A FOUL CHANCE AND A FAIR CHANCE.
A correspondent writes us upon the subject of how the freedman is getting on, as follows:
“On my way up the Mississippi, between the States of Arkansas and Mississippi, I fell into conversation with a planter living on the right bank of the river, and, after the manner of all Yankees, asked him how the negroes were getting on. He was a short, chunky, red-faced man, and his account was gloomy in the extreme. He said that he would not undertake to tell me all the trouble he had with his ‘help,’ for, if he did, I would not believe him at all. He said that he could not advance them anything at the beginning of the season, for fear of their running away and leaving him without hands in time of harvest; that they were so lazy that all they cared for was to get bread and meat for the least possible amount of work; that, although all his hands were deacons or preachers or ‘exalters,’ they stole so that he could not raise any pigs or chickens; that the members of the church were more licentious than the ‘world’s people’; that they got angry and burned his gin-house every year, etc., etc. He was the first man that I had met, during a residence of nine years at the South, who would admit that he was sorry the slaves had been made free.
“On my way down the river, at about the same point, I had a conversation upon the same subject with a man residing on the other bank. He was a tall gentleman of fine form, with an intellectual, genial, open face. In reply to my inquiries, he said the freedmen were doing first-rate; were industrious, honest, temperate and moral; were acquiring property in stock, tools and land; and he found free labor more easily managed and more profitable than slave labor. I referred to the conversation I had with his Mississippi neighbor on my way up, and asked him why their reports were so different. With a good deal of animation and emphasis, he replied: ‘I can tell you why it is: I just give my niggers a chance, and he doesn’t. He has always brought them out in debt to him at the end of every year, and has crushed out all their enterprise and ambition, so that, as he says, the problem with them is how to get a bare living with the least possible amount of work. All the nigger wants is a fair chance.’”