Page:John Brown (W. E. B. Du Bois).djvu/107

Rh great mass of their enslaved race. He sought them in home and church and out on the street, and he hired them in his business. He came to them on a plane of perfect equality—they sat at his table and he at theirs. He neither descended upon them from above nor wallowed with their lowest, and the result was that as Redpath says, "Captain Brown had a higher notion of the capacity of the Negro race than most white men. I have often heard him dwell on this subject, and mention instances of their fitness to take care of themselves, saying, in his quaint way, that 'they behaved so much like "folks" that he almost thought they were so.' He thought that perhaps a forcible separation of the connection between master and slave was necessary to educate the blacks for self-government; but this he threw out as a suggestion merely."

Nor did this appreciation of the finer qualities and capacity of the Negroes blind him to their imperfections. He found them "intensely human," but with their human frailties weakened by slavery and caste; and with perfect faith in their ability to rise above their faults, he criticized and inspired them. In his quaint essay on "Sambo's Mistakes," putting himself in the black man's place, he enumerates his errors: His failure to improve his time in good reading; his waste of money in indulgent luxuries and societies and consequent lack of capital; his servile occupations; his talkativeness and inaptitute for organizationl his sectarian bias. In