So far from being discouraged by defeats, the unjust treatment meted out to these young men should redouble the efforts of others of their class to carry this new Bastile by storm. It should lead every colored Congressman to make sure that he either sends a colored applicant or a white one who has not the seeds of snobbery and caste in his soul. Smith, after four years of torture, comes home, is driven home, because, forsooth, he might attend the ball next year! He is hounded out of the Academy because he would have to be assigned to a white regiment! There are some negroes who feel that their rights in the land of their birth are superior to the prejudices of the enemies of the Union, and who dare to speak and write in behalf of these rights, as their fathers dared to fight for them a very few years ago.
"Bouchet, under civil rule, enters Yale College the best prepared student of one hundred and thirty freshmen, and all through his course is treated like a gentleman, both by the faculty and the students, men who know what justice means, and have some adequate idea of the true theory of education and gentlemanly conduct. Two freed boys, from North Carolina and South Carolina, slaves during the war, prepare at the best Northern academics, and enter, without remonstrance, Amherst and Dartmouth. What divinity, then, hedges West Point and Annapolis? What but the old rebel spirit, which seeks again to control them for use in future rebellions as it did in the past. The war developed some unwelcome truths with regard to this snobbish and disloyal spirit of our national institutions, and the exploits of some volunteer officers showed that all manhood, bravery, skill, and energy were not contained in West Point or Annapolis, or, if there, did not pertain solely to the petty cliques that aim to give tone to those academies. It is not for any officer, the creature of the government --it is not for any student, the willing ward of that government--to say who shall enter the national schools and be the recipients of my bounty. It is the duty of every member of Congress to see that the government sanctions no such spirit; and it becomes every loyal citizen who wishes to avoid the mistakes of the former war to see to it that no class be excluded, and that every boy, once admitted, shall have the strictest justice dealt out to him, a thing which, thus far, has not been done in the case of the colored cadets.
"The true remedy lies in the feelings and sympathies of the officers of these academies, in the ability and fair investigations of the board of examiners;not from such gentlemen as at present seem to rule these institutions.
"NIGER NIGRORUM."
This article was taken from some South Carolina paper during the summer of '74. Its tone is in accordance with the multitude of articles upon the same subject which occurred about the same time, and, like them all, or most of them, is rather farfetched. It is too broad.
Its denunciations cover too much ground. They verge upon untruth.
As to Conyers and McClellan at the Naval Academy Iknow nothing. Of Napier I know nothing. Of Smith Iprefer to say nothing. Of Williams I do express the belief that his treatment was impartial and just.
He was regularly and rightly found deficient and duly dismissed. The article seems to imply that he should not have been "found" and dismissed simply because he was a negro. A very shallow reason indeed, and one "no fair-minded man" will for an instant entertain.
Of four years' life at the Academy, I spent the first with Smith, rooming with him. During the first half year Williams was also in the corps with us. The two following years I was alone. The next and last year of my course I spent with Whittaker, of South Carolina. I have thus had an opportunity to become acquainted with Smith's conduct and that of the cadets toward him. Smith had trouble under my own eyes on more than one occasion, and Whittaker* has already received blows in the face, but I have not had so much as an angry word to utter. There is a reason for all this, and had "Niger Nigrorum" been better acquainted with it he had never made the blunder he has.
*Johnson Chestnut Whittaker, of Camden, South Carolina, appointed to fill vacancy created by Smith's dismissal, after several white candidates so appointed had failed, entered the Academy in September, 1876. Shortly after entering he was struck in the face by a young man from Alabama for sneering at him, as he said, while passing by him. Whittaker immediately reported the affair to the cadet officer of the day, by whose efforts this belligerent Alabama gentleman was brought before a court-martial, tried, found guilty, and suspended for something over six months, thus being compelled to join the next class that entered the Academy.
I cannot venture more on the treatment of colored cadets generally without disregarding the fact that this is purely a narrative of my own treatment and life at West Point. To go further into that subject would involve much difference of opinion, hard feelings in certain quarters, and would cause a painful and needless controversy.
