The Journal of Negro History Volume III Part 50

ORVILLE HOLLIDAY.

_The American Cavalryman._ By HENRY F. DOWNING. The Neale Publis.h.i.+ng Company, New York, 1917. Pp. 306. Price $1.50.

This is a Liberian romance written by Henry F. Downing, a colored man who evidently spent some years in Liberia. The diction is good, the style pleasing, and the story interesting, but it is not a sympathetic portrayal of African character and customs. It is written from a white man's point of view and shows a tendency to regard the white man's civilization of today as the only true standard. He shows, however, that he does not always approve of the European method of dealing with the African. While describing an unequal contest between the cavalryman and natives, he says: "But alas! in war, as in finance and love, victory does not always smile upon the most deserving. She usually favors the numerically stronger side; that is, unless the less numerous party is armed with quick firing guns, dumdum bullet, and other harmless weapons that Europeans think it criminal to employ against one another, but cheerfully use to Christianize and civilize the poor helpless black African."

The chief value of the work lies in its portrayal of native customs, some of which are beautiful, some wholly barbarous and all more or less tinctured with superst.i.tion. But, when we pause to think how rife superst.i.tion still is among all so-called civilized peoples, we conclude that it is a belief hard to eradicate from human nature. Even in our own country people were hanged as witches a little over a hundred years ago.

While cunning and shrewdness are shown to hold an exalted place in the native character, still lying and cheating, when discovered, are severely punished. Loyalty to friends and fidelity to pledges are held in great esteem. Human life does not seem to be valued very highly judging from the readiness with which a chief extinguished it by having all disloyal or disobedient followers beheaded at a moment's notice. It is evident throughout, however, that human nature is the same in civilized and uncivilized peoples.

There is no attempt to portray the history of Liberia in these pages, a thing which in my opinion would have made the work stronger and far more valuable. It does give a fair picture of Monrovia, the capital city, and presents, to some extent, the need for wise and just administration and the necessity of funds to improve the city and endow it with parks, libraries, and places of amus.e.m.e.nt. The value of the American constabulary force is felt and the importance of increased communications, union and helpfulness between the government and the tribes are emphasized. Altogether it is a work worth writing and worth reading, although it does not give enough prominence to the n.o.bler traits of the native character.

IDA GIBBS HUNT.

_Education for Life._ By FRANCIS G. PEABODY, Vice-President of the Board of Trustees. The Story of Hampton Inst.i.tute, told in Connection with the Fiftieth Anniversary of the School. Doubleday, Page and Company, New York, 1918. Pp. 393. Price $2.50.

This work has for its background a brief account of the Negro during the Civil War and the Reconstruction, serving as the occasion for the beginning of the successful career of General Samuel Chapman Armstrong, the founder of Hampton Inst.i.tute. The actual history of the inst.i.tution appears under such captions as the beginnings of Hampton, the years of promise, the coming of the Indian, the years of fulfilment, the end of an era, the coming of Frissell, and the expansion of Hampton. The author has endeavored also to explain the relations of Hampton and the South and to forecast the future possibilities of this school. The work is well printed and beautifully ill.u.s.trated.

In the _Springfield Republican_ of July 6, 1918, A. L. Dawes said in her review of this work:

"Hampton inst.i.tute has chosen a fitting occasion, the completion of fifty years of life and work, to issue the history of its achievement.

It comes at the end of one distinct epoch, and the beginning of another, when it is of much value to consider the results which make a foundation for new progress. It is a record of wonderful achievement, and this amazing inst.i.tution may well be proud of it. We are led from the huddled camp of contrabands in 1868 to the allied armies in 1918; from a crowd of men and women without a past and seemingly without a future--even a possibility only to the eyes of patriotism and faith--we are led in these pages to the ranks of efficient soldiers and brilliant officers fighting with southern men whose grandfathers called their grandfathers slaves!

"Faith has become pride and patriotism has become an individual possession in a resurrected race. The book might well have been called by that t.i.tle--'The Resurrection of a Race'--but its distinguished author, in calling it 'Education for Life,' has chosen to consider Hampton's double mission to the race and to the world in connection with education. This latter aspect of its work makes the book particularly pertinent at this time of world reconstruction. This attractive volume will be read with interest and satisfaction by the many widespread friends of Hampton Inst.i.tute, and it will also be sought with eagerness by another audience, the large public, which is seeking new theories of education for a new world. This group will find it a clear and compelling statement of a new philosophy of education worked out there, heretofore neither recognized nor understood outside, but limited either to manual training or vocational education.

"Hampton has been fortunate in its biographer. It is a labor of love, by Rev. Francis G. Peabody, one of the few remaining trustees whose service covers its three epochs and whose friends.h.i.+p has inspired its three princ.i.p.als. Perhaps no one else has so entered into the life of the place. He has made himself one with pupils and faculty and trustees and public in such friendly fas.h.i.+on that he may rightly say 'we' from any point of view. His many readers will look for noteworthy diction amounting to a new use of words, grace of speech and charm of phrase, a startling power of insight, a pa.s.sion for social service and the revelation of the spiritual in all human affairs, with the inspiration which compels. These things Dr. Peabody's readers expect of him, but it might have been questioned whether he could write a history. In this book he has shown us that history is the story of life, and he has used all these abilities to discover and fitly express the life which has become Hampton Inst.i.tute. Not the least of all his skill has appeared in what he has left out--so that the book is never dull though it is crowded with facts. Everything is here that is needed to answer the questions of any objector, and what is more difficult, of any friend. The ill.u.s.trations are not only interesting, but valuable footnotes to history, and there are a number of collections of statistics at the end of the book of incomparable worth to the student of these subjects; we cannot enough commend their range and selection.

"Among the rest, we notice a just commendation of the Hampton Club in this city. All through the book explanation forestalls objection, while old friends find new information and new reasons for half-understood methods. Such are the acc.u.mulating exposition of the Hampton idea, and the description of circ.u.mstances and resources which condition all action, and determine the measure of progress. Those who know and love this wonderful place will be gratified at the stress laid on the 'Hampton spirit' of service as the explanation of its success, as well as the constant recognition of the spiritual in the methods as well as the aims of this hothouse of missionary effort. No one familiar with the school would have found the record complete without the stressing of this element at once its motive and its life.

Few could have so well defined that elusive but forceful thing--'the Hampton spirit.'

"It needed all the writer's ability to set forth fitly the ardent Armstrong and the able Frissell--witness his success in this characterization of them:

"'Never were two administrative officers more unlike each other.

Armstrong was impetuous, magnetic, volcanic; Frissell was reserved, sagacious, prudent. The gifts of the one were those of action; the strength of the other was in discretion.'

"He has given us all fresh knowledge of both men. By his choice and collocation of extracts he shows Armstrong not only to have had the enthusiastic impact on his world known to all men, but also a forelooking philosophy which guided him to a definite end. He brings out the long line of unusual circ.u.mstances which prepared him for this work, and in repeating the vision in which like a Hebrew prophet the young officer was called to teach the Negroes, the writer shows that work to have been a definite growth. No one who knew Samuel C.

Armstrong can ever forget him, or ever describe him, but not one of his wide circle ever failed to be moved by any contact with him to put forth his own powers to their full measure.

"Dr. Peabody does full justice to the help and service of the Freedmen's Bureau, which from the first linked the inst.i.tution with the government, and to the American Missionary a.s.sociation, which made its beginning possible. He further shows many missionary and philanthropic sources upon which it has always drawn. If he halts a little in enthusiastic justice to Gen. Benjamin F. Butler, who began this crusade, he has evidently done it best--an unexpected best it must be said, from a Harvard professor! Samuel Armstrong was moved by his Christian impulses and missionary inheritance to help these needy people, but there could hardly have been a more unpromising opportunity.

"The task which Armstrong took up was greater than the present generation can imagine. Dr. Peabody has recognized this by a clear and dispa.s.sionate description of the situation in 1868, an a.n.a.lysis of the greatest value to the present-day reader. Armstrong's high courage and faith brought him to the day when he saw the race well on the high road to its place in the sun, before he dropped his mantle on the shoulders of his successor. It is doubtful, perhaps, whether he saw clearly how much he had done nor how firmly he had established his principles of the necessity of work and respect for it. Dr. Peabody brings out very distinctly this his great achievement, but it is superfluous to quote from a story which everyone will want to read for himself.

"Mindful of the fact that education depends upon personal contact, this book deals largely with the work of the two outstanding personalities, who have made the inst.i.tution what it is. Hollis Burke Frissell, who took up the work of princ.i.p.al when Armstrong left it twenty-five years ago--'Dr. Frissell' as everyone knew him--proved to be in some ways one of the great men of his time, certainly so if you give a high value to education. As one of his close friends has said of him, 'He invariably grew to the measure of the stature that his work called for.'

"If Dr. Peabody has failed at all in the hard task of describing one in whom the full round of qualities blended into the white light of simplicity it is perhaps in not making his virility sufficiently evident. The first and last impression Frissell made was of lovableness, and he was so intent on getting work done that he never cared to be known as its author. Therefore, even his friends did not always discover his strength or sometimes his greatness. He carried on the school to a phenominal success and he developed more than one beginning to a definite policy.

"In the latter part of Gen. Armstrong's career a simple occurrence changed the whole character of the school. From it the school developed into a world inst.i.tution. When the government asked Gen.

Armstrong to continue the education of seventeen Indians already begun by Capt. Pratt, the task was undertaken as a civil and Christian duty, but thus was started a government policy, and an educational experiment which, carried on and broadened to other races under Dr.

Frissell, has changed the face of our own land and altered the conditions of backward races the world over. Because of this great historical fact, Hampton should always keep up its Indian department, which witnesses to the beginning of its world relation.

"The pa.s.sing of time after the Civil War and emanc.i.p.ation also made possible to Dr. Frissell the development of another policy, that of the unification of the North and the South. This was something very near his heart, and for it he started the southern education board--which was his creation more fully than Dr. Peabody explains--the Jeans board, much of the southern work of the Rockefeller or general educational board and other well-known agencies to this end. And to accomplish the reconciliation of the races and the regions he gave the vital force which finally cost him his life. The future will render this service its due meed of praise, as the writer so well sets forth, a service carried on in the midst of misunderstanding and sharp criticism.

"Dr. Peabody has devoted himself especially on bringing out the growth of Dr. Frissell's carefully-thought-out educational ideals, whereby he added the value of work to the necessity of it in a complete education. Under Frissell, as is so well shown, Hampton entered on its second stage, its relation to the philosophy of education. Men came from all over the world to study the question of the training of native races. Inspired by his work, Frissell saw the possibilities on every side, and looked far into the future. Thus, as has been said, his set purpose broadened the school to include Porto Rico, Cuba, the Philippines, and even Africa, making it what he loved to call it, a 'race laboratory.' That he succeeded appears in the constant stream of officials, educators and philanthropists from all over the globe coming to Hampton that they may study and copy its methods. The vision of the future which was given to Dr. Frissell was not so much a vision of a new race, as with Armstrong; it was for Frissell a vision of a new humanity.

"It is this vision of 'Education for life' which Dr. Peabody brings out so clearly--both its meaning and its value. The oldest friends of Hampton have hardly understood it before, so well does he explain it, and so thoroughly does he show that its purpose is to make men and women. Artisans and skilled workmen come out of it, but its first purpose is to develop individuals and all its interests tend to this end. This explains its limitations also, and answers many complaints.

The white teacher who recently left because there was 'no future' for her own career; the educator who complained of a system which continued to educate on general lines when some vocational diversion would be more profitable; those who support the objections of the 'Crisis' that Hampton is not a university--all these critics fail to understand the new philosophy of Hampton and its dominant human motive. It would be a great mistake if, as appears to be hinted here, any concessions should be made to the demand of these last critics, whose aims would destroy the whole idea of Hampton, and its value as a world experiment. The author of the book and distinguished student of social ethics so strongly brings out its claim to a new education, for a new world that (to repeat) the reader cannot fail to inquire if this is the solution of the future in our forthcoming new world.

"Dr. Peabody brings us to the beginning of the third era and pays a deserved tribute to the new princ.i.p.al. Rev. James E. Gregg, who enters on the task at a critical time. Just now, when the race question is acute both here and everywhere, and when the new democracy is demanding a new education, there could hardly be a greater opportunity for the man or the school.

This inadequate sketch of a most informing and inspiring book may well be closed with a few paragraphs which sum up the aims of Hampton Inst.i.tute:

"'In short, the fundamental issue in all education for life is between a training to make things and a training to make character. Is a man to be taught carpentering primarily that a house shall be well built, or that in the building the man himself shall get intelligence, self-mastery and skill?'

"'The principle was definitely accepted that these shops and cla.s.ses were maintained, not as sources of profit, but as factors in an education for life. Young men and women were not to be regarded as satisfactory products of Hampton Inst.i.tute because each could do one thing and get good wages for doing it, but because each had been trained to apply mind and will to the single task, and had made it not only a way of living, but a way of life.'

"'Trade education as conceived gradually developed and finally realized at Hampton Inst.i.tute is a development of the person through the trade, rather than a development of the trade through the person.

The product is not primarily goods, but goodness; not so much profit as personality.... These students become delivered from the benumbing conditions of modern industry by the emanc.i.p.ating and humanizing effect of the Hampton scheme of industrial training, and those who are thus initiated in a large view of their small opportunities are likely to find their way, not only to those occupations, which are still open at the top, but to those resources of happiness which are discovered when work has become a vocation, and labor has contributed to life.'"

NOTES

In the introduction to Book II of _Negro Folk-Songs_ the author, Mrs.

Natalie Curtis Burlin, has some interesting paragraphs showing the connection of this music with certain origins in Africa. She says:

"That Negro folk-song is indeed an offshoot from an African root, n.o.body who has heard Africans sing or even beat the drum can deny. The American Negroes are sprung, of course, from many tribes; but whereas the native traffic in slaves and captives brought individuals from widely separated parts of the continent to the coasts and thus to the European slavers, the great ma.s.s of Negroes that filled the slave s.h.i.+ps destined for America probably belonged--according to some authorities--to the big linguistic stock called Bantu, comprising some fifty million people south of the equator. The Zulu and Ndau tribes, whose songs I studied, are of this stock. Yet, as there are over a hundred million Negroes on the Dark Continent, whose different traits are probably represented in some form in this country, all statements as to musical derivations could be made with final authority only by one who had studied comprehensively the music of many different tribes _in Africa_. This much, however, one may most emphatically affirm: though the Negro, transplanted to other lands, absorbed much musically from a surrounding civilization, yet the characteristics which give to his music an interest worthy of particular study are precisely those which differentiate Negro songs from the songs of the neighboring white man; they are racial traits, and the black man brought them from the Dark Continent.

"The most obvious point of demarcation between Negro music and European is found, of course, in the rhythm. The simpler rhythms natural to the white man (I speak of folk-music, the people's song, not of the elaborate creations of trained musicians) are usually even and symmetrical. Throughout western Europe and in English and Latin countries, the accents fall as a rule on the stressed syllables of the spoken tongue and on the regular beats of the music. The opposite is the case in Negro songs: here the rhythms are uneven, jagged, and, at a first hearing, eccentric, for the accents fall most frequently on the short notes and on the naturally _unstressed_ beats, producing what we call 'syncopation' of a very intricate and highly developed order. The peculiarity of this syncopation is best explained to the layman by drawing attention to the way in which the natural rhythms of the English language are distorted to fit the rhythm of Negro music: where the white man would sing, '_Go down Moses_,' the Negro chants, '_Go down, Moses_,' while a phrase like '_See my Mother_,' becomes in the mouth of the colored singer '_See my Mother_.' These identical accents are found in even the wordless vowel refrains of native African songs. Rhythmically the Negro folk-song has far more variety of accent than the European; it captivates the ear and the imagination with its exciting vitality and with its sense of alertness and movement. For this reason Negro rhythms and white man imitations of them popularized as 'rag-time' have spread far and wide and have conquered the world to-day. The black man has by nature a highly organized rhythmic sense. A totally uneducated Negro, dancing or playing the bones, is often a consummate artist in rhythm, performing with utter abandon and yet with flawless accuracy. My African informant, Kamba Simango, thought nothing of singing one rhythm, beating another with his hands and dancing a third--and all at once!

"Melodically as well as rhythmically, American Negro songs possess distinct characteristics. One of these is a very prevalent use of the pentatonic or five-tone scale, corresponding to the black keys of the piano. If one comes upon a group of colored men unconsciously humming or whistling at work, most often it is the five-tone scale that utters their musical thoughts. This scale--along with other scales--is heard in black Africa also, and in the music of many simple peoples in different parts of the world. Indeed, just as totally unrelated races at certain stages of culture seem to trace many of the same rudimentary symbols and designs on pottery and in textiles, so in music, the archaic simplicity of the five-tone scale would seem almost a basic human art-instinct. Yet the highly developed civilization and the carefully defined musical systems of China and other nations of the farthest East retain the pentatonic scale in wide use, the Chinese in their philosophical and mystical theories of music, linking the five-tones symbolically with the heavenly bodies. It is surprising how much variety can be achieved with those five tones. One of the most graceful melodies that I know in all music is the popular Chinese 'lily Song' which I recorded from a Chinese actor and which possesses the sheer beauty of outline and the firm delicacy of a Chinese drawing. Indeed, the melodic possibilities of the five-tone scale, containing a charm absolutely peculiar to that scale, instead of being limited, seem almost endless.

"American Negro music, is however, by no means restricted to this tonality, for we find a broad indulgence in the major and minor modes of modern art, and also there are many songs in which occur tones foreign to those scales most common of which is perhaps the minor, or flat, seventh. Then, too, there are songs framed in the scale with a sharp fourth; and we also find, though more rarely in Negro music, the augmented interval of three semitones. Those of us who have noted Arabic folk-songs are accustomed to a.s.sociate this latter interval with Semitic music; occurring as it does in African music also it reminds us of the contact between the black population of Africa and the Semitic peoples in the white north of the continent whose caravan trade brought them into communication with the more savage interior, while their s.h.i.+ps touched at ports along the coasts and even landed colonists on the Eastern sh.o.r.es, where Arab trade across the Red Sea must have existed since early Bible times. As the age-old slave traffic brought captives from African tribes out from the heart of black Africa to the north, we can readily see how, since the very dawn of history, Negro and Semitic cultures must have touched. One of the Bantu legends in my collection from Portuguese East Africa is probably of Semitic origin, and the song which it embodies seems also tinged with foreign color. Without doubt, Semitic tunes and musical intervals found their way to African ears, while, on the other side, African Negro drum-beats and syncopations must have influenced Berber, Moorish and thus perhaps even Spanish rhythms.

"Another characteristic of the Negro, musically, is a harmonic sense indicating musical intuition of a high order. This instinct for natural polyphony is made clear in the recording of the Negro songs in this collection, wherein I have noted the four-part harmony as sung extemporaneously by colored boys who had had no musical training whatever. Some of the most beautiful improvisational part-singing that I ever heard arose from the throats of utterly illiterate black laborers in a tobacco factory. One has but to attend a colored church, whether North or South, to hear men and women break naturally into alto, tenor or ba.s.s parts (and even subdivisions of these), to realize how instinctively the Negro musical mind thinks harmonies. I have heard players in colored bands perform one part on an instrument and sing another while all those around him were playing and singing still different parts. Yet it has been a.s.serted by some people that the harmonic sense of the Negro is a product of white environment and that the black man owes his intuitive gift to the slave-holders who sang hymns, ballads and popular songs in his hearing! With all due allowance for white influence, which has been great, of course, the fact remains that in savage Africa, remote from European culture, many of the most primitive pagan songs are sung in parts with elaborate interludes on drums tuned to different pitches. Indeed the music of the Dark Continent is rich in polyphonic as well as rhythmic suggestions for the European. Perhaps the war may help to p.r.i.c.k some of the vanity of the white race, which, looking down with self-a.s.sumed superiority upon other races, is quick to condemn delinquencies as native characteristics, and to ascribe to its own influences anything worthy; whereas the reverse is, alas, all too often the case.

Certainly the art of Africa, of India, of the Orient and of North America owes to the Anglo-Saxon only corruption and commercialization.

As for American Negro music, those songs that are most like the music of the white people--and they are not few--are the least interesting; they are sentimental, tame, and uneventful both in melody and rhythm.

On the other hand, such melodies as 'Go down Moses,' 'Four and Twenty Eiders on Their Knees,' 'Run, Mary, Run,' these speak from the very soul of the black race and no white man could have conceived them.

They have a dignity barbaric, aloof and wholly individual which lifts them cloud-high above any 'White' hymns that the Negro might have overheard. Austere as Egyptian bas-relief, simple as Congo sculpture, they are mighty melodies, and they are Negro."

D. Appleton and Company have published for Professor Ulrich B.

Phillips of the University of Michigan a volume ent.i.tled _American Negro Slavery_.