Studies in the South and West, with Comments on CanadaWarner, Charles Dudley
History
Studies in the South and West, with Comments on Canada
Warner, Charles Dudley
Canada -- Description and travel; United States -- Description and travel
No one, however, can see the mass of colored people in the cities and
on the plantations, the ignorant mass, slowly coming to moral
consciousness, without a recognition of the magnitude of the negro
problem. I am glad that my State has not the practical settlement of it,
and I cannot do less than express profound sympathy with the people who
have. They inherit the most difficult task now anywhere visible in human
progress. They will make mistakes, and they will do injustice now and
then; but one feels like turning away from these, and thanking God for
what they do well.
There are many encouraging things in the condition of the negro.
Good-will, generally, among the people where he lives is one thing;
their tolerance of his weaknesses and failings is another. He is
himself, here and there, making heroic sacrifices to obtain an
education. There are negro mothers earning money at the wash-tub to keep
their boys at school and in college. In the South-west there is such a
call for colored teachers that the Straight University in New Orleans,
which has about five hundred pupils, cannot begin to supply the demand,
although the teachers, male and female, are paid from thirty-five to
fifty dollars a month. A colored graduate of this school a year ago is
now superintendent of the colored schools in Memphis, at a salary of
$1200 a year.
Are these exceptional cases? Well, I suppose it is also exceptional to
see a colored clergyman in his surplice seated in the chancel of the
most important white Episcopal church in New Orleans, assisting in the
service; but it is significant. There are many good auguries to be drawn
from the improved condition of the negroes on the plantations, the more
rational and less emotional character of their religious services,
and the hold of the temperance movement on all classes in the country
places.
II.—SOCIETY IN THE NEW SOUTH.
The American Revolution made less social change in the South than in the
North. Under conservative influences the South developed her social life
with little alteration in form and spirit—allowing for the decay that
always attends conservatism—down to the Civil War. The social revolution
which was in fact accomplished contemporaneously with the political
severance from Great Britain, in the North, was not effected in the
South until Lee offered his sword to Grant, and Grant told him to
keep it and beat it into a ploughshare. The change had indeed been
inevitable, and ripening for four years, but it was at that moment
universally recognized. Impossible, of course, except by the removal of
slavery, it is not wholly accounted for by the removal of slavery; it
results also from an economical and political revolution, and from a
total alteration of the relations of the South to the rest of the world.
The story of this social change will be one of the most marvellous the
historian has to deal with.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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