CHAPTER VII.
HOW SOUTHERNERS DESCRIBE THEIR OWN CONDITION—EACH STATE MUST BE TAKEN SEPARATELY—MISSOURI—TENNESSEE—KENTUCKY—TEXAS—VIRGINIA—GEORGIA—FLORIDA—NORTH CAROLINA—ARKANSAS—SOUTH CAROLINA—LOUISIANA—MISSISSIPPI—WILL THE BLACKS GET THE FRANCHISE?—NO PARTY CONSIDERS THEM FIT—THEY WILL HAVE IT FOR A TIME—THIS WILL WEAKEN THE REPUDIATING PARTY—ALSO THE PARTY HOSTILE TO THIS COUNTRY—THE BLACKS WILL NOT ALL BE REPUBLICAN—THE SOUTH SHOULD HAVE BEEN LEFT ALONE TO SETTLE THE LABOUR QUESTION—THE BUREAU SUGGESTED FALSE IDEAS—THERE WILL BE NO WAR OF RACES—WHAT WILL KILL OUT THE BLACKS—THE RATE OF THIS—FUSION PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE—MEANS OF COMMUNICATION IN THE SOUTH INDICATE ITS CONDITION.
HOW SOUTHERNERS DESCRIBE THEIR OWN CONDITION—EACH STATE MUST BE TAKEN SEPARATELY—MISSOURI—TENNESSEE—KENTUCKY—TEXAS—VIRGINIA—GEORGIA—FLORIDA—NORTH CAROLINA—ARKANSAS—SOUTH CAROLINA—LOUISIANA—MISSISSIPPI—WILL THE BLACKS GET THE FRANCHISE?—NO PARTY CONSIDERS THEM FIT—THEY WILL HAVE IT FOR A TIME—THIS WILL WEAKEN THE REPUDIATING PARTY—ALSO THE PARTY HOSTILE TO THIS COUNTRY—THE BLACKS WILL NOT ALL BE REPUBLICAN—THE SOUTH SHOULD HAVE BEEN LEFT ALONE TO SETTLE THE LABOUR QUESTION—THE BUREAU SUGGESTED FALSE IDEAS—THERE WILL BE NO WAR OF RACES—WHAT WILL KILL OUT THE BLACKS—THE RATE OF THIS—FUSION PHYSICALLY IMPOSSIBLE—MEANS OF COMMUNICATION IN THE SOUTH INDICATE ITS CONDITION.
The Condition of the South.
I have been frequently asked what I found was the condition of the South? And the question has been put in such a manner as to imply that the speaker regarded the South as a homogeneous entity, and that he supposed that the causes of its suffering—the war and the abolition of slavery—affected every part of it equally. But the reverse of this would be nearer to the truth. The Southern Confederacy was composed of States very differently circumstanced from each other, except in the one point of their system of labour; and the late war, and the overthrow of their system of labour, have affected those different States very differently. It is difficult to understand to how great a degree this is the case without having oneself gone through the South and seen these differenceswith one’s own eyes. This is what I did, and I shall now attempt to give a short account of what I saw and heard. My route was through Richmond, Petersburg, Weldon, Wilmington, Charleston, Atlanta, Augusta, and Mobile to New Orleans; then up the valley of the Mississippi by way of Jackson, Memphis, and St. Louis. I had a superabundance of introductions for all the places I visited. I had obtained at Washington letters to all the Generals holding commands in the South, and which were in many cases fortified by duplicates from other quarters. I had also brought with me letters from New York and elsewhere to merchants whose firms ranked among the leading houses of the South, and to others who had been through the war; to men who were endeavouring to resuscitate the industry of their fallen States, and to a gentleman who held one of the highest offices in the late Confederate Government. I had therefore sufficient means for obtaining the information I required.
But the question is, what did one see and hear, and what were the conclusions to which one was brought by personal observation? The fact that first forces itself on the eye in the towns, and often in the rural districts you pass through, is that there are multitudes of negroes loafing about, doing nothing. You see them at every station. When you come to make inquiries as to what they are doing, and how they subsist, and generally as to the state of the country, you are told that they are to be found in shoals in every town where there is a Freedman’s Bureau. They expect something from the Bureau; and, like so many coloured Micawbers, aredrawn to the towns in the hope that something or other will turn up. So in the towns; but that in the country districts, where there is no power to restrain the idle and ill-disposed, things are in an actively bad condition—that this class has taken to stealing, and has not left on many properties a sweet potato or head of maize, or the pig that would have fed upon them—that they have made a clean sweep of everything edible. As to the state of the whites, that their condition is far more dreadful both to bear and to contemplate; for the blacks, as soon as they please to do the work they are accustomed to, may escape from their present distress, but that tens of thousands of white families, who lately were living in affluence and refinement, not knowing what it was either to want anything or to do anything for themselves, are now in a state of abject penury, positively of starvation; that many are without the means of procuring hominy and salt pork, the humblest fare in the country. And about this point there can be no doubt; for you have as evidence of the statement not only what Southerners say, but, as I afterwards found on returning to New York, the corroborative evidence of those good Northern people who are themselves subscribing largely to keep these destitute Southern families alive. In addition to all this, everyone tells you that he expects the unspeakable horrors of a war of races, which in their opinion cannot be adjourned for more than two years, as the coloured population are becoming day by day more and more dissatisfied with what the great change has hitherto done for them.
The first observation to be made on these statementsis, that they cannot be equally applicable to all the very differently circumstanced States of the late Southern Confederacy. For instance, the State of Missouri, which is one of the most fertile in the Union, and by its climate thoroughly adapted to the Northern farm-system, was instantly benefited by the abolition of slavery. Tennessee and Kentucky will soon be in the same position, for both may very well be cultivated by white labour. The slow rate of progress made by the latter, when compared with the State of Ohio, which is only separated from it by the Ohio river, and has a colder climate, and not a more productive soil, is a proof that slavery, in which alone they differed, was the sole cause of its retardation. Texas was even at the moment very slightly affected by the change, and will now become a more attractive field than ever for white immigration. Here cattle-breeding is the chief occupation, which is one that does not at all require slave labour; and here also cotton has for many years been cultivated by the whites without the compulsory aid of the blacks. Virginia having passed through all the distress which is implied by the passage from the estate to the farm system, will emerge from its present distress a far richer and more populous state than it was before. General Lee’s son, and many others of the noble Virginian race, have already set the example, and are themselves holding the plough and doing all the work of the farm with their own hands. How much more pleasing a picture will the valleys and plains of the Old Dominion then present when every hundred acres shall have its homestead, and support a family of the noblest raceof mankind! And in truth how sad a picture have they hitherto presented, while held in large estates, rudely cultivated by the enforced toil of that race which was the lowest and most incapable of all! The northern part of this State is very fertile, and is everywhere intersected with navigable streams, such as would enable the farmer to ship his produce generally from his own door. This is what is called the tide-way district of Virginia. And as all vegetables and fruit grown here, in the natural home of the magnolia, are at least a fortnight earlier than they are to the north of the Potomac, they would command the markets of New York and of the Northern cities. This advantage cannot be snatched from them by any more southern State, as it is the combined result of the character of their soil, of their climate, and of their abundant means of water communication.
Position of each State.
In Georgia, particularly in the upper part of the State, where the ground rises considerably, I heard and saw that successful efforts were being made to effect the change from the estate to the farm system; and, instead of trusting entirely to cotton, to try what could be done by growing wheat and maize, the latter to be turned into pork—in short, to do whatever could be done to adapt their industry to existing circumstances. Florida at present is rather occupied by wild deer than by man; but as it is capable of becoming the chief wintersanitariumfor the consumption-scourged North, and also of producing tropical fruits and sugar for the whole Union, it has a fair prospect before it. Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, the writer of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’ and sisterof the celebrated Brooklyn preacher, has gone to Florida, with her brother, Mr. Charles Beecher, for the purpose of attempting the cultivation of the sugar cane with free labour. North Carolina is endeavouring to follow the example of its neighbours Virginia and Georgia. Arkansas, which was settled chiefly by the sons of Georgian planters, is showing much of the Georgian spirit. In Alabama great efforts had been made to re-establish the cultivation of cotton on the basis of freedom; and things were promising well, when at the end of 1867 the price of cotton, by a concurrence of adverse accidents, fell to 15 cents or 7½2d.at Liverpool. This depression to a point below the cost of production in any part of the world was felt, I believe, by most of those who attend to these matters, to be only a temporary mishap. The same cotton was selling at the end of the following March at 25 cents—a fully remunerative price; but in most cases the planters had not been able to hold, so that the low price they were obliged to accept has ruined many, and discouraged more. I was told by a Tennessee cotton planter that a price of 20 cents would have contained an ample margin for profit on the cotton he had himself grown, on a large scale, with hired black labour. His contract with those he employed was that he should give them high wages, with more than a proportionate deduction for every hour of absence from work.
Distress in South Carolina.
There now remain unmentioned only the three States of South Carolina, Louisiana, and Mississippi. As far as I could judge, South Carolina was utterly and hopelessly crushed. Its best estates were in the SeaIslands, which, as they were very fertile, and their produce fetched exceptionally high prices, were densely inhabited with blacks; in many of them, however, no white man could live, or even pass a night with impunity. Under these circumstances it might have been expected that as soon as the negroes were emancipated they would take possession of the land in these islands. And so it happened in most of the unhealthy ones; while in those that were healthy the original proprietors equally lost their property by confiscation or forfeiture, or by being ousted in some way or other. The result of this, and of the other losses that arose out of the war, and the utter overthrow of the Confederacy, is that throughout South Carolina the most abject and irrecoverable poverty reigns precisely where formerly there was most abundant wealth. I heard of one gentleman, who before the war had been unable to spend the whole of his large income, being now a porter in a dry goods store; and of another, who formerly had possessed everything which riches could supply, dying in such penury that his family had to beg of their friends contributions for his funeral. For this State there appears to be no resurrection, except in some new order of things, under which a new set of proprietors will occupy the land, and cultivate it with Northern capital, and somewhat in the Northern fashion.
In Louisiana also things were so bad that it was hardly possible to see how they could be worse. In New Orleans I found families who formerly had lived in noble mansions, and exercised a grand hospitality, now occupying quiet lodgings. In some instances I knew of several families clubbing together, and livingas it were in common. But here there was a great difference—hope was not dead. They talked confidently of the re-establishment, at all events, of their sugar industry, and of the trade of the city. I saw several sugar estates not far from New Orleans, the very costly machinery upon which had been destroyed during the war. I was told—though, of course, I cannot vouch for the accuracy of the figures—that the machinery had been broken up and burnt on twelve hundred out of the seventeen hundred sugar estates of this State.
As far as I could see and hear, the State of Mississippi also was in a very bad way. This seemed to arise from two causes. A larger proportion of the white inhabitants than is the case elsewhere belong to the class called in the South ‘mean whites,’—that is, persons without property, education, or enterprise. And then the planters are unable to borrow what is requisite for enabling them to work their plantations. No one will lend them a cent. This is but a natural consequence of the act of repudiation they adopted at the instigation of Mr. J. Davis, late President of the Southern Confederacy, and whom this State has either the honour or the dishonour of reckoning among her best known men.
This, however, is not the only light in which the South has to be regarded. There is the question of political as well as of industrial reconstruction, and the former is now throughout all the North shaking the very foundations of the Union, and setting the son against the father, and the brother against the brother. The question is being dealt with entirely and exclusively on party considerations, and this Mr. ThaddeusStevens and other leaders of the Republican party have acknowledged in speech and print. They say universal suffrage, whatever the consequences to the Southern planter, must be conceded to the blacks, in order that the South may return to the Union, not as of old, on the Democratic side, but on the Republican, as the present exigencies of that party and of the Union require. Nothing can secure this except the black vote. All considerations of the fitness of the late slave for the exercise of the franchise is thus dismissed, and nothing insisted on but what is needed by the necessities of the dominant party.
The Negro Franchise.
Of course no man who knows anything of the capacity and of the history of the black race, even if he be of the Republican party, abstractedly thinks that they are qualified for taking part in the government of the country, and of legislating for and governing many of the Southern States.
Will it then be conferred upon them? It may be taken for granted that it will. Many talk of a secret compact—an underground railway, as it is called on the other side—between the President and the Southern leaders, to defeat by their joint efforts the Congressional plan, he being rewarded by the support of the South, when, as Democratic States, it returns to Congress. If such a compact has any existence, it is very unlikely to have any results. As the blacks have been admitted to the conventions throughout the South, for forming the new constitutions under which they are to exercise the franchise, and as the present Congress is determined that they shall have it, one does not see what is to prevent its extensionto them. Whether the possession of the boon will be continued to them is another point. But be that as it may, we must, I think, regard the immediate possession of the franchise by the blacks as a certain event, and consider what are likely to be its consequences.
Its first and most obvious effect will be that which it was intended to produce—the weakening, and perhaps the exclusion from power for some time, of the Democratic party. Will this be an evil or an advantage to the Union? As far as I am able to judge, an unqualified advantage. The Democratic candidate of to-day for the Presidency, Mr. Pendleton of Ohio, and so of course the Democratic party itself are in favour of a partial, but very considerable, repudiation of the debt. This would be so disastrous a policy, that no one who wishes well to the Union can wish well to the Democrats. But this plank in their platform may be reshaped or entirely removed. Their permanent distinguishing principle is resistance to the policy of strengthening the central Government at the expense of the liberties and privileges of the separate States, whereas the reverse of this is the distinguishing principle of the great Republican party. It is evident that the Republican policy is that which is best adapted for commanding and calling out for immediate use the resources of the nation, and so during their great war it was decidedly in the ascendent. And since the war, the tendency of legislation and of administration has been in that direction: and this tendency will probably become stronger, at all events it will be more needed, as the United States increase in area and population.
Who are necessarily Hostile to England.
Englishmen also may be reminded that almost all the abuse and insults Americans have heaped upon us have been the manufacture of Democratic brains, and, till Fenianism arose, came chiefly from Southern men. We cannot wish success to that party from which we have never received fair and courteous—I would even say, rational—treatment, and which now encloses in its bosom all our deadliest enemies in the United States. If formerly we regarded the accusations they brought against us, and the motives they imputed to us, as the hallucinations of disordered minds, we must now expect still livelier sallies, in order that they may not fall below the mark of Fenian animosity. In any difficulty which may arise between this country and the United States, the Democratic leaders are precluded, for the sake of the Irish vote, from recognising right or reason; and they must go on in this groove. The Republicans are under no such demoralising necessity. Of course it would be unwise in a traveller or a diplomatist to show decided preferences for any particular party; but it is well to know where you are likely to find friends. The manufacturing and commercial element of the Republican party is alone disposed by circumstances to feel ill-will towards us. But all this will die out as soon as the good sense of the American people has made the discovery of the degree to which they are crippled and impoverished by the pestilent heresy of protection.
But to go back to the subject of the black vote. It does not appear to me that this will always be given on the Republican side. The African will be too ignorant to judge for himself; and though hewill never want for Northern advisers, he will have others nearer home, and in some cases will, I think, be influenced by those who employ him; and not unfrequently he may even wish, as the negro is the most imitative of all the races of mankind, to vote, not as his sable brethren, but as his old master votes. The whites will act as one man; the negroes will never be able to do so; and in States where the colours are pretty evenly balanced, a few deserters would incline the scale in favour of the old Southern party.
I mentioned that while in the office of the Freedmen’s Bureau at Washington, before I entered the South, it struck me that its establishment could not be justified on grounds of wisdom. What I saw in the South confirmed this supposition. Mischief, I thought, had been done by it. The whites might safely, and ought in good policy to, have been left to settle the labour question with their old slaves. They quite understood that it would be ruin to themselves if they failed to satisfy them, and that they could only do this by making them feel that they were fairly and kindly treated. The future of the whites entirely depended on this; and they saw the necessity of it so clearly that they might, without any interference on the part of the North, which could do no good, have been left to arrange with the blacks how the new system was to be worked. These were the two parties to the new labour-and-wages contract; and the Freedmen’s Bureau could have no voice in the matter.
Impolicy of the Freedmen’s Bureau.
The industrial question evidently came first, because it is on labour primarily that the existence of a nation depends. But the Bureau establishes itself in some town; and what does this mean? That theblacks need protection—of course from their old masters, for there are no other people on whom to cast this imputation. And what does the Bureau itself give out that it will do? It proposes to educate the negro. This implies that the first thing to be attended to is not labour, but something else, and that a matter which in the order of nature occupies only a secondary place. It implies too that during the time education is being carried on, labour must be suspended, for one cannot be in the school and in the field at the same time. And what is the use and value of education in the eyes of the negro? Just this—that it will fit him for the situation of a clerk, or for keeping a shop. At all events it is no preparation for field labour. In these ways it appears that the Bureau implanted, at a most critical time, false and mischievous ideas which will inflict much suffering both on blacks and whites, and which it will be very difficult to counteract. There would have been no reason why the Government should not have sent, without any flourish of trumpets, a commissioner into each State of the South, to see that the blacks were fairly treated, if the whites had anywhere shown a disposition to treat them otherwise.
As I have already intimated, I frequently heard Southern people expressing an apprehension that a war of races was imminent. Their reasons were that the disappointment felt by the blacks at the smallness of their gains from emancipation was constantly deepening, and that their posture towards the whites was becoming very unsatisfactory. It is impossible, of course, to foresee what ignorant and excitable Africans may do. Still I think a war of races amost improbable event. The blacks have sense enough to know that there would be no chance of their coming victorious out of such a conflict; for they would be outnumbered by the whites, if all the Southern States are regarded as a single unit, which they most assuredly would be for the purposes of such a war; and they would be comparatively unarmed, without resources, and without organisation. They also know that, even if they were able to exterminate all the whites in the South, they would gain nothing by this; for that then they would only be putting themselves in the position of the Indian races, to be ousted from the land whenever it suited the convenience of the North. And they are well aware that in any rising they might contemplate they could expect no help from the Northern force that was sent at the end of the war into each State of the South to coerce the whites and protect the blacks. The feelings of these men, I believe, are well known; at all events, I heard one of them in a railway car in the South give expression to his own feelings on this point, and he did it so as to include his comrades. ‘They have sent us down here,’ his words were, ‘to look after the whites and take care of the blacks. But that is not what we are going to do. We are not going to help niggers to cut white men’s throats. If they move a finger against the whites, we are not going to mind colonels or generals, but will shoot every d—d nigger in the place.’ Nor is it possible to conceive the existence of any other feeling; for in no class in the United States is the antipathy to the negro race so strong as in that from which the army is recruited. This the negro knows very well.
The Blacks must Die Out.
But though I think that no war of this kind is to be dreaded, which would make very short work of the blacks, yet one cannot but think that their eventual extermination by moral and economical causes is inevitable. They have from the dawn of history been the chief export of Africa, but have never anywhere been capable of existing in a state of freedom on the same ground as any superior race. The superior race gets possession of all the means of living, all the trades, all the professions, all the land, and the inferior race is thus pushed out of existence. If Congress were to enact, and future Congresses to maintain the enactment, that south of the Ohio and Potomac no white man was ever to do any kind of field labour, or to follow the trades of carpentering or bricklaying, of shoemaking or tailoring, then there would be means provided for the subsistence of the black race, and it might possibly be kept up even in a state of freedom; but as none of these occupations will eventually be left them, their doom is as certain as anything can be in the affairs of men. Already, if a builder introduces into his yard, or places on any work in which he is engaged, a single coloured carpenter or mason, every person in his employ will strike work unless the man of colour, however unexceptionable he may be in his conduct, and however skilful in his trade, is instantly dismissed. All the stevedores at New Orleans were a few years ago of the coloured race. Some whites having taken to the employment, began to insist on the dismissal of all coloured people; and now there is not to be seen a single coloured stevedore on the quays of New Orleans. And just so eventually it must be with field labour. TheSouth must be completely, or at the least largely, cultivated on the Northern farm-system: and then it will be seen that the whites will no more tolerate the companionship of the blacks in field labour than in anything else. A people who have not the means of living must die out, and so emancipation comes to be extinction.
Those who believe in the obliteration of the black race will speculate on the time required for such a consummation. Suppose then each generation is only able to leave behind it half its own numbers, this would bring the blacks to the vanishing point at about the end of a century, by which time the white population of the United States will probably outnumber that of the whole of Europe. The rate of decrease, however, may be much more rapid. Persons now living can recollect the time when a considerable quarter of the city of Boston was occupied by these people; but now, without emigration, they have almost entirely disappeared. This is attributed by the people of Boston to several causes. In a state of freedom they bring up very few children. The mortality also among them is very great, especially from consumption; and then there is the fact that in the second, or at latest the third generation, the mixed race becomes quite incapable of continuing itself. These facts are distressing to contemplate; but nothing is gained by refusing to look facts in the face, of whatever character they may be. It is an analogous fact that the red man has been swept away from the face of the continent that was his own, all the way from Boston to the Rocky Mountains; and the work of annihilation will soon be complete from the Atlantic to the Pacific. But this ordinance ofnature, that a civilised and a savage race cannot coexist on the same soil, is no reason why the inferior race should be treated with unfairness, unkindness, or contempt.
Fusion of Races Impossible.
As to the fusion of the two races, history assures us that nothing of the kind has ever been accomplished, and that it is physically impossible. And it is fortunate for the progress of mankind that nature has put her veto upon it; otherwise that portion of the highest, and most advanced, and most richly endowed race of the human family, which has been placed on the grandest and most favourable stage for fresh development, would be sunk and degraded by admixture with the lowest race of all. The fact that in the long centuries during which the Greeks and the Romans occupied Western Asia and Northern Africa, they were unable to produce a mixed race capable of maintaining itself, may be suggested for the consideration of those who are advocating a scheme of ‘miscegenation’ between the Anglo-Saxon and the negro.
If we form our estimate of the condition of the South from considering the condition of its means of communication, we shall find it bad indeed. While I was there, some of its main lines of railway were running only one passenger train a-day. And, notwithstanding the infrequency of the trains, I observed in all the districts I passed through that there were very few passengers, and very little traffic. What ruin and desolation may be read in this single fact, when one remembers that a few years back the value of the raw produce exported from the Southern States amounted to between fifty and sixty million pounds a-year, and was greater than anything else of thekind in the world. What a vast amount of travelling must such a vast amount of business have given rise to! for not only was fifty or sixty million pounds’ worth of cotton, rice, sugar, turpentine, and tobacco to be sent out of the country, but there was also an equal value in food and manufactured goods to be brought in; for in the South they hardly grew or manufactured anything, except what they exported. Everything they consumed was imported. One cannot but contrast the stirring life which all this must have caused in every town, harbour, and railway, with their present deadness. The rails from Petersburg to Weldon are very much out of order, but one despairs of being able to convey in words an adequate idea of the state of disorder in which they are between the latter town and Wilmington. It was over this line, of 162 miles in length, that, during the war, the blockade-run goods and munitions of war were forwarded to Richmond and the front. At that time there were but small means for repairing or replacing worn-out rails. And as the trade of Wilmington is now dwindled to nothing, and this road is off the main line of communication with the South, there have as yet been no inducements or funds to set it right. The jolting on it is so great that the passengers are incessantly being thrown to a height of several inches from their seat; and that at last produces in some the effect which a gale at sea would have upon them. I believe that no English railway carriage with only four, or at most six wheels, could keep on such rails; but American carriages, having never less than eight wheels, have a much firmer hold.