Not the least important among the subjects to which we invite your
earnest attention is the condition of the labor class at the South.
Their cause is one with the labor classes all over the world. The labor
unions of the country should not throw away this colored element of
strength. Everywhere there is dissatisfaction with the present relation
of labor and capital, and to-day no subject wears an aspect more
threatening to civilization than the respective claims of capital and
labor, landlords and tenants. In what we have to say for our laboring
class we expect to have and ought to have the sympathy and support of
laboring men everywhere and of every color.
It is a great mistake for any class of laborers to isolate itself and
thus weaken the bond of brotherhood between those on whom the burden and
hardships of labor fall. The fortunate ones of the earth, who are
abundant in land and money and know nothing of the anxious care and
pinching poverty of the laboring classes, may be indifferent to the
appeal for justice at this point, but the laboring classes cannot afford
to be indifferent. What labor everywhere wants, what it ought to have,
and will some day demand and receive, is an honest day’s pay for an
honest day’s work. As the laborer becomes more intelligent he will
develop what capital he already possesses--that is the power to organize
and combine for its own protection. Experience demonstrates that there
may be a wages of slavery only a little less galling and crushing in
its effects than chattel slavery, and that this slavery of wages must go
down with the other.
There is nothing more common now than the remark that the physical
condition of the freedmen of the South is immeasurably worse than in the
time of slavery; that in respect to food, clothing and shelter they are
wretched, miserable and destitute; that they are worse masters to
themselves than their old masters were to them. To add insult to injury,
the reproach of their condition is charged upon themselves. A grandson
of John C. Calhoun, an Arkansas land-owner, testifying the other day
before the Senate Committee of Labor and Education, says the “negroes
are so indolent that they fail to take advantage of the opportunities
offered them; that they will only devote so much of their time to work
as will enable them to procure the necessities of life; that there is
danger of a war of races,” etc., etc.
His testimony proclaims him the grandson of the man whose name he bears.
The blame which belongs to his own class he shifts from them to the
shoulders of labor. It becomes us to test the truth of that assertion by
the light of reason, and by appeals to indisputable facts. Of course the
land-owners of the South may be expected to view things differently from
the landless. The slaveholders always did look at things a little
differently from the slaves, and we therefore insist that, in order that
the whole truth shall be brought out, the laborer as well as the
capitalist shall be called as witnesses before the Senate Committee of
Labor and Education. Experience proves that it takes more than one class
of people to tell the whole truth about matters in which they are
interested on opposite sides, and we protest against the allowance of
only one side of the labor question to be heard by the country in this
case. Meanwhile, a little reason and reflection will in some measure
bring out truth! The colored people of the South are the laboring people
of the South. The labor of a country is the source of its wealth;
without the colored laborer to-day the South would be a howling
wilderness, given up to bats, owls, wolves, and bears. He was the source
of its wealth before the war, and has been the source of its prosperity
since the war. He almost alone is visible in her fields, with implements
of toil in his hands, and laboriously using them to-day.
Let us look candidly at the matter. While we see and hear that the
South is more prosperous than it ever was before and rapidly recovering
from the waste of war, while we read that it raises more cotton, sugar,
rice, tobacco, corn, and other valuable products than it ever produced
before, how happens it, we sternly ask, that the houses of its laborers
are miserable huts, that their clothes are rags, and their food the
coarsest and scantiest? How happens it that the land-owner is becoming
richer and the laborer poorer?
The implication is irresistible--that where the landlord is prosperous
the laborer ought to share his prosperity, and whenever and wherever we
find this is not the case there is manifestly wrong somewhere.
This sharp contrast of wealth and poverty, as every thoughtful man
knows, can exist only in one way, and from one cause, and that is by one
getting more than its proper share of the reward of industry, and the
other side getting less, and that in some way labor has been defrauded
or otherwise denied of its due proportion, and we think the facts, as
well as this philosophy, will support this view in the present case, and
do so conclusively. We utterly deny that the colored people of the South
are too lazy to work, or that they are indifferent to their physical
wants; as already said, they are the workers of that section.
The trouble is not that the colored people of the South are indolent,
but that no matter how hard or how persistent may be their industry,
they get barely enough for their labor to support life at the very low
point at which we find them. We therefore throw off the burden of
disgrace and reproach from the laborer where Mr. Calhoun and others of
his class would place it, and put it on the land-owner where it belongs.
It is the old case over again. The black man does the work and the white
man gets the money.
It may be said after all the colored people have themselves to blame for
this state of things, because they have not intelligently taken the
matter into their own hands and provided a remedy for the evil they
suffer.
Some blame may attach at this point. But those who reproach us thus
should remember that it is hard for labor, however fortunately and
favorably surrounded, to cope with the tremendous power of capital in
any contest for higher wages or improved condition. A strike for higher
wages is seldom successful, and is often injurious to the strikers; the
losses sustained are seldom compensated by the concessions gained. A
case in point is the recent strike of the telegraph operators--a more
intelligent class can nowhere be found. It was a contest of brains
against money, and the want of money compelled intelligence to surrender
to wealth.
An empty sack is not easily made to stand upright. The man who has it in
his power to say to a man, you must work the land for me for such wages
as I choose to give, has a power of slavery over him as real, if not as
complete, as he who compels toil under the lash. All that a man hath
will he give for his life.
In contemplating the little progress made by the colored people in the
acquisition of property in the South, and their present wretched
condition, the circumstances of their emancipation should not be
forgotten. Measurement in their case should not begin from the height
yet to be attained by them, but from the depths whence they have come.
It should be remembered by our severe judges that freedom came to us not
from the sober dictates of wisdom, or from any normal condition of
things, not as a matter of choice on the part of the land-owners of the
South, nor from moral considerations on the part of the North. It was
born of battle and of blood. It came across fields of smoke and fire
strewn with wounded, bleeding, and dying men. Not from the Heaven of
Peace amid the morning stars, but from the hell of war--out of the
tempest and whirlwind of warlike passions, mingled with deadly hate and
a spirit of revenge; it came, not so much as a boon to us as a blast to
the enemy. Those against whom the measure was directed were the
land-owners, and they were not angels, but men, and, being men, it was
to be expected they would resent the blow. They did resent it, and a
part of that resentment unhappily fell upon us.
At first the land-owners drove us out of our old quarters, and told us
they did not want us in their fields; that they meant to import German,
Irish, and Chinese laborers. But as the passions of the war gradually
subsided we were taken back to our old places; but, plainly enough, this
change of front was not from choice, but necessity. Feeling themselves
somehow or other entitled to our labor without the payment of wages, it
was not strange that they should make the hardest bargains for our
labor, and get it for as little as possible. For them the contest was
easy; their tremendous power and our weakness easily gave them the
victory.
Against the voice of Stevens, Sumner, and Wade, and other far-seeing
statesmen, the Government by whom we were emancipated left us completely
in the power of our former owners. They turned us loose to the open sky
and left us not a foot of ground from which to get a crust of bread.
It did not do as well by us as Russia did by her serfs, or Pharaoh did
by the Hebrews. With freedom Russia gave land and Egypt loaned jewels.
It may have been best to leave us thus to make terms with those whose
wrath it had kindled against us. It does not seem right that we should
have been so left, but it fully explains our present poverty and
wretchedness.
The marvel is not that we are poor in such circumstances, but rather
that we were not exterminated. In view of the circumstances, our
extermination was confidently predicted. The facts that we still live
and have increased in higher ratio than the native white people of the
South are proofs of our vitality, and, in some degree, of our industry.
Nor is it to be wondered at that the standard of morals is not higher
among us, that respect for the rights of property is not stronger. The
power of life and death held over labor which says you shall work for me
on my own terms or starve, is a source of crime, as well as poverty.
Weeds do not more naturally spring out of a manure pile than crime out
of enforced destitution. Out of the misery of Ireland comes murder,
assassination, fire, and sword. The Irish are by nature no worse than
other people, and no better. If oppression makes a wise man mad it may
do the same, and worse, to a people who are not reputed wise. The woe
pronounced upon those who keep back wages of the laborer by fraud is
self-acting and self-executing and certain as death. The world is full
of warnings.