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BOOK REVIEWS
American Negro Slavery. By Ulrich Bonnell Phillips. A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as determined by the Plantation Regime. D. Appleton and Company, New York and London, 1918. Pp. 529.
This book is both more and less than a history of slavery in America. It transcends the limit of the average treatise in this field in that it shows how the institution influenced the economic history of America in all its ramifications. It falls far short of being a complete history of slavery for the reason of the neglect of many aspects by the author. The book is successful as a compilation or digest of the sources of the history of slavery cast in the mind of a man of southern birth and northern environment in manhood.
The author furnishes adequate background for this work in tracing the slave trade, beginning with the exploitation of Guinea and proceeding to a detailed consideration of the maritime traffic. Slavery as it existed in the West Indies is portrayed in his account of the sugar industry. In the continental colonies it appears in his treatment of the tobacco industry, rice culture and the interests of the northern colonies. He shows how the struggle for the rights of man resulted in a sort of reaction against slavery in the North and the so-called prohibition of the African slave trade.
In his discussion of the introduction of cotton and the domestic slave trade, there are few facts which cannot be obtained from several standard works. His treatment of types of plantations, with reference to their management, labor, social aspects and tendencies, is more informing. The contrast between town and country slaves, the discussion of free Negroes, slave crime and the force of the law, do not give us very much that is new. On the whole, however, the book is a valuable piece of research giving a more intensive treatment of economic slavery than any other single volume hitherto published.
On the other hand, the book falls far short of giving a complete history of the institution of slavery. In the first place, the book is too much of a commercial account. The slaves are mentioned as representing both persons and property, but this treatise lacks proportion in that it deals primarily with the slaves as property in the cold-blooded fashion that the southerners usually bartered them away. Very little is said about the blacks themselves, seemingly to give more space to the history of the whites, who profited by their labor, just as one would in writing a history of the New England fisheries say very little about the species figuring in the industry, but more about the life of the people participating in it. It is evident that although a southerner, Mr. Phillips has lived so far from the Negroes that he knows less about them than those who have periodically come into contact with them but on certain occasions have given the blacks serious study. This is evidenced by Mr. Phillips' own statement when he says in his preface, that "a generation of freedom has wrought less transformation in the bulk of the blacks than might casually be supposed." This failure to understand what the Negroes have thought and felt and done, in other words, the failure to fathom the Negro mind, constitutes a defect of the work.
Another neglected aspect of the book is the failure of the author to treat adequately the anti-slavery movement. It was not necessary for him to give an extensive treatment of abolition but it is impossible to set forth exactly what the institution was without giving sufficient space to this attitude of a militant minority toward it. It was certainly proper for the author to say more about the northerners and southerners who arrayed themselves in opposition to the institution. In his chapter on the economic views of slavery this aspect was mentioned but not properly amplified. Some references to it elsewhere, of course, appear in parts of the book but, considering the importance of this phase of the history of slavery in America, one can say it has been decidedly neglected. The author, as he says in his preface, avoided "polemic writings, for their fuel went so much to heat that their light upon the living conditions is faint." It was not necessary also to avoid the controversy in which these writers participated. No one will gainsay the fact that persons who engage in controversy cannot be depended upon to tell the truth, but if the slavery dispute largely influenced the history of the country, it should have adequate treatment in a history of this kind.
John H. B. Latrobe and His Times. By John E. Semmes. The Norman, Remington Company, Baltimore, Maryland. Pp. 595. Price $6.00.
This is an extensive biography of a man born in Philadelphia and, after some adventures elsewhere, transplanted to Baltimore, where he became one of the first citizens of the land. His career as a cadet at West Point, his study and practice of law, his business interests, his travels and connections with learned and humanitarian societies all bespeak the many-sidedness of a useful citizen. The work contains a Latrobe genealogy and a topical index. It is well illustrated and exhibits evidences of much effort on the part of the author.
The part of the book most interesting to students of Negro history, however, is the chapter on African colonization, a subject which engaged the attention of Latrobe for many years and for which he became an influential promoter in serving as corresponding secretary of the Maryland Colonization Society and as president of the American Colonization Society. Although only one chapter of the book is devoted to this aspect of Mr. Latrobe's biography, it figured as largely in his life as any other public interest. He said: "I cannot now recall in order all that I did for it. It was the one thing then, and has ever been the one thing outside of my lawyer's calling, to which I have devoted myself." His biographer says that he spent about one quarter of his working hours during ten years of his life in advocating colonization. Dr. Daniel C. Gilman, President of Johns Hopkins University, said at a meeting of the Maryland Historical Society held in Latrobe's memory that "probably his greatest distinction outside of his professional life was acquired in promoting the cause of African colonization in ante-bellum days."
The author, however, instead of informing the reader as to what Latrobe did for colonization, laments the failure of this enterprise and endeavors to show that colonization or segregation in some form must be the solution of the Negro problem. In the chapter mentioned above he refers to this important work of Latrobe, not to set forth what he actually accomplished in this field, but to give the author's views. He proceeds to quote Thomas Jefferson, Henry Clay and Abraham Lincoln, and finally Horace Grady and Bishop H. M. Turner on colonization, with a view to convincing the reader that although Mr. Latrobe's effort at colonizing the Negroes in Africa failed, it must eventually be brought about since the two races will not happily live together and then the great work of Latrobe will stand out as an achievement rather than as a failure. This branching off into opinion rather than into a scientific treatment of facts renders the biography incomplete so far as it concerns one of the larger aspects of Latrobe's life. The reader must, therefore, go to the papers of Latrobe to trace his connection with colonization with a view to determining exactly how largely this interest figured in the life of a successful lawyer and business man and the extent to which he interested the people throughout the country. The public will, therefore, welcome a more scholarly biography of J. H. B. Latrobe.
The Mulatto in The United States. By Edward Byron Reuter. Richard G. Badger, The Gorham Press, Boston, 1918. Pp. 417. Price $2.50 net.
This is the first work to deal especially with the people of color and will, therefore, attract some attention. It is chiefly valuable for the discussion which it will arouse rather than for the information given. It is an unscientific compilation of facts collected from a few sources by a man who has devoted some time to the study of the Negro but just about enough to misunderstand the race. His chief shortcoming consists in his misinformation. For scientific purposes the book has no value.
In the beginning of the work there is a discussion of mixed blood races in the old world, concluding with a treatment of the same in the West Indies and America. Considering the mulatto the key to the race problem in America, Mr. Reuter undertakes to show the extent of race mixture, its nature and growth. He discusses the intermarriage of the races, unlawful polygamy, intermarriage with Indians, intermixture during slavery and concubinage of black women with white men. He seems to know nothing of the numerous facts easily accessible in various works, which show that during slavery there was also a concubinage of white women with black men. In the next place, the author treats the Negro of today, depending mainly on a few unreliable sources of information such as the proceedings of certain Negro conventions, a Negro newspaper and the few books specially devoted to Negro history. In this it appears that he does not know that the chief sources of Negro history are not books bearing such titles, for the history of the race has not yet been written.
Mr. Reuter's conclusions are fundamentally wrong for the two reasons that he does not know who the mulattoes are and, although taking cognizance of the fact that science has uprooted the idea of racial inferiority, he is loath to abandon the contention that the mulatto is superior to the Negro. For example, in his chapter on leading men of the Negro race, in which he specifies whether they are blacks or mulattoes, he has classified as mulattoes a large number of Negroes who have practically no evidences of white blood and are commonly referred to throughout the country as the blacks of the Negro race. The title of the book, therefore, should not be The Mulatto but The Negro. It would then establish nothing as it does. Upon the careers of these black persons he has supported his theories as to the superiority of the mulatto. This encourages him, therefore, to intimate that because of their proximity to the racial characteristics of the white race they are in some respects superior to the blacks. Here we have the return of the ante-bellum proslavery philosopher disguised as a scientific investigator.
The Anti-Slavery Movement in Kentucky. By Asa Earl Martin, Assistant Professor of American History, The Pennsylvania State College. The Standard Printing Company of Louisville, Kentucky, 1918. Pp. 165.
In this volume there is an effort to bring out something new in the history of slavery. The author is mindful of the tendency of most writers of the history of slavery to direct their attention to the radical movements associated with the names of the leading abolitionists. His effort is to treat that neglected aspect of slavery having to do with the work of the gradual emancipationists. "These men, unlike the followers of Garrison, who were restricted to the free States," said he, "were found in all parts of the Union. They embraced great numbers of leaders in politics, business and education, and while far more numerous in the free than in the slave States, they nevertheless included a large and respectable element in Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and Missouri." He has in mind here, of course, the conservative slaveholders of the border States who had for a number of years felt that slavery was an economic evil of which the country should rid itself gradually by systematic efforts. Feeling that they contributed in the end a great deal to the downfall of the regime and in some respects exercised as much influence as the abolitionists, he has undertaken to set their story before the world.
The author begins with the first attack upon slavery, the early anti-slavery movement in Kentucky, the colonizationist idea, the work of the anti-slavery societies, and the efforts of the church to exterminate the evil. In the eighth and ninth chapters he treats more seriously the main question at issue, namely, exactly how men of that slave-holding commonwealth persistently endeavored to find a more rational means of escaping the baneful effects of the institution. His important contribution, therefore, is that abolition found little favor in Kentucky while gradual emancipation moved the hearts of men of both parties and even of slave-holders. How the struggle between these pro-slavery and anti-slavery parties culminated in 1849 in the defeat of the latter, is the concluding portion of the book. He shows that Kentucky exceeded most of the border slave States in permitting the freer and more extensive discussion of that question than any of the other commonwealths similarly situated.
Professor Martin's work, therefore, is a complement of Dr. I. E. McDougle's Slavery in Kentucky. Whereas Professor Martin deals primarily with the work of the gradual emancipationists, Dr. I. E. McDougle directs his attention largely to some other aspects of the question. Both of these works may be read with profit. In them the whole question has been adequately discussed and there will not soon be a need for further investigation in this field.
NOTES
Within a few years from the time the United States army will be reduced to a peace status, the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History will publish a scientific history of the Negro soldiers in the great war. As this effort will require a large outlay, it is earnestly desired that persons interested in the propagation of the truth will give this movement their support. A campaign for funds has begun and the encouragement hitherto received indicates that the amount necessary to finance this enterprise will be secured.
At present it is impossible to indicate exactly the extent of this work. It will be first necessary to make an extensive research into all of the sources of information as to the Negroes' participation in the war and when the data thus collected will have been properly digested, a more detailed description of the work may be forecasted. It is safe to say, however, that the work will consist of several volumes written by the Director of Research.
This same interest is set forth, as follows, in an item appearing in the December number of the Crisis:
"The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has appropriated funds and commissioned the Director of Publications and Research to collect the data and compile a history of the Negro in the Great War.
"Dr. DuBois has invited a number of Negro scholars, soldiers and officials to form an Editorial Board, which will be able to issue an authentic, scientific and definitive history of our part in this war.
"The personnel of this board will be announced later. Meantime, we want the active coöperation of every person who can and will help. We want facts, letters and documents, narratives and clippings. Let us all unite to make the record complete. Correspondence may be directed to this office."
The following important announcement appeared in the December number of the Crisis:
Tercentenary
The husband of Pocahontas wrote in 1619: "About the last of August came a Dutch man of warre that sold us twenty Negars." From this beginning sprang the present twelve million Americans of Negro descent.
Next August will mark the Three Hundredth Anniversary of this vast transplantation of a race, which ranks easily as one of the most significant movements of mankind. Such an event can hardly be "celebrated," for it connoted too much of misery and human sorrow. On the other hand, it is too stern and meaningful a happening to be forgotten. For this reason, a group of thirty-three colored men met in New York, October 19, 1918, at the invitation of a committee appointed by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
They determined to inaugurate "A Solemn Memorial of the Tercentenary of the Transplanting of the Negro race to the United States." In order, however, to give all sections and interests of the Negro race adequate voice and representation in these plans, this committee set about choosing a Committee of "Three Hundred and More," in whose hands the Memorial will take final shape. This Committee is now being chosen and will meet in New York early in January, 1919.
The Linchoten Vereeniging has published for Mr. E. C. Godee Mossbergen two volumes of Reizen in Zuid-Afrika in de Hollandse Tijd.
From the press of Longsman two volumes bearing on Africa have been published. One is by Sir Hugh Clifford, entitled the German Colonies, with special relation to the native population of Africa. The other, by H. C. O'Neill, is the War in Africa and the Far East, dealing largely with the conquest of the German colonies.
Houghton, Mifflin and Company have published a study entitled Lincoln in Illinois by Miss Octavia Roberts. This work is largely a compilation of the recollections of his contemporaries.
To extend the work of the Association the Director of Research is now making an effort to secure the cooperation of five persons who, like Mr. Julius Rosenwald, will contribute $400 annually to the support of this cause. Mr. Moorfield Storey and Mr. Cleveland H. Dodge have each pledged themselves to give this amount. It is earnestly hoped that other philanthropists will subscribe.
The Journal of Negro History
Vol. IV—April, 1919—No. 2
THE CONFLICT AND FUSION OF CULTURES WITH SPECIAL REFERENCE TO THE NEGRO 79
Under ordinary circumstances the transmission of the social tradition is from the parents to the children. Children are born into society and take over its customs, habits, and standards of life simply, naturally, and without conflict. But it will at once occur to any one that the life of society is not always continued and maintained in this natural way, by the succession of parents and children. New societies are formed by conquest and by the imposition of one people upon another. In such cases there arises a conflict of cultures and as a result the process of fusion takes place slowly and is frequently not complete. New societies are frequently formed by colonization, in which case new cultures are grafted on to older ones. The work of missionary societies is essentially one of colonization in this sense.
Finally we have societies growing up, as in the United States, by immigration. These immigrants, coming as they do from all parts of the world, bring with them fragments of divergent cultures. Here again the process of assimilation is slow, often painful, not always complete. In the case where societies are formed and maintained by adoption, that is by immigration, the question arises: How far is it possible for a people of a different race and a different culture to take over the traditions and social inheritance of another and an alien people? What are the conditions which facilitate this transmission and, in general, what happens when people of different races and cultures are brought together in the intimate relations of community life?
These questions have already arisen in connection with the education of the Negro in America and with the work of foreign missions. If the schools are to extend and rationalize the work they are already doing in the Americanization of the immigrant peoples, questions of this sort may become actual in the field of pedagogy. This paper is mainly concerned with the Negro, not because the case of the Negro is more urgent than or essentially different from that of the immigrant, but because the materials for investigation are more accessible.
Admitting, as the anthropologists now seem disposed to do, that the average native intelligence in the races is about the same, we may still expect to find in different races certain special traits and tendencies which rest on biological rather than cultural differences. For example, over and above all differences of language, custom or historic tradition, it is to be presumed that Teuton and Latin, the Negro and the Jew—to compare the most primitive with the most sophisticated of peoples—have certain racial aptitudes, certain innate and characteristic differences of temperament which manifest themselves especially in the objects of attention, in tastes and in talents. Is the Jewish intellectual, for example, a manifestation of an original and peculiar endowment of the Jewish race or is he rather a product of traditional interest and emphasis characteristic of Jewish people—a characteristic which may be explained as an accommodation to the long-continued urban environment of the race?80 Is the Negro's undoubted interest in music and taste for bright colors, commonly attributed to the race, to be regarded as an inherent and racial trait or is it merely the characteristic of primitive people? Is Catholicism to be regarded as the natural manifestation of the Latin temperament as it has been said that Protestantism is of the Teutonic?
Here are differences in the character of the cultural life which can scarcely be measured quantitatively in terms of gross intellectual capacity. Historical causes do not, it seems, adequately account for them. So far as this is true we are perhaps warranted in regarding them as modifications of transmitted tradition due to innate traits of the people who have produced them. Granted that civilization, as we find it, is due to the development of communication and the possibility of mutual exchange of cultural materials, still every special culture is the result of a selection and every people borrows from the whole fund of cultural materials not merely that which it can use but which, because of certain organic characteristics, it finds stimulating and interesting.
The question then resolves itself into this: How far do racial characteristics and innate biological interests determine the extent to which one racial group can and will take over and assimilate the characteristic features of an alien civilization? How far will it merely take over the cultural forms, giving them a different content or a different inflection? This problem, so far as it is related to the lives of primitive peoples, has already been studied by the ethnologists. Rivers, in his analysis of the cultures of Australian people, has found that what we have hitherto regarded as primitive cultures are really fusions of other and earlier forms of culture.81 The evidence of this is the fact that the fusion has not been complete. In the process of interchange it frequently happens that what Rivers calls the "fundamental structure" of a primitive society has remained unchanged while the relatively formal and external elements of alien culture only have been taken over and incorporated with it.
There are indications also that, where cultural borrowings have taken place, the borrowed elements have for the people who have taken them over a meaning different from what they had for the people from whom they were borrowed. W.J. McGee, in an article entitled "Piratical Acculturation," has given an interesting illustration of this fact.82 McGee's observations of the Beri Indians go to show that they imitated the weapons of their enemies, but that they regarded them as magical instruments and the common people did not even know their names. There are numerous other illustrations of this so-called "piratical acculturation" among the observations of ethnologists. It is said that the Negroes in Africa, when they first came into possession of the white man's guns, regarded them as magical instruments for making a noise and used them, as the Germans used the Zeppelins and the newspapers, merely to destroy the enemy's morale.
No doubt the disposition of primitive peoples is to conceive everything mystically, or animistically, to use the language of ethnology, particularly where it concerns something strange. On the other hand, when the primitive man has encountered among the cultural objects to which civilization has introduced him, something which he has been able to make immediately intelligible to himself, he has at once formed a perfectly rational conception of it. Some years ago at Lovedale, South Africa, the seat of one of the first successful industrial mission schools, there was an important ceremony to which all the native African chiefs in the vicinity were formally invited. It was the introduction and demonstration of the use of the plow, the first one that had ever been seen in those parts. The proceedings were followed with great interest by a large gathering of natives. When the demonstration was finished one old chief turned to his followers and said with great conviction: "This is a great thing which the white man has brought us. One hoe like that is worth as much as ten wives." An African chief could hardly have expressed appreciation of this one fundamental device of our civilization in more pragmatic or less mystical terms. The wise old chief grasped the meaning of the plow at once, but this was because he had been pre-adapted by earlier experience to do so.
It is the subjective, historic and ultimately, perhaps, racial and temperamental factor in the lives of peoples which makes it difficult, though not impossible, perhaps, to transmit political and religious institutions to people of a different racial type and a different social tradition. William James' essay, "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings," in which he points out how completely we are likely to miss the point and mistake the inner significance of the lives of those about us, unless we share their expedience, emphasizes this fact. If then the transmission and fusion of cultures is slow, incomplete and sometimes impossible, it is because the external forms, the formulas, technical devices of every social tradition can be more easily transmitted than the aims, the attitudes, sentiments and ideals which attach to them are embodied in them. The former can be copied and used; the latter must be appreciated and understood.
For a study of the acculturation process, there are probably no materials more complete and accessible than those offered by the history of the American Negro. No other representatives of a primitive race have had so prolonged and so intimate an association with European civilization, and still preserved their racial identity. Among no other people is it possible to find so many stages of culture existing contemporaneously. It has been generally taken for granted that the Negro brought a considerable fund of African tradition and African superstition from Africa to America. One not infrequently finds in the current literature and even in standard books upon the Negro, references to voodoo practices among the Negroes in the Southern States. As a matter-of-fact the last authentic account which we have of anything approaching a Negro nature worship in the United States took place in Louisiana in 1884. It is described by George W. Cable in an article on "Creole Slave Songs" which appeared in the Century Magazine in 1886. In this case it seems to have been an importation from the West Indies. I have never found an account of a genuine instance of voodoo worship elsewhere in the United States, although it seems to have been common enough in the West Indies at one time.
My own impression is that the amount of African tradition which the Negro brought to the United States was very small. In fact, there is every reason to believe, it seems to me, that the Negro, when he landed in the United States, left behind him almost everything but his dark complexion and his tropical temperament. It is very difficult to find in the South today anything that can be traced directly back to Africa. This does not mean that there is not a great deal of superstition, conjuring, "root doctoring" and magic generally among the Negroes of the United States. What it does mean is that the superstitions we do find are those which we might expect to grow up anywhere among an imaginative people, living in an intellectual twilight such as exists on the isolated plantations of the Southern States. Furthermore, this superstition is in no way associated, as it is in some of the countries of Europe, southern Italy for example, with religious beliefs and practices. It is not part of Negro Christianity. It is with him, as it is with us, folk-lore pure and simple. It is said that there are but two African words that have been retained in the English language. One of these is the word Buckra, from which comes Buckra Beach in Virginia. This seems remarkable when we consider that slaves were still brought into the United States clandestinely up to 1862.83
The explanation is to be found in the manner in which the Negro slaves were collected in Africa and the manner in which they were disposed of after they arrived in this country. The great markets for slaves in Africa were on the West Coast, but the old slave trails ran back from the coast far into the interior of the continent, and all the peoples of Central Africa contributed to the stream of enforced emigration to the New World. In the West Indies a good deal was known among slave-traders and plantation owners about the character and relative value of slaves from different parts of Africa, but in the United States there was less knowledge and less discrimination. Coming from all parts of Africa and having no common language and common tradition, the memories of Africa which they brought with them were soon lost.
There was less opportunity in the United States also than in the West Indies for a slave to meet one of his own people, because the plantations were considerably smaller, more widely scattered and, especially, because as soon as they were landed in this country, slaves were immediately divided and shipped in small numbers, frequently no more than one or two at a time, to different plantations. This was the procedure with the very first Negroes brought to this country. It was found easier to deal with the slaves, if they were separated from their kinsmen.
