Various - The American Missionary. Volume 43, No. 03, March, 1889

Dear Brethren: The work of this Association requires $1,000 per day. The receipts for the first four months of our fiscal year have been only about $800 a day. Here is the germ of a debt. Unless it is chilled and destroyed in the vigorous months of March, April and May, when the churches are full and active, it will, during the hot summer months, when the audiences are thin, grow rapidly, and develop its bitter fruit—a great deficit. The coming three months will be the test. We are the servants of the churches and are doing their work, and we are confident that they intend to give us the means to carry it forward.

We, therefore, appeal to the pastors whose collections come during these three months, or whose collections can conveniently be brought within these three months, to lend us their great help by emphasizing our needs when the collections are taken, and we appeal to our patrons that they will, both in their church collections or by their special donations, come to our aid in a time when that aid will be so beneficial.

Perhaps we never shall cease our urgent appeals for the "sinews of war." The growing work of this Association requires increasing funds to meet the enlarged demand. But we are beginning to feel the need of a greater force in the field. We sound forth the bugle note calling for recruits for the army of the Lord in our glorious warfare. We appeal to students in theological seminaries, colleges, normal schools and female seminaries, to consider the claims of this great work. We make this appeal with special urgency to the Congregational institutions of the land, for it is from this body of Christians that we receive nearly all the funds with which we carry on our work, and there is a special fitness that the sons and daughters of these churches should enter the field for which the funds are contributed.

But we wish to make a distinct announcement in connection with this appeal. We wish only to "get the best." The needy people for whom we labor have suffered such privations, and such absolute destitution of all adequate religious instruction, that we feel they are now entitled to as good as can be given them. We send no teachers to the field that are incompetent and without adequate experience. We do not believe that everybody is qualified to teach the Negroes, at least it is not fair to them, that we should employ those who cannot find occupation anywhere else. Good health, good training, good powers of discipline, a missionary spirit and a membership in some evangelical church, are the absolute essentials for all persons that we employ. We call for recruits, but we ask for only those that are well equipped, courageous and ready to endure hardness as good soldiers of Christ.

"I was an officer in the 5th United States Colored Troops, the first colored regiment raised west of the Alleghenies, just before the massacre of colored troops at Fort Pillow, and knowing so much of the fidelity and valor and good service of those troops in the war to the Nation, to which they then owed so little, I have special interest in the enlightenment and uplifting of the colored race in the South."

In the last month's Missionary , we published some statements showing that persons declined to contribute to our treasury because we had been so enriched by the Daniel Hand Fund. It gives us pleasure to know that all our patrons do not take this view of the matter, as will be seen from the following extract from the letter of a practical business man:

"If A.M.A. means A Million Accepted , I hope you will be able to write it once a year till you can build churches, school-houses and colleges all through the South, but not enough to take away from the churches of the North and East the privilege of helping the poor and needy till they are able to take care of themselves."

Rev. Chas. H. McIntosh has for some months assisted Dr. Roy in collecting funds for the Association, using a stereopticon as a means of illustrating his lectures on the varied phases of our work.

Pastor Leeper of Red Oak, Iowa, writes: "We were much pleased with Brother McIntosh's lecture and exhibit. He does well, and makes in every way a good impression. The lantern works promptly and makes clear pictures. That mode of presenting the work is the best I have seen. The people will not soon forget what they saw and heard. They were surprised to know that the A.M.A. is doing so extensive a work. I had often preached on the subject, but pictures make the facts stand out so much more vividly. We had crowded houses."

Rev. J.B. Chase, of Hull, Iowa, wishes to complete his files of the American Missionary to have them bound for a public library. If any of our readers have the numbers for August and September, 1880, and April, 1878, that they can spare and willingly give, it would be a favor to us if they would mail them to the above address. Our edition for those months is exhausted.

Never since the days of reconstruction and of the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution, has the question of the equal suffrage of the races in the South awakened public attention as it does now. In many quarters, some of them very influential, the right of the Negro to a fair vote and a fair count is strenuously advocated. On the other hand, the supremacy of the whites as the ruling race in the South is set forth by leading Southern men more distinctly than ever before.

Col. Grady, of Atlanta, in his famous speech at Dallas, Texas, urges this in these emphatic terms:

Standing in the presence of this multitude, sobered with the responsibility of the message I deliver to the young men of the South, I declare that the truth above all others to be worn unsullied and sacred in your hearts, to be surrendered to no force, sold for no price, compromised in no necessity, but cherished and defended as the covenant of your prosperity, and the pledge of peace to your children, is that the white race must dominate forever in the South, because it is the white race, and superior to that race with which its supremacy is threatened.

Hon. W.C.P. Breckinridge, member of Congress from Kentucky, and many other prominent men in the South, express the same sentiment, so that this may be regarded as the ultimatum of Southern popular requirement.

The most obvious way is that which is in use at present, the intimidation of the colored man and the manipulation of the ballot-box. But against this the sober second thought of the South itself begins to revolt. Thus a paper so thoroughly Southern as the Charleston News and Courier utters this salutary and emphatic protest:

"It appals thinking men to know and see that the present generation and the rising generation of white men in the South are taught in practice that republican institutions are a failure, and that elections are to be carried, not by the honest vote of a fair majority, but by campaigning, which begins with rank intimidation and ends with subterfuge and evasion. The white people suffer more by the trickery and malfeasance by which they score victory than the colored people suffer. The supremacy of what, for convenience, is called Anglo-Saxon civilization, though there is little of the Anglo-Saxon manner or of civilization in the mode of securing it, must and will be maintained, but it can be maintained without sectional divisions in politics and without the maintenance of radical lines at elections."