The Great Stain

by Noel Rae

  Church Service in New Orleans. “Walking this morning through a rather mean neighborhood I was attracted, by a loud chorus of singing, to the open door of a chapel, or small church. I found a large congregation of Negroes within, and the singing being just then concluded, and a Negro preacher commencing a sermon, I entered an empty pew near the entrance. I had no sooner taken a seat than a Negro usher came to me, and in the most polite manner, whispered, ‘Won’t you please to let me give you a seat higher up, master, ‘long o’ tudder white folks?’

  “I followed him to the uppermost seat, facing the pulpit, where there were three other white persons. One of them was a woman—old, very plain, and not as well dressed as many of the Negroes; another looked like a ship’s officer, and was probably a member of the police force in undress [i.e. out of uniform; as in many other southern states, the law required that at least one white man be present at a Negro service]. Both of these remained diligently and gravely attentive during the service. The third was a foreign-looking person, very flashily dressed and sporting a yellow-headed walking stick and much cheap jewelry.

  “The preacher was nearly black, with close woolly hair. His figure was slight, he seemed to be about thirty years of age, and the expression on his face indicated a refined and delicately sensitive nature. His eye was very fine, bright, deep, and clear; his voice and manner generally quiet and impressive. The text was, ‘I have fought the good fight, I have kept the faith; henceforth there is laid up for me a crown of glory’; and the sermon was an appropriate and generally correct explanation of the customs of the Olympian games, and a proper and often eloquent application of the figure to the Christian course of life. Much of the language was highly metaphorical; the figures long, strange and complicated, yet sometimes, however, beautiful.

  “As soon as I had taken my seat, my attention was attracted by an old Negro near me, whom I supposed for some time to be suffering under some nervous complaint; he trembled, his teeth chattered, and his face, at intervals, was convulsed. He soon began to respond aloud to the sentiments of the preacher in such words as these: ‘Oh, yes!’ ‘That’s it, that’s it!’ ‘Yes, yes—glory—yes!’ and similar expressions could be heard from all parts of the house whenever the speaker’s voice was unusually solemn, or his language and manner eloquent or excited. Sometimes the outcries and responses were not confined to ejaculations of this kind, but shouts, and groans, terrific shrieks, and indescribable expressions of ecstasy—of pleasure or agony—and even stamping, jumping and clapping of hands were added. The tumult often resembled that of an excited political meeting; and I was once surprised to find my own muscles all stretched, as if ready for a struggle—my face glowing and my feet stamping—having been infected unconsciously, as men often are, with instinctive bodily sympathy with the excitement of the crowd.

  “I took notes as well as I could of a single passage of the sermon. The preacher, having said that among the games of the arena were ’raaslin’ (wrestling) and boxing, and described how a combatant, determined to win the prize, would come boldly up to his adversary and stand square before him, looking him straight in the eyes, and while he guarded himself with one hand, would give him a ‘lick’ with the other, continued in these words: ‘Then would he stop, and turn away his face, and let the adversary hit back? No, my brethren, no, no! He’d follow up his advantage, and give him another lick; and if he fell back, he’d keep close after him, and not stop!—and not faint!—not be content with merely driving him back—but he’d persevere! (Yes, glory!) and hit him again! (That’s it! Hit him again! Hit him again! Oh, glory! Hi! Hi! Glory!) and drive him into the corner! And never, never stop till he had him down! (Glory! Glory! Glory!) And he had got his foot on his neck, and the crown of wild olive leaves was placed upon his head by the lord of the games. (Ha! Ha! Glory to the Lord! etc.) It was the custom of the Olympian games, my brethren, for the victor to be crowned with a crown of wild olive leaves; but sometimes, after all, it wouldn’t be awarded right, because the lord of the games was a poor, frail, erroneous man, and maybe he couldn’t see right, or maybe he wasn’t an honest man, and would have his favorites among the combatants, and if his favorite was beaten, he would not allow it, but would declare that he was the victor, and the crown would descend on his head. (Glory!) But there ain’t no danger of that with our fight with the world, for our Lord is throned in justice. (Glory!—Oh, yes! Yes!—Sweet Lord! Sweet Lord!) He seeth in secret, and he knoweth all things, and there’s no chance for a mistake, and if we only will just persevere and conquer, and conquer and persevere (Yes, sir! Oh, Lord, yes!) and persevere—not for a year, or for two year, or ten year, nor for seventy year, perhaps; but if we persevere—(Yes! Yes!)—if we persevere—(Oh, Lord! Help us!)—if we persevere unto the end—(Oh! Oh! Glory! Glory! Glory!)—until he calls us home! (Frantic shouting.) Henceforth there is laid up for us a crown of immortal glory—(Ha! Ha! Ha!)—not a crown of wild olive leaves that begin to droop as soon as they touch our brow, (Oh! Oh! Oh!) but a crown of immortal glory! That fadeth not away! Never begins to droop! But is immortal in the heavens!’ (Tremendous uproar, many of the congregation on their feet, uttering cries and shrieks impossible to be expressed in letters. The shabby gentleman by my side, who had been asleep, suddenly awakened, dropped his stick, and shouted with all his might, ‘Glory to the Lord!’)

  “The preacher was drawing his sermon to a close and offering some sensible and pertinent advice, soberly and calmly, and the congregation was attentive and comparatively quiet, when a small old woman, perfectly black, among those in the gallery, suddenly rose and began dancing and clapping her hands; at first with a slow and measured movement, and then with increasing rapidity, at the same time beginning to shout ‘Ha! Ha!’ The women about her arose also and tried to hold her, as there appeared great danger that she would fall out of the gallery, and those below left their pews that she might not fall on them.

  “The preacher continued his remarks—much the best part of his sermon—but it was plain that they were wasted; everyone was looking at the dancing woman in the gallery, and many were shouting and laughing aloud (in joyful sympathy, I suppose.) His eye flashed as he glanced anxiously from the woman to the people, and then stopping in the middle of a sentence, a sad smile came over his face; he closed his book and bowed his head upon his hands to the desk. A voice in the congregation struck into a tune, and the whole congregation rose and joined in a roaring song. The woman was still shouting and dancing, her head thrown back and rolling from one side to another. Gradually her shout became indistinct, she threw her arms wildly about instead of clapping her hands, fell back into the arms of her companions, then threw herself forward and embraced those before her, then tossed herself from side to side, gasping, and finally sank to the floor, where she remained at the end of the song, kicking, as if acting a death struggle.”

  This was followed by another sermon by a different preacher, mostly against drinking rum, and then by a hymn, many of the congregation keeping time with their feet, “and swinging their bodies.” After some announcements, the service ended with the Apostles’ blessing, “and the congregation slowly passed out, chatting and saluting one another politely as they went.”

  Alabama. After a week in Montgomery, Olmsted “left for Mobile, on the steamboat Fashion, a clean and well-ordered boat, with polite and obliging officers.” The crew “was composed partly of Irishmen and partly of Negroes; the latter were slaves and were hired of their owners at $40 a month—the same wages paid to the Irishmen. A dollar of their wages was given to the Negroes themselves for each Sunday they were on the passage. So far as convenient, they were kept at work separately from the white hands; they were also messed separately.

  “We were two days and a half making the passage, the boat stopping at almost every bluff and landing to take on cotton, until she had a freight of nineteen hundred bales, which was built up on the guards, seven or eight tiers in height, and until it reached the hurricane deck. The boat was thus brought so de
ep that her guards were in the water, and the ripple of the river constantly washed over them. There are two hundred landings on the Alabama River, and three hundred on the Bigby [Tombigbee] at which the boats advertise to call, if required, for passengers or freight.”

  These landings were little more than stopping places, without docks or wharves, where the boats tied up to a tree at the river’s edge. At one of them, called Claiborne, where they stopped one night, there was a village “situated upon a bluff, a hundred and fifty feet high, with a nearly perpendicular bank. The boat came to the shore at the foot of a plank slide-way, down which cotton was sent to it from a warehouse at the top.

  “There was something truly Western in the direct, reckless way in which the boat was loaded. A strong gang-plank being placed at right angles to the slide-way, a bale of cotton was let slide from the top, coming down with fearful velocity. On striking the gang-plank, it would rebound up and out on to the boat, against a barricade of bales previously arranged to receive it. The moment it struck this barricade it would be dashed at by two or three men and jerked out of the way, and others would roll it to its place for the voyage on the tiers aft. The mate, standing near the bottom of the slide, as soon as the men had removed one bale to what he thought a safe distance, would shout to those aloft, and down would come another. Not unfrequently a bale would not strike fairly on its end, and would rebound off, diagonally, overboard; or would be thrown up with such force as to go over the barricade, breaking stanchions and railings, and scattering the passengers on the berth deck. Negro hands were sent to the top of the bank to roll the bales to the slide, and Irishmen were kept below to remove them and stow them. On asking the mate the reason of this arrangement, he said, ‘The niggers are worth too much to be risked here; if the Paddies are knocked overboard, or get their backs broke, nobody loses anything.’”

  Organization of labor. At a long-established plantation that had been in the same family for generations, Olmsted witnessed slavery “under its most favorable aspects,” softened by “the ties of long family association, common traditions, common memories and, if ever, common interests between the slaves and their rulers.” The field-hands were divided “into four classes, according to their physical capacities. The children beginning as ‘quarter hands,’ advancing to ‘half-hands,’ and then to ‘three quarter hands’; and finally, when mature and able-bodied, healthy and strong, to ‘full hands.’ As they decline in strength, from age, sickness or other cause, they retrograde in the scale, and proportionately less labor is required of them.

  Amalgamation. This was the euphemism for sex between blacks and whites—usually a matter of a white man forcing himself on a black woman, but there were also long-standing arrangements whereby a wealthy white man kept his wife and official family in one household, and his colored mistress and their offspring in another. Either way, in the opinion of a certain Mrs. Douglass, who had been sent to jail for teaching slaves to read, and from there had written a letter that Olmsted quoted, amalgamation was “one great evil hanging over the Southern Slave States, destroying domestic happiness and the peace of thousands … The white mothers and daughters of the South have suffered under it for years—have seen their dearest affections trampled upon—their hopes of domestic happiness destroyed, and their future lives embittered, even to agony, by those who should be all in all to them, as husbands, sons and brothers.”

  Pursuing this topic, Olmsted wrote: “A Negress was hung this year in Alabama for the murder of her child. At her trial she confessed her guilt. She said her owner was the father of the child, and that her mistress knew it, and treated it so cruelly in consequence, that she had killed it to save it from further suffering.” Also: “A large planter told, as a reason for sending his boys to the North to be educated, that there was no possibility of their being brought up in decency at home. Another planter told me that he was intending to move to a free country on this account. He said that the practice was not occasional or general, it was universal. ‘There is not,’ he said, ‘a likely-looking black girl in this State that is not the concubine of a white man. There is not an old plantation in which the grandchildren of the owner are not whipped in the field by his overseer.’”

  Sugar plantation. From New Orleans, Olmsted went by steamboat up the Mississippi to the large sugar plantation owned by “Mr. R.”—actually Richard Taylor, son of President Zachary Taylor and future Confederate general. Mr. R. was “a man of more than usual precision of mind, energetic and humane; and while his Negroes seemed to be better disciplined than any others I had seen, they evidently regarded him with affection and pride.” The plantation had about nine hundred acres of well-tilled land, drained by two canals. A large and comfortable mansion stood close to the river, with gardens in front and numerous outbuildings in the back. The Negroes’ houses were “as neat and well-made externally as the cottages usually provided by large manufacturing companies in New England,” and food, clothing, coffee and tobacco were generously supplied. Nursing mothers were allowed to be with their children for two hours at noon and to leave work an hour early. Labor was most intensive during the grinding season, which began in October and lasted two or three months. “Mr. R. assured me that during the last grinding season nearly every man, woman and child on his plantation, including the overseer and himself, were on duty fully eighteen hours a day. From the moment the grinding first commences until the end of the season, it is never discontinued: the fires under the boiler never go out, and the Negroes only rest six hours in the twenty-four, by relays.” Yet despite the hard work “Mr. R. said that his Negroes were as glad as he was himself to have the time for grinding arrive, and they worked with greater cheerfulness than at any other season.” Why was this so? Answer: incentives—“they are then better paid; they have better and more varied food and stimulants than usual, but especially they have a degree of freedom and of social pleasure, and a variety of occupation which brings recreation of the mind … Men of sense have discovered that when they desire to get extraordinary exertions from their slaves, it is better to offer them rewards than to whip them.”

  Poor whites. “At one corner of Mr. R.’s plantation there was a hamlet consisting of about a dozen small houses or huts, built of wood or clay, in the old French peasant style. The residents owned small farms on which they raised a little corn and rice; but Mr. R. described them as lazy vagabonds, doing but little work, and spending much time in shooting, fishing and play. He wanted much to buy all their land, and get them to move away. He was willing to pay two or three times as much as the property was actually worth to get them to move off. As fast as he got possession he destroyed their houses and gardens, removed their fences and trees, and brought all their land into his cane-plantation.

  “Why did he so dislike to have these poor people living near him, I asked? Because, he straightway answered, they demoralized his Negroes. Seeing them live in apparent comfort, without much property and without steady labor, the slaves could not help thinking that it was unnecessary for men to work so hard as they themselves were obliged to, and that if they were free they would not work.”

  “[Mr. R.] acknowledged slavery to be a very great evil, morally and economically. It was a curse upon the South; he had no doubt at all about it: nothing would be more desirable than its removal, if it were possible to be accomplished. But he did not think it could be abolished without instituting greater evils than those sought to be remedied. Its influence on the character of the whites was what was most deplorable. He was sorry to think that his children would have to be subject to it. He thought that eventually, if he were able to afford it, he should free his slaves and send them to Africa.”

  Three observations: “It is difficult to handle simply as property a creature possessing human passions and human feelings, however debased and torpid the condition of that creature may be; while, on the other hand, the absolute necessity of dealing with property as a thing greatly embarrasses a man in any attempt to treat it as a person. And it is the
natural result of this complicated state of things that the system of slave management is irregular, ambiguous, and contradictory; that it is never either constantly humane or consistently economical.

  “As a general rule, the larger the body of Negroes on a plantation or estate, the more completely are they treated as mere property.

  “Throughout the South-west the Negroes, as a rule, appear to be worked much harder than in the Eastern and Northern Slave States. I do not think they accomplish as much as agricultural laborers at the North usually do, but they certainly labor much harder, and more unremittingly.”

  Life on a large plantation. One of the last places Olmsted visited was a very large cotton plantation on the Mississippi—so large that it employed four overseers as well as a manager, “a gentleman of good education, generous and poetic in temperament,” while “the overseers were superior to most of their class.” All were well paid. “These five men, each living more than a mile distant from either of the others, were the only white men on the estate.” As to the slaves, who numbered several hundred, they “appeared to be well taken care of and abundantly supplied with the necessaries of vigorous physical existence.”