THE NEGRO.
In the back country of Virginia, and on the borders of North Carolina,
it becomes clear that our common English notions of the negro and of
slavery are nearer the truth than common notions often are. The London
Christy Minstrels are not more given to bursts of laughter of the form
“Yah! yah!” than are the plantation hands. The negroes upon the Virginia
farms are not maligned by those who represent them as delighting in the
contrasts of crimson and yellow, or emerald and sky-blue. I have seen
them on a Sunday afternoon, dressed in scarlet waistcoats and gold-laced
cravats, returning hurriedly from “meetin’,” to dance break-downs, and
grin from ear to ear for hours at a time. What better should we expect
from men to whom until just now it was forbidden, under tremendous
penalties, to teach their letters?
Nothing can force the planters to treat negro freedom save from the
comic side. To them the thing is too new for thought, too strange for
argument; the ridiculous lies on the surface, and to this they turn as a
relief. When I asked a planter how the blacks prospered under freedom,
his answer was, “Ours don‘t much like it. You see, it necessitates
monogamy. If I talk about the ‘responsibilities of freedom,’ Sambo says,
‘Dunno ’bout that; please, mass’ George: me want two wife.’” Another
planter tells me, that the only change he can see in the condition of
the negroes since they have been free is that formerly the supervision
of the overseer forced them occasionally to be clean, whereas now
nothing on earth can make them wash. He says that, writing lately to his
agent, he received an answer to which there was the following
postscript: “You ain‘t sent no sope. You had better send sope: niggers
is _certainly_ needing sope.”
It is easy to treat the negro question in this way; easy, on the other
hand, to assert that since history fails us as a guide to the future of
the emancipated blacks, we should see what time will bring, and
meanwhile set down negroes as a monster class of which nothing is yet
known, and, like the compilers of the Catalan map, say of places of
which we have no knowledge, “Here be giants, cannibals, and negroes.” As
long as we possess Jamaica, and are masters upon the African west
coast, the negro question is one of moment to ourselves. It is one, too,
of mightier import, for it is bound up with the future of the English in
America. It is by no means a question to be passed over as a joke. There
are five millions of negroes in the United States; juries throughout ten
States of the Union are mainly chosen from the black race. The matter is
not only serious, but full of interest, political, ethnological,
historic.
In the South you must take nothing upon trust; believe nothing you are
told. Nowhere in the world do “facts” appear so differently to those who
view them through spectacles of yellow or of rose. The old planters tell
you that all is ruin,--that they have but half the hands they need, and
from each hand but a half day‘s work: the new men, with Northern energy
and Northern capital, tell you that they get on very well.
The old Southern planters find it hard to rid themselves of their
traditions; they cannot understand free blacks, and slavery makes not
only the slaves but the masters shiftless. They have no cash, and the
Metayer system gives rise to the suspicion of some fraud, for the
negroes are very distrustful of the honesty of their former masters.
The worst of the evils that must inevitably grow out of the sudden
emancipation of millions of slaves have not shown themselves as yet, in
consequence of the great amount of work that has to be done in the
cities of the South, in repairing the ruin caused during the war by fire
and want of care, and in building places of business for the Northern
capitalists. The negroes of Virginia and North Carolina have flocked
down to the towns and ports by the thousand, and find in Norfolk,
Richmond, Wilmington, and Fort Monroe employment for the moment. Their
absence from the plantations makes labor dear up country, and this in
itself tempts the negroes who remain on land to work sturdily for wages.
Seven dollars a month--at the rate equal to one pound--with board and
lodging, were being paid to black field hands on the corn and tobacco
farms near Richmond. It is when the city works are over that the
pressure will come, and it will probably end in the blacks largely
pushing northward, and driving the Irish out of hotel service at New
York and Boston, as they have done in Philadelphia and St. Louis.
Already the negroes are beginning to ask for land, and they complain
loudly that none of the confiscated lands have been assigned to them.
“Ef yer dun gib us de land, reckon de ole massas ’ll starb de niggahs,”
was a plain, straightforward summary of the negro view of the negro
question, given me by a white-bearded old “uncle” in Richmond, and
backed by every black man within hearing in a chorus of “Dat‘s true, for
shore;” but I found up the country that the planters are afraid to let
the negroes own or farm for themselves the smallest plot of land, for
fear that they should sell ten times as much as they grew, stealing
their “crop” from the granaries of their employers.
At a farm near Petersburg, owned by a Northern capitalist, 1000 acres,
which before emancipation had been tilled by one hundred slaves, now
needed, I was told, but forty freedmen for their cultivation; but when I
reached the place, I found that the former number included old people
and women, while the forty were all hale men. The men were paid upon the
tally system. A card was given them for each day‘s work, which was
accepted at the plantation store in payment for goods supplied, and at
the end of the month money was paid for the remaining tickets. The
planters say that the field hands will not support their old people;
but this means only that, like white folk, they try to make as much
money as they can, and know that if they plead the wants of their wives
and children, the whites will keep their aged people.
That the negro slaves were lazy, thriftless, unchaste, and thieves, is
true; but it is as slaves, and not as negroes, that they were all these
things; and, after all, the effects of slavery upon the slave are less
terrible than its effects upon the master. The moral condition to which
the planter class had been brought by slavery, shows out plainly in the
speeches of the rebel leaders. Alexander H. Stephens, Vice-President of
the Confederacy, declared in 1861 that “Slavery is the natural and moral
condition of the negro.... I cannot permit myself to doubt,” he went on,
“the ultimate success of a full recognition of this principle throughout
the civilized and enlightened world ... negro slavery is in its
infancy.”
There is reason to believe that the American negroes will justify the
hopes of their friends; they have made the best of every chance that has
been given them as yet; they were good soldiers, they are eager to learn
their letters, they are steady at their work: in Barbadoes they are
industrious and well conducted; in La Plata they are exemplary citizens.
In America the colored laborer has had no motive to be industrious.
General Grant assured me of the great aptness at soldiering shown by the
negro troops. In battle they displayed extraordinary courage, but if
their officers were picked off they could not stand a charge; no more,
he said, could their Southern masters. The power of standing firm after
the loss of leaders is possessed only by regiments where every private
is as good as his captain and colonel, such as the Northwestern and New
England volunteers.
Before I left Richmond I had one morning found my way into a school for
the younger blacks. There were as many present as the forms would
hold--sixty, perhaps, in all--and three wounded New England soldiers,
with pale, thin faces, were patiently teaching them to write. The boys
seemed quick and apt enough, but they were very raw--only a week or two
in the school. Since the time when Oberlin first proclaimed the
potential equality of the race by admitting negroes as freely as white
men and women to the college, the negroes have never been backward to
learn.
It must not be supposed that the negro is wanting in abilities of a
certain kind. Even in the imbecility of the Congo dance we note his
unrivaled mimetic powers. The religious side of the negro character is
full of weird suggestiveness; but superstition, everywhere the handmaid
of ignorance, is rife among the black plantation hands. It is thought
that the punishment with which the shameful rites of Obi-worship have
been visited has proved, even in the City of New Orleans, insufficient
to prevent them. Charges of witchcraft are as common in Virginia as in
Orissa; in the Carolinas as in Central India the use of poison is often
sought to work out the events foretold by some noted sorceress. In no
direction can the matter be followed out to its conclusions without
bringing us face to face with the sad fact that the faults of the
plantation negro are every one of them traceable to the vices of the
slavery system, and that the Americans of to-day are suffering beyond
measure for evils for which our forefathers are responsible. We
ourselves are not guiltless of wrong-doing in this matter: if it is
still impossible openly to advocate slavery in England, it has, at
least, become a habit persistently to write down freedom. We are no
longer told that God made the blacks to be slaves, but we are bade
remember that they cannot prosper under emancipation. All mention of
Barbadoes is suppressed, but we have daily homilies on the condition of
Jamaica. The negro question in America is briefly this: is there, on the
one hand, reason to fear that, dollars applied to land decreasing while
black mouths to be fed increase, the Southern States will become an
American Jamaica? Is there, on the other hand, ground for the hope that
the negroes may be found not incapable of the citizenship of the United
States? The former of these two questions is the more difficult, and to
some extent involves the latter: can cotton, can sugar, can rice, can
coffee, can tobacco, be raised by white field hands? If not, can they be
raised with profit by black free labor? Can co-operative planting,
directed by negro over-lookers, possibly succeed, or must the farm be
ruled by white capitalists, agents, and overseers?
It is asserted that the negro will not work without compulsion; but the
same may be said of the European. There is compulsion of many kinds. The
emancipated negro may still be forced to work--forced as the white man
is forced in this and other lands, by the alternative, work or starve!
This forcing, however, may not be confined to that which the laws of
natural increase lead us to expect; it may be stimulated by bounties on
immigration.
The negro is not, it would seem, to have a monopoly of Southern labor in
this continent. This week we hear of three shiploads of Chinese coolies
as just landed in Louisiana; and the air is thick with rumors of labor
from Bombay, from Calcutta, from the Pacific Islands--of Eastern labor
in its hundred shapes--not to speak of competition with the whites, now
commencing with the German immigration into Tennessee.
The berries of this country are so large, so many, so full of juice,
that alone they form a never-failing source of nourishment to an idle
population. Three kinds of cranberries, American, pied, and English; two
blackberries, huckleberries, high-bush and low-bush blueberries--the
latter being the English bilberry--are among the best known of the
native fruits. No one in this country, however idle he be, need starve.
If he goes farther south, he has the banana, the true staff of life.
The terrible results of the plentiful possession of this tree are seen
in Ceylon, at Panama, in the coastlands of Mexico, at Auckland in New
Zealand. At Pitcairn‘s Island the plantain grove has beaten the
missionary from the field; there is much lip-Christianity, but no
practice to be got from a people who possess the fatal plant. The
much-abused cocoa-nut cannot come near it as a devil‘s agent. The
cocoa-palm is confined to a few islands and coast tracts--confined, too,
to the tropics and sea-level; the plantain and banana extend over
seventy-degrees of latitude, down to Botany Bay and King George‘s Sound,
and up as far north as the Khyber Pass. The palm asks labor--not much,
it is true; but still a few days’ hard work in the year in trenching,
and climbing after the nuts. The plantain grows as a weed, and hangs
down its bunches of ripe tempting fruit into your lap as you lie in its
cool shade. The cocoanut-tree has a hundred uses, and urges men to work
to make spirit from its juice, ropes, clothes, matting, bags, from its
fiber, oil from the pulp; it creates an export trade which appeals to
almost all men by their weakest side, in offering large and quick
returns for a little work. John Ross‘s “Isle of Cocoas,” to the west of
Java and south of Ceylon, yields him heavy gains; there are profits to
be made upon the Liberian coast, and even in Southern India and Ceylon.
The plantain will make nothing; you can eat it raw or fried, and that is
all; you can eat it every day of your life without becoming tired of its
taste; without suffering in your health, you can live on it exclusively.
In the banana groves of Florida and Louisiana there lurks much trouble
and danger to the American free States.
The negroes have hardly much chance in Virginia against the Northern
capitalists, provided with white labor; but the States of Louisiana,
Mississippi, Florida, and South Carolina promise to be wholly theirs.
Already they are flocking to places in which they have a majority of the
people, and can control the municipalities, and defend themselves, if
necessary, by force; but if the Southerners of the coast desert their
country, the negroes will not have it to themselves, unless nature
declares that they shall. New Englanders will pour in with capital and
energy, and cultivate the land by free black or by coolie labor, if
either will pay. If they do pay, competition will force the remaining
blacks to work or starve.
The friends of the negro are not without a fear that the laborers will
be too many for their work, for, while the older cotton States appear to
be worn out, the new, such as Texas and Tennessee, will be reserved by
public opinion to the whites. For the present the negroes will be
masters in seven of the rebel States; but in Texas, white men--English,
Germans, Danes--are growing cotton with success; and in Georgia and
North Carolina, which contain mountain districts, the negro power is not
likely to be permanent.
We may, perhaps, lay it down as a general principle that, when the negro
can fight his way through opposition, and stand alone as a farmer or
laborer, without the aid of private or State charity, then he should be
protected in the position he has shown himself worthy to hold, that of a
free citizen of an enlightened and laboring community. Where it is found
that when his circumstances have ceased to be exceptional, the negro
cannot live unassisted, there the Federal government may fairly and
wisely step in and say, “We will not keep you; but we will carry you to
Liberia or to Hayti, if you will.”
It is clear that the Southern negroes must be given a decisive voice in
the appointment of the legislatures by which they are to be ruled, or
that the North must be prepared to back up by force of opinion, or if
need be, by force of arms, the Federal Executive, when it insists on the
Civil Rights Bill being set in action at the South. Government through
the negroes is the only way to avoid government through an army, which
would be dangerous to the freedom of the North. It is safer for America
to trust her slaves than to trust her rebels--safer to enfranchise than
to pardon.
A reading and writing basis for the suffrage in the Southern States is
an absurdity. Coupled with pardons to the rebels, it would allow the
“boys in gray”--the soldiers of the Confederacy--to control nine States
of the Union; it would render the education of the freedmen hopeless.
For the moment, it would entirely disfranchise the negroes in six
States, whereas it is exactly for the moment that negro suffrage is in
these States necessary; while, if the rebels were admitted to vote, and
the negroes excluded from the poll, the Southern representatives, united
with the Copperhead wing of the Democratic party, might prove to be
strong enough to repudiate the Federal debt. This is one of a dozen
dangers.
An education basis for the suffrage, though pretended to be impartial,
would be manifestly aimed against the negroes, and would perpetuate the
antipathy of color to which the war is supposed to have put an end. To
education such a provision would be a death-blow. If the negroes were to
vote as soon as they could read, it is certain that the planters would
take good care that they never should read at all.
That men should be able to examine into the details of politics is not
entirely necessary to the working of representative government. It is
sufficient that they should be competent to select men to do it for
them. In the highest form of representative government, where all the
electors are both intelligent, educated, and alive to the politics of
the time, then the member returned must tend more and more to be a
delegate. That has always been the case with the Northern and Western
members in America, but never with those returned by the Southern
States; and so it will continue, whether the Southern elections be
decided by negroes or by “mean whites.”
In Warren County, Mississippi, near Vicksburg, is a plantation which
belongs to Joseph Davis, the brother of the rebel president. This he has
leased to Mr. Montgomery--once his slave--in order that an association
of blacks may be formed to cultivate the plantation on co-operative
principles. It is to be managed by a council elected by the community at
large, and a voluntary poor-rate and embankment-rate are to be levied on
the people by themselves.
It is only a year since the termination of the war, and the negroes are
already in possession of schools, village corporations, of the Metayer
system, of co-operative farms; all this tells of rapid advance, and the
conduct and circulation of the _New Orleans Tribune_, edited and
published by negroes, and selling 10,000 copies daily, and another
10,000 of the weekly issue, speaks well for the progress of the blacks.
If the Montgomery experiment succeeds, their future is secure.