And first, as to the material condition of the former slaves. Sydney Smith, revisiting Edinburgh in 1821, after ten years’ absence, was struck with the “wonderful increase of shoes and stockings, streets and houses.” The change as to the first item, in South Carolina, tells the story of social progress since emancipation. The very first of my old acquaintances whom I met in that region was the robust wife of one of my soldiers. I found her hoeing in a field, close beside our old camp-ground, I had seen that woman hoeing in the same field fifteen years before. The same sky was above her, the same soil beneath her feet; but the war was over, slavery was gone. The soil that had been her master’s was now her own by purchase; and the substantial limbs that trod it were no longer bare and visibly black, but incased in red-striped stockings of the most conspicuous design. “Think of it!” I said to a clever Massachusetts damsel in Washington, “the whole world so changed, and yet that woman still hoes.” “In hose,” quoth the lively maiden; and I preserve for posterity the condensed epigram.
Besides the striped stockings, which are really so conspicuous that the St. Augustine light-house is painted to match them, one sees a marked, though moderate progress in all the comforts of life. Formerly the colored people of the sea islands, even in their first days of freedom, slept very generally on the floor; and when our regimental hospital was first fitted up, the surgeon found with dismay that the patients had regarded the beds as merely beautiful ornaments, and had unanimously laid themselves down in the intervening spaces. Now I noticed bedstead and bedding in every cabin I visited in South Carolina and Florida. Formerly the cabins often had no tables, and families rarely ate together, each taking food as was convenient; but now they seemed to have family meals, a step toward decent living. This progress they themselves recognized. Moreover, I often saw pictures from the illustrated papers on the wall, and the children’s school-books on the shelf. I rarely met an ex-soldier who did not own his house and ground, the inclosures varying from five to two hundred acres; and I found one man on the St. John’s who had been offered $3000 for his real estate. In many cases these homesteads had been bought within a few years, showing a steady progress in self-elevation.
I do not think the world could show a finer sample of self-respecting peasant life than a colored woman, with whom I came down the St. John’s River to Jacksonville, from one of the little settlements along that magnificent stream. She was a freed slave, the wife of a former soldier, and was going to market, basket in hand, with her little boy by her side. She had the tall erect figure, clear black skin, thin features, fine teeth, and intelligent bearing that marked so many of my Florida soldiers. She was dressed very plainly, but with scrupulous cleanliness: a rather faded gingham dress, well-worn tweed sack, shoes and stockings, straw hat with plain black ribbon, and neat white collar and cuffs. She told me that she and her husband owned one hundred and sixty acres of land, bought and paid for by their own earnings, at $1.25 per acre; they had a log-house, and were going to build a frame-house; they raised for themselves all the food they needed, except meat and flour, which they bought in Jacksonville. They had a church within reach (Baptist); a school-house of forty pupils, taught by a colored teacher; her husband belonged to the Good Templars, as did all the men in their neighborhood. For miles along the St. John’s, a little back from the river, such settlements are scattered; the men cultivating their own plots of ground, or working on the steam-boats, or fishing, or lumbering. What more could be expected of any race, after fifteen years of freedom? Are the Irish voters of New York their superiors in condition, or the factory operatives of Fall River?
I met perhaps a hundred men, in different places, who had been under my command, and whose statements I could trust. Only one of these complained of poverty; and he, as I found, earned good wages, had neither wife nor child to support, and was given to whisky. There were some singular instances of prosperity among these men. I was told in Jacksonville that I should find Corporal McGill “de most populous man in Beaufort.” When I got there, I found him the proprietor of a livery stable populous with horses at any rate; he was worth $3000 or $4000, and was cordial and hospitable to the last degree. At parting, he drove me to the station with his best carriage and horses; and I regret to add that while he was refusing all compensation his young steeds ran away, and as the train whirled off I saw my “populous” corporal double-quick down the shell-road, to recapture his equipage. I found Sergeant Hodges a master carpenter at Jacksonville; Corporal Hicks was a preacher there, highly respected; and I heard of Corporal Sutton as a traveling minister farther up the river. Sergeant Shemeltella, a fine-looking half-Spaniard from St. Augustine, now patrols, with gun in hand, the woods which we once picketed at Port Royal Ferry, and supplies game to the markets of Charleston and Savannah. And without extending the list I may add that some of these men, before attaining prosperity, had to secure, by the severest experience, the necessary judgment in business affairs. It will hardly be believed that the men of my regiment alone sunk $30,000 in an impracticable building association, and in the purchase of a steamboat which was lost uninsured. One of the shrewdest among them, after taking his share of this, resolved to be prudent, put $750 in the Freedmen’s Bank, and lost that too. Their present prosperity must be judged in the light of such formidable calamities as these.
I did not hear a single charge of laziness made against the freed colored people in the States I visited. In Virginia it was admitted that they would work wherever they were paid, but that many were idle for want of employment. Rev. Dr. Pinckney, in a recent address before the Charleston Historical Society, declares that the negroes “do not refuse to work; all are planting;” and he only complains that they work unskillfully. A rice-planter in Georgia told me that he got his work done more efficiently than under the slave system. Men and women worked well for seventy-five cents a day; many worked under contract, which at first they did not understand or like. On the other hand, he admitted, the planters did not at once learn how to manage them as freedmen, but had acquired the knowledge by degrees; so that even the strikes at harvest-time, which had at first embarrassed them, were now avoided. Another Georgia planter spoke with much interest of an effort now making by the colored people in Augusta to establish a cotton factory of their own, in emulation of the white factories which have there been so successful. He said that this proposed factory was to have a capital of fifty thousand dollars in fifty dollar shares, and that twenty-eight thousand dollars of it were already raised. The white business agent of one of the existing factories was employed, he said, as the adviser of those organizing this. He spoke of it with interest as a proper outlet for the industry of the better class of colored people, who were educated rather above field labor. He also spoke with pride of the normal school for colored people at Atlanta.
The chief of police in Beaufort, South Carolina, a colored man, told me that the colored population there required but little public assistance, though two thousand of them had removed from the upper parts of the State within a year and a half, thinking they could find better wages at Beaufort. This removal struck me as being of itself a favorable indication, showing that they were now willing to migrate, whereas they were once hopelessly fixed to the soil, and therefore too much in the power of the land owners. The new industry of digging phosphates for exportation to England employs a good many in Beaufort County, and they earn by this from seventy-five cents to a dollar a day. Others are employed in loading vessels at the new settlement of Port Royal; but the work is precarious and insufficient, and I was told that if they made two dollars a week they did well. But it must be remembered that they have mostly little patches of land of their own, and can raise for themselves the corn and vegetables on which they chiefly live. I asked an old man if he could supply his family from his own piece of ground. “Oh, yes, mars’r,” he said (the younger men do not say “mars’r,” but “boss”), and then he went on, with a curious accumulation of emphasis: “I raise plenty too, much more dan I
destroy,”—meaning simply “very much more.”
The price of cotton is now very low, and the sea-island cotton has lost forever, perhaps, its place in the English market. Yet Rev. Dr. Pinckney, in the address just quoted, while lamenting the ravages of war in the sea islands, admits that nearly half as much cotton was raised in them in 1875 as in 1860, and more than half as much corn, the population being about the same, and the area cultivated less than one third. To adopt his figures, the population in 1860 was 40,053; acres under cultivation, 274,015; corn, 618,959 bushels; cotton, 19,121 bales. In 1875 the population was 43,060; acres under cultivation, 86,449; corn, 314,271 bushels; cotton, 8199 bales.
When we consider the immense waste of war, the destruction of capital, the abandonment of estates by those who yet refuse to sell them, and the partial introduction of industry other than agricultural, this seems to me a promising exhibit. And when we observe how much more equitable than formerly is now the distribution of the products between capitalist and laborer, the case is still better. Dr. Pinckney’s utmost complaint in regard to South Carolina is that the result of the war “has been injurious to the whites, and not beneficial to the blacks.” Even he, a former slaveholder, does not claim that it has injured the blacks; and this, from his point of view, is quite a concession. Twenty years hence he may admit that whatever the result of war may have been, that of peace will be beneficial to both races.
In observing a lately emancipated race, it is always harder to judge as to the condition of the women than of the men, especially where the men alone have been enfranchised. My friend the judge, in Virginia, declared that the colored men and women were there so unlike that they seemed like different races: the men had behaved “admirably,” he said; the women were almost hopelessly degraded. On the other hand, my white friends of both sexes at Beaufort took just the opposite view, and thought the women there quite superior to the men, especially in respect to whisky. Perhaps the influences of the two regions may have made the difference, as the sea islands have had the presence, ever since the beginning of the war, of self-devoted and well-educated teachers, mostly women, while such teachers have been much rarer in Virginia. They have also been rare in Florida; but then the Florida negroes are a superior class.
Certainly it was pleasant to me to hear favorable accounts of this and that particular colored woman of whom I had known something in war times. Almost the first old acquaintance named to me on the sea islands, for instance, was one Venus, whose marriage to a soldier of my regiment I chronicled in war times. “Now, cunnel,” said that soldier in confidence, “I want for get me one good lady.” And when I asked one of his friends about the success of the effort, he said triumphantly, “John’s gwine for marry Venus.” Now the record of Venus as a good lady was so very questionable in her earlier incarnations that the name was not encouraging; but I was delighted to hear of the goddess, fifteen years later, as a most virtuous wife and a very efficient teacher of sewing in Miss Botume’s school. Her other sewing-teacher, by the way, is Juno.
I went into schools, here and there; the colored people seemed to value them very much, and to count upon their own votes as a means of securing these advantages, instead of depending, as formerly, on Northern aid. The schools I visited did not seem to me so good as those kept by Northern ladies during the war, at Port Royal; but the present schools form a part of a public system, and are in that respect better, while enough of the Northern teachers still remain to exert a beneficial influence, at least on the sea islands. I was sorry to be in Charleston only on Saturday, when the Shaw Memorial School was not in session. This is a large wooden building, erected on land bought with part of a fund collected in the colored regiments for a monument to Colonel Shaw. This school has an average attendance of five hundred and twenty, with twelve teachers, white and black. The Morris Street School for colored children, in Charleston, has fourteen hundred pupils. These two schools occupy nearly half of the four columns given by the Charleston News and Courier of April 12, 1878, to the annual exhibition of public schools. The full programme of exercises is given, with the names of the pupils receiving prizes and honors; and it seems almost incredible that the children whose successes are thus proudly recorded can be the sons and daughters of freed slaves. And I hold it utterly ungenerous, in view of such facts, to declare that the white people of the South have learned nothing by experience, and are “incapable of change.”
Public officials at Beaufort told me that in that place most of the men could now sign their names,—certainly a great proof of progress since war times. I found some of my friends anxious lest school should unfit the young people for the hard work of the field; but I saw no real proof of this, nor did the parents confirm it. Miss Botume, however, said that the younger women now thought that, after marriage, they ought to be excused from field labor, if they took care of their homes and children; a proposal so directly in the line of advancing civilization that one can hardly object to it. The great solicitude of some of the teachers in that region relates to the passage of some congressional bill which shall set aside the tax sales under which much real estate is now held; but others think that there is no fear of this, even under a democratic administration.
This leads naturally to the question, What is to be the relation between the two races in those Southern States of which I speak? I remember that Corporal Simon Crier, one of the oddities of my regiment, used to declare that when the war was over, he should go to “Libery;” and, when pressed for a reason, used to say, “Dese yer secesh will neber be cibilized in my time.” Yet Simon Crier’s time is not ended, for I heard of him as peacefully dwelling near Charleston, and taking no part in that insignificant colonization movement of which we hear so much more at the North than at the South. Taking civilization in his sense,—a fair enough sense,—we shall find Virginia, South Carolina, and Florida holding an intermediate position; being probably behind North Carolina, West Virginia, and the border States, but decidedly in advance of Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi.
It is certain that there is, in the States I visited, a condition of outward peace and no conspicuous outrages; and that this has now been the case for many months. All will admit that this state of things must be a blessing, unless there lies beneath it some covert plan for crushing or reënslaving the colored race. I know that a few good men at the North honestly believe in the existence of some such plan; I can only say that I thoroughly disbelieve in it. Taking the nature of the Southern whites as these very men describe it,—impulsive and ungoverned,—it is utterly inconceivable that such a plan, if formed, should not show itself in some personal ill usage of the blacks, in the withdrawal of privileges, in legislation endangering their rights. I can assert that, carrying with me the eyes of a tolerably suspicious abolitionist, I saw none of these indications. During the war, I could hardly go anywhere within the Union lines for twenty-four hours without being annoyed by some sign of race hostility, or being obliged to interfere for the protection of some abused man or woman. During this trip, I had absolutely no occasion for any such attitude. The change certainly has not resulted from any cringing demeanor on the part of the blacks, for they show much more manhood than they once did. I am satisfied that it results from the changed feeling created towards a race of freedmen and voters. How can we ask more of the States formerly in rebellion than that they should be abreast of New England in granting rights and privileges to the colored race? Yet this is now the case in the three States I name; or at least if they fall behind at some points, they lead at some points. Let us look at a few instances.
The republican legislature of Connecticut has just refused to incorporate a colored military company; but the colored militia regiment of Charleston was reviewed by General Hampton and his staff just before my visit. One of the colored officers told me that there was absolutely no difference in the treatment accorded this regiment and that shown toward the white militia, who were reviewed the day before; and Messrs. Whipper and Jon
es, the only dissatisfied republican leaders whom I saw, admitted that there was no opposition whatever to this arming of the blacks. I may add that while I was in Virginia a bill was reported favorably in the legislature for the creation of a colored militia company, called the State Guard, under control of their own officers, and reporting directly to the adjutant-general.
I do not know a Northern city which enrolls colored citizens in its police, though this may here and there have happened. I saw colored policemen in Charleston, Beaufort, and Jacksonville, though the former city is under democratic control; and I was told by a leading colored man that the number had lately been increased in Charleston, and that one lieutenant of police was of that race. The republican legislature of Rhode Island has just refused once more to repeal the bill prohibiting intermarriages, while the legislature of South Carolina has refused to pass such a bill. I can remember when Frederick Douglas was ejected from the railway cars in Massachusetts, because of his complexion; and it is not many years since one of the most cultivated and ladylike colored teachers in the nation was ejected from a street car in Philadelphia, her birthplace, for the same reason. But I rode with colored people in first-class cars throughout Virginia and South Carolina, and in street cars in Richmond and Charleston. I am told that this last is the case also in Savannah and New Orleans, but can testify only to what I have seen. In Georgia, I was told, the colored people were not allowed in first-class cars; but they had always a decent second-class car, opening from the smoking-car, with the door usually closed between.
A Just and Lasting Peace: A Documentary History of Reconstruction Page 56