Been in the Storm So Long (98 page)

W
HEN THE
C
IVIL
W
AR ENDED
, Henry McNeal Turner sensed that his work had only begun. He thought he knew how and where he could best serve his people. Two years earlier, he had preached his farewell sermon as pastor of Israel Bethel Church in Washington, D.C., and within weeks he had returned to his native South as a chaplain assigned to the 1st Regiment, United States Colored Troops. While serving in that post, he manifested a racial pride that would distinguish his thoughts and actions for the remainder of his life. Never would he relent in the conviction that the African race possessed the capacity for intellectual and material greatness. “I claim for them,” he wrote in August 1865, “superior ability.” None of the renowned orators, ministers, and statesmen he had heard in the North, not even a Henry Ward Beecher or a Charles Sumner, compared in his estimation with the simple eloquence he had once heard from the lips of a black slave in South Carolina. Nor did he consider the celebrated work of architects and mechanics in the North superior to the skills demonstrated by many slave artisans. While conceding that these were “exceptional” blacks who had “mastered circumstances,” Turner liked to think of them nevertheless as “extraordinary projections” who suggested the still largely unrealized potential of his people.

Even with emancipation, he realized, this vast potential would be difficult to tap. No matter how often he celebrated the achievements of individual blacks, he remained deeply troubled in 1865 by the condition of the great mass of recently freed slaves, especially those outside of the urban centers who had spent a lifetime laboring in the fields, sustained only by the will to survive. Almost everywhere he traveled in the postwar South, Turner found freedmen still embracing and cherishing the old slave habits, exhibiting little of the racial pride he felt so intensely; some of them were too “timid,” “doubtful,” and “fearful” to exercise their freedom, preferring instead to defer to their old masters or to transfer their feelings of dependency to their new Yankee masters.

That so many of his brethren should behave in this way came as no surprise to him. “Oh, how the foul curse of slavery has blighted the natural greatness of my race!” he wrote in early 1865, while his regiment was camped in North Carolina. “It has not only depressed and horror-streaked the should-be glowing countenance of thousands, but it has almost transformed many into inhuman appearance.”

By the close of the war, the rapidly proliferating northern benevolent societies were actively engaged in tending to the religious, educational, and relief needs of the freedmen. Turner knew of their activities, and he welcomed the diligence, commitment, and resources they brought to the freedman’s cause. But he perceived, too, that hundreds of thousands of newly freed slaves remained beyond the reach of these societies. Enjoying only a superficial freedom, they survived as best they could without money, land, or homes; they had never seen the inside of a schoolhouse, they either embraced primitive notions of Christian worship or attended a white man’s church (where they heard their bondage sanctified), and they had little or no appreciation of the responsibilities and liabilities they had incurred with emancipation. “They want to know what to do with freedom,” Turner observed. “It is not natural that a people who have been held as chattels for two hundred years, should thoroughly comprehend the limits of freedom’s empire: the scope is too large for minds so untutored to enter upon at once.” If Turner understood better than most the magnitude of the problem, that necessarily tempered his optimism and prepared him for a long and demanding ordeal. “I do not expect a high state of things, in this day at most; it will be impossible for the present generation to become wonders of the world. Nothing more than a partial state of civilization and moral attainment can be hoped for by the most sanguine.”

That was more than sufficient inducement, however, for Turner to enlist his efforts in the critical work of redeeming the nearly four million slaves from the moral and spiritual degradation which their condition had forced upon them. Upon resigning his chaplaincy in 1865, he chose to remain in the South to organize freedmen into the African Methodist Episcopal Church and subsequently into the Republican Party.
³

The prospects for a reformation in the post-emanicipation South seemed auspicious, even exhilarating. While the Union soldier completed the liberation of the slaves from physical bondage, the teacher would free them from mental indolence and the missionary would lead them out of the “Synagogues of Satan.” Both the teacher and the missionary would assume the responsibility for instilling in their minds the personal habits, moral values, and religious character deemed necessary to dignify and implement their new legal status. Although a formidable undertaking, the recruits were available and eager to begin their work—several thousand men and women of both races, some of them attached to the Freedmen’s Bureau, some the designated agents of a church or a freedmen’s aid society, and some initially unaffiliated but ready to serve in any capacity. “I dont ask position or money,” a chaplain in a black regiment wrote a Freedmen’s Bureau officer. “But I ask a place where I can be most useful to my race. My learning, my long experience as a teacher North, and my faithful service as Chaplain, demand that I seek such a place among my race.”
⁴
For many of the recruits, their previous involvement in the abolitionist movement made this southern pilgrimage a particularly satisfying and fulfilling experience. No less gratified were those in the black contingent who were now returning to the places from which they had escaped as slaves or from which they had exiled themselves as free blacks.

The vision that bound them together was that of a redeemed South. Like the Puritans of seventeenth-century New England, with their vision of a “city on a hill,” this modern Gideon’s Band proposed to establish beachheads of Christian piety and Yankee know-how in the moral wilderness of the defeated Confederacy, dispelling the darkness which two centuries of human slavery had cast over the region. Teachers and missionaries alike, whatever their race or affiliation, could agree on the critical need to provide the recently freed slaves with prerequisites of civilization and citizenship, and these would be nothing less than the virtues esteemed by mid-nineteenth-century Americans and taught in nearly every school and from every pulpit—industry, frugality, honesty, sobriety, marital fidelity, self-reliance, self-control, godliness, and love of country. “Hitherto their masters have acted and done for them,” a black religious journal observed, “but now that they are free they must be taught how to be free.” A white missionary educator in South Carolina said as much when he defined what had to be done for the freedmen—“to
unlearn
them and learn them
from
, the vices, habits and associations of their former lives.” And if the white evangels could talk in terms of supplying enough teachers “to make a
New England of the whole South,” a black bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church could anticipate that glorious day when “New England ideas, sentiments, and principles will ultimately rule the entire South.”
⁵

Whatever the optimism and confidence with which the missionaries and teachers began their work, sectarian rivalries, racial tensions, personality clashes, and differences over tactics and roles would take their toll within the ranks of this strong-willed group of individuals. Even the most dedicated and best-intentioned of them experienced their moments of discouragement, not only in seeking to minimize native white opposition and internal dissension but in bridging the cultural gulf which separated them from the former slaves. To communicate with the freedmen could be in itself a tiring and exasperating ordeal. “We are not as yet like
skilled
in
negro-talk,”
one missionary teacher wrote home soon after arriving in Virginia. The wonder perhaps is not that so many problems surfaced or that some evangels fell from grace but rather that so many of them held on and persevered under the most formidable challenges, sustained by the depth of their commitment alone. “Ours is truly a missionary work,” C. M. Shackford reported from Mississippi, “in our isolation from society, in teaching the ignorant, in deprivation of many comforts, and in being the scorn and derision of the community. There is a glory, excellence, and satisfaction in the work.”
⁶

The same sense of high purpose that found this white missionary laboring among the freedmen in Okolona, Mississippi, also nourished Richard H. Cain, a black minister who had transplanted his pastorship from Brooklyn, New York, to South Carolina. “I have often thought of my kindred at home—of the happy associations left behind. While I have toiled through the hot sun and over the dense sands of the South, hungry and weary, I have met hundreds of my brethren far away from their homes, awaiting my arrival, that they might hear the truths of the Gospel. I have forgotten my own trials in the flush of joy which thrilled my heart as I gazed on the vast sea of upturned eyes and radiant, expectant faces. I have exclaimed, Truly, the harvest is ripe, but the laborers are few.’ ”
⁷

The newly freed slaves viewed with varying degrees of marvel, gratitude, and suspicion this strange army of men and women who came into their midst carrying Bibles and spelling books instead of rifles. They were clearly
not
like the white folks they had known; some of them, in fact, seemed almost incongruous in a southern setting, antiseptic in appearance, and stiff and formal in their manners and conversation. The language they spoke, and the way in which they formed their words, confirmed their alien appearance and made it difficult at times to make any sense out of what they were saying. “Dey didn’t talk like folks here and didn’t understan’ our talk,” recalled Wayman Williams, who had been a slave in Mississippi and Texas, and he suggested that both sides would need to develop some patience and a degree of compassion before the barriers of communication would break down.

The learning process, as Williams also remembered, proved quite often to be reciprocal. While the teacher tried to instill proper English and pronunciation into them, the pupils introduced her to southern ways and to the mysteries of black magic and conjuration. “De teacher from de North don’t know what to think of all dat. But our old missy, who live here all de time, know all ’bout it. She lets us believe our magic and conjure, ’cause she partly believe it, too.”
⁸

Nor were the black emissaries from the North necessarily any less alien to the freedmen, though they might have recognized the type at least from some of the free Negroes they had known. Previous experience with black drivers, black overseers, and even free Negroes had a way of tempering the initial enthusiasm with which the freedmen welcomed the black teachers and missionaries; at the same time, the old slave preachers and exhorters would resist any attempt to supplant them in position and influence with their people. The northern black might also share with his white co-workers a similar difficulty in bridging the cultural gulf between himself and his southern brethren. “I cannot worship intelligently with the colored people,” Thomas W. Cardozo confessed, “and, consequently, am at a loss every sabbath what to do.” The educated black minister from the North who soon found himself castigating the crude, unruly, and heathen worship of his fellow blacks was no different than the black teacher from the North who found himself suddenly and unexpectedly wielding the whip to enforce discipline in the classroom.