Alexander Crummell

“ I beg therefore to urge upon public attention, the immediate need of raiding the standard of female education in this country, i beg to insist upon the deep necessity of elevating the mind of woman in the republic, and directing it to noble and commanding themes. I beg to enforce the duty of making woman in this land as superior, intellectual, and dignified, as we all would have her beautiful, and attractive, and moral. ”

“ In our schools we must aim to give our children a thorough and sound training in the simple elements of common school education. Instead of the too common effort to make philosophers out of babes, and savans out of sucklings; let us be content to give our children correctness, accuracy, and thoroughness, in spelling, reading, writing, arithmetic, and geography. I cannot but regard it as a serious defect in the schools in Liberia that so many teachers undertake to instruct their pupils in Chemistry, Botany, and Natural Philosophy, before they can write and spell with accuracy. ”

“ We must cultivate it among ourselves; we must strive to infuse its spirit among our reclaimed and aspiring natives. And what that spirit is we have witnessed in the character of the people among whom we have lived, across the waters; in their strong institutions; in the history of their ancestors; in the distinctive features of their governmental antecedents; in their colonies; their religion, letters, and commerce. The spirit of the English language is the spirit of Independence, both personal and national; the spirit of free speech and a free press, and personal liberty ”

“ Now all these divers streams of influence, operating daily and hourly all through the country, upon thousands of our native population, disclose to us a transforming agency, which is gradually subverting the native languages of our tribes. The influence is here; it is in operation; it is powerful. Every day by trading, by adventure, by the curiosity of the natives, by war at times, by the migration of tribes, by the hasty footsteps of fugitives—this English language is moving further and further interiorwards its centre, and sweeping abroad with a wider and wider circumference. ”

“ Learning and Letters will lie without influence; material interests will everywhere predominate; we shall lose the freshness and the force of all our Anglo-Saxon antecedents; and at length, men everywhere, will rise up and weigh their paltry purses in the scale, over against the strongest brains; and all manhood shall cease in the land! No better corrective to this sad tendency can be found than a good, sound, moral, English Education for those, especially, who will be entrusted with the rearing and training of our unborn children. ”

“ Now, in considering this subject, what first arrests attention, is the bare simple fact that here, on this coast, that is, between Gallinas and Cape Pedro, is an organized negro community, republican in form and name; a people possessed of Christian institutions and civilized habits, with this one marked peculiarity, that is, that in color, race, and origin, they are identical with the masses of rude natives around them; and yet speak the refined and cultivated English language—a language alien alike from the speech of their sires and the soil from whence they sprung, and knowing no other. ”

“ The English Bible, more than any other single cause, has been the prime means of sustaining that purity of diction, that simplicity of expression, that clearness of thought, that earnestness of spirit, and that loftiness of morals, which seem to be distinctive peculiarities of this language. ”

“ Let us esteem it one of the proudest boasts of this land, and, to appropriate the happy language of a heathen—esteem it "the rare felicity of our times that, in this country, one can think what he pleases, and speak what he thinks." [22] Let us prize the principle of Personal Liberty, as one of the richest jewels of our constitutional diadem. Let us not shrink from the severest lest to which a heathen and degraded population around us, may at times strain it. ”

“ In truth, how could France or Spain train the Negro race to high ideas of liberty and of government, when all their modern history has been an almost hopeless effort, to learn the alphabet of freedom,—to tread the first steps of legal self-restraint? ”

“ Wherever the English language is spoken these sentiments are the daily utterances of men. Even in those cases where there is the widest separation between theory and practice, even there the idea of freedom exists and secures expression. The American black man, even in the States of slavery, has been in a school of freedom, from which even the Italian, the German, the Frenchman, the Russian, and the Sardinian, have been separate and alien. ”

“ I do not blame women so much for this state of things; nor do I forget the somewhat pardonable fact that dress is the only Fine Art we have in Liberia. The world has been six thousand years in existence, and it has hardly yet begun to do justice to the intellect of woman. ”

“ It is a matter alike of policy and of duty for us to attempt, though at a humble distance, the same legal reformation among this people that the English have, with great success effected in India. There is no greater disparity here in our relative numbers, than there, between the Christian power and the heathen masses; while here we have a population at once simple and unenlightened to deal with, and the presence and protection of the three chief naval powers of the world. ”

“ I grant that not unfrequently they present the individual black man, refined, elegant, accomplished, and learned, far beyond any that spring up on American or English soil. But in capacity for free government, and civil order, the British West India Isles, Sierra Leone, the free colored men of America, and our own Republic are, without doubt, far in advance of all the rest of the children of Africa under the sun. ”

“ In states thus constituted, no matter how deep may be the grievance, how severe the suffering, the obstructive element has to disappear; the disturbing force, whether man or system, must be annihilated!—for freedom is terrible as well as majestic; and the state emerges from the conflict with a fresh acquisition of strength, and with an augmented capacity for a nobler career and loftier attainments. ”

“ As a consequence, there has sprung up, in one generation, within our borders, a mighty army of English-speaking natives, who, as manhood approached, have settled around us in their homes from one end of the land to the other. Many of these take up the dialects of the other tribes in whose neighborhood their masters lived, but even then English is their speech. Thus it is that everywhere in the Republic, from Gallinas to Cape Palmas, one meets with a multitude of natives who have been servants in our Liberian families, and are daily in the utterance of English. ”

“ An antidote to its extravagances, will, moreover, be found in the cultivation of another prime characteristic of the English language, that is, its high moral and spiritual character. Remembering that "righteousness exalteth a nation, but that sin is a reproach to any people;" let us aim at the cultivation among us, of all that sensitive honor, those habits of honesty, that purity of manners and morals, those domestic virtues, and that evangelical piety, which are peculiarly the attributes of Anglo-Saxon society, States, and homes. ”

“ It is the nature and office of books, to produce these grand results. "For books," to use the lofty periods of Milton, "are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them, to be as active as that soul whose progeny they are—nay, they do preserve, as in a vial, the purest efficacy and extraction of that living intellect that bred them! ”

“ But the master need in Liberia is that of a female seminary, of a high order, for the education of Girls. Already our wives and daughters are in the rear of ourselves and sons, in training and culture; humble as we all are, in this country, in acquirements, yet there is a class of men in Liberia who are fully fifty years in advance of our women, that is, intellectually. ”

“ Nobody who has a due reverence for * * * * his own spiritual being, which has been mainly trained and fashioned by his native language—nobody who rightly appreciates what a momentous thing it is to keep the unity of a people entire and unbroken, to preserve and foster all its national recollections, what a glorious and inestimable blessing it is to 'speak the tongue that Shakspeare spake,' will ever wish to trim that tongue according to any arbitrary theory."—Rev. ”

“ How, when misrule became organic, and seated tyranny unreasoning and obstinate, they have demonstrated to all the world, how trilling a thing is the tenure of tyrants, how resistless and invincible is the free spirit of a nation! ”

“ Moreover, let us cultivate the principle of Independence, both as a nation and as individuals, and in our children; as, in itself a needed element of character, as the great antidote to the deep slavishness of a three centuries' servitude, and as a corrective to the inactivity, the slothfulness, and the helplessness, which are gendered by a tropical clime. I am well aware of the exaggeration to which all men are liable to carry this sentiment ”

“ For, while we repress all tendencies to childish vanity and idle exaggeration, we are to consider other telling facts which spring from our character and influence, and which are necessary to a just estimate of the peculiar agency we are now contemplating. And here a number of facts present themselves to our notice. Within a period of thirty years, thousands of heathen children have been placed under the guardianship of our settlers. Many of these have forgotten their native tongue, and know now the English language as their language. ”

“ Now, instead of a language characterized by such rude and inferior features as these, ice have been brought to the heritage of the English language. Negro as we are by blood and constitution, we have been, as a people, for generations in the habitual utterance of Anglo-Saxon speech. ”

“ With the noble tongue which Providence has given us, it will be difficult for us to be divorced from the spirit, which for centuries has been speaking through it. For a language acts in divers ways, upon the spirit of a people; even as the spirit of a people acts with a creative and spiritualizing force upon a language. ”

“ There are emigrants in this country from the Carolinas and Georgia, who, in some cases, come closer to the Fatherland; but more than a moiety of the people of this country have come from Maryland and Virginia, and I have no doubt that there are scores, not to say hundreds of them, who are unable to trace back their sires to Africa. I know that in my own ease, my maternal ancestors have trod American soil, and therefore have used the English language wellnigh as long as any descendants of the early settlers of the Empire State. ”

“ But the value of such a Library to a youth, just starting into life, would be incalculable. And no better service could be done the cause of pure speech, correct diction, and earnest thought, than a general effort to put a Library of this kind within the reach of every intelligent boy in the country, of 15 years of age. ”

“ Is our influence upon them to touch only the brain, and not life, manners, the family, society? or rather should we not as a Nation, take upon ns the duty of so training these people, that as they receive the language, so they may likewise receive the civilization, the order, the industry, and the mild, but transforming influence's of a regulated Christian state? The Mission of Liberia, in its civil aspects, is clear to my mind. This nation is to restore society all along our coast ”

“ At these stations, what with day-schools and night-schools, for a dozen scholars each; and remembering that, at Cavalla, 100 children, at least, are always under training, in reading, writing, and arithmetic; you can see that several thousands of our aboriginal population have received a common school education in the English language. And numbers of these persons show their appreciation of their advantages, by securing the same for their children, and coveting them for their kindred. ”

“ As a consequence, all our growth seems to be the result of national, in the place of local enterprise; a feeling of dependence upon the Capital is exhibited everywhere: and there exists, universally, a lack of municipal pride and energy. It would be quite beyond the limits I have set before me, to enter upon this subject, else, I should venture to point out great and growing evils which are the result of this state of things; in the points, that is, of political ambition, local improvements, roads, and civil order. I confine myself, however to the subject of education ”

“ Of all races of men none, I ween, are so domineering, none have a stronger, more exclusive spirit of caste, none have a more contemptuous dislike of inferiority; and yet in this race the ancient spirit of freedom rises higher than their repugnances. It impels them to conquer even their prejudices: and hence, when chastened and subdued by Christianity, it makes them philanthropic and brotherly. Thus it is that in England this national sentiment would not tolerate the existence of slavery. although it was Negro slavery. ”

“ Although I am doubtful of the moral effect of this movement upon ourselves, yet I feel no little pride in the fact that this young nation should become, so, a land of refuge, an asylum for the oppressed! ”

“ But no one who looks carefully at the state of things in this country, can suppose, for a moment, that either justice is done to the intellect of this sex, or, that women, in this land, feel the burden of obligation which rests so heavily upon them. ”

“ On the coast, between Bassa and this point, there are many large towns where, among adults, it is almost as constantly employed as in our civilized communities. [11]
Notice here another fact: among all the industrial pursuits of our citizens, trading absorbs as much attention as any other pursuit. Scores of our youth, soon after leaving school, start with their cloth, guns, powder, and tobacco, for the factory, whether on the coast or in the country. Added to this is the other fact, that from Sierra Leone to the Equator, the master commercial influence is English. ”