Another mode of impeaching the wisdom of emancipation, and the one
which seems to give special pleasure to our enemies, is, as they say,
that the condition of the coloured people of the South has been made
worse by emancipation.
The champions of this idea are the only men who glory in the good old
times when the slaves were under the lash and were bought and sold
in the market with horses, sheep, and swine. It is another way of
saying that slavery is better than freedom; that darkness is better
than light, and that wrong is better than right; that hell is better
than heaven! It is the American method of reasoning in all matters
concerning the Negro. It inverts everything; turns truth upside down,
and puts the case of the unfortunate Negro inside out and wrong end
foremost every time. There is, however, nearly always some truth on
their side of error, and it is so in this case.
When these false reasoners assert that the condition of the emancipated
slave is wretched and deplorable, they partly tell the truth, and I
agree with them. I even concur with them in the statement that the
Negro is physically, in certain localities, in a worse condition to-day
than in the time of slavery, but I part with these gentlemen when they
ascribe this condition to emancipation.
To my mind the blame does not rest upon emancipation, but the defeat of
emancipation. It is not the work of the spirit of liberty, but the work
of the spirit of bondage. It comes of the determination of slavery to
perpetuate itself, if not under one form, then under another. It is due
to the folly of endeavouring to put the new wine of liberty in the old
bottles of slavery. I concede the evil, but deny the alleged cause.
The landowners of the South want the labour of the Negro on the hardest
terms possible. They once had it for nothing. They now want it for next
to nothing. To accomplish this, they have contrived three ways. The
first is, to rent their land to the Negro at an exorbitant price per
annum and compel him to mortgage his crop in advance to pay this rent.
The laws under which this is done are entirely in the interest of the
landlord. He has a first claim upon everything produced on the land.
The Negro can have nothing, can keep nothing, can sell nothing, without
the consent of the landlord. As the Negro is at the start poor and
empty-handed, he has had to draw on the landlord for meat and bread to
feed himself and family while his crop is growing. The landlord keeps
books; the Negro does not; hence, no matter how hard he may work or how
hard saving he may be, he is, in most cases, brought in debt at the end
of the year, and once in debt he is fastened to the land as by hooks of
steel. If he attempts to leave he may be arrested under the order of
the law.
Another way, which is still more effective, is the practice of paying
the labourer with orders on the store instead of lawful money. By
this means money is kept out of the hands of the Negro, and the Negro
is kept entirely in the hands of the landlord. He cannot save money
because he gets no money to save. He cannot seek a better market for
his labour because he has no money with which to pay his fare, and
because he is, by that vicious order system, already in debt, and
therefore already in bondage. Thus he is riveted to one place, and is,
in some sense, a slave; for a man to whom it can be said, “You shall
work for me for what I choose to pay you, and how I shall choose to pay
you,” is, in fact, a slave, though he may be called a free man.
We denounce the landlord and tenant system of England, but it can be
said of England as cannot be said of our free country, that by law no
labourer can be paid for labour in any other than lawful money. England
holds any other payment to be a penal offence and punishable by fine
and imprisonment. The same should be the case in every State in the
American Union.
Under the mortgage system, no matter how industrious or economical the
Negro may be, he finds himself at the end of the year in debt to the
landlord, and from year to year he toils on and is tempted to try again
and again, but seldom with any better result.
With this power over the Negro, this possession of his labour, you may
easily see why the South sometimes makes a display of its liberality
and brags that it does not want slavery back. It had the Negro’s
labour, heretofore for nothing, and now it has it for next to nothing
and at the same time is freed from the obligation to take care of the
young and the aged, the sick and the decrepit. There is not much virtue
in all this, yet it is the ground of loud boasting.