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 The Project Gutenberg eBook of
John Jasper: The unmatched Negro philosopher
and preacher
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Title: John Jasper: The unmatched Negro philosopher and

preacher

Author: William E. Hatcher

Release date: June 6, 2022 [eBook #68205]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Fleming H. Revell Company,

1908

Credits: Charlene Taylor, Martin Pettit and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK JOHN

JASPER: THE UNMATCHED NEGRO PHILOSOPHER AND
PREACHER ***
 Transcriber’s Note:

Obvious typographic errors have been

corrected.
JOHN JASPER
 JOHN JASPER

The Unmatched Negro

Philosopher and Preacher

By
WILLIAM E. HATCHER, LL. D.

New York Chicago Toronto

Fleming H. Revell Company
London and Edinburgh

Copyright, 1908, by
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY

New York: 158 Fifth Avenue

Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave.
London: 21 Paternoster Square
Edinburgh: 75 Princes Street
 CONTENTS
Introduction 7
I. Jasper Presented 15
II. Jasper Has a Thrilling Conversion 23
III. How Jasper Got His Schooling 30
IV. The Slave Preacher 36
V. “Whar Sin Kum Frum?” 47
VI. Jasper Set Free 58
VII. The Picture-Maker 65
VIII. Jasper’s Star Witness 72
IX. Jasper’s Sermon on “Dem Sebun Wimmin” 89
X. Jasper Glimpsed Under Various Lights 94
XI. Sermon:—The Stone Cut Out of the Mountain 108
XII. Facts Concerning the Sermon on the Sun 121
XIII. The Sun Do Move 133
XIV. One Jasper Day in the Spring Time of 1878 150
XV. Jasper’s Picture of Heaven 174
 INTRODUCTION
Reader; stay a moment. A word with you before you begin to sample
this book. We will tell you some things in advance, which may help
you to decide whether it is worth while to read any further. These
pages deal with a negro, and are not designed either to help or to
hurt the negro race. They have only to do with one man. He was one
of a class,—without pedigree, and really without successors, except
that he was so dominant and infectious that numbers of people
affected his ways and dreamed that they were one of his sort. As a
fact, they were simply of another and of a baser sort.
The man in question was a negro, and if you cannot appreciate
greatness in a black skin you would do well to turn your thoughts into
some other channel. Moreover, he was a negro covered over with
ante bellum habits and ways of doing. He lived forty years before the
war and for about forty years after it. He grew wonderfully as a
freeman; but he never grew away from the tastes, dialects, and
manners of the bondage times. He was a man left over from the old
régime and never got infected with the new order. The air of the
educated negro preacher didn’t set well upon him. The raw
scholarship of the new “ish,” as he called it, was sounding brass to
him. As a fact, the new generation of negro preachers sent out by
the schools drew back from this man. They branded him as an
anachronism, and felt that his presence in the pulpit was a shock to
religion and an offense to the ministry; and yet not one of them ever
attained the celebrity or achieved the results which came to this
unlettered and grievously ungrammatical son of Africa.
But do not be afraid that you are to be fooled into the fanatical camp.
This story comes from the pen of a Virginian who claims no
exemption from Southern prejudices and feels no call to sound the
praises of the negro race. Indeed, he never intended to write what is
contained within the covers of this book. It grew up spontaneously
and most of the contents were written before the book was thought
of.
It is, perhaps, too much to expect that the meddlers with books will
take the ipse dixit of an unaccredited stranger. They ought not to do
it: they are not asked to do it. They can go on about their business, if
they prefer; but if they do, they will miss the story of the
incomparable negro of the South. This is said with sobriety and after
a half century spent in close observation of the negro race.
More than that, the writer of this never had any intention of bothering
with this man when he first loomed up into notoriety. He got drawn in
unexpectedly. He heard that there was a marvel of a man “over in
Africa,” a not too savoury portion of Richmond, Virginia,—and one
Sunday afternoon in company with a Scot-Irishman, who was a
scholar and a critic, with a strong leaning towards ridicule, he went to
hear him preach. Shades of our Anglo-Saxon fathers! Did mortal lips
ever gush with such torrents of horrible English! Hardly a word came
out clothed and in its right mind. And gestures! He circled around the
pulpit with his ankle in his hand; and laughed and sang and shouted
and acted about a dozen characters within the space of three
minutes. Meanwhile, in spite of these things, he was pouring out a
gospel sermon, red hot, full of love, full of invective, full of
tenderness, full of bitterness, full of tears, full of every passion that
ever flamed in the human breast. He was a theatre within himself,
with the stage crowded with actors. He was a battle-field;—himself
the general, the staff, the officers, the common soldiery, the
thundering artillery and the rattling musketry. He was the preacher;
likewise the church and the choir and the deacons and the
congregation. The Scot-Irishman surrendered in fifteen minutes after
the affair commenced, but the other man was hard-hearted and
stubborn and refused to commit himself. He preferred to wait until he
got out of doors and let the wind blow on him and see what was left.
He determined to go again; and he went and kept going, off and on,
for twenty years. That was before the negro became a national
figure. It was before he startled his race with his philosophy as to the
rotation of the sun. It was before he became a lecturer and a
sensation, sought after from all parts of the country. Then it was that
he captured the Scot-Irish and the other man also. What is written
here constitutes the gatherings of nearly a quarter of a century, and,
frankly speaking, is a tribute to the brother in black,—the one
unmatched, unapproachable, and wonderful brother.
But possibly the reader is of the practical sort. He would like to get
the worldly view of this African genius and to find out of what stuff he
was made. Very well; he will be gratified! Newspapers are
heartlessly practical. They are grudging of editorial commendation,
and in Richmond, at the period, they were sparing of references of
any kind to negroes. You could hardly expect them to say anything
commendatory of a negro, if he was a negro, with odd and
impossible notions. Now this man was of that very sort. He got it into
his big skull that the earth was flat, and that the sun rotated;—a
scientific absurdity! But you see he proved it by the Bible. He
ransacked the whole book and got up ever so many passages. He
took them just as he found them. It never occurred to him that the
Bible was not dealing with natural science, and that it was written in
an age and country when astronomy was unknown and therefore
written in the language of the time. Intelligent people understand this
very well, but this miracle of his race was behind his era. He took the
Bible literally, and, with it in hand, he fought his battles about the
sun. Literally, but not scientifically, he proved his position, and he
gave some of his devout antagonists a world of botheration by the
tenacity with which he held to his views and the power with which he
stated his case. Scientifically, he was one of the ancients, but that
did not interfere with his piety and did not at all eclipse his views. His
perfect honesty was most apparent in all of his contentions; and,
while some laughed at what they called his vagaries, those who
knew him best respected him none the less, but rather the more, for
his astronomical combat. There was something in his love of the
Bible, his faith in every letter of it, and his courage, that drew to him
the good will and lofty respect of uncounted thousands and,
probably, it might be said, of uncounted millions.
Now when this man died it was as the fall of a tower. It was a crash,
heard and felt farther than was the collapse of the famous tower at
Venice. If the dubious, undecided reader has not broken down on the
road but has come this far, he is invited to look at the subjoined
editorial from The Richmond Dispatch, the leading morning paper of
Richmond, Va., which published at the time an article on this lofty
figure, now national in its proportions and imperishable in its fame,
when it bowed to the solemn edict of death.

(From The Richmond Dispatch)

“It is a sad coincidence that the destruction of the Jefferson
Hotel and the death of the Rev. John Jasper should have fallen
upon the same day. John Jasper was a Richmond Institution, as
surely so as was Major Ginter’s fine hotel. He was a national
character, and he and his philosophy were known from one end
of the land to the other. Some people have the impression that
John Jasper was famous simply because he flew in the face of
the scientists and declared that the sun moved. In one sense,
that is true, but it is also true that his fame was due, in great
measure, to a strong personality, to a deep, earnest conviction,
as well as to a devout Christian character. Some preachers
might have made this assertion about the sun’s motion without
having attracted any special attention. The people would have
laughed over it, and the incident would have passed by as a
summer breeze. But John Jasper made an impression upon his
generation, because he was sincerely and deeply in earnest in
all that he said. No man could talk with him in private, or listen to
him from the pulpit, without being thoroughly convinced of that
fact. His implicit trust in the Bible and everything in it, was
beautiful and impressive. He had no other lamp by which his
feet were guided. He had no other science, no other philosophy.
He took the Bible in its literal significance; he accepted it as the
inspired word of God; he trusted it with all his heart and soul and
mind; he believed nothing that was in conflict with the teachings
of the Bible—scientists and philosophers and theologians to the
contrary notwithstanding.
“‘They tried to make it appear,’ said he, in the last talk we had
with him on the subject, ‘that John Jasper was a fool and a liar
when he said that the sun moved. I paid no attention to it at first,
because I did not believe that the so-called scientists were in
earnest. I did not think that there was any man in the world fool
enough to believe that the sun did not move, for everybody had
seen it move. But when I found that these so-called scientists
were in earnest I took down my old Bible and proved that they,
and not John Jasper, were the fools and the liars.’ And there
was no more doubt in his mind on that subject than there was of
his existence. John Jasper had the faith that removed
mountains. He knew the literal Bible as well as Bible scholars
did. He did not understand it from the scientific point of view, but
he knew its teachings and understood its spirit, and he believed
in it. He accepted it as the true word of God, and he preached it
with unction and with power.
“John Jasper became famous by accident, but he was a most
interesting man apart from his solar theory. He was a man of
deep convictions, a man with a purpose in life, a man who
earnestly desired to save souls for heaven. He followed his
divine calling with faithfulness, with a determination, as far as he
could, to make the ways of his God known unto men, His saving
health among all nations. And the Lord poured upon His
servant, Jasper, ‘the continual dew of His blessing.’”
 I
JASPER PRESENTED

John Jasper, the negro preacher of Richmond, Virginia, stands

preëminent among the preachers of the negro race in the South. He
was for fifty years a slave, and a preacher during twenty-five years of
his slavery, and distinctly of the old plantation type. Freedom came
full-handed to him, but it did not in any notable degree change him in
his style, language, or manner of preaching. He was the ante bellum
preacher until eighty-nine years of age, when he preached his last
sermon on “Regeneration,” and with quiet dignity laid off his mortal
coil and entered the world invisible. He was the last of his type, and
we shall not look upon his like again. It has been my cherished
purpose for some time to embalm the memory of this extraordinary
genius in some form that would preserve it from oblivion. I would
give to the American people a picture of the God-made preacher
who was great in his bondage and became immortal in his freedom.
This is not to be done in biographic form, but rather in vagrant
articles which find their kinship only in the fact that they present
some distinct view of a man, hampered by early limitations, denied
the graces of culture, and cut off even from the advantages of a
common education, but who was munificently endowed by nature,
filled with vigour and self-reliance, and who achieved greatness in
spite of almost limitless adversities. I account him genuinely great
among the sons of men, but I am quite sure that the public can never
apprehend the force and gist of his rare manhood without first being
made acquainted with certain facts appertaining to his early life.
Jasper was born a slave. He grew up on a plantation and was a
toiler in the fields up to his manhood. When he came to Richmond,
now grown to a man, he was untutored, full of dangerous energies,
almost gigantic in his muscle, set on pleasure, and without the fear
of God before his eyes. From his own account of himself, he was
fond of display, a gay coxcomb among the women of his race, a fun-
maker by nature, with a self-assertion that made him a leader within
the circles of his freedom.
We meet him first as one of the “hands” in the tobacco factory of Mr.
Samuel Hargrove, an enterprising and prosperous manufacturer in
the city of Richmond. Jasper occupied the obscure position of “a
stemmer,”—which means that his part was to take the well-cured
tobacco leaf and eliminate the stem, with a view to preparing what
was left to be worked into “the plug” which is the glory of the
tobacco-chewer. This position had one advantage for this quick-
witted and alert young slave. It threw him into contact with a
multitude of his own race, and as nature had made him a lover of his
kind his social qualities found ample scope for exercise. In his early
days he went at a perilous pace and found in the path of the sinful
many fountains of common joy. Indeed, he made evil things fearfully
fascinating by the zestful and remorseless way in which he indulged
them.
It was always a joy renewed for him to tell the story of his
conversion. As described by him, his initial religious experiences,
while awfully mystical and solemn to him, were grotesque and
ludicrous enough. They partook of the extravagances of the times,
yet were so honest in their nature, and so soundly Scriptural in their
doctrines, and so reverential in their tone, that not even the most
captious sceptic could hear him tell of them, in his moments of
exalted inspiration, without feeling profoundly moved by them.
It ought to be borne in mind that this odd and forcible man was a
preacher in Richmond for a half century, and that during all that time,
whether in slavery or in freedom, he lived up to his religion,
maintaining his integrity, defying the unscrupulous efforts of jealous
foes to destroy him, and walking the high path of spotless and
incorruptible honour. Not that he was always popular among his
race. He was too decided, too aggressive, too intolerant towards
meanness, and too unpitying in his castigation of vice, to be popular.
His life, in the nature of the case, had to be a warfare, and it may be
truly said that he slept with his sword buckled on.
Emancipation did not turn his head. He was the same high-minded,
isolated, thoughtful Jasper. His way of preaching became an offense
to the “edicated” preachers of the new order, and with their new
sense of power these double-breasted, Prince-Albert-coated, high
hat and kid-gloved clergymen needed telescopes to look as far down
as Jasper was, to get a sight of him. They verily thought that it would
be a simple process to transfix him with their sneers, and flaunt their
new grandeurs before him, in order to annihilate him. Many of these
new-fledged preachers, who came from the schools to be pastors in
Richmond, resented Jasper’s prominence and fame. They felt that
he was a reproach to the race, and they did not fail to fling at him
their flippant sneers.
But Jasper’s mountain stood strong. He looked this new tribe of his
adversaries over and marked them as a calcimined and fictitious
type of culture. To him they were shop-made and unworthy of
respect. They called forth the storm of his indignant wrath. He
opened his batteries upon them, and, for quite a while, the thunder of
his guns fairly shook the steeples on the other negro churches of
Richmond. And yet it will never do to think of him as the incarnation
of a vindictive and malevolent spirit. He dealt terrific blows, and it is
hardly too much to say that many of his adversaries found it
necessary to get out of the range of his guns. But, after all, there was
a predominant good nature about him. His humour was
inexhaustible, and irresistible as well. If by his fiery denunciations he
made his people ready to “fight Philip,” he was quite apt before he
finished to let fly some of his odd comparisons, his laughable stories,
or his humorous mimicries. He could laugh off his own grievances,
and could make his own people “take the same medicine.”
Jasper was something of a hermit, given to seclusion, imperturbably
calm in his manner, quite ascetic in his tastes, and a cormorant in his
devouring study of the Bible. Naturally, Jasper was as proud as
Lucifer,—too proud to be egotistic and too candid and self-assertive
to affect a humility which he did not feel. He walked heights where
company was scarce, and seemed to love his solitude. Jasper was
as brave as a lion and possibly not a little proud of his bravery. He
fought in the open and set no traps for his adversaries. He believed
in himself,—felt the dignity of his position, and never let himself down
to what was little or unseemly.
The most remarkable fact in Jasper’s history is connected with his
extraordinary performances in connection with his tersely expressed
theory,—THE SUN DO MOVE! We would think in advance that any man
who would come forward to champion that view would be hooted out
of court. It was not so with Jasper. His bearing through all that
excitement was so dignified, so sincere, so consistent and heroic,
that he actually did win the rank of a true philosopher. This result, so
surprising, is possibly the most handsome tribute to his inherent
excellence and nobility of character. One could not fail to see that his
fight on a technical question was so manifestly devout, so filled with
zeal for the honour of religion, and so courageous in the presence of
overwhelming odds, that those who did not agree with him learned to
love and honour him.
The sensation which he awakened fairly flew around the country. It is
said that he preached the sermon 250 times, and it would be hard to
estimate how many thousands of people heard him. The papers,
religious and secular, had much to say about him. Many of them
published his sermons, some of them at first plying him with derision,
but about all of them rounding up with the admission of a good deal
of faith in Jasper. So vast was his popularity that a mercenary
syndicate once undertook to traffic on his popularity by sending him
forth as a public lecturer. The movement proved weak on its feet,
and after a little travel he hobbled back richer in experience than in
purse.
As seen in the pulpit or in the street Jasper was an odd picture to
look upon. His figure was uncouth; he was rather loosely put
together; his limbs were fearfully long and his body strikingly short,—
a sort of nexus to hold his head and limbs in place. He was black,
but his face saved him. It was open, luminous, thoughtful, and in
moments of animation it glowed with a radiance and exultation that
was most attractive.
Jasper’s career as a preacher after the war was a poem. The story is
found later on and marks him as a man of rare originality, and of
patience born of a better world. He left a church almost entirely the
creation of his own productive life, that holds a high rank in
Richmond and that time will find it hard to estrange from his spirit
and influence. For quite a while he was hardly on coöperative terms
with the neighbouring churches, and it is possible that he ought to
share somewhat in the responsibility for the estrangement which so
long existed;—though it might be safely said that if they had left
Jasper alone he would not have bothered them. Let it be said that
the animosities of those days gradually gave away to the gracious
and softening influence of time, and, when his end came, all the
churches and ministers of the city most cordially and lovingly united
in honouring his memory.
It may betoken the regard in which Jasper was held by the white
people if I should be frank enough to say that I was the pastor of the
Grace Street Baptist Church, one of the largest ecclesiastical bodies
in the city at the time of Jasper’s death, and the simple
announcement in the morning papers that I would deliver an address
in honour of this negro preacher who had been carried to his grave
during the previous week brought together a representative and
deeply sympathetic audience which overflowed the largest church
auditorium in the city. With the utmost affection and warmth I put
forth my lofty appreciation of this wonderful prince of his tribe, and so
far as known there was never an adverse criticism offered as to the
propriety or justice of the tribute which was paid him.
It is of this unusual man, this prodigy of his race, and this eminent
type of the Christian negro, that the somewhat random articles of this
volume are to treat. His life jumped the common grooves and ran on
heights not often trod. His life went by bounds and gave surprises
with each succeeding leap.
 II
JASPER HAS A THRILLING CONVERSION

Let us bear in mind that at the time of his conversion John Jasper
was a slave, illiterate and working in a tobacco factory in Richmond.
It need hardly be said that he shared the superstitions and indulged
in the extravagances of his race, and these in many cases have
been so blatant and unreasonable that they have caused some to
doubt the negro’s capacity for true religion. But from the beginning
Jasper’s religious experiences showed forth the Lord Jesus as their
source and centre. His thoughts went to the Cross. His hope was
founded on the sacrificial blood, and his noisy and rhapsodic
demonstrations sounded a distinct note in honour of his Redeemer.
Jasper’s conviction as to his call to the ministry was clear-cut and
intense. He believed that his call came straight from God. His boast
and glory was that he was a God-made preacher. In his fierce
warfares with the educated preachers of his race—“the new issue,”
as he contemptuously called them—he rested his claim on the
ground that God had put him into the ministry; and so reverential, so
full of noble assertion and so irresistibly eloquent was he in setting
forth his ministerial authority that even his most sceptical critics were
constrained to admit that, like John the Baptist, he was “a man sent
from God.”
And yet Jasper knew the human side of his call. It was a part of his
greatness that he could see truth in its relations and completeness,
and while often he presented one side of a truth, as if it were all of it,
he also saw the other side. With him a paradox was not a
contradiction. He gratefully recognized the human influences which
helped him to enter the ministry. While preaching one Sunday
afternoon Jasper suddenly stopped, his face lighted as with a vision,
a rich laugh rippled from his lips while his eyes flashed with soulful
fire. He then said, in a manner never to be reported: “Mars Sam