The American Missionary | Page 7

administrators have passed
through high office, and had to deal with the ultimate problems of
British government in that country, without feeling the value of the
work done by missionaries. Such men gradually realize, as I have
realized, that the missionaries do really represent the spiritual side of
the new civilization, and of the new life which we are introducing into
India."
Names and places being changed, it is coming to appear that the whole
of this can be said of the Christian workers from the North among the
colored people of the South. Besides all of their work that can be told
by statistics, and besides all of that in building up character among the
Negroes and awakening their intellect and their aspiration for thrift in
every sense, they have exerted a profound unconscious influence upon
the white people of that Southland. They, too, have built up among the
whites a confidence in the purity and unselfishness of their motives. At
first they were suspected as emissaries of a political party. By many
even of the best people there they were held as necessarily persons of
low-down condition and character to be willing to do that "low-down

work." "With our views of the case, how could we believe anything
else?" was the answer to the remonstrance against the current mode of
treatment. Gradually this feeling has been giving way to one of
growing confidence, until for several years such men as Rev. Dr. A.G.
Haygood and Mr. G.W. Cable, and such papers as the Memphis Appeal,
and such a State Board of Examiners as that of the Atlanta University
have been publicly declaring the high intellectual quality and moral
standing of these once despised teachers, while many of the most
respectable citizens are privately saying the same thing, and multitudes
believe it, though making no announcement of the same.
By this crucifixion of feeling through which those workers have passed,
and by their self-denying endurance of hardness, they too, in no small
sense, have been making expiation for the wrongs done the slaves.
Their missionary instinct also forms the necessary spiritual complement
of the aggressive genius of the Puritan civilization which is now taking
possession where its sword had cleared the way. Their advance in the
good opinion of the best people of the South is also a striking evidence
of their high character and intelligence. No class of Northern people
going South have done so much to make the North respected as the
missionaries, and none are doing more to lessen the danger of transition
from the old state of things to the new. Going, not as "carpet-baggers,"
but as citizens, to be identified with the moral reconstruction of the
South, they translate there the real spirit of the North, and represent the
spiritual side of the new life which is going into that fair portion of our
own dear country. By the peculiar people to whom they especially go,
and who prove to have a natural affinity for Puritan ideas and
institutions, they are doing more than any others to set up, not a New
England in the South, but a New South, wherein shall be rejuviant the
principles of that civilization which was planted at Plymouth Rock.
JOSEPH E. ROY.
* * * * *
EXPULSION OF NEGROES FROM MARION, ARKANSAS.
It is not our custom to publish details of alleged outrages upon the

colored people at the South. We have no wish to stir up strife by
recalling memories of the past, or by giving incidents of recent
aggression against the helpless. But this case in Marion is free from
bloody details and is a simple illustration of the determination of the
white people to maintain their sway in the South.
The simple facts in the case are, that in Crittenden County, Arkansas,
of which Marion is the county town, the population is chiefly colored,
the ratio being seven negroes to one white man. For several years the
office of Judge of the County and Probate Court, and the Clerk and
under officers of the court, were colored men. The more important
county offices were held by white men. On a given day, fifty or more
heavily-armed white men appeared at the county seat and drove from
their offices and homes the colored officers named above, together with
the colored local doctor, the lawyer, the schoolmaster of the colored
school, the editor of the colored newspaper and a number of other
prominent colored citizens.
The farther details of the transaction are given in a thoughtful and calm
article in a recent number of The Independent by Rev. B.A. Imes, the
colored minister of the church at Memphis, Tenn., under the care of this
Association. We give below all of the article that relates to the facts:
THE