Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [358]
Like the Union soldiers who preceded them, the missionary teachers and educators came to the South with a number of assumptions and expectations about the people they sought to elevate to a higher level of intellect and morality. The effects of a lifetime of bondage, they suspected, had dulled the minds of its victims, debased their morals, demeaned their character, destroyed their self-respect, and rendered them incapable of taking care of themselves. Marcia Colton, a missionary worker in Virginia, claimed that her conversations with returned missionaries from Africa and her previous familiarity with Negroes as slaves permitted her to minister to the freedmen “with more Charity, & less expectation” than most of her co-workers. “I did not expect to find with them generally, any nice distinction of propriety or Chastity.” Nor did Lydia Maria Child, a veteran abolitionist, think any of her friends who chose to teach in the South should harbor any false illusions about what they would find there. “I doubt whether we can treat our colored brethren exactly as we would if they were white, though it is desirable to do so. But we have kept their minds in a state of infancy, and children must be treated with more patience and forbearance than grown people.” Much like their antislavery antecedents, the freedmen’s aid societies, as “the wisest and best friends” of the Negro, refused to claim that the African race was the equal of the Anglo-Saxon. But neither would they concede that blacks were necessarily inferior. “They simply assert that the negro must be accorded an opportunity for development before his capacity for development can be known.” This was, of course, sound abolitionist gospel, steeped in the conviction of antebellum reform that untrammeled individual development alone should determine place in society.54
For many of the missionary teachers, this was their first visit to the South, and the initial impressions they formed of the blacks they encountered would tap a wide range of emotions. At the outset, the sheer numbers, blackness, and demeanor of these people would have to be absorbed. Elizabeth Botume, for one, tried hard.
Negroes, negroes, negroes. They hovered around like bees in a swarm. Sitting, standing, or lying at full-length, with their faces turned to the sky. Every doorstep, box, or barrel was covered with them.… Words fail to describe their grotesque appearance. Fortunately they were oblivious to all this incongruity. They had not yet attained distinct personality; they were only parts of a whole; once “massa’s niggers,” now refugees and contrabands.
Although experience would force the teachers to revise some of the assumptions they brought with them to the South, what they espied in the condition and moral deportment of the freed slaves tended to confirm the previous image of “helpless grown up children” with well-developed habits of indolence, dependency, and licentiousness and skilled in the arts of deception and thievery. But like any good abolitionist, the missionary teacher regarded these vices as the natural consequences of a lifetime of slavery, not innate racial characteristics. If these people were childlike, that was because they had been denied the necessary tools for development. If they were sometimes thieves, they had acquired the habit to supplement their meager rations. If they were easily led into unchastity, they had only modeled their behavior after their masters’. If they dissembled and shielded each other, they had developed those