style="font-size:15px;"> 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.
CHAPTER III.
THE SOUTH
THE political forecasts and opinions which were given me upon plantations were, in a great measure, those indicated in my talk with the Norfolk “loafers.” On the history of the commencement of the rebellion there was singular unanimity. “Virginia never meant to quit the Union; we were cheated by those rascals of the South. When we did go out, we were left to do all the fighting. Why, sir, I‘ve seen a Mississippian division run away from a single Yankee regiment.”
As
