The Lutheran Pioneer St. Louis — 1932, Page 78

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78

THE LUTHERAN PIONEER

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the ancient Book. It was placed upon the table by
the old captain with all the solemnity of one per-
forming a sacred rite. Then turning to the mate,
the old captain said, “Mr. Mate, I think, while this
weather lasts, we’d better get as many of them on
deck as we can. They keep better that way.
Besides,” he added in a tired, unsmiling way,
“she’s begun to stink already. You’ve noticed it?
Well, my boy. the trade’s no perfume shop.”

“Mr. Mate,” the captain continued, “you’ve no-
ticed no sickness below ?”

“Just the usual, sir,’ answered the mate,
a young chap with a far-a-way look in his big
blue eyes.

“Nothing like plague or —?”

“No, sir,” the mate answered before the captain
could complete his question.

“The Lord be praised; He is very merciful,”
said the old captain and dropped his eyelids for
a moment as if in silent prayer. Quickly raising
his eye, the old skipper said, “Mr. Mate, you’d better
take another look and make sure.”

The mate felt his lips go dry as he envisioned
the confusion of limbs and bodies, which made him
think of Judgment Day just after the first sounding
of the trump. The smoky lantern shook in his hand
as he thought of the black — the black down there
in that hole; the black that he could see and feel
and taste and smell; the black that made his own
skin smell black. The lantern shook as the young
mate thought of that breathing, that thick, heavy
breathing, and those cries of shivering humanity.
Those liquid sounds beat against his lantern with
its pale glare like the sounds of palateless men try-
ing to talk through human throats.

As the mate turned to obey the skipper’s orders,
he heard the soft rustling of the leaves of the Bible
as the old Book was being opened again. He knew
by heart the captain’s argument; it ran something
like this: “I get my sailing orders from the Lord.
It’s down there,” touching the Bible, “down there in
black and white —the sons of Ham — bond-
servants — sweat of their brows. I tell you, the
pay’s good, but it’s the Lord’s work, too. We’re
spreading the Lord’s seed,—spreading His seed,?—

_ and he made the outflung motion of a sower.

The mate, young and highly imaginative, could

hear the soft patter of fallen seeds, black shining

_ seeds, falling on American soil with light, inexorable’

patter and fall to strike, lie silent, and quicken, —
“quicken and grow into a black-leaved tree whose
trunk and roots were shadows; a tree shaped like
| yoke, but whose burden was far from light.

III.

Toward the close of the eighteenth century the
traffic in human souls was a declining industry.
The condition of the black laborer in America was
little different from that of the European peasant or
indentured servant. Washington, the father of
American liberty, advised his friends to sell their
slaves and invest their money in something likely
to have a better future. Patrick Henry told La-
fayette that “slavery was held on to in America
more from a habit of dependence than from any
other motive.”

Then suddenly cotton became king, the traffic
revived, and by the end of the first quarter of the
nineteenth century the slaves had increased to over’
five hundred thousand. With the crowning of cotton
as king there grew up a passionate defense of the
system of slavery, and the doctrine of racial in-
feriority was proclaimed with bitter finality. Presi-
dent Dew of William and Mary College wrote: “It
is the order of nature that the beings of superior
faculties and knowledge and therefore of superior
power should dispose of those who are inferior.”
Noah’s curse upon the children of Ham resounded
from a thousand pulpits. “Man is made in the
image of God,” the preachers cried, “and since God,
as every one knows, is not a Negro, it follows that
the Negro is not a man.” (!) John C. Calhoun, the
great Southern statesman, cried: “Show me a nigger
that can do a problem in Euclid or parse a Greck
verb, and I'll admit he’s a human being.” (!)

The Colonial Assembly of South Carolina passed
a law in 1740 which made it an offense, punishable
by a fine of one hundred pounds, “to teach, or cause
to be taught, any slave or to employ one as a scribe
in any manner of writing whatever.” Georgia
quickly followed with a law which prohibited the
education not only of slaves, but also of free Negroes
and added to the punishment of the teacher “a pub-
lic whipping of the free person of color or slave
instructed.” In 1831 a Georgia law provided that
any Negro who should teach another to read or
write should be punished by a fine and a whipping
and that any white person who should so offend
should be punished by a fine of $500 and imprison-
ment in the common jail. In 1835 North Carolina
passed an act prohibiting all public instruction of
Negroes and providing specifically that the public-
school system thereafter should never extend any
of its benefits to any descendant of Negro ancestors
even to the fourth generation. (Not quite a century
later this same State abrogated this law and now-
leads the nation in its provision for public instruc--