SOCIAL PROGRESS, 1820-1860[1]

[Footnote 1:  This chapter follows closely upon Chapter III, Section 5, and is largely complementary to Chapter VIII.]

So far in our study we have seen the Negro as the object of interest on the part of the American people.  Some were disposed to give him a helping hand, some to keep him in bondage, and some thought that it might be possible to dispose of any problem by sending him out of the country.  In all this period of agitation and ferment, aside from the efforts of friends in his behalf, just what was the Negro doing to work out his own salvation?  If for the time being we can look primarily at constructive effort rather than disabilities, just what do we find that on his own account he was doing to rise to the full stature of manhood?

Naturally in the answer to such a question we shall have to be concerned with those people who had already attained unto nominal freedom.  We shall indeed find many examples of industrious slaves who, working in agreement with their owners, managed sometimes to purchase themselves and even to secure ownership of their families.  Such cases, while considerable in the aggregate, were after all exceptional, and for the ordinary slave on the plantation the outlook was hopeless enough.  In 1860 the free persons formed just one-ninth of the total Negro population in the country, there being 487,970 of them to 3,953,760 slaves.  It is a commonplace to remark the progress that the race has made since emancipation.  A study of the facts, however, will show that with all their disadvantages less than half a million people had before 1860 not only made such progress as amasses a surprising total, but that they had already entered every large field of endeavor in which the race is engaged to-day.

When in course of time the status of the Negro in the American body politic became a live issue, the possibility and the danger of an imperium in imperio were perceived; and Rev. James W.C.  Pennington, undoubtedly a leader, said in his lectures in London and Glasgow:  “The colored population of the United States have no destiny separate from that of the nation in which they form an integral part.  Our destiny is bound up with that of America.  Her ship is ours; her pilot is ours; her storms are ours; her calms are ours.  If she breaks upon any rock, we break with her.  If we, born in America, can not live upon the same soil upon terms of equality with the descendants of Scotchmen, Englishmen, Irishmen, Frenchmen, Germans, Hungarians, Greeks, and Poles, then the fundamental theory of America fails and falls to the ground."[1] While everybody was practically agreed upon this fundamental matter of the relation of the race to the Federal Government, more and more there developed two lines of thought, equally honest, as to the means by which the race itself was to attain unto the highest things that American civilization had to offer.  The leader of one school of thought