Part 5

ANNIE L. BURTON

In a little clearing in the backwoods of Harding County, Kentucky, there stood years ago a rude cabin within whose walls Abraham Lincoln passed his childhood. An "unaccountable" man he has been called, and the adjective was well chosen, for who could account for a mind and nature like Lincoln's with the ancestry he owned? His father was a thriftless, idle carpenter, scarcely supporting his family, and with but the poorest living. His mother was an uneducated woman, but must have been of an entirely different nature, for she was able to impress upon her boy a love of learning. During her life, his chief, in fact his only book, was the Bible, and in this he learned to read. Just before he was nine years old, the father brought his family across the Ohio River into Illinois, and there in the unfloored log cabin, minus windows and doors, Abraham lived and grew. It was during this time that the mother died, and in a short time the shiftless father with his family drifted back to the old home, and here found another for his children in one who was a friend of earlier days. This woman was of a thrifty nature, and her energy made him floor the cabin, hang doors, and open up windows. She was fond of the children and cared for them tenderly, and to her the boy Abraham owed many pleasant hours.

As he grew older, his love for knowledge increased and he obtained whatever books he could, studying by the firelight, and once walking six miles for an English Grammar. After he read it, he walked the six miles to return it. He needed the book no longer, for with this as with his small collection of books, what he once read was his. He absorbed the books he read.

During these early years he did "odd jobs" for the neighbors. Even at this age, his gift of story telling was a notable one, as well as his sterling honesty. His first knowledge of slavery in all its horrors came to him when he was about twenty-one years old. He had made a trip to New Orleans, and there in the old slave market he saw an auction. His face paled, and his spirits rose in revolt at the coarse jest of the auctioneer, and there he registered a vow within himself, "If ever I have a chance to strike against slavery, I will strike and strike hard." To this end he worked and for this he paid "the last full measure of devotion."

His political life began with a defeat for the Illinois Legislature in 1830, but he was returned in 1834, 1836, 1838, and declined re-election in 1840, preferring to study law and prepare for his future. "Honest Abe" he has been called, and throughout Illinois that characteristic was the prominent one known of him. From this time his rise was rapid. Sent to the Congress of the nation, he seldom spoke, but when he did his terse though simple expression always won him a hearing. His simplicity and frankness was deceptive to the political leaders, and from its very fearlessness often defeated them.

His famous debates with Senator Douglas, the "Little Giant," spread his reputation from one end of the country to the other, and at their close there was no question as to Lincoln's position in the North, or on the vital question of the day.

The spirit of forbearance he carried with him to the White House, "with malice toward none, with charity for all." This was the spirit that carried him through the four awful years of the war. The martyr's crown hovered over him from the outset. The martyr's spirit was always his. The burden of the war always rested on his shoulders. The fathers, sons and brothers, the honored dead of Gettysburg, of Antietam, all lay upon his mighty heart.

He never forgot his home friends, and when occasionally one dropped in on him, the door was always open. They frequently had tea in the good old-fashioned way, and then Lincoln listened to the news of the village, old stories were retold, new ones told, and the old friendships cemented by new bonds.

Then came the end, swift and sudden, and gloom settled upon the country; for in spite of ancestry, self-education, ungainly figure, ill-fitting clothes, the soul of the man had conquered even the stubborn South, while the cold-blooded North was stricken to the heart. The noblest one of all had been taken.

THE RACE QUESTION IN AMERICA

DR. P. THOMAS STANFORD

AUTHOR OF THE "TRAGEDY OF THE NEGRO IN AMERICA"

As a member of the negro race, I myself have suffered as a child whose parents were born in slavery, deprived of all influences of the ennobling life, made obedient to the will of the white man by the lash and chain, and sold to the highest bidder when there was no more use for them.

The first negro fact for white thought is--that my clients, the colored people here in America, are not responsible for being here any more than they are responsible for their conditions of ignorance and poverty. They suddenly emerge from their prison house poor, without a home, without food or clothing, and ignorant. Now the enemies of God and of the progress of civilization in our country are to-day introducing a system of slavery with which they hope to again enslave the colored people. To carry out their evil designs they retain able politicians, lawyers and newspapers to represent them, such as Senator Tillman, the Hon. John Temple Graves of Georgia and the Baltimore Sun, and they are trying the negro on four counts which allege that the race is ignorant, cannot be taught, is lazy and immoral.

Now, are the negroes, as a whole, guilty of these charges? In the first place, the negro race of America is not ignorant. In the year 1833 John C. Calhoun, senator from South Carolina, is reported to have said that if he could find a single negro who understood the Greek syntax, he would believe the negro was human and would treat him as such. At that time it was a very safe test. God accepted the challenge in behalf of the negro race, and inspired his white sons and daughters both in the North and South to teach their brothers in black; and a few years afterward black men were examined and the world pronounced them scholars, while later still the schools were using a Greek grammar written by a black man, W. S. Scarborough of Wilberforce, O. In his class were Frederick Douglas, Henry Highland Garnett, Robert Elliot, the Rev. J. C. Price and John M. Langstone, as defenders of the race. Bishop Allen Payne, Bishop Hood and John B. Reaver will ever be remembered for their godly piety and Christian example, as we shall also remember Bishop, Sumner and Bubois for their great literary productions, William Washington Brown as the greatest organizer and financier of the century, Prof. Booker Washington as the greatest industrial educator of the world, and last, but not least, Thomas Condon, the greatest crank for the spiritual training and higher education of the negro race.

Under the leadership of such men, assisted by our white friends and backed up by our colored race journals--the Christian Banner of Philadelphia, the Christian Recorder, the Star of Zion and the Afro-American Ledger of Baltimore, Ind., the National Baptist Union of Pennsylvania, the Age of New York, the Christian Organizer of Virginia and the Guardian of Boston--our onward march to civilization is phenomenal and by these means we have reduced illiteracy 50 per cent.

In the South we have over $12,000,000 worth of school property, 3,000 teachers, 50 high schools, 17 academies, 125 colleges, 10 law and medical schools, 25 theological seminaries, all doing a mighty work for God and humanity.

Now as to laziness. We have now in practice 14,000 lawyers and doctors, and have accumulated over $150,000,000 worth of church property. In the South we have over 150,000 farms and houses, valued at $900,000,000, and personal property at $170,000,000. We have raised over $11,000,000 for educational purposes. The property per capita for every colored man, woman and child in the United States is estimated at $75, and we are operating successfully several banks and factories; we have 7,500,000 acres of land, and the business activity of the colored people was never as thoroughly aroused as it is to-day.

When I come to deal with the charge of immorality I bow my head and blush for shame, first because if the charge be true, I see they are getting like the white man every day. I know that at the close of the American civil war the 4,000,000 negroes had more than 25 per cent. of white blood coursing through their veins.

What about this new educated negro? Just ask the Pullman Car Company, which employs hundreds of negroes, into whose care thousands of women and children of our best American families are entrusted every day.

Now, you cannot do without the negro, because if you send him away, you will run after him. He is here to stay. The only way to deal successfully with the colored race is God's way. First, recognize that he is your guest; second, recognize that you have robbed him of his birthplace, home, family and savings. It is these facts that are causing so much unrest on the part of the whites in this country. The negro loves his country, which he has proved beyond a doubt in every American battle, in every act of loyalty to his country, and in his long and patient suffering. Pay him what you owe him by educating him. Give him an opportunity to live. Allow him to live in decent parts of your city. Pay wages sufficient to support his children. Do this and God will remove the objectionable negro from the land.

* * * * *

The Negro stands to-day upon an eminence that overlooks more than two decades spent in efforts to ameliorate the condition of seven million immortal souls by opening before their hitherto dark and cheerless lives possibilities of development into a perfect and symmetrical manhood and womanhood.

The retrospect presents to us a picture of a people's moral degradation and mental gloom caused by slavery. A people absolutely sunk in the lowest depth of a poverty which reduced them to objects of charity and surrounded them with difficulties which have ever stood as impregnable barriers in their way to speedy advancement in all those qualities that make the useful citizen. Every influence of state and society life seems to be against their progress and like some evil genius, these Negro hating ghosts are forever hunting them with the idea that their future must be one of subserviency to the white race.

Hated and oppressed by the combined wisdom, wealth and statesmanship of a mighty confederacy who watched and criticised their mistakes which were strongly magnified by those who fain would write destruction upon the Emancipation; they are expected to rise from this condition.

The idea of giving to the newly enfranchised a sound, practical education was considered at the dawn of freedom, an easy solution of what as an unsolved problem threatened the perpetuity of republican institutions. Within a year from the firing on Sumter, benevolent and farsighted Northern friends had established schools from Washington to the Gulf of Mexico, which became centers of light penetrating the darkness and scattering the blessings of an enlightened manhood far and wide.

The history of the world cannot produce a more affecting spectacle than the growth of this mighty Christian philanthropy which, in beginning amid the din of battle, has steadily marched on through every opposing influence, and lifted a race from weakness to strength, from poverty to wealth, from moral and intellectual nonentity to place and power among the nations of the earth.

We have ten millions of colored people in the United States whose condition is much better to-day than it was fifty years ago. Then he had nothing, not even a name. To-day he has 160,000 farms under good cultivation and valued at $4,000,000 and has personal property valued at $200,000,000. In the Southland the negroes own 160 first-class drug stores, nine banks, 13 building associations, and 100 insurance and benefit companies, two street railways and an electric at Jacksonville, Fla., which they started some few years ago when the white people passed the Jim Crow law for that state.