HOW SOUTHERNERS DESCRIBE THEIR OWN CONDITION—EACH STATE MUST BE TAKEN
SEPARATELY—MISSOURI—TENNESSEE—KENTUCKY—TEXAS—VIRGINIA—GEORGIA—FLORIDA—
NORTH CAROLINA—ARKANSAS—SOUTH CAROLINA—LOUISIANA—MISSISSIPPI—WILL THE
BLACKS GET THE FRANCHISE?—NO PARTY CONSIDERS THEM FIT—THEY WILL HAVE
IT FOR A TIME—THIS WILL WEAKEN THE REPUDIATING PARTY—ALSO THE PARTY
HOSTILE TO THIS COUNTRY—THE BLACKS WILL NOT ALL BE REPUBLICAN—THE SOUTH
SHOULD HAVE BEEN LEFT ALONE TO SETTLE THE LABOUR QUESTION—THE BUREAU
SUGGESTED FALSE IDEAS—THERE WILL BE NO WAR OF RACES—WHAT WILL KILL
OUT THE BLACKS—THE RATE OF THIS—FUSION PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE—MEANS OF
COMMUNICATION IN THE SOUTH INDICATE ITS CONDITION.
I have been frequently asked what I found was the condition of the
South? And the question has been put in such a manner as to imply that
the speaker regarded the South as a homogeneous entity, and that he
supposed that the causes of its suffering—the war and the abolition
of slavery—affected every part of it equally. But the reverse of this
would be nearer to the truth. The Southern Confederacy was composed
of States very differently circumstanced from each other, except in
the one point of their system of labour; and the late war, and the
overthrow of their system of labour, have affected those different
States very differently. It is difficult to understand to how great a
degree this is the case without having oneself gone through the South
and seen these differences with one’s own eyes. This is what I did,
and I shall now attempt to give a short account of what I saw and
heard. My route was through Richmond, Petersburg, Weldon, Wilmington,
Charleston, Atlanta, Augusta, and Mobile to New Orleans; then up the
valley of the Mississippi by way of Jackson, Memphis, and St. Louis. I
had a superabundance of introductions for all the places I visited. I
had obtained at Washington letters to all the Generals holding commands
in the South, and which were in many cases fortified by duplicates
from other quarters. I had also brought with me letters from New York
and elsewhere to merchants whose firms ranked among the leading houses
of the South, and to others who had been through the war; to men who
were endeavouring to resuscitate the industry of their fallen States,
and to a gentleman who held one of the highest offices in the late
Confederate Government. I had therefore sufficient means for obtaining
the information I required.
[Sidenote: _The Condition of the South._]
But the question is, what did one see and hear, and what were the
conclusions to which one was brought by personal observation? The
fact that first forces itself on the eye in the towns, and often in
the rural districts you pass through, is that there are multitudes of
negroes loafing about, doing nothing. You see them at every station.
When you come to make inquiries as to what they are doing, and how
they subsist, and generally as to the state of the country, you are
told that they are to be found in shoals in every town where there
is a Freedman’s Bureau. They expect something from the Bureau; and,
like so many coloured Micawbers, are drawn to the towns in the hope
that something or other will turn up. So in the towns; but that in the
country districts, where there is no power to restrain the idle and
ill-disposed, things are in an actively bad condition—that this class
has taken to stealing, and has not left on many properties a sweet
potato or head of maize, or the pig that would have fed upon them—that
they have made a clean sweep of everything edible. As to the state of
the whites, that their condition is far more dreadful both to bear
and to contemplate; for the blacks, as soon as they please to do the
work they are accustomed to, may escape from their present distress,
but that tens of thousands of white families, who lately were living
in affluence and refinement, not knowing what it was either to want
anything or to do anything for themselves, are now in a state of abject
penury, positively of starvation; that many are without the means of
procuring hominy and salt pork, the humblest fare in the country. And
about this point there can be no doubt; for you have as evidence of the
statement not only what Southerners say, but, as I afterwards found
on returning to New York, the corroborative evidence of those good
Northern people who are themselves subscribing largely to keep these
destitute Southern families alive. In addition to all this, everyone
tells you that he expects the unspeakable horrors of a war of races,
which in their opinion cannot be adjourned for more than two years,
as the coloured population are becoming day by day more and more
dissatisfied with what the great change has hitherto done for them.
The first observation to be made on these statements is, that they
cannot be equally applicable to all the very differently circumstanced
States of the late Southern Confederacy. For instance, the State of
Missouri, which is one of the most fertile in the Union, and by its
climate thoroughly adapted to the Northern farm-system, was instantly
benefited by the abolition of slavery. Tennessee and Kentucky will soon
be in the same position, for both may very well be cultivated by white
labour. The slow rate of progress made by the latter, when compared
with the State of Ohio, which is only separated from it by the Ohio
river, and has a colder climate, and not a more productive soil, is a
proof that slavery, in which alone they differed, was the sole cause of
its retardation. Texas was even at the moment very slightly affected
by the change, and will now become a more attractive field than ever
for white immigration. Here cattle-breeding is the chief occupation,
which is one that does not at all require slave labour; and here also
cotton has for many years been cultivated by the whites without the
compulsory aid of the blacks. Virginia having passed through all the
distress which is implied by the passage from the estate to the farm
system, will emerge from its present distress a far richer and more
populous state than it was before. General Lee’s son, and many others
of the noble Virginian race, have already set the example, and are
themselves holding the plough and doing all the work of the farm with
their own hands. How much more pleasing a picture will the valleys
and plains of the Old Dominion then present when every hundred acres
shall have its homestead, and support a family of the noblest race of
mankind! And in truth how sad a picture have they hitherto presented,
while held in large estates, rudely cultivated by the enforced toil of
that race which was the lowest and most incapable of all! The northern
part of this State is very fertile, and is everywhere intersected with
navigable streams, such as would enable the farmer to ship his produce
generally from his own door. This is what is called the tide-way
district of Virginia. And as all vegetables and fruit grown here, in
the natural home of the magnolia, are at least a fortnight earlier than
they are to the north of the Potomac, they would command the markets of
New York and of the Northern cities. This advantage cannot be snatched
from them by any more southern State, as it is the combined result of
the character of their soil, of their climate, and of their abundant
means of water communication.
[Sidenote: _Position of each State._]
In Georgia, particularly in the upper part of the State, where the
ground rises considerably, I heard and saw that successful efforts were
being made to effect the change from the estate to the farm system;
and, instead of trusting entirely to cotton, to try what could be
done by growing wheat and maize, the latter to be turned into pork—in
short, to do whatever could be done to adapt their industry to existing
circumstances. Florida at present is rather occupied by wild deer than
by man; but as it is capable of becoming the chief winter _sanitarium_
for the consumption-scourged North, and also of producing tropical
fruits and sugar for the whole Union, it has a fair prospect before
it. Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, the writer of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’
and sister of the celebrated Brooklyn preacher, has gone to Florida,
with her brother, Mr. Charles Beecher, for the purpose of attempting
the cultivation of the sugar cane with free labour. North Carolina
is endeavouring to follow the example of its neighbours Virginia and
Georgia. Arkansas, which was settled chiefly by the sons of Georgian
planters, is showing much of the Georgian spirit. In Alabama great
efforts had been made to re-establish the cultivation of cotton on the
basis of freedom; and things were promising well, when at the end of
1867 the price of cotton, by a concurrence of adverse accidents, fell
to 15 cents or 7½2_d._ at Liverpool. This depression to a point below
the cost of production in any part of the world was felt, I believe,
by most of those who attend to these matters, to be only a temporary
mishap. The same cotton was selling at the end of the following March
at 25 cents—a fully remunerative price; but in most cases the planters
had not been able to hold, so that the low price they were obliged to
accept has ruined many, and discouraged more. I was told by a Tennessee
cotton planter that a price of 20 cents would have contained an ample
margin for profit on the cotton he had himself grown, on a large scale,
with hired black labour. His contract with those he employed was
that he should give them high wages, with more than a proportionate
deduction for every hour of absence from work.
[Sidenote: _Distress in South Carolina._]
There now remain unmentioned only the three States of South Carolina,
Louisiana, and Mississippi. As far as I could judge, South Carolina
was utterly and hopelessly crushed. Its best estates were in the Sea
Islands, which, as they were very fertile, and their produce fetched
exceptionally high prices, were densely inhabited with blacks; in many
of them, however, no white man could live, or even pass a night with
impunity. Under these circumstances it might have been expected that
as soon as the negroes were emancipated they would take possession of
the land in these islands. And so it happened in most of the unhealthy
ones; while in those that were healthy the original proprietors equally
lost their property by confiscation or forfeiture, or by being ousted
in some way or other. The result of this, and of the other losses that
arose out of the war, and the utter overthrow of the Confederacy,
is that throughout South Carolina the most abject and irrecoverable
poverty reigns precisely where formerly there was most abundant wealth.
I heard of one gentleman, who before the war had been unable to spend
the whole of his large income, being now a porter in a dry goods store;
and of another, who formerly had possessed everything which riches
could supply, dying in such penury that his family had to beg of their
friends contributions for his funeral. For this State there appears to
be no resurrection, except in some new order of things, under which
a new set of proprietors will occupy the land, and cultivate it with
Northern capital, and somewhat in the Northern fashion.
In Louisiana also things were so bad that it was hardly possible to see
how they could be worse. In New Orleans I found families who formerly
had lived in noble mansions, and exercised a grand hospitality, now
occupying quiet lodgings. In some instances I knew of several families
clubbing together, and living as it were in common. But here there
was a great difference—hope was not dead. They talked confidently of
the re-establishment, at all events, of their sugar industry, and of
the trade of the city. I saw several sugar estates not far from New
Orleans, the very costly machinery upon which had been destroyed during
the war. I was told—though, of course, I cannot vouch for the accuracy
of the figures—that the machinery had been broken up and burnt on
twelve hundred out of the seventeen hundred sugar estates of this State.
As far as I could see and hear, the State of Mississippi also was in a
very bad way. This seemed to arise from two causes. A larger proportion
of the white inhabitants than is the case elsewhere belong to the class
called in the South ‘mean whites,’—that is, persons without property,
education, or enterprise. And then the planters are unable to borrow
what is requisite for enabling them to work their plantations. No one
will lend them a cent. This is but a natural consequence of the act
of repudiation they adopted at the instigation of Mr. J. Davis, late
President of the Southern Confederacy, and whom this State has either
the honour or the dishonour of reckoning among her best known men.
This, however, is not the only light in which the South has to be
regarded. There is the question of political as well as of industrial
reconstruction, and the former is now throughout all the North shaking
the very foundations of the Union, and setting the son against the
father, and the brother against the brother. The question is being
dealt with entirely and exclusively on party considerations, and
this Mr. Thaddeus Stevens and other leaders of the Republican party
have acknowledged in speech and print. They say universal suffrage,
whatever the consequences to the Southern planter, must be conceded to
the blacks, in order that the South may return to the Union, not as
of old, on the Democratic side, but on the Republican, as the present
exigencies of that party and of the Union require. Nothing can secure
this except the black vote. All considerations of the fitness of the
late slave for the exercise of the franchise is thus dismissed, and
nothing insisted on but what is needed by the necessities of the
dominant party.
[Sidenote: _The Negro Franchise._]
Of course no man who knows anything of the capacity and of the history
of the black race, even if he be of the Republican party, abstractedly
thinks that they are qualified for taking part in the government of
the country, and of legislating for and governing many of the Southern
States.
Will it then be conferred upon them? It may be taken for granted that
it will. Many talk of a secret compact—an underground railway, as it
is called on the other side—between the President and the Southern
leaders, to defeat by their joint efforts the Congressional plan, he
being rewarded by the support of the South, when, as Democratic States,
it returns to Congress. If such a compact has any existence, it is very
unlikely to have any results. As the blacks have been admitted to the
conventions throughout the South, for forming the new constitutions
under which they are to exercise the franchise, and as the present
Congress is determined that they shall have it, one does not see what
is to prevent its extension to them. Whether the possession of the
boon will be continued to them is another point. But be that as it may,
we must, I think, regard the immediate possession of the franchise by
the blacks as a certain event, and consider what are likely to be its
consequences.
Its first and most obvious effect will be that which it was intended to
produce—the weakening, and perhaps the exclusion from power for some
time, of the Democratic party. Will this be an evil or an advantage to
the Union? As far as I am able to judge, an unqualified advantage. The
Democratic candidate of to-day for the Presidency, Mr. Pendleton of
Ohio, and so of course the Democratic party itself are in favour of a
partial, but very considerable, repudiation of the debt. This would be
so disastrous a policy, that no one who wishes well to the Union can
wish well to the Democrats. But this plank in their platform may be
reshaped or entirely removed. Their permanent distinguishing principle
is resistance to the policy of strengthening the central Government at
the expense of the liberties and privileges of the separate States,
whereas the reverse of this is the distinguishing principle of the
great Republican party. It is evident that the Republican policy is
that which is best adapted for commanding and calling out for immediate
use the resources of the nation, and so during their great war it
was decidedly in the ascendent. And since the war, the tendency of
legislation and of administration has been in that direction: and this
tendency will probably become stronger, at all events it will be more
needed, as the United States increase in area and population.
[Sidenote: _Who are necessarily Hostile to England._]
Englishmen also may be reminded that almost all the abuse and insults
Americans have heaped upon us have been the manufacture of Democratic
brains, and, till Fenianism arose, came chiefly from Southern men. We
cannot wish success to that party from which we have never received
fair and courteous—I would even say, rational—treatment, and which now
encloses in its bosom all our deadliest enemies in the United States.
If formerly we regarded the accusations they brought against us, and
the motives they imputed to us, as the hallucinations of disordered
minds, we must now expect still livelier sallies, in order that they
may not fall below the mark of Fenian animosity. In any difficulty
which may arise between this country and the United States, the
Democratic leaders are precluded, for the sake of the Irish vote,
from recognising right or reason; and they must go on in this groove.
The Republicans are under no such demoralising necessity. Of course
it would be unwise in a traveller or a diplomatist to show decided
preferences for any particular party; but it is well to know where you
are likely to find friends. The manufacturing and commercial element
of the Republican party is alone disposed by circumstances to feel
ill-will towards us. But all this will die out as soon as the good
sense of the American people has made the discovery of the degree to
which they are crippled and impoverished by the pestilent heresy of
protection.
But to go back to the subject of the black vote. It does not appear to
me that this will always be given on the Republican side. The African
will be too ignorant to judge for himself; and though he will never
want for Northern advisers, he will have others nearer home, and in
some cases will, I think, be influenced by those who employ him; and
not unfrequently he may even wish, as the negro is the most imitative
of all the races of mankind, to vote, not as his sable brethren, but
as his old master votes. The whites will act as one man; the negroes
will never be able to do so; and in States where the colours are pretty
evenly balanced, a few deserters would incline the scale in favour of
the old Southern party.
I mentioned that while in the office of the Freedmen’s Bureau at
Washington, before I entered the South, it struck me that its
establishment could not be justified on grounds of wisdom. What I saw
in the South confirmed this supposition. Mischief, I thought, had been
done by it. The whites might safely, and ought in good policy to, have
been left to settle the labour question with their old slaves. They
quite understood that it would be ruin to themselves if they failed
to satisfy them, and that they could only do this by making them feel
that they were fairly and kindly treated. The future of the whites
entirely depended on this; and they saw the necessity of it so clearly
that they might, without any interference on the part of the North,
which could do no good, have been left to arrange with the blacks how
the new system was to be worked. These were the two parties to the new
labour-and-wages contract; and the Freedmen’s Bureau could have no
voice in the matter.
[Sidenote: _Impolicy of the Freedmen’s Bureau._]
The industrial question evidently came first, because it is on labour
primarily that the existence of a nation depends. But the Bureau
establishes itself in some town; and what does this mean? That the
blacks need protection—of course from their old masters, for there
are no other people on whom to cast this imputation. And what does
the Bureau itself give out that it will do? It proposes to educate
the negro. This implies that the first thing to be attended to is not
labour, but something else, and that a matter which in the order of
nature occupies only a secondary place. It implies too that during the
time education is being carried on, labour must be suspended, for one
cannot be in the school and in the field at the same time. And what is
the use and value of education in the eyes of the negro? Just this—that
it will fit him for the situation of a clerk, or for keeping a shop.
At all events it is no preparation for field labour. In these ways it
appears that the Bureau implanted, at a most critical time, false and
mischievous ideas which will inflict much suffering both on blacks and
whites, and which it will be very difficult to counteract. There would
have been no reason why the Government should not have sent, without
any flourish of trumpets, a commissioner into each State of the South,
to see that the blacks were fairly treated, if the whites had anywhere
shown a disposition to treat them otherwise.
As I have already intimated, I frequently heard Southern people
expressing an apprehension that a war of races was imminent. Their
reasons were that the disappointment felt by the blacks at the
smallness of their gains from emancipation was constantly deepening,
and that their posture towards the whites was becoming very
unsatisfactory. It is impossible, of course, to foresee what ignorant
and excitable Africans may do. Still I think a war of races a most
improbable event. The blacks have sense enough to know that there would
be no chance of their coming victorious out of such a conflict; for
they would be outnumbered by the whites, if all the Southern States
are regarded as a single unit, which they most assuredly would be for
the purposes of such a war; and they would be comparatively unarmed,
without resources, and without organisation. They also know that, even
if they were able to exterminate all the whites in the South, they
would gain nothing by this; for that then they would only be putting
themselves in the position of the Indian races, to be ousted from the
land whenever it suited the convenience of the North. And they are well
aware that in any rising they might contemplate they could expect no
help from the Northern force that was sent at the end of the war into
each State of the South to coerce the whites and protect the blacks.
The feelings of these men, I believe, are well known; at all events,
I heard one of them in a railway car in the South give expression to
his own feelings on this point, and he did it so as to include his
comrades. ‘They have sent us down here,’ his words were, ‘to look
after the whites and take care of the blacks. But that is not what we
are going to do. We are not going to help niggers to cut white men’s
throats. If they move a finger against the whites, we are not going
to mind colonels or generals, but will shoot every d—d nigger in the
place.’ Nor is it possible to conceive the existence of any other
feeling; for in no class in the United States is the antipathy to the
negro race so strong as in that from which the army is recruited. This
the negro knows very well.
[Sidenote: _The Blacks must Die Out._]
But though I think that no war of this kind is to be dreaded, which
would make very short work of the blacks, yet one cannot but think
that their eventual extermination by moral and economical causes is
inevitable. They have from the dawn of history been the chief export
of Africa, but have never anywhere been capable of existing in a state
of freedom on the same ground as any superior race. The superior race
gets possession of all the means of living, all the trades, all the
professions, all the land, and the inferior race is thus pushed out
of existence. If Congress were to enact, and future Congresses to
maintain the enactment, that south of the Ohio and Potomac no white
man was ever to do any kind of field labour, or to follow the trades
of carpentering or bricklaying, of shoemaking or tailoring, then there
would be means provided for the subsistence of the black race, and
it might possibly be kept up even in a state of freedom; but as none
of these occupations will eventually be left them, their doom is as
certain as anything can be in the affairs of men. Already, if a builder
introduces into his yard, or places on any work in which he is engaged,
a single coloured carpenter or mason, every person in his employ will
strike work unless the man of colour, however unexceptionable he may
be in his conduct, and however skilful in his trade, is instantly
dismissed. All the stevedores at New Orleans were a few years ago of
the coloured race. Some whites having taken to the employment, began to
insist on the dismissal of all coloured people; and now there is not
to be seen a single coloured stevedore on the quays of New Orleans.
And just so eventually it must be with field labour. The South must
be completely, or at the least largely, cultivated on the Northern
farm-system: and then it will be seen that the whites will no more
tolerate the companionship of the blacks in field labour than in
anything else. A people who have not the means of living must die out,
and so emancipation comes to be extinction.
Those who believe in the obliteration of the black race will speculate
on the time required for such a consummation. Suppose then each
generation is only able to leave behind it half its own numbers, this
would bring the blacks to the vanishing point at about the end of a
century, by which time the white population of the United States will
probably outnumber that of the whole of Europe. The rate of decrease,
however, may be much more rapid. Persons now living can recollect the
time when a considerable quarter of the city of Boston was occupied by
these people; but now, without emigration, they have almost entirely
disappeared. This is attributed by the people of Boston to several
causes. In a state of freedom they bring up very few children. The
mortality also among them is very great, especially from consumption;
and then there is the fact that in the second, or at latest the third
generation, the mixed race becomes quite incapable of continuing
itself. These facts are distressing to contemplate; but nothing is
gained by refusing to look facts in the face, of whatever character
they may be. It is an analogous fact that the red man has been swept
away from the face of the continent that was his own, all the way
from Boston to the Rocky Mountains; and the work of annihilation will
soon be complete from the Atlantic to the Pacific. But this ordinance
of nature, that a civilised and a savage race cannot coexist on the
same soil, is no reason why the inferior race should be treated with
unfairness, unkindness, or contempt.
[Sidenote: _Fusion of Races Impossible._]
As to the fusion of the two races, history assures us that nothing
of the kind has ever been accomplished, and that it is physically
impossible. And it is fortunate for the progress of mankind that nature
has put her veto upon it; otherwise that portion of the highest, and
most advanced, and most richly endowed race of the human family, which
has been placed on the grandest and most favourable stage for fresh
development, would be sunk and degraded by admixture with the lowest
race of all. The fact that in the long centuries during which the
Greeks and the Romans occupied Western Asia and Northern Africa, they
were unable to produce a mixed race capable of maintaining itself, may
be suggested for the consideration of those who are advocating a scheme
of ‘miscegenation’ between the Anglo-Saxon and the negro.
If we form our estimate of the condition of the South from considering
the condition of its means of communication, we shall find it bad
indeed. While I was there, some of its main lines of railway were
running only one passenger train a-day. And, notwithstanding the
infrequency of the trains, I observed in all the districts I passed
through that there were very few passengers, and very little traffic.
What ruin and desolation may be read in this single fact, when one
remembers that a few years back the value of the raw produce exported
from the Southern States amounted to between fifty and sixty million
pounds a-year, and was greater than anything else of the kind in the
world. What a vast amount of travelling must such a vast amount of
business have given rise to! for not only was fifty or sixty million
pounds’ worth of cotton, rice, sugar, turpentine, and tobacco to be
sent out of the country, but there was also an equal value in food and
manufactured goods to be brought in; for in the South they hardly grew
or manufactured anything, except what they exported. Everything they
consumed was imported. One cannot but contrast the stirring life which
all this must have caused in every town, harbour, and railway, with
their present deadness. The rails from Petersburg to Weldon are very
much out of order, but one despairs of being able to convey in words
an adequate idea of the state of disorder in which they are between
the latter town and Wilmington. It was over this line, of 162 miles in
length, that, during the war, the blockade-run goods and munitions of
war were forwarded to Richmond and the front. At that time there were
but small means for repairing or replacing worn-out rails. And as the
trade of Wilmington is now dwindled to nothing, and this road is off
the main line of communication with the South, there have as yet been
no inducements or funds to set it right. The jolting on it is so great
that the passengers are incessantly being thrown to a height of several
inches from their seat; and that at last produces in some the effect
which a gale at sea would have upon them. I believe that no English
railway carriage with only four, or at most six wheels, could keep
on such rails; but American carriages, having never less than eight
wheels, have a much firmer hold.