lding 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