wuz ez mean ez Sukey Ann been tellin’. Mine wuz good tuh me. Sukey Ann jes been tellin’ you dem tales tuh see how she kin wuk you up.” Perhaps the school-teacher had not meant to be taken more literally than Sukey Ann deserved to be.

Until freedom, white and black children could hardly be kept apart. Boys ran off fishing and rabbit-hunting together; girls played dolls in the garret of the great house or in a sunny corner of the woodpile. They rarely quarrelled. The black’s adoration of the white, the white’s desire to be allowed to play with the black, stood in the way of conflict. An early result of the social equality doctrine was war between children of the races. Such strife was confined almost wholly to white and black schools in towns, where black and white children were soon ready to “rock” each other. A spirit of dislike and opposition to blacks, which their elders could hardly understand, having never experienced it, began to take possession of white children. The following story will give some idea of these dawning manifestations of race prejudice:

Negro and white schools were on opposite sides of the street in Petersburg, the former a Freedmen’s Bureau institution, the latter a private school taught by a very youthful ex-Confederate, Captain M., who, though he looked like a boy himself, had made, after a brilliant university course, a shining war record. The negro boys, stimulated by the example of their elders who were pushing whites off the sidewalks, and excited by ill-timed discourses by their imported white pedagogue, “sassed” the white boys, contended with them for territory, or aggravated them in some way. A battle ensued, in which the white children ran the black off the street and into their own schoolhouse, the windows of which were damaged by rocks, the only serious mischief resulting from exchange of projectiles.

In short order six Federal soldiers with bayonets fixed marched into the white schoolhouse, where the Captain was presiding over his classes, brought by this time to a proper sense of penitence and due state of order, their preceptor being a military disciplinarian. The invading squad came to capture the children. The Captain indignantly protested, saying he was responsible for his boys; it was sufficient to serve warrant on him, he would answer for them; it was best not to make a mountain out of a mole-hill and convulse the town with a children’s quarrel. The sergeant paid him scant courtesy and arrested the children. The Captain donned his old Confederate overcoat, than which he had no other, and marched down the street with his boys to the Provost’s office.

The Provost, a soldier and a gentleman, after examining into the case and considering the small culprits, all ranged in a terrified row and not knowing but that they would be blown next moment into Paradise or the other place, asked the Captain if he would guarantee that his children would keep the peace. The Captain assured him that he could and would if the teacher of the coloured boys would keep his charges in bounds, adding that he would have the windows repaired at his expense. The Provost accepted this pledge, and with a withering look at the pedagogic complainant, said to the arresting officer: “Sergeant, I am sorry it was necessary to send six armed men to arrest these little boys.” This happened at ten o’clock in the morning. Before ten that night the Provost was removed by orders from Washington. So promptly had complaint been entered against him that he was too lenient to whites, so quickly had it taken effect! Yet his course was far more conservative of the public peace than would have been the court-martialing of the children of prominent citizens of the town, and the stirring-up of white and black parents against each other.

“It’s no harm for a hungry coloured man to make a raid on a chicken-coop or corn-pile,” thus spoke Carpet-Bagger Crockett in King William County, Virginia, June, 1869, in the Walker-Wells campaign, at a meeting opened with prayer by Rev. Mr. Collins, Northern missionary. Like sentiment was pronounced in almost the same words by a carpet-bag officer of state, a loud advocate of negro education, from the steps of the State House in Florida. Like sentiment was taught in direct and indirect ways by no small number of preceptors in negro schoolhouses.