Part 27 (1/2)
It ought to be stated frankly here that at first, and for several years after the introduction of industrial training at such educational centres as Hampton and Tuskegee, there was opposition from colored people, and from portions of those Northern white people engaged in educational and missionary work among the colored people in the South.
Most of those who manifested such opposition were actuated by the highest and most honest motives. From the first the rank and file of the blacks were quick to see the advantages of industrial training, as is shown by the fact that industrial schools have always been overcrowded.
Opposition to industrial training was based largely on the old and narrow ground that it was something that the Southern white people favored, and therefore must be against the interests of the Negro.
Again, others opposed it because they feared that it meant the abandonment of all political privileges, and the higher or cla.s.sical education of the race. They feared that the final outcome would be the materialization of the Negro, and the smothering of his spiritual and aesthetic nature. Others felt that industrial education had for its object the limitation of the Negro's development, and the branding him for all time as a special hand-working cla.s.s.
Now that enough time has elapsed for those who opposed it to see that it meant none of these things, opposition, except from a very few of the colored people living in Boston and Was.h.i.+ngton, has ceased, and this system has the enthusiastic support of the Negroes and of most of the whites who formerly opposed it. All are beginning to see that it was never meant that ALL Negro youths should secure industrial education, any more than it is meant that ALL white youths should pa.s.s through the Ma.s.sachusetts Inst.i.tute of Technology, or the Amherst Agricultural College, to the exclusion of such training as is given at Harvard, Yale, or Dartmouth; but that in a peculiar sense a large proportion of the Negro youths needed to have that education which would enable them to secure an economic foundation, without which no people can succeed in any of the higher walks of life.
It is because of the fact that the Tuskegee Inst.i.tute began at the bottom, with work in the soil, in wood, in iron, in leather, that it has now developed to the point where it is able to furnish employment as teachers to twenty-eight Negro graduates of the best colleges in the country. This is about three times as many Negro college graduates as any other inst.i.tution in the United States for the education of colored people employs, the total number of officers and instructors at Tuskegee being about one hundred and ten.
Those who once opposed this see now that while the Negro youth who becomes skilled in agriculture and a successful farmer may not be able himself to pa.s.s through a purely literary college, he is laying the foundation for his children and grandchildren to do it if desirable.
Industrial education in this generation is contributing in the highest degree to make what is called higher education a success. It is now realized that in so far as the race has intelligent and skillful producers, the greater will be the success of the minister, lawyer, doctor, and teacher. Opposition has melted away, too, because all men now see that it will take a long time to ”materialize” a race, millions of which hold neither houses nor railroads, nor bank stocks, nor factories, nor coal and gold mines.
Another reason for the growth of a better understanding of the objects and influence of industrial training is the fact, as before stated, that it has been taken up with such interest and activity by the Southern whites, and that it has been established at such universities as Cornell in the East, and in practically all of the state colleges of the great West.
It is now seen that the result of such education will be to help the black man to make for himself an independent place in our great American life. It was largely the poverty of the Negro that made him the prey of designing politicians immediately after the war; and wherever poverty and lack of industry exist to-day, one does not find in him that deep spiritual life which the race must in the future possess in a higher degree.
To those who still express the fear that perhaps too much stress is put upon industrial education for the Negro I would add that I should emphasize the same kind of training for any people, whether black or white, in the same stage of development as the ma.s.ses of the colored people.
For a number of years this country has looked to Germany for much in the way of education, and a large number of our brightest men and women are sent there each year. The official reports show that in Saxony, Germany, alone, there are 287 industrial schools, or one such school to every 14,641 people. This is true of a people who have back of them centuries of wealth and culture. In the South I am safe in saying that there is not more than one effective industrial school for every 400,000 colored people.
A recent dispatch from Germany says that the German Emperor has had a kitchen fitted up in the palace for the single purpose of having his daughter taught cooking. If all cla.s.ses and nationalities, who are in most cases thousands of years ahead of the Negro in the arts of civilization, continue their interest in industrial training, I cannot understand how any reasonable person can object to such education for a large part of a people who are in the poverty-stricken condition that is true of a large element of my race, especially when such hand training is combined, as it should be, with the best education of head and heart.
THE NEGRO IN THE REGULAR ARMY by Oswald Garrison Villard
When the Fifty-fourth Ma.s.sachusetts Regiment stormed Fort Wagner July 18, 1863, only to be driven back with the loss of its colonel, Robert Gould Shaw, and many of its rank and file, it established for all time the fact that the colored soldier would fight and fight well. This had already been demonstrated in Louisiana by colored regiments under the command of General G.o.dfrey Weitzel in the attack upon Port Hudson on May 27 of the same year. On that occasion regiments composed for the greater part of raw recruits, plantation hands with centuries of servitude under the lash behind them, stormed trenches and dashed upon cold steel in the hands of their former masters and oppressors. After that there was no more talk in the portion of the country of the ”natural cowardice”
of the negro. But the heroic qualities of Colonel Shaw, his social prominence and that of his officers, and the comparative nearness of their battlefield to the North, attracted greater and more lasting attention to the daring and bravery of their exploit, until it finally became fixed in many minds as the first real baptism of fire of colored American soldiers.
After Wagner the recruiting of colored regiments, originally opposed by both North and South, went on apace, particularly under the Federal government, which organized no less than one hundred and fifty-four, designated as ”United States Colored Troops.” Colonel Shaw's raising of a colored regiment aroused quite as much comment in the North because of the race prejudice it defied, as because of the novelty of the new organization. General Weitzel tendered his resignation the instant General B. F. Butler a.s.signed black soldiers to his brigade, and was with difficulty induced to serve on. His change of mind was a wise one, and not only because these colored soldiers covered him with glory at Port Hudson. It was his good fortune to be the central figure in one of the dramatic incidents of a war that must ever rank among the most thrilling and tragic the world has seen. The black cavalrymen who rode into Richmond, the first of the Northern troops to enter the Southern capital, went in waving their sabres and crying to the negroes on the sidewalks, ”We have come to set you free!” They were from the division of G.o.dfrey Weitzel, and American history has no more stirring moment.
In the South, notwithstanding the raising in 1861 of a colored Confederate regiment by Governor Moore of Louisiana (a magnificent body of educated colored men which afterwards became the First Louisiana National Guards of General Weitzel's brigade and the first colored regiment in the Federal Army), the feeling against negro troops was insurmountable until the last days of the struggle. Then no straw could be overlooked. When, in December, 1863, Major-General Patrick R.
Cleburne, who commanded a division of Hardee's Corps of the Confederate Army of the Tennessee, sent in a paper in which the employment of the slaves as soldiers of the South was vigorously advocated, Jefferson Davis indorsed it with the statement, ”I deem it inexpedient at this time to give publicity to this paper, and request that it be suppressed.” General Cleburne urged that ”freedom within a reasonable time” be granted to every slave remaining true to the Confederacy, and was moved to this action by the valor of the Fifty-fourth Ma.s.sachusetts, saying, ”If they [the negroes] can be made to face and fight bravely against their former masters, how much more probable is it that with the allurement of a higher reward, and led by those masters, they would submit to discipline and face dangers?”
With the ending of the civil war the regular army of the United States was reorganized upon a peace footing by an act of Congress dated July 28, 1866. In just recognition of the bravery of the colored volunteers six regiments, the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry and the Thirty-eighth, Thirty-ninth, Fortieth, and Forth-first Infantry, were designated as colored regiments. When the army was again reduced in 1869, the Thirty-eighth and Forty-first became the Twenty-fourth Infantry, and the Thirty-ninth and Fortieth became the Twenty-fifth. This left four colored regiments in the regular army as it was const.i.tuted from 1870 until 1901. There has never been a colored artillery organization in the regular service.
To these new regiments came a motley mixture of veterans of volunteer organizations, newly released slaves, and some freedmen of several years' standing but without military experience. They were eager to learn, and soon showed the same traits which distinguish the black regiments to-day,--loyalty to their officers and to their colors, sobriety and courage, and a notable pride in the efficiency of their corps. But if ever officers had to ”father and mother” their soldiers they were the company officers of these regiments. The captains in particular had to be bankers, secretaries, advisers, and judges for their men. As Lieutenant Grote Hutcheson has stated it, ”The men knew nothing, and the non-commissioned officers but little more. From the very circ.u.mstances of their preceding life it could not be otherwise.
They had no independence, no self-reliance, not a thought except for the present, and were filled with superst.i.tion.” Yet the officers were determined to prove the wisdom of the experiment. To do this they were forced to give their own attention to the minutest details of military administration, and to act as non-commissioned officers. The total lack of education among the men necessitated an enormous amount of writing by the officers. In the Ninth Cavalry only one man was found able to write well enough to be sergeant-major, and not for several years was it possible to obtain troop clerks. When the Tenth Cavalry was being recruited an officer was sent to Philadelphia with the express purpose of picking up educated colored men for the non-commissioned positions.
Difficult as the tasks of the officers thus were, most of them felt well repaid for their unusual labors by the affectionate regard in which they were held by their soldiers, and by the never-failing good humor with which the latter went about their duties.
As the years pa.s.sed the character of the colored soldiers naturally changed. In place of the war veterans, and of the men whose chains of servitude had just been struck off, came young men from the North and East with more education and more self-reliance. They depended less upon their officers, both in the barracks and in the field, yet they reverenced and cared for them as much as did their predecessors. Their greatest faults then as now were gambling and quarreling. On the other hand, the negro regiments speedily became favorably known because of greater sobriety and of fewer desertions than among the white soldiers.
It was the Ninth Cavalry which a few years ago astonished the army by reporting not a single desertion in twelve months, an unheard-of and perhaps undreamed-of record. In all that goes to make a good soldier, in drill, fidelity, and smartness, the negro regular from the first took front rank.
Nor was there ever any lack of the fighting quality which had gratified the nation at Fort Wagner, or at Fort Blakely, Ala., where the Seventy-third Colored Infantry, under Colonel Henry C. Merriam, stormed the enemy's works, in advance of orders, in one of the last actions of the war. It soon fell to the lot of the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry to prove that the negroes could do as well under fire in the Indian wars as they had when fighting for the freedom of their race. While the Twenty-fourth and Twenty-fifth Infantry had merely garrison work to do, the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry scouted for years against hostile Indians in Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, and Kansas, always acquitting themselves honorably. In September, 1868, a little over two years after their organization, three troops of the Ninth Cavalry did well in an action against Indians at Horsehead Hills, Texas. When General George A. Forsyth and his detachment of fifty scouts were surrounded and ”corralled” by seven hundred Indians on an island in the Republican River, it was the troop of Captain Louis H. Carpenter, of the Tenth Cavalry, which first came to their rescue. Similarly when Major T. T. Thornburg's command was nearly wiped out by Utes in 1879, it was Captain F. S. Dodge's Troop D of the Ninth which succeeded in reaching it in time, losing all its horses in so doing. This regiment alone took part in sixty Indian fights between 1868 and 1890, during which time it lost three officers and twenty-seven men killed, and had three officers and thirty-four men wounded. The Tenth Cavalry's casualties were also heavy during this same period, and it fought for many years over a most difficult country in New Mexico and Arizona, taking a conspicuous part in running to earth Geronimo's and Victoria's bands of Apaches.
On one of these campaigns Lieutenant Powhatan H. Clarke gave effective proof of the affection which the officers of colored regiments have for their men. In the fight in the Pineto Mountains with a portion of Geronimo's forces this young Southerner risked his life to save a colored sergeant who had fallen wounded in an open s.p.a.ce where both he and his rescuer were easy marks for the Apaches. For this gallant act Lieutenant Clarke rightly received a medal of honor. The Twenty-fourth Infantry, on the other hand, has contributed a striking instance of the devotion of colored soldiers to their officers. When Major Joseph W.
Wham, paymaster, was attacked by robbers on May 11, 1889, his colored escort fought with such gallantry that every one of the soldiers was awarded a medal of honor or a certificate of merit. Some of them stood their ground although badly wounded, notably Sergeant Benjamin Brown, who continued to fight and to encourage his men until shot through both arms. In a fight against Apaches in the Cuchilo Negro Mountains of New Mexico on August 16, 1881, Moses Williams, First Sergeant of Troop I, Ninth Cavalry, displayed such gallantry that he was given a medal of honor by common consent. When the only officer with the detachment, Lieutenant Gustavus Valois, had his horse shot under him, and was cut off from his men, Sergeant Williams promptly rallied the detachment, and conducted the right flank in a running fight for several hours with such coolness, bravery, and unflinching devotion to duty that he undoubtedly saved the lives of at least three comrades. His action in standing by and rescuing Lieutenant Valois was the more noteworthy because he and his men were subjected, in an exposed position, to a heavy fire from a large number of Indians. For splendid gallantry against Indians, while serving as sergeant of Troop K, Ninth Cavalry, on May 14, 1880, and August 12, 1881, George Jordan was also given a medal of honor. Five of the medal of honor men now in the service are colored soldiers, while fifteen others have ”certificates of merit” also awarded for conspicuous deeds of bravery.
It was not until the battle of Santiago, however, that the bulk of the American people realized that the standing army comprised regiments composed wholly of black men. Up to that time only one company of colored soldiers had served at a post east of the Mississippi. Even Major, later Brigadier-General, Guy V. Henry's gallop to the rescue of the Seventh Cavalry on December 30, 1890, with four troops of the Ninth Cavalry, attracted but little attention. This feat was the more remarkable because Major Henry's command had just completed a march of more than one hundred miles in twenty-four hours. But in the battle at Santiago, the four colored regiments won praise from all sides, particularly for their advance upon Kettle Hill, in which the Rough Riders also figured. From the very beginning of the movement of the army after its landing, the negro troops were in the front of the fighting, and contributed largely to the successful result. Although they suffered heavy losses, especially in officers, the men fought with the same gallantry they had displayed on the plains, as is attested by the honors awarded. In every company there were instances of personal gallantry.
The first sergeants especially lived up to the responsibilities placed upon them. The color sergeant of the Tenth Cavalry, Adam Houston, bore to the front not only his own flags, but those of the Third Cavalry when the latter's color sergeant was shot down. In several emergencies where troops or companies lost their white officers, the senior sergeants took command and handled their men in a faultless manner, notably in the Tenth Cavalry.
Indeed, the conduct of these men has done much to dispel the old belief that colored soldiers will fight only when they have efficient white officers. This may well have been true at one period of the civil war when the colored race as a whole had never even had the responsibilities attaching to free men. It is growing less and less true as time pa.s.ses and better educated men enter the ranks. In recognition of their achievements at Santiago a number of these black non-commissioned officers were made commissioned officers in several of the so-called ”immune” regiments of United States Volunteers raised in July, 1898.