I passed through Eatonton, the birthplace of Joel Chandler Harris, on my way to the sea. He taught us much about the Negro. In England Brer Fox and Brer Rabbit have become as cherished as the toys of the nursery. I think Uncle Remus meant as much to us as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” The genial point of view and the genial books do as much to help humanity as the strong and bitter ones. Both certainly have their place. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” stirred people out of a lazy attitude of mind toward the Negro slaves, but in America it aggravated a bitterness which no other book has been able to allay. The very intensity of the white man’s thought about the Negro bodes ill for the future. The White men of the North deliberately have made the effort to rear a Negro _intelligentsia_. The idealists of the North said, “You shall go on”; others said, “No, you shall stay as you were”; the clash of the two wills lit up racial war, but the Negro has sided with the idealists who sought to raise him, with the Friends of Pennsylvania and the humanitarians of New England. In the panic of Sherman’s approach the planters and their wives told their slaves that the Yanks would flog them and burn them or put them in the front of the battle, and drown the women and children in the Ogeechee or the Chattahoochee. Many believed and fled with their masters; others hid in the woods, but the rumor of salvation was on the lips of most. The Southerner has a saying, “The nigger is the greatest union in the country.” News indeed travels faster among slaves and servants than among employers and masters. There was not much hesitation when the army arrived. The Negroes saw and believed. The incredulous were converted and the scared persuaded out of their hiding places. All with one accord forgot their fear and then went to the other extreme; that is, as far in credulity as their dull minds had lodged in incredulity. The arrival of the victors gave rise to the most extravagant hopes. The Negro had never reasoned about anything in an informed way. He knew nothing of the world except the simplicity of the plantation. He had on the one hand slavery, and on the other the vague and vast idealism of Christian hymns; the melancholy of bondage and the emotionalism of Evangelical religion. He did not think of New York, London, Paris, St. Petersburg, of the workingmen’s movement, of free thought, of political economy, but only of “de ole plantation,” and then “de ribber.” From drab slavery he looked straight to Jordan and the golden gates, and to a no-work, easy-going paradise happy as the day is long, with God as Massa, and Mary and the Son to play with. There were no between stages to which to aspire. They expected, as did the Puritan churches about them, the huge combustion of the Last Day, and they did not set much store by this world. Hence their exalted state of mind following Sherman’s army. They were ready to shout _Glory_ when the world was afire, and they displayed all the emotion