"THAT LITTLE BOY, SMILED THE ROSY-CHEEKED GENTLEMAN"
"Mawnin', Miss, mawnin'!" he began in loud, cheerful tones. "'Scusin' de privilege o' de interruption, I'se 'blige ax yer kin I borry Trusty fer a li'l' w'ile, 'spesh'ly fer de 'casion?"
Just what the occasion was he did not explain; but Trusty, possibly receiving suggestive glimmers of inward light on the subject, and being at this particular moment otherwise interested, began to show evidence of unexpected combativeness.
"M-m-m—I ain' gwine be 'scuse fer no 'casion," he mumbled cantankerously.
"Come, now, boy, ya-as, yer is, too!" disagreed the parent, advancing toward the subject of complication. "Yer see, Miss! Ain't I tole yer he's de hard-haidedes' chile? Fus I'se 'blige whup 'im school, 'n' nex' I cyan' git 'im 'way ter bless me! Ain't I jes tole yer!" And again, with a firm hand, Trusty was lifted and transported across the room to the open door. Miss North hastily suggested the final formalities requisite for an excuse, but her voice was quite lost among the reverberations of a more powerful organ:
"Ain't I jes tole yer so! Ya-as, yer is, too! Ain't I jes tole yer! Come 'long, now; jes come 'long, now!"
They disappeared through the doorway, and then only the final reverberations came back to them as Trusty was triumphantly exhorted on his way.
But the worst of vicissitudes, and the best of them, only wait to give place to new ones, and the old days change to new ones and the weeks and the months go on; and, as the oft-repeated act becomes a habit, so it had finally become an unvarying habit for Ezekiel to arrive at school with Trusty's hand held loosely in his own, while Trusty himself plodded unresistingly at his side.
But occasionally there comes a time, too, when the habitual thing fails to happen.
It was one morning toward the end of May. Miss North had glanced at the clock, which hovered close to nine, and then she had glanced around the room at several waiting children, and into the yard, which was filling rapidly, and wondered, half passively, why Ezekiel and Trusty had not come. In a quickly changing, drifting undercurrent of thought, she remembered their first arrival together—just how they had looked as they stood, hand in hand, before her desk. Again, she remembered Trusty as he had looked that first day, just after his arrival, first sullenly rebelling, and then vibrating, as it were, between a state of absolute indifference and one of suddenly aroused interest. Strange, how it had grown to be a regular thing for Trusty to be "interested"! She glanced around the room and out to the yard again, and wondered why they didn't come; and when one of the children came in from outside with an excited story of "ole Trusty racin' down de road, an' 'is father after 'im," she listened.
"Ole man Miles say Trusty he cyan' come school dis yere day, an' Trusty say he is, an' 'Zekiel say he is, too, an' ole man say he ain't, an' Trusty 'n' 'Zekiel say he is, an' start off down de road jes a-runnin'! An' ole man af' 'em clean all de way yere!"
A moment after this enthusiastic announcement, the school-room door burst open, and Ezekiel came lurching into the room, half carrying, half dragging Trusty, who was spattered with mud and dirt from head to foot.
"Miss No'th! He say he cyan' come!" cried Ezekiel. "He—he say—he cyan' come—no mo'!" He stumbled against her desk, and Trusty dropped limply down before him, feebly snatching at Miss North's skirts.
"He—he—say—I cyan'—come—no mo'!" he whispered in a faint, panting echo.
Ezekiel dropped heavily against the desk, his breath catching convulsively in his throat. "He—he lock 'im up so he cyan' come ter—ter school!" he choked. "But—T-Trusty he say he—he is, an' he keep on tellin' 'im he—is—an' he is! An'—an' he jes say—he cyan' come—no—mo'!" His head bumped down between his arms, and he waited, his breath still catching in his throat. "An' I—I tells 'im he—he's 'blige ter come! But—'tain'—no—use; he—he—jes lock de do'! An'—an' we jumps outen de winder, an'—an' he cotch T-Trusty 'n' lock 'im up 'gin—an'—an' he jumps outen 'gin—'cuz he keeps on tellin' 'im he—he's—'b-blige ter come ter—ter school! He—he tells 'im he's—jes—'b-blige ter come!"
With hushed faces, the children gazed first at Ezekiel and then at Miss North. With an involuntary movement of the arms, she made a movement toward him. But a small heap of a boy stirred at her feet, and she looked down. A possibility, suddenly realized, seemed to seize him, and he looked up, clinging to her in helpless terror.
"Doan't yer let 'im tek me back!" he whispered hoarsely, "so I cyan' git 'way! Doan't yer, Miss No'th! Please doan't yer! 'Cuz—ain't I 'blige—ain't I 'blige—s-seem like—some'ow"—Miss North bent down to hear it—"s-seem like—some'ow—t-ter-day—I'se jes—'blige ter be yere!"
She heard the faint, choked whisper, and she saw the trembling little figure. She saw the other little figure, and then again the faint, choked whisper came sounding up to her ears. But dimly, dimly—just for the moment—she seemed to hear something else—to see another little boy, whipped to school by a coarse, brutish man, yet all the while helplessly struggling against it. That other little boy—again the small hands caught at her skirts.
"Doan't yer let 'im! Will yer, Miss No'th?"
She lifted him from the floor.
"No—I won't let him," and she put him gently into his seat.
Still, with hushed faces, the children gazed wonderingly.... She held out her arms.
"Come, Ezekiel!" Was Miss North going to cry?
"Sit down—right here, Ezekiel; you are very—tired!"
He still hung over the desk, and she went up to him between the seats.
"Eze-kiel! Come! Come—my dear little boy!"
But there was the sound of an opening door, and she turned.
In the doorway stood a large and ancient-looking colored man, and for a moment he only stood there, breathing laboriously and murmuring in strange, half-audible tones. Then, with sudden unexpected perception, he took in the scene before him. Half mortified, half conciliatory, he turned to Miss North.
"Jes all completely wrop in dey edjercation!" he explained ingratiatingly, with resigned indulgence. His eyes rested on Trusty.
"Cert'nly did use ter be de boss o' dat boy! Cert'nly did!" He looked at Ezekiel and chuckled indulgently. "But look like times is change! Cert'nly is change! Ya-as, suh, I jes natchelly pass de case over ter you!"
He turned around and went out again—and Ezekiel looked up at Miss North through his tears.
FIRST DAYS OF THE RECONSTRUCTION
BY
CARL SCHURZ
ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS
My travels in the interior of the South in the summer and fall of 1865 took me over the track of Sherman's march, which, in South Carolina at least, looked for many miles like a broad black streak of ruin and desolation—fences gone, lonesome smoke-stacks, surrounded by dark heaps of ashes and cinders, marking the spots where human habitations had stood, the fields along the road wildly overgrown by weeds, with here and there a sickly-looking patch of cotton or corn cultivated by negro squatters. In the city of Columbia, the political capital of the State, I found a thin fringe of houses encircling a confused mass of charred ruins of dwellings and business buildings which had been destroyed by a sweeping conflagration.
No part of the South I then visited had, indeed, suffered as much from the ravages of the war as South Carolina—the State which was looked upon by the Northern soldier as the principal instigator of the whole mischief and therefore deserving of special punishment. But even those regions which had been touched but little or not at all by military operations were laboring under dire distress. The Confederate money in the hands of the Southern people, paper money signed by the Confederate government without any security behind it, had by the collapse of the Confederacy become entirely worthless. Only a few individuals of more or less wealth had been fortunate enough to save, and to keep throughout the war, small hoards of gold and silver, which in the aggregate amounted to little. Immediately after the close of the war the people may be said to have been substantially without a "circulating medium" to serve in the transaction of ordinary business. United States money came in to fill the vacuum, but it could not be had for nothing; it could be obtained only by selling something for it, in the shape of goods or of labor. The Southern people, having during four years of war devoted their productive activity, aside from the satisfaction of their current home wants, almost entirely to the sustenance of their army and of the machinery of their government, and having suffered great losses by the destruction of property, had, of course, very little to sell. In fact, they were dreadfully impoverished and needed all their laboring capacity to provide for the wants of the next day; and as agriculture was their main resource, upon which everything else depended, the next day was to them of supreme importance.
The First Crop Without Slaves
But now the men come home from the war found their whole agricultural labor system turned upside down. Slave labor had been their absolute reliance. They had been accustomed to it, they had believed in it, they had religiously regarded it as a necessity in the order of the universe. During the war a large majority of the negroes had stayed upon the plantations and attended to the crops in the wonted way in those regions which were not touched by the Union armies. They had heard of "Mas'r Lincoln's" Emancipation Proclamation in a more or less vague way, but did not know exactly what it meant, and preferred to remain quietly at work and wait for further developments. But when the war was over, general emancipation became a well-understood reality. The negro knew that he was a free man, and the Southern white man found himself face to face with the problem of dealing with the negro as a free laborer. To most of the Southern whites this problem was utterly bewildering. Many of them, honest and well-meaning people, admitted to me, with a sort of helpless stupefaction, that their imagination was wholly incapable of grasping the fact that their former slaves were now free. And yet they had to deal with this perplexing fact, and practically to accommodate themselves to it, at once and without delay, if they were to have any crops that year.
Many of them would frankly recognize this necessity and begin in good faith to consider how they might meet it. But then they stumbled forthwith over a set of old prejudices which in their minds had acquired the stubborn force of convictions. They were sure the negro would not work without physical compulsion; they were sure the negro did not, and never would, understand the nature of a contract; and so on. Yes, they "accepted the situation." Yes, they recognized that the negro was henceforth to be a free man. But could not some method of force be discovered and introduced to compel the negro to work? It goes without saying that persons of such a way of thinking labored under a heavy handicap in going at a difficult task with a settled conviction that it was really "useless to try." But even if they did try, and found that the negro might, after all, be induced to work without physical compulsion, they were apt to be seriously troubled by things which would not at all trouble an employer accustomed to free labor. I once had an argument with a Georgia planter who vociferously insisted that one of his negro laborers who had objected to a whipping had thereby furnished the most conclusive proof of his unfitness for freedom. And such statements were constantly reinforced by further assertion that they, the Southern whites, understood the negro and knew how to treat him, and that we of the North did not and never would.
This might have been true in one sense, but not true in another. The Southerner knew better than the Northerner how to treat the negro as a slave, but it did not follow that he knew best how to treat the negro as a freeman; and just there was the rub. It was perhaps too much to expect of the Southern slaveholders, or of Southern society generally, that a clear judgment of the new order of things should have come to them at once. The total overturning of the whole labor system of a country, accomplished suddenly, without preparation or general transition, is a tremendous revolution, a terrible wrench, well apt to confuse men's minds. It should not have surprised any fair-minded person that many Southern people for a time clung to the accustomed idea that the landowner must also own the black man tilling his land, and that any assertion of freedom of action on the part of that black man was insubordination equivalent to criminal revolt, and any dissent by the black man from the employer's opinion or taste intolerable insolence. Nor should it be forgotten that the urgent necessity of negro labor for that summer's crop could hardly fail to sharpen the nervous tension then disquieting Southern society.
Restless Foot-loose Negroes
It is equally natural that the negro population of the South should at that time have been unusually restless. I have already mentioned the fact that during the Civil War the bulk of the slave population remained quietly at work on the plantations, except in districts touched by the operations of the armies. Had negro slaves not done so, the Rebellion would not have survived its first year. They presented the remarkable spectacle of an enslaved race doing slaves' work to sustain a government and an army fighting for the perpetuation of its enslavement. Some colored people did, indeed, escape from the plantations and run into the Union lines where our troops were within reach, and some of their young men enlisted in the Union army as soldiers. But there was nowhere any commotion among them that had in the slightest degree the character of an uprising in force of slaves against their masters. Nor was there, when, after the downfall of the Confederacy, general emancipation had become an established fact, a single instance of an act of vengeance committed by a negro upon a white man for inhumanity suffered by him or his while in the condition of bondage. No race or class of men ever passed from slavery to freedom with a record equally pure of revenge. But many of them, especially in the neighborhood of towns or of Federal encampments, very naturally yielded to the temptation of testing and enjoying their freedom by walking away from the plantations to have a frolic. Many others left their work because their employers ill-treated them or in other ways incurred their distrust. Thus it happened that in various parts of the South the highroads and byways were alive with foot-loose colored people.
I did not find, so far as I was informed by personal observation or report, that their conduct could, on the whole, be called lawless. There was some stealing of pigs and chickens and other petty pilfering, but rather less than might have been expected. More serious depredations rarely, if ever, occurred. The vagrants were throughout very good-natured. They had their carousals with singing and dancing, and their camp-meetings with their peculiar religious programs. But, while these things might in themselves have been harmless enough under different circumstances, they produced deplorable effects in the situation then existing. Those negroes stayed away from the plantations just when their labor was most needed to secure the crops of the season, and those crops were more than ordinarily needed to save the population from continued want and misery. Violent efforts were made by white men to drive the straggling negroes back to the plantations by force, and reports of bloody outrages inflicted upon colored people came from all quarters. I had occasion to examine personally into several of those cases, and I saw in odious hospitals negroes, women as well as men, whose ears had been cut off, or whose bodies were slashed with knives, or bruised with whips or bludgeons, or punctured with shot-wounds. Dead negroes were found in considerable numbers in the country roads or on the fields, shot to death, or strung on the limbs of trees. In many districts the colored people were in a panic of fright, and the whites in a state of almost insane irritation against them. These conditions in their worst form were only local, but they were liable to spread, for there was plenty of inflammable spirit of the same kind all over the South. It looked sometimes as if wholesale massacres were prevented only by the presence of the Federal garrisons which were dispersed all over the country.
