The religious characteristics of the race are very marked; faith, hope and love are leading traits.  They endured a bondage that would have crushed other races; their faith and hope never deserted them.  Their bitter experience in those long and weary years drove them to God as their only source of help, and the “Slave Songs,” with the sad history out of which they grew, are among the most pathetic utterances of patience, trust and triumphant hope that human literature presents.  So it was during the war, which was long and sometimes of doubtful result, but they never lost their faith in their ultimate deliverance.  The Jew in his journey from bondage to Canaan, often became despondent and murmured; the Negro never did either.

Hear the Jew: 

“Because there were no graves in Egypt, hast thou taken us to die in the wilderness?”

“Let us make a Captain and let us return into Egypt.”

Hear the Negro, in the Slave Songs: 

“Way over in the Egypt land, You shall gain the victory.  Way over in the Egypt land, You shall gain the day. March on, and you shall gain the victory, March on, and you shall gain the day.”

Such a people are surely destined to develop a rich and beautiful Christian life.  If they should be specially trained, and their warm hearts inspired, for the work of missionaries to Africa, who can doubt the success of their efforts?  They would stand on a better vantage ground there than the Mohammedan, for he is a foreigner transplanted on the soil.  They would come back to the home of their fathers, and would meet the natives as brothers—­long separated, yet as brothers; their color and personal characteristics would attest the kinship, their Christian love would kindle towards the degraded of their race, and their holy ambition would be fired by the great work to which they were called—­the uplifting of the millions of long-neglected Africa.  It would be reasonable to expect that they would endure the African climate better than the white man.  They are a tropical race, and, in America, they love and cling to the sunny South, seldom migrating to the North; they do not suffer from the malaria that is so fatal to the whites in the South.

These views and impressions are confirmed by actual experience.  With a view of learning the results of that experience, I addressed letters to the Secretaries of all the larger societies in Europe and America doing missionary work on that continent, and, in due time, received courteous replies from nearly all of them, giving opinions and facts with more or less fulness of detail.  My inquiries mainly centered around two points:  first, the ability of the colored missionary as compared with the white, to endure the climate; and secondly, his relative success as a missionary.  The opinions given in those letters, as might be expected, are various, and the facts themselves, gathered from widely different sources, and relating to very different climates and local circumstances, point to somewhat different conclusions.