tenants and laborers with supplies. We found, upon investigation of these laws, and of the witnesses in relation to their operation, that as a general rule they were urgently called for by the circumstances in which the South found itself after the war. The universal adoption of homestead and personal property exemption laws deprived poor men of credit, and the landlord class, for its own protection, procured the passage of these laws giving them a lien upon the crop made by the tenant until his rents and his supplies furnished for the subsistence of the tenant and his family had been paid and discharged; and while upon the surface these laws appeared to be hard and in favor of the landlord, they were, as was actually testified by many intelligent witnesses, quite as much or more in favor of the tenant, as it enabled him to obtain credit, to subsist himself and his family, and to make a crop without any means whatsoever but his own labor. It was alleged also that in many instances landlords, or if not landlords then merchants, would establish country stores for furnishing supplies to laborers and tenants, and the laborer, having no money to go elsewhere or take the natural advantages of competition, was forced to buy at these stores at exorbitant prices.
Your committee regret to say that they found it to be frequently the case that designing men, or bad and dishonest men, would take advantage of the ignorance or necessity of the Negroes to obtain these exorbitant prices; but at the same time your committee is not aware of a spot on earth where the cunning and unscrupulous do not take advantage of the ignorant; and cannot regard it as a sufficient cause for these black people leaving their homes and going into distant States and among strangers unless they had a proper assurance that the State to which they were going contained no dishonest men, or men who would take such advantage of them. Your committee feel bound to say, however, in justice to the planters of the South, that this abuse is not at all general nor frequent; and that as a general rule while exorbitant prices are exacted sometimes from men in the situation of the blacks, yet the excuse for it is the risk which planter and merchant run. Should a bad crop year come, should the Army worm devour the cotton, or any other calamity come upon the crop, the landlord is without his rent, the storekeeper is without his pay, and worse than all the laborer is without a means of subsistence for the next year. It is hoped and believed that when the heretofore disturbed condition of the people of the South settles down into regularity and order, the natural laws of trade and competition will assert themselves and this evil will be to a great extent remedied, whilst the diffusion of education among the colored people will enable them to keep their own accounts and hold a check upon those who would act dishonestly towards them.
On the whole, your committee express the positive opinion that the condition of the colored people of the South is not only as good as could have been reasonably expected, but is better than if large communities were transferred to a colder and more inhospitable climate, thrust into competition with a different system of labor, among strangers who are not accustomed to them, their ways, habits of thought and action, their idiosyncrasies, and their feelings. While a gradual migration, such as circumstances dictate among the white races, might benefit the individual black man and his family as it does those of the white race, we cannot but regard this wholesale attempt to transfer a people without means and without intelligence, from the homes of their nativity in this manner, as injurious to the people of the South, injurious to the people and the labor system of the State where they go, and, more than all, injurious to the last degree to the black people themselves. That there is much in their condition to be deplored in the South no one will deny; that that condition is gradually and steadily improving in every respect is equally true. That there have been clashings of the races in the South, socially and politically, is never to be denied nor to be wondered at; but when we come to consider the method in which the people were freed, as the result of a bitter and desolating civil war; and that for purposes of party politics these incompetent, ignorant, landless, homeless people, without any qualifications of citizenship, without any of the ties of property or the obligations of education, were suddenly thrown into political power, and the effort was made not only to place them upon an equality with their late masters, but to absolutely place them in front and hold them there by legislation, by military violence, and by every other means that could possibly be resorted to; when we consider these things no philosophical mind can behold their present condition, and the present comparative state of peace and amity between the two races, without wonder that their condition is as good as it is.
No man can behold this extraordinary spectacle of two people attempting to reconcile themselves in spite of the interference of outsiders, and to live in harmony, to promote each other's prosperity in spite of the bitter animosities which the sudden elevation of the one has engendered, without the liveliest hope that if left to themselves, the condition of the former subject race will still more rapidly improve, and that the best results may be reasonably and fairly expected.
Your committee is further of the opinion that all the attempts of legislation; that all the inflammatory appeals of politicians upon the stump and through the newspapers; that the wild and misdirected philanthropy of certain classes of our citizens; that these aid societies, and all other of the influences which are so industriously brought to bear to disturb the equanimity of the colored people of the South and to make them discontented with their position, are doing them a positive and almost incalculable injury, to say nothing of pecuniary losses which have thus been inflicted upon Southern communities.
Your committee is further of opinion that Congress having enacted all the legislation for the benefit of the colored people of the South which under the Constitution it can enact, and having seen that all the States of the South have done the same; that by the Constitution of the United States and the constitutions of the various States these people are placed upon a footing of perfect equality before the law, and given the chance to work out their own civilization and improvements, any further attempts at legislation or agitation of the subject will but excite in them hopes of exterior aid that will be disappointing to them, and will prevent them from working out diligently and with care their own salvation; that the sooner they are taught to depend upon themselves, the sooner they will learn to take care of themselves; the sooner they are taught to know that their true interest is promoted by cultivating the friendship of their white neighbors instead of their enmity, the sooner they will gain that friendship; and that friendship and harmony once fully attained, there is nothing to bar the way to their speedy civilization and advancement in wealth and prosperity, except such as hinder all people in that great work.
The undersigned, a minority of the committee appointed under resolution of the Senate of December 15, 1879, to investigate the causes which have led to the emigration of Negroes from the Southern to the Northern States, submit the following report: 74
In the month of December last a few hundred colored men, women, and children, discontented with their condition in North Carolina, and hoping to improve it, were emigrating to Indiana.
This movement, though utterly insignificant in comparison with the vastly greater numbers which were moving from other Southern States into Kansas, seemed to be considered of very much more importance, in certain quarters, on account of its alleged political purposes and bearing. The theory upon which the investigation was asked was that the emigration into the State of Indiana was the result of a conspiracy on the part of Northern leaders of the Republican party to colonize that State with Negroes for political purposes. The utter absurdity of this theory should have been apparent to everybody, for if the Republican party, or its leaders, proposed to import Negroes into Indiana for political purposes, why take them from North Carolina? Why import them from a State where the Republicans hope and expect to carry the election, when there were thousands upon thousands ready and anxious to come from States certainly Democratic. Why transport them by rail at heavy expense half way across the continent when they could have taken them from Kentucky without any expense, or brought them up the Mississippi River by steamers at merely nominal cost? Why send twenty-five thousand to Kansas to swell her 40,000 Republican majority, and only seven or eight hundred to Indiana? These considerations brand with falsehood and folly the charge that the exodus was a political movement induced
Report of the Committee of the Senate of the United States for the First and Second Sessions of the Forty-Sixth Congress, 1879-80, VII, pp. viii-xxv.
