The American Missionary | Page 5

question: Is there a remedy? There
is! The teacher and the preacher, the spelling-book and the Bible, the
saviours of men, the reformers of society, the uplifters of races, are
spreading over the South. They go to the manufacturing towns--the
Birminghams and the Annistons--they go to the large cities with their
common and normal schools, their medical, law and theological
seminaries. When the pupils become teachers, they go into the smaller
towns, they go into the rural districts, on the small farms, everywhere
instructing, encouraging and stimulating the people, leading them to
more intelligent industries, to economy, to the purchase of land, the
erection of better houses, to a higher aim in life, and to the formation of
a right character. Of such stuff men are made, citizens, Christians; men

who can use the ballot, who own property that must be protected by the
ballot; men who have homes that must be refined and pure, churches
where God is worshipped intelligently and where a practical morality is
taught and attained. Such a people will be safe, for they will be bone
and muscle of the South, they will be needed in its wide expanse of
fertile soil, needed in its practical trades, needed for the accumulated
wealth, intelligence and cultivated piety they will bring into all the
walks and avocations of life.
But it will be some time before these educational and religious means
reach all the blacks, and in the meantime much patience and toil will be
needed. To the blacks we would say: You won the admiration of men
and the blessing of God by your patience under the yoke of slavery
when there seemed to be no hope; now win both again by bearing in
like spirit your lesser present ills, while hope dawns and help is near.
To thoughtful men North and South we urge: Take hold of this work
like men. If a thousandth part of the self-sacrifice and money spent in
the war were devoted to this work, the evil might be averted. Why
stand over-awed at a threatened flood that if met in time may not only
be averted but be turned into fertilizing waters over the broad lands?
* * * * *
BOOK REVIEW.
THE REAR GUARD OF THE REVOLUTION. By JAMES R.
GILMORE (Edmund Kirke). D. Appleton & Co.: New York. 1.50.
JOHN SEVIER AS A COMMONWEALTH BUILDER. By JAMES R.
GILMORE (Edmund Kirke). D. Appleton & Co.: New York. 1.50.
Just one hundred years before the rebellion of the Southern States,
Daniel Boone cut on a beech tree near Jonesboro, Tenn., the following
words, which are still legible:
D. Boon Cilled A BAR on THE Tree in YEAR 1760

The same year that Daniel Boone "cilled" (killed) this "bar," William
Bean, a former companion of Boone's, settled in the valley of the
Watauga River, in what is now Eastern Tennessee. The two volumes
whose titles are given above trace the history of this mountain
settlement from the time that this pioneer crossed the Alleghenies down
to the death of John Sevier, Sept. 24, 1815. These books are of much
more than ordinary interest to the readers of the AMERICAN
MISSIONARY. James R. Gilmore (Edmund Kirke) has put the same
power of graphic description, the simple yet thrilling narrative, which
held us spell-bound to the last chapters of Among the Pines.
Our limited space does not permit an extended review of these volumes.
We only call attention to them here because they touch upon great
missionary problems, and throw a flood of light upon these interesting
Mountain people among whom the A.M.A. has so extensive and
important a work. The first of these volumes in chronological order is
the Rear Guard of the Revolution. The colony of the Mountain people
in the Watauga Valley, led by John Sevier and James Robertson and
Isaac Shelby, constituted this "rear guard." No better blood ever
mingled in the veins of a people than that which flows in this Mountain
people. French Huguenot, Scotch-Irish Presbyterian and Welsh
Presbyterian were their ancestors. With such leadership as these three
men furnished, the early Mountain colonists ought to have been heroes,
and they were.
In the author's own words, "These three men, John Sevier, James
Robertson and Isaac Shelby, * * * were like Washington and Lincoln,
'providential men.' They marched neither to the sound of drum nor
bugle, and no flaming bulletins proclaimed their exploits in the ears of
a listening continent; their slender forces trod silently the western
solitudes, and their greatest battles were insignificant skirmishes never
reported beyond the mountains; but their deeds were pregnant with
consequences that will be felt along the coming centuries."
They were, and they held themselves to be, "providential men."
Whether reading the Bible by the light of the great pine