"If I were to reside here, you of course would treat me courteously so long as I was a gentleman in my deportment?"
"Certainly; but you are an individual."
"But if two individuals can live peacefully, why not ten,—or a hundred,—a thousand,—all?"
She hesitated a moment; and then, with flashing eyes and flushed countenance, which added charms to her beauty, said, "Well, it is hard—and you will not think any worse of me for saying it—to have your friends killed, your servants all taken away, your lands confiscated; and then know that you have failed,—that you have been whipped. I wish that we had the power to whip you; but we haven't, and must make the best of it. What we are to do I don't know. We have been able to have everything that money could buy, and now we haven't a dollar. I don't care anything about keeping the negroes in slavery; but there is one feeling which we Southerners have that you cannot enter into. My old mamma who nursed me is just like a mother to me; but there is one thing that I never will submit to,—that the negro is our equal. He belongs to an inferior race."
She laid down the argument in the palm of her hand with a great deal of emphasis.
"Your energy, boldness, and candor are admirable. If under defeat and disaster you sat down supinely and folded your hands, there would be little hope of your rising again; but your determination to make the best of it shows that you will adapt yourself readily to the new order of things. There never will be complete equality in society. Political and social equality are separate and distinct. Rowdies and ragamuffins have natural rights: they may have a right to vote, they may be citizens; but that does not necessarily entitle them to free entrance into our homes."
The idea was evidently new to the young lady,—and not only to her, but to all in the room. To them the abolition of slavery was the breaking down of all social distinctions. So long as the negro was compelled to enter the parlor as a servant, they could endure his presence; but freedom implied the possibility, they imagined, of his entrance as an equal, entitled to a place at their firesides and a seat at their tables. The thought was intolerable.
The poor whites of the South are far below the colored people in ability and force of character. They are a class from which there is little to hope. Nothing rouses their ambition. Like the Indians, they are content with food for to-day; to-morrow will take care of itself. In the cities they swarm along the sides of buildings on sunny days, and at night crawl into their miserable cabins with little more aspiration than dogs that seek their kennels. Undoubtedly there is far less suffering among the poor of the Southern cities than among the poor of New York, where life is ever a struggle with want. The South has a milder climate, nature requires less labor for production, and the commercial centres are not overcrowded. The poor whites of the South maintain no battle with starvation, but surrender resignedly to poverty. They can exist without much labor, and are too indolent to strive to rise to a higher level of existence. The war has taken their best blood. Only shreds and dregs remain.
"What can be done for the poor whites?"
It is a momentous question for the consideration of philanthropists and statesmen.