Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [342]
No matter what denominations they represented, the black missionaries found upon entering the South a ready confirmation of the marvelous workings of the Divine Spirit. To look around them, to witness at first hand this “most terrible retribution” which God had inflicted on the white South for the “cruel barbarities” of slavery, more than fulfilled the warnings they had hurled against Babylon from their pulpits in the North. What more dramatic proof of His presence and the triumph of His justice than to see for themselves Pharaoh’s hosts engulfed and vanquished. After the Reverend Richard H. Cain walked through the streets of Charleston and gazed at the ruins that were once “the dwellings of the proud and defiant manstealers,” he could only conclude that this city had become “a monument of God’s indignation and an evidence of His righteous judgments.” For the slave, he added, a new era had dawned, the day of redemption was at hand, and the prophet’s proclamation had come to be realized: “Arise, shine: for thy light is come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon thee.” And those who wished to oversee the fulfillment of this prophecy had only to “go among this redeemed people; enter their humble homesteads; sit down with them and listen to their stories of wrong and their songs of rejoicing; [and] gain their confidence.” For the Reverend Cain, Charleston was the place to establish his church for the freedmen.13
Although some of the black missionaries had once resided in the South as slaves or free Negroes, many of them were native Northerners who had formed their impressions of slavery in the abolitionist movement. Upon entering the South, then, they expected to find a people degraded and scarred—physically and psychically—by a lifetime of bondage and in desperate need of “regeneration and civilization.” No proclamation or legislative act, they assumed, could get at the evils that had accumulated and festered over many decades. “As a malignant cancer leaves its roots after being apparently cured,” the Reverend James W. C. Pennington observed from Jacksonville, Florida, “so Slavery has left its barbarisms which are in danger of being mixt up with all that is now being done for the advancement of christian civilization among the people.” The breakup of slavery, he believed, had uncovered “a fearful moral chaos” in the South, and only education and “the Remedial power of the Gospel” could accomplish for the African race in the United States what they had already achieved for the Anglo-Saxon race. Repeatedly, clerics and teachers alike would define the task before them as undoing the moral depravity, self-debasement, and dependency which slavery had fostered in its victims, and the Reverend Cain, for one, thought no vestiges of bondage more resistant to reform than these. “The people are emancipated but not free!” he wrote from Charleston. “They are still slaves to their old ideas, as well as to their masters. The great masses have, by the old systems, been taught that they were inferior to the whites in everything, and they believe it still.”14
If instruction in the spelling book could be left to the teacher, the work of moral reformation belonged properly to the clergyman, but in the postemancipation South such distinctions in roles were seldom deemed necessary or even desirable and the teacher and the minister in some instances were the same person. In any event, both the school and the church declared open war on the “rum-suckers, bar-room loafers, whiskey-dealers, and card players among the men, and those women who dressed finely on ill-gotten gain.” The best weapon