Business, Speculation and Progress Among the Sea Island Negroes.
Whatever may be the end of the wars for the “great city,” which
everybody assures us is to be built hereabouts—at Hilton Head, _or_ at
Bay Point, _or_ up the river, at Beaufort—it is certain that, thus far,
Hilton Head has the start in business. Wading through the sand here, one
finds, at the distance of a square or two from the landing, a row of
ambitious-fronted one and two-story frame houses, blooming out in the
most extravagant display of fancy-lettered signs. The sutlers and
keepers of trade stores, who do here abound, style their street
Merchants’ Row. The luckless staff officers, who have made their
purchases there, preferred to call it “Robbers’ Row,” and there was the
inherent fitness in the title which makes names stick.
The counters in Robbers’ Row are piled with heavy stocks of ready-made
clothing, pieces of coarse goods, hats and the like; and the show-cases
are filled with cheap jewelry, and the thousand knick-knacks which
captivate the negro eye. It was a busy season for the negroes, but still
a number were in the stores making purchases. “There, my fine fellow,
that fits you exactly. Now, when you get one of those cheap cravats, and
an elegant hat, together with a pair of new boots, which you _must_
have, and this elegant pair of check pants to match your coat, you’ll
look like a gentleman, won’t he, Auntie?” The uncouth, coarse-limbed
plantation black eyed the trader suspiciously, however, and felt the
coarse check coat, with which he had been furnished, as if he were
afraid so fine a fabric would fall to pieces at his touch. But
“Auntie’s” pleasure in contemplating her husband thus gorgeously
arrayed, in something becoming his style of beauty, was unbounded; and
the reduction in the family purse, that day wrought, must be set to her
account. Substitute straight hair for wool, and change the complexion
somewhat, and the scenes here become reproductions of others, familiar
long ago. They, however, were witnessed far above the head of
navigation, on the Mississippi, at a lonely trading post, among the
Chippewas, kept by a thrifty half-breed. Of the two races, the
Sea-Island negroes evince decidedly the superior judgment in selecting
articles, with some reference to their usefulness.
Of course, at all these stores, just as at the Indian trading posts, the
customers are swindled; but there is the consolation that the swindle is
regulated and limited by law. A military order has been found necessary
to curtail the extravagant profits of the traders, and protect the
negroes; and, in most cases, they do not now probably pay over two
prices for what they buy. Kid gloves, I found, were only five dollars a
pair, and a very good lady’s riding guantlet could be had for six
dollars. From these, the average scale of prices may be guessed.
This, however, is only of late date. The prices that were charged, and
the profits realized, here in the earlier months, and even years, of the
occupation, seem fabulous. One man, for example, has accumulated what
would be regarded a handsome fortune, even in New York, who had to work
his passage down here as a deck hand. He was a bankrupt merchant,
honest, but penniless. He believed the fall of these islands would open
a field for handsome trade, and came down, as a sailor, to see for
himself. Returning, he told his creditors what he had seen; and they had
faith enough in him to make up for him a stock of goods, which he sold
out immediately, at such profit as to enable him to make subsequent
purchases on his own account. He has paid off every dollar of his
indebtedness, and is a wealthy man. Numerous stories of the kind are
told; and it may be safely concluded that whoever would endure the dirty
work involved in following the army as trader, has had almost unlimited
opportunities before him.
Speculation now busies itself about something more permanent. In spite
of the fact that vessels find it hard to ride at anchor near Hilton Head
during a storm, every effort is to be made to stimulate on its site the
growth of a city. A newspaper is already published, which dilates on the
magnificence of its future, and rebukes everybody who doesn’t call the
place Port Royal (the name generally given to the great sheet of water
constituting at once its harbor, that of Bay Point, and of one or two
other places farther in), rather than Hilton Head. An immense wooden
hotel is up, and nearly ready for the furniture, which is all stored
here in advance, ready for the shoal of visitors expected with the
return of cool weather. A railroad is projected nearly due north to
Branchville, a distance of seventy to eighty miles, where it would
connect with the whole railroad system of the South, and make Beaufort
and Hilton Head absolutely independent of Charleston and Savannah.
“Charleston can never have the trade of this coast again, you know; the
North hates it too much, and, in fact, the port never ought to be opened
again; and if we can only get this railroad connection, our harbor is so
much finer than any other on the coast, that we will inevitably have the
greatest city south of Baltimore.” Boston capitalists are said to stand
ready to advance the money for the railroad, but where, in the absence
of State Government, to get the authority to build it, is the question;
and General Gillmore tells me he was appealed to, the other day, to know
if he couldn’t declare it a military necessity.
That these glowing anticipations of Port Royal greatness will be
realized, at least in part, is unquestionable. The harbor is one of the
very finest on the coast—incomparably superior to either Charleston or
Savannah. The Sea Island soil produces the best cotton in the world, and
the negroes already have it in a state of more thorough cultivation than
was ever before known. The increased wants of the freedmen will
stimulate trade, and small farmers will not be able, as the planters
were in old times, to go to Savannah or Charleston and buy supplies at
wholesale. Whatever the fortune of South Carolina, the Sea Islands must
henceforth be flourishing. Whether negroes will not, by and by, prefer
to trade with persons of their own color, remains to be seen. Real
estate ventures must be further complicated, also, with the
probabilities that the whole sea-coast of South Carolina (if not the
entire State), will speedily become one vast negro colony. Already, the
only inhabitants on the Sea Islands are negroes, and the same race is in
a majority for many miles inland. Compulsory colonization has always
been a failure; but is it not probable that there will be a natural
tendency of negroes to places where flourishing negro communities are
already established, and the local government is mainly in their own
hands?
Some of our party, who remained at Beaufort after the meeting, gave
amusing accounts of a negro wedding. It seems that the good
superintendent’s remark—if he had only known we were coming he would
have had two or three weddings for us—was no idle boast. Scarcely a
Sunday passes without a marriage, and the young volunteers, who imagine
their monthly pay a pretty good “start” for a family, are especially
given to matrimonial ventures.
Many of the Sea Islanders, while in slavery, came well up to the
description of Brigham Young, whom Artemus Ward pronounced the “most
married man” he ever saw. But polygamy is a practice not permitted by
the beneficent Government to the poor negroes now—only white people, in
distant localities, can be indulged in so doubtful a luxury—and herewith
arises one of General Saxton’s chief embarrassments. It would often
happen that, in the course of being transferred from one plantation to
another, a negro would have successively three or four, or even half a
dozen wives. Now that he is restricted to one, which should it be?
Moralists and theorists would answer, “the first;” General Saxton, with
the instinct of a sound political economist, says “the one that has the
most children.” As for the rest, they must hunt up other husbands.
The negroes really seem to appreciate the dignity and solemnity of the
marriage institution; and they have a great anxiety to enter its bonds
fashionably. At the Beaufort wedding, just referred to, the bride wore a
calico dress whose colors were as glowing as her own was swarthy; her
hands were covered with white cotton gloves; and as for her head, neck
and shoulders, a true history will be forever at a loss to tell how they
_were_ clad, for over her head was cast, in flowing folds of portentous
thickness, a gauzy sheet, supposed to represent a white veil. It
shrouded the features in unnatural pallor; it suggested no hint of neck,
and but the remotest suspicion of shoulders, and it was only gathered
into terminal folds somewhere in the region of what should have been the
waist.
From beneath this effectual concealment, the bride made haste to give
her responses. The poor girl had been cheated out of her marriage, a
week before, by some unexpected order to the regiment which claimed the
services of her soldier-intended, and she was determined to have “de
ting trou wid, dis time.” When the minister asked if he would have this
woman to be his wife, she hastily exclaimed, “Oh! yes, massa, I’ll be
his wife;” and when the irrevocable words were said, the huge veil
disappeared with wondrous rapidity before the ardor of the kiss. But
they got, on their marriage certificate, the signatures of a couple of
witnesses which the highest born in the land would be proud to possess.
It has been seen that, among the Sea Islanders, the course of true love
runs very much as it does elsewhere. The course of justice seems to be
sometimes as tortuous. Take, for example, the story of a stolen hen in
Mitchelville, and what came of the theft.
Mitchelville, it must be remembered, is the negro village on Hilton Head
Island, regularly organized with negro officers, and enjoying its
Councilmen and Supervisor, whom their constituents insist on styling
Aldermen and Mayor. The “Aldermen” are enjoined, among other things, to
settle disputes concerning claims for personal property and the like.
Before one of these Aldermen came a disconsolate negress. Her hen had
been stolen, and Gawky Sam was the boy who did it. The boy was summoned,
the evidence heard, the case clearly made out, and two dollars fine
imposed. But here stepped in another Alderman, who, re-hearing the case,
added another dollar to the fine. Before the money was paid, still
another managed to get the case before him, and he imposed a fine of
five dollars. By this time, the Supervisor (“Mayor”) heard the story,
and summoning all the parties before him, inquired: “Uncle Ben, why did
you fine de boy two dollars?”
“Well, sah, de case was clar; de hen was a mity fine, fat un, and I
reckon she worf about a dollar. Den, sir, nobody oughtub be ’lowed to
steal for less dan a dollah, nohow. So I made him pay de wuf of de hen
to the owner, and a dollah for stealin beside.”
“Well, ’Cl’erklis (Anglice, Uncle Hercules), why did you make de fine
tree dollah?”
“Well, de hen war wuf a dollah, easy. Den de boy ought to pay a dollah
for stealin’, anyhow. But den, sah, dat hen war a layin’ eggs, and if
dat Gawky Sam hadn’t done stole her, de eggs she’d a laid ’ud a been,
wuf’t least ’nuther dollah by this time!”
And the third Alderman, it was found, had proceeded upon the same basis,
but had reckoned the hen more fertile of eggs, or allowed for her having
a longer time in which to produce them; and he had made the boy pay for
three dollars’ worth of eggs that the hen would have laid for the owner,
if she hadn’t been stolen!
What new versions of law and justice the Mayor would have given, alas!
were lost to the jurisprudence of the Sea Islands, and the case came to
an ignoble ending; for Gawky Sam’s father had grown frightened at these
successive additions to the fine, and the hen had been hastily carried
back to the coop whence she was originally stolen. The Mayor,
accordingly, imposed a fine of a dollar for the crime of the theft, and
peace reigned again among the Aunties of Mitchelville.
* * * * *
Ludicrous as was the solemnity of these proceedings, they were,
nevertheless, of value, as showing inherent ideas of justice. In the
days of slavery every negro believed it right to steal, for was he not
stolen, bodily, from himself? And from taking “Massa’s” property, it was
no very hard step to taking that of other people. But with freedom have
come better practices, and already we are assured that theft is
comparatively rare.
Whoever has read what I have written about the cotton fields of St.
Helena will need no assurance that another cardinal sin of the slave,
his laziness—“inborn and ineradicable,” as we were always told by his
masters—is likewise disappearing under the stimulus of freedom and
necessity. Dishonesty and indolence, then, were the creation of slavery,
not the necessary and constitutional faults of the negro character. May
it not be reasonably hoped that the other great sin of the slave, his
licentiousness, will yet be found to have its origin in the same system,
and its end in the responsibilities of educated freedom?
Mrs. Stowe, in one of the most striking passages of _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_,
suggests a comparison between Eva and Topsy, the one, the child of
refined and educated parents, and coming of a race in which refinement
and education had bettered the blood from generation to generation; the
other, born of ages of oppression, barbarism, bestial ignorance and sin.
The comparison might be pushed to a conclusion Mrs. Stowe does not draw.
How _can_ the brain, thus cramped and debased from father to son, at one
bound, rise to the hight of the Anglo-Saxon mind, which these
generations of culture have been broadening and strengthening?
Enthusiasts tell us that the negro mind is to-day as good as that of the
white; but I doubt if ten or fifteen years of education on these Sea
Islands will prove it. They seem to me, in some cases, to have as _much_
intellect as the whites; but it is in the rough, is torpid, needs to be
vitalized and quickened, and brought under control. Things which require
no strong or complex intellectual effort—how to read, how to manage
their farms, or bargain for the sale of watermelons—they learn quickly
and well. An average negro child will learn its letters, and read
cleverly in the First Reader, in three months. The average of white
children do little, if any, better. But the negroes who are to make
rapid progress in the higher branches, or who are to be proficients in
skilled labor, have not yet been found abundantly on the Sea Islands.
So their moral faculties seem to me to be torpid, like their minds.
Their religion seems rather a paroxysm of the affections than an
intelligent conviction; and it is only beginning to lay hold upon the
realities of their daily lives. Their affections, whether toward God or
toward their neighbors, are unquestionably lively, but of doubtful
depth. One sees, however, scarcely a trace of revengeful feeling toward
their old masters. If good passions are shallow, so, too, are bad ones.
Nor do I see any element whatever out of which a negro insurrection
could now, or ever could have been, evolved. The enterprise which risks
present pains and dangers for future good is not now a characteristic of
the Sea-Island negroes. If it come at all, it must come—as it has _not_
yet, to some of the most cultivated peoples in the world—with the
education and aspirations of comparative freedom.
[Illustration: _Forts at Savannah.—Page 131._]