had kept a fashionable boarding-house], and told them that I wanted the Opera-house for the colored people to give an entertainment and exhibition in. The request was extraordinary. Nobody but white people had ever been admitted to the Opera-house. But, after some hesitation and consultation, the request was granted. We gave the exhibition, and the white people all attended. It was really a beautiful affair, lovely tableaux, with gorgeous dresses, recitations, etc., and everybody was astonished that the colored people had so much taste and talent, and had got on so far in education. They said they were delighted and surprised, and they liked it so well that they wanted the entertainment repeated—it was given for one of our charities—but I was too wise for that. I didn’t want to run the chance of destroying the impression by repeating, and I said we would wait a while, and then show them something better. Well, the election came off in August, and everything went all right, and now the colored people in Mobile can have anything they want. There is the best feeling between the races. I tell you we should get on beautifully if the politicians would let us alone. It is politics that has made all the trouble in Alabama and in Mobile.” And I learned that in Mobile, as in many other places, the negroes were put in minor official positions, the duties of which they were capable of discharging, and had places in the police.
On “Louisiana Day” in the Exposition the colored citizens took their full share of the parade and the honors. Their societies marched with the others, and the races mingled on the grounds in unconscious equality of privileges. Speeches were made, glorifying the State and its history, by able speakers, the Governor among them; but it was the testimony of Democrats of undoubted Southern orthodoxy that the honors of the day were carried off by a colored clergyman, an educated man, who united eloquence with excellent good-sense, and who spoke as a citizen of Louisiana, proud of his native State, dwelling with richness of allusion upon its history. It was a perfectly manly speech in the assertion of the rights and the position of his race, and it breathed throughout the same spirit of good-will and amity in a common hope of progress that characterized the talk of the colored woman commissioner of Mobile. It was warmly applauded, and accepted, so far as I heard, as a matter of course.
No one, however, can see the mass of colored people in the cities and on the plantations, the ignorant mass, slowly coming to moral consciousness, without a recognition of the magnitude of the negro problem. I am glad that my State has not the practical settlement of it, and I cannot do less than express profound sympathy with the people who have. They inherit the most difficult task now anywhere visible in human progress. They will make mistakes, and they will do injustice now and then; but one feels like turning away from these, and thanking God for what they do well.
There are many encouraging things in the condition of the negro. Good-will, generally, among the people where he lives is one thing; their tolerance of his weaknesses and failings is another. He is himself, here and there, making heroic sacrifices to obtain an education. There are negro mothers earning money at the wash-tub to keep their boys at school and in college. In the South-west there is such a call for colored teachers that the Straight University in New Orleans, which has about five hundred pupils, cannot begin to supply the demand, although the teachers, male and female, are paid from thirty-five to fifty dollars a month. A colored graduate of this school a year ago is now superintendent of the colored schools in Memphis, at a salary of $1200 a year.
Are these exceptional cases? Well, I suppose it is also exceptional to see a colored clergyman in his surplice seated in the chancel of the most important white Episcopal church in New Orleans, assisting in the service; but it is significant. There are many good auguries to be drawn from the improved condition of the negroes on the plantations, the more rational and less emotional character of their religious services, and the hold of the temperance movement on all classes in the country places.
II.—SOCIETY IN THE NEW SOUTH.
The American Revolution made less social change in the South than in the North. Under conservative influences the South developed her social life with little alteration in form and spirit—allowing for the decay that always attends conservatism—down to the Civil War. The social revolution which was in fact accomplished contemporaneously with the political severance from Great Britain, in the North, was not effected in the South until Lee offered his sword to Grant, and Grant told him to keep it and beat it into a ploughshare. The change had indeed been inevitable, and ripening for four years, but it was at that moment universally recognized. Impossible, of course, except by the removal of slavery, it is not wholly accounted for by the removal of slavery; it results also from an economical and political revolution, and from a total alteration of the relations of the South to the rest of the world. The story of this social change will be one of the most marvellous the historian has to deal with.
Provincial is a comparative term. All England is provincial to the Londoner, all America to the Englishman. Perhaps New York looks upon Philadelphia as provincial; and if Chicago is forced to admit that Boston resembles ancient Athens, then Athens, by the Chicago standard, must have been a very provincial city. The root of provincialism is localism, or a condition of being on one side and apart from the general movement of contemporary life. In this sense, and compared with the North in its absolute openness to every wind from all parts of the globe, the South was provincial. Provincialism may have its decided advantages, and it may nurture many superior virtues and produce a social state that is as charming as it is interesting, but along with it goes a certain self-appreciation, which ultracosmopolitan critics would call Concord-like, that seems exaggerated to outsiders.
The South, and notably Virginia and South Carolina, cherished English traditions long after the political relation was severed. But it kept the traditions of the time of the separation, and did not share the literary and political evolution of England. Slavery divided it from the North in sympathy, and slavery, by excluding European emigration, shut out the South from the influence of the new ideas germinating in Europe. It was not exactly true to say that the library of the Southern gentleman stopped with the publications current in the reign of George the Third, but, well stocked as it was with the classics and with the English literature become classic, it was not likely to contain much of later date than the Reform Bill in England and the beginning of the abolition movement in the North. The pages of De Bow’s Review attest the ambition and direction of Southern scholarship—a scholarship not much troubled by the new problems that were at the time rending England and the North. The young men who still went abroad to be educated brought back with them the traditions and flavor of the old England and not the spirit of the new, the traditions of the universities and not the new life of research and doubt in them. The conservatism of the Southern life was so strong that the students at Northern colleges returned unchanged by contact with a different civilization. The South met the North in business and in politics, and in a limited social intercourse, but from one cause and another for three-quarters of a century it was practically isolated, and consequently developed a peculiar social life.
One result of this isolation was that the South was more homogeneous than the North, and perhaps more distinctly American in its characteristics. This was to be expected, since it had one common and overmastering interest in slavery, had little foreign admixture, and was removed from the currents of commerce and the disturbing ideas of Reform. The South, so far as society was concerned, was an agricultural aristocracy, based upon a perfectly defined lowest class in the slaves, and holding all trade, commerce, and industrial and mechanical pursuits in true mediæval contempt. Its literature was monarchical, tempered by some Jeffersonian, doctrinaire notions of the rights of man, which were satisfied, however, by an insistence upon the sovereignty of the States, and by equal privileges to a certain social order in each State. Looked at, then, from the outside, the South appeared to be homogeneous, but from its own point of view, socially, it was not at all so. Social life in these jealously independent States developed almost as freely and variously as it did in the Middle Ages in the free cities of Italy. Virginia was not at all
