WAR AND HOW IT EMANCIPATED THE SLAVE.

615

there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object is to save the Union, and not either to destroy or to save slavery." And the Northern press emphasized over and over again the fact that this was "a white man's war." But the logic of events is inexorable. It seems amazing now that Union generals should have been puzzled as to the question whether they ought in duty to return runaway slaves to their masters. General Butler settled the controversy by one happy phrase when he called the fugitives "contraband of war." "contraband of war." Soon it was deemed right

to use these contrabands, to employ the new-coined word, as the South was using the negroes still in bondage, to aid in the non-fighting work of the army -on fortification, team driving, cooking, and so on. From this it was but a step, though a step not taken without much perturbation, to employ them as soldiers. At Vicksburg, at Fort Pillow, and in many another battle, the negro showed beyond dispute that he could fight for his liberty. No fiercer or braver charge was made in the war than that upon the parapet of Fort Wagner by Colonel Shaw's gallant colored regiment, the Massachusetts Fifty-fourth.

In a thousand ways the negro figures in the history of the war. In its

literature he everywhere stands out picturesquely. He sought the flag with the greatest avidity for freedom; flocking in crowds, old men and young, women and children, sometimes with quaint odds and ends of personal belongings, often empty-handed, always enthusiastic and hopeful, almost always densely ignorant of the meaning of freedom and of self-support. But while the negro showed this avidity for liberty, his conduct toward his old masters was often generous, and almost never did he seize the opportunity to inflict vengeance for his past wrongs. The eloquent Southern orator and writer, Henry W. Grady, said: "History has no parallel to the faith kept by the negro in the South during the war. Often five hundred negroes to a single white man, and yet through these dusky throngs the women and children walked in safety and the unprotected homes rested in peace. A thousand torches would have

disbanded every Southern army, but not one was lighted."

It was with conditions, and only after great hesitation, that the final step of emancipating the slaves was taken by President Lincoln in September, 1862. The proclamation was distinctly a war measure, but its reception by the North and by the foreign powers and its immediate effect upon the contest were such that its expediency was at once recognized. Thereafter there was possible no question as to the personal freedom of the negro in the United States of America. With the Confederacy, slavery went down once and forever. In the so-called reconstruction period which followed, the negro suffered almost as much from the over-zeal of his political friends as from the prejudice of his old masters. A negro writer, who is a historian of his race, has declared that the Government gave the negro the statute book when he should have had the spelling book; that it placed him in the legislature when he ought to have been in the school house, and that, so to speak, "the heels were put where the brains ought to have been." A quarter of a century and more has passed since that turbulent period began, and if the negro has become less prominent as a political factor, all the more for that reason has he been advancing steadily though slowly in the requisites of citizenship. He has learned that he must, by force of circumstances, turn his attention, for the time at least, rather to educational, industrial, and material progress than to political ambition. And the record of his advance on these lines is promising and hopeful. In Mississippi alone, for instance, the negroes own one-fifth of the entire property in the State. In all, the negroes of the South to-day possess two hundred and fifty million dollars' worth of property. Everywhere throughout the South white men and negroes may be found working together.

At the beginning of the war the negro population of the country was about four millions, to-day it is between seven and seven and a-half millions; in 1880, fifteen-sixteenths of the whole colored population belonged to the Southern States, and the census of 1890 shows that the proportion has not greatly changed.

This ratio in itself shows how absurdly trifling in results have been all the movements toward colonization or emigration to Northern States. The negro emphatically belongs to the Southern States, and in them and by them his future must be determined. Another point decided conclusively by the census of 1890 is seen in the refutation of an idea based, indeed, on the census of 1880, but due in its origin to the very faulty census of 1870. This idea was that the colored population had increased much more rapidly in proportion than the white population. The new census shows, on the contrary, that the whites in the Southern States increased during the last decade nearly twice as rapidly as the negroes, or, as the census bulletin puts it, in increase of population, "the colored race has not held its own against the white man in a region where the climate and conditions are, of all those which the country affords, the best suited to its development."

The promise of the negro race to-day is not so much in the development of men of exceptional talent, such as Frederick Douglas or Senator Bruce, as in the general spread of intelligence and knowledge. The Southern States have very generally given the negro equal educational opportunities with the whites, while the eagerness of the race to learn is shown in the recently ascertained fact that while the colored population has increased only twenty-seven per cent. the enrollment in the colored schools has increased one hundred and thirty-seven per cent. Fifty industrial schools are crowded by the colored youth of the South. Institutions of higher education, like the Atlanta University, and Hampton Institute of Virginia, and Tuskegee College, are doing admirable work in turning out hundreds of negroes fitted to educate their own race. Within a year or two honors and scholarships have been taken by half a dozen colored young men at Harvard, at Cornell, at Phillips Academy and at other Northern schools and colleges of the highest rank. The fact that a young negro, Mr. Morgan, was in 1890 elected by his classmates at Harvard as the class orator has a special significance. Yet there is greater significance, as a negro newspaper man writes, in the fact that the equatorial telescope now used by the Lawrence University of Wisconsin was made entirely by colored pupils in the School of Mechanical Arts of Nashville, Tenn. In other words, the AfroAmerican is finding his place as an intelligent worker, a property owner, and an independent citizen, rather than as an agitator, a politician or a race advocate. In religion, superstition and effusive sentiment are giving way to stricter morality. In educational matters, ambition for the high-sounding and the abstract is giving place to practical and industrial acquirements. It will be many years before the character of the negro, for centuries dwarfed and distorted by oppression and ignorance, reaches its normal growth, but that the race is now at last upon the right path and is being guided by the true principles cannot be doubted.

Says one who has made an exceedingly thorough personal study of the subject in all the Southern States: "The evolution in the condition has kept pace with that of any other races, and I think has been even a little better. The same forces of evolution that have brought him to where he is now will bring him further. One thing is indisputable: the negro knows his destiny is in his own hands. He finds that his salvation is not through politics, but through indus trial methods.