AN EX-SLAVE'S TRIBUTE TO THE EMANCIPATOR*

WHE

DR. BOOKER T. WASHINGTON

HEN I look back it seems to me that almost the first name I learned, aside from those of the people who lived on or near the Virginia plantation where I was born, was that of Abraham Lincoln, who, forty-six years ago last month, signed the Proclamation which set my people free.

The circumstances under which I first heard the name of the great emancipator were these: When the war broke out I was a small boy on a plantation in Franklin County, in the southwestern corner of Virginia. We were living in a remote part of the country and, although the war was going on all around us, we saw little of it, except when we saw them brought back again-as we did sometimes dead.

My mother was the cook on our plantation and as I grew up and was able to make myself useful, my work was to attend my master's table at meal time. In the dining-room there was an arrangement by which a number of fans that hung to the rafters over the table could be moved slowly back and forth by pulling a string. It was my business to work these fans at meal time, and that, as I remember, was the first work I ever did. As a result, however, I was present at all the meals and heard all the conversation that went on there. Incidentally I heard a great deal about the causes and the progress of the War, and though I understood very little of what I heard, there was one name that stuck fast in my memory and that was the name of Abraham Lincoln. The reason that I remembered this name more than the others, was because it was the one name that I encountered at the "big house," which I heard repeated in different tones and with different significance in the cabins of the slaves.

Copyright, 1909, by The Chicago Tribune.

Many a night before the dawn of day I have been awakened to find the figure of my dear mother bending over me as I lay huddled up in a corner of the kitchen, praying that "Marse Lincoln" might succeed and that some day I might be free. Under these circumstances the name of Lincoln made a great impression upon me, and I never forgot the circumstances under which I first heard it.

Among the masses of the negro people on the plantations during the War, all their dreams and hopes of freedom were in some way or other coupled with the name of Lincoln. When the slaves sang those rude plantation hymns, in which thoughts of heaven and salvation were mingled with thoughts of freedom, I suspect they frequently confused the vision of the Saviour with that of the Emancipator, and so salvation and freedom came to mean sometimes pretty much the same thing.

There is an old plantation hymn that runs somewhat as follows:

"We'll soon be free,

We'll soon be free,

When de Lord will call us home.

My brudder, how long,

My brudder, how long,

'Fore we done sufferin' here?

It won't be long,

It won't be long,

'Fore de Lord will call us home."

When that song was first sung, the "freedom" of which it speaks was the freedom that comes after death, and the "home" to which it referred was Heaven. After the War broke out, however, the slaves began to sing these freedom songs with greater vehemence, and they gained a new and more definite meaning. To such an extent was this the case that in Georgetown, South Carolina, it is said that negroes were put in jail for singing the song which I have quoted.

When Lincoln, in April, 1865, entered Richmond immediately after it had been evacuated by the Confederate armies, the colored people, to whom it seemed almost as if the "last

day" had come, greeted the strange, kindly figure of the President as if he had been their Saviour instead of merely their liberator.

There is a story of one old Aunty who had a sick child in her arms when the President passed through the city. The child was alarmed at the surrounding riot, and was crying to come home, but the good woman kept trying to get the child to gaze at the President, which she was afraid to do, and she would try to turn the child's head in that direction, and would turn around herself in order to accomplish the same object.

"See yeah, honey," she would say, "look at de Saviour, an' you will git well. Touch de hem of his garment, honey, an' yur pain will be done gone."

As the years have gone by, we have all learned, white folks and colored people, North and South, how much the country as a whole owes to the man who liberated the slaves. There is no one now, North or South, who believes that slavery was a good thing, even for those who seemed to profit most by it; but hard and cruel as the system frequently was in the case of the black man, the white man suffered quite as much from the evils that it produced. In order to hold the negro in slavery, it was necessary to keep him in ignorance. The result was that the South condemned itself, not merely to employ none but the poorest and most expensive labor, but what was worse, to use all its higher intellectual, moral, and religious energies in defending before the world its right to hold another race, not merely in a condition of ignorance, but of moral and spiritual degradation.

There is no task that an individual or a people can undertake which is so ungrateful, and so certain, in the long run, to fail, as that of holding down another individual or another race that is trying to rise. It is not possible, you know, for an individual to hold another individual down in the gutter without staying down there with him. So it is not possible for one race to devote a large share of its time and attention to keeping another race down, without losing some time and

some energy that might otherwise have been used in raising itself higher in the scale of civilization.

Under the influence of slavery the South was fast getting out of touch and sympathy with all the generous, upbuilding, and civilizing influences of the world.

Abraham Lincoln, in giving freedom to the black man, who was a slave, gave it at the same time to the white man, who was free. He not merely loosened the enslaved forces of nature in the Southern States, but he emancipated the whole United States from that sectional and fratricidal hatred which led the white man in the South to look upon his brother in the North as an enemy to his section and himself, and led the white man in the North to look upon his brother in the South as an enemy not merely to the nation, but also to mankind. I have had some experience of physical slavery, and I have known, too, what it is to hate men of another race, and I can say positively that there is no form of slavery which is so degrading as that which leads one man to hate another because of his race, his condition, or the color of his skin.

All these things did not seem so clear to us before the War as they do now, and yet there have always been people in the South who clearly saw the evils of slavery and opposed them. If the times had permitted these men in the South to look calmly upon the course of events, they would have found themselves in close sympathy with Abraham Lincoln. Now that the excitement of the anti-slavery agitation has died away, not merely these men, but many others in the South are beginning to see that during the whole course of the Civil War the South had no more sincere friend than the Abolitionist President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln. He, at least, never forgot, during all the long and bloody struggle, that a time was coming when the men who fought for the South, and the men who fought for the Union must settle down side by side as fellow-citizens of the one indivisible Republic.

Some one who was present when Lincoln heard the news

of Lee's surrender said that Jeff Davis ought to be hung. The President in his reply quoted from his Inaugural Address, "Let us judge not that we be not judged." Another said that the sight of Libby prison forbade mercy. "Let us judge not," he repeated, "that we be not judged." This I was said at the close of the War when the whole North was aflame with the news of victory. A year before, however, he had said in his jocular way, "We should avoid planting and cultivating too many thorns in the bosom of society." All through the War he saw, what Southern statesmen either shut their eyes to or failed to see, that even had the South won in the War, the old struggle between freedom and slavery would have gone on just the same, under other banners and other battle cries.

"Physically speaking," he said, in his first Inaugural Address, "we cannot separate. We cannot remove our respective sections from each other, nor build an impassable wall between them. A husband and wife may be divorced, and go out of the presence and beyond the reach of each other; but the different parts of our country cannot do this. They cannot but remain face to face, and intercourse, either amicable or hostile, must continue between them. Is it possible, then, to make that intercourse more advantageous or more satisfactory after separation than before? Can aliens make treaties easier than friends can make laws? Can treaties be more faithfully enforced between aliens than laws can among friends? Suppose you go to war, you cannot fight always; and when, after much loss on both sides, and no gain on either, you cease fighting, the identical old questions as to terms of intercourse are again upon you."

Whether as separate nations, or as separate States of the same nation, the struggle between freedom and slavery was bound to continue. Had it been possible to put an end to the conflict over slavery between the people of the Northern and people of the Southern States, it would soon have broken out again within the Southern States themselves. It should never be forgotten that there was always a minority in the South which openly or in silence opposed slavery. After 1830, when the abolition agitation sprang up in the North and it came to be considered a sort of treason in the South to lend any sort of favor to abolition sentiments, the opinions