CHAPTER LIII.Concluding Suggestions.

The President’s vetoes of the Freedman’s Bureau Bill and the Civil Rights Bill, with his Twenty-second of February speech and subsequent utterances, were received throughout the South-Western Cotton States with an exultation which drove the newspapers[84]to sad straits. To do justice to the occasion, the leading journal of New Orleans was forced to this:

“In the midst of a storm of passion, beating angrily and furiously against the bulwark of States’ rights, when the ambitious and interested partisans who have raised it, attempt madly to ride into power over the ruins of a shattered Constitution; when the bellowing thunder roars on all sides, and the play of the forked lightning serves only to reveal the thick and impenetrable darkness which shrouds our political heavens, no sublimer spectacle can be presented than that of an American President, who, with serene countenance and determined spirit, appears on the arena of bitter and destructive strife, and says, in tones of power to the warring elements: ‘Peace! be still!’ and instantly the storm is hushed. The growling thunder, though its mutterings are still faintly heard, dies out in the distance: The denunciations of defeated partisans, and of fanatical bloodhounds, cease to spread their alarms over the land. The conflicting winds retire to their mountain cave. The clouds enveloping the concave above us break asunder, and a rainbow of varied dyes, which spans the heavens, gives full assurance of a bright and glorious day for our country.”

The rural journals were less glitteringly general: but they fairly represented the prevailing public sentiment. One of the most outspoken said:[85]

“The old Tennesseean has shown his blood, and bearded the lion in his lair, ‘The Douglass in his hall’—‘glory enough for one day’—glorious old man, and let the earth ring his praise to the heavens.

The South and the Government are in the same boat one more time, thank the gods! ‘now blow ye winds and crack your cheeks.’ If Black Republicanism wishes to find out whether the South is loyal, there is now a beautiful opportunity. If they wish to prove their false assertion, let them now attempt any seditious move, and they will find every blast from Johnson’s ‘Bugle horn, worth a thousand men;’ and before the notes shall die away in the valleys of the South, a soldier from the South will wave the old banner of the Stars and Stripes on the Northern hills; and though we do not desire them to do this, we defy them to do so. We will see then how they like the fit of their own cap.

States reduced to Territories? Indeed a little move in that direction would be of service, we think, in bringing about a full restoration of harmony between the sections. A little taste of their own medicine.”

And the enthusiastic writer proceeded to declare, that the fair regions held by the Radical vipers were once more in the hands to which they properly belonged; and that the vipers could, therefore, turn their envenomed fangs upon each other, and with their forked tongues hiss their slimy curses into their own hell-torn, shrieking souls; while the South would, as a meteor shot from the electric realms of air, once more sweep across the skies of the glorious old Republic, and spangle its history with the splendors of her truth, her intellect, and her chivalry.

In spite, however, of such strong writing, and the stronger speaking everywhere prevalent, I was convinced during my visits to New Orleans, and Vicksburg, and the trip northward through the interior, which ended my year’s experiences of Southern life, that there was little probability of serious results. Undoubtedly the South would sympathize with the President in any movement against Congress; but it is in no condition to give valuable co-operation. In 1866, as in 1865, the work of reorganization is entirely in the hands of the Government. The South will take—now as at any time since the surrender—whatever it can get.

“I believe in States Rights, of co’se,” said an old gentleman, at Jackson, Mississippi; “but I think my faith is like that described in the Bible: ‘The evidence of things not seen,the substance of things hoped for.’ The person that can see anything of States’ Rights now-a-days, has younger eyes than mine.” The same old man was very bitter against the “infamous scoundrel,” who had written a recent article about the South in the Atlantic Monthly. “There ought to be some law to prevent such libels. You protect individuals against them; why isn’t it more important to protect whole communities?”

All complained of the changed front in the Senate on the Civil Rights Bill. “What business had Dixon to be absent?” exclaimed an officer of Lee’s staff. “What if he was sick? If he had been dead, even, they ought to have carried him there and voted him!”

The attitude of Congress was regarded with alarm. Even the unreflecting masses were beginning to suspect that flattery of the President and abuse of Congress would not be sufficient to carry them through the difficulties that beset their political progress.

In most cases, the hostility to the Freedman’s Bureau seemed to be general in its nature, not specific. Men regarded it as tyrannical and humiliating that Government hirelings should be sent among them to supervise their relations with their old slaves; but, in practice, they were very glad of the supervision. It was a degrading system, they argued, but, so long as it existed, the negroes could not be controlled except by the favor of the Bureau agents, “and so, of co’se, we have to use them.” When the agents were removed from this prevailing respect for their powers, few opportunities were lost to show them the estimation in which they were held.

A steamboat was lying at the New Orleans levee, discharging a quantity of very miscellaneous freight. Among it was what the captain called “a lot of nigger’s plunder.” The entire worldly effects of a negro family seemed to be on board with little confinement from trunks or boxes. Half a dozen squalling chickens were carried over the gang-plank by the old auntie, in one hand, while in the other was held a squalling picaninny. A bundle of very dirty and ragged bed-clothes, tied up with the bed-cord, came next. There was a bedstead, apparently made with an ax, and a table, on which no other tool could by any chance have been employed. A lot of broken dishes, pots, and kettles followed. Then came an old bureau. The top drawer was gone, the bottom drawer was gone, the middle one had the knobs broken off, the frame remained to show that a looking-glass had once surmounted it, and two of the feet were broken off.

“By the powers, there’s the Freedman’s Bureau,” exclaimed one of the group of Southern spectators standing on the guards. An agent of the Freedman’s Bureau, in uniform, was within hearing, and the tauntinglaugh that rang over the boat seemed especially meant for his ears. To have resented, or noticed it, in that crowd, would have been at least foolish, if not worse. The agent was fortunate to escape with no more pointed expression of the public opinion concerning his office and duties.

Little change in the actual Unionism of the people could be seen since the surrender. In the year that had intervened, they had grown bolder, as they had come to realize the lengths to which they might safely go. They were “loyal” in May, 1865, in the sense of enforced submission to the Government, and they are loyal in the same sense in May, 1866. At neither time has the loyalty of the most had any wider meaning. But scarcely any dream of further opposition to the Government. A “war within the Union,” for their rights, seems now to be the universal policy—a war in which they will act as a unit with whatever party at the North favors the fewest possible changes from the old order of things, and leaves them most at liberty to regulate their domestic institutions in their own way.

Nothing but the prevalent sense of the insecurity attending all Southern movements, during the political and social chaos that followed the surrender, prevented a large immigration from the North in the winter of 1865-’66. That the openings which the South presents for Northern capital and industry are unsurpassed, has been sufficiently illustrated. With a capital of a few thousand dollars, and a personal supervision of his work, a Northern farmer, devoting himself to cotton-growing, may count with safety on a net profit of fifty per cent, on his investment. With a good year and a good location he may do much better. Through Tennesseeand the same latitudes, east and west, he will find a climate not very greatly different from his own, and a soil adapted to Northern cereals as well as to the Southern staple. The pine forests still embower untold riches; the cypress swamps of the lower Mississippi and its tributaries, only await the advent of Northern lumbermen to be converted into gold-mines; the mineral resources of Northern Georgia and Alabama, in spite of the war’s developments, are yet as attractive as those that are drawing emigration into the uninhabited wilds across the Rocky Mountains. But capital and labor—especially agricultural labor—demand security.

Along the great highways of travel in the South, I judge investments by Northern men to be nearly as safe as they could be anywhere. The great cotton plantations bordering the Mississippi are largely in the hands of Northern lessees; and few, if any of them have experienced the slightest difficulty from any hostility of the inhabitants. So, along the great lines of railroad, and through regions not too remote from the tide of travel and trade, there are no complaints. It is chiefly in remote sections, far from railroads or mails, and isolated among communities of intense Southern prejudices, that Northern men have had trouble.

Whenever it is desirable to settle in such localities, it should be done in small associations. A dozen families, living near each other, would be abundantly able to protect themselves almost anywhere in the cotton-growing States.

Whoever contemplates going South, in time for the operations of 1867, should not delay his first visit later than November, 1866. Between October and January last, the prices of lands through the South, either for lease or sale, advanced fully fifty per cent. Uplandcotton plantations can now be bought, in most localities, in tracts of from one hundred up to five thousand acres, for from eight to twenty dollars per acre; and the richest Mississippi and Red River bottom plantations do not command, in most cases, over forty dollars; the price being generally reckoned only on the open land prepared for the culture of cotton. But purchases should be made and arrangements for labor perfected before the New Year’s rush comes on.

I have sought to show something of the actual character of the negroes, as learned from a closer and longer experience than falls to the lot of most tourists. The worst enemies to the enfranchised race, will at least admit that ample prominence has been given to their faults. I shall be glad if any satisfactory data have been furnished for determining their place in the future of the country.

They are not such material as, under ordinary circumstances, one would now choose for the duties of American citizenship. But wherever they have opportunity, they are fitting themselves for it with a zeal and rapidity never equalled by any similar class. Their order and industry are the only guaranty for the speedy return of prosperity to the South. Their devotion to the Union may prove one of the strongest guarantees for the speedy return of loyalty to the South. In any event, there can be no question, in the pending reorganization, as to the policy of seeking to ignore them. The Nation can not longer afford it.

Better let them build who rear the house of nations,Than that Fate should rock it to foundation stone;Leave the Earth her storms, the stars their perturbations,“Steadfast welfare stays whereJusticebinds her zone.”

Better let them build who rear the house of nations,

Than that Fate should rock it to foundation stone;

Leave the Earth her storms, the stars their perturbations,

“Steadfast welfare stays whereJusticebinds her zone.”

84.It should be remembered, in any estimates of politics at the South, that nearly all the leading Southern journals are still in the hands of the men who, five years ago, in their columns wrote up the rebellion. And, while the men who fought for the rebellion are entirely subdued, the men who wrote for it have seven devils now for every one that formerly possessed them.

85.Montgomery (Ala.) Ledger.

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