No more crafty and effective devise for defrauding the southern laborers
could be adopted than the one that substitutes orders upon shopkeepers
for currency in payment of wages. It has the merit of a show of honesty,
while it puts the laborer completely at the mercy of the land-owner and
the shopkeeper. He is between the upper and the nether millstones, and
is hence ground to dust. It gives the shopkeeper a customer who can
trade with no other storekeeper, and thus leaves the latter no motive
for fair dealing except his own moral sense, which is never too strong.
While the laborer holding the orders is tempted by their worthlessness,
as a circulating medium, to get rid of them at any sacrifice, and hence
is led into extravagance and consequent destitution.
The merchant puts him off with his poorest commodities at highest
prices, and can say to him take these or nothing. Worse still. By this
means the laborer is brought into debt, and hence is kept always in the
power of the land-owner. When this system is not pursued and land is
rented to the freedman, he is charged more for the use of an acre of
land for a single year than the land would bring in the market if
offered for sale. On such a system of fraud and wrong one might well
invoke a bolt from heaven--red with uncommon wrath.
It is said if the colored people do not like the conditions upon which
their labor is demanded and secured, let them leave and go elsewhere. A
more heartless suggestion never emanated from an oppressor. Having for
years paid them in shop orders, utterly worthless outside the shop to
which they are directed, without a dollar in their pockets, brought by
this crafty process into bondage to the land-owners, who can and would
arrest them if they should attempt to leave when they are told to go.
We commend the whole subject to the Senate Committee of Labor and
Education, and urge upon that committee the duty to call before it not
only the land-owners, but the landless laborers of the South, and thus
get at the whole truth concerning the labor question of that section.