Last winter in the United States

by F. Barham Zincke

The Negro Franchise.

Of course no man who knows anything of the capacity and of the history of the black race, even if he be of the Republican party, abstractedly thinks that they are qualified for taking part in the government of the country, and of legislating for and governing many of the Southern States.

Will it then be conferred upon them? It may be taken for granted that it will. Many talk of a secret compact—an underground railway, as it is called on the other side—between the President and the Southern leaders, to defeat by their joint efforts the Congressional plan, he being rewarded by the support of the South, when, as Democratic States, it returns to Congress. If such a compact has any existence, it is very unlikely to have any results. As the blacks have been admitted to the conventions throughout the South, for forming the new constitutions under which they are to exercise the franchise, and as the present Congress is determined that they shall have it, one does not see what is to prevent its extension to them. Whether the possession of the boon will be continued to them is another point. But be that as it may, we must, I think, regard the immediate possession of the franchise by the blacks as a certain event, and consider what are likely to be its consequences.

Its first and most obvious effect will be that which it was intended to produce—the weakening, and perhaps the exclusion from power for some time, of the Democratic party. Will this be an evil or an advantage to the Union? As far as I am able to judge, an unqualified advantage. The Democratic candidate of to-day for the Presidency, Mr. Pendleton of Ohio, and so of course the Democratic party itself are in favour of a partial, but very considerable, repudiation of the debt. This would be so disastrous a policy, that no one who wishes well to the Union can wish well to the Democrats. But this plank in their platform may be reshaped or entirely removed. Their permanent distinguishing principle is resistance to the policy of strengthening the central Government at the expense of the liberties and privileges of the separate States, whereas the reverse of this is the distinguishing principle of the great Republican party. It is evident that the Republican policy is that which is best adapted for commanding and calling out for immediate use the resources of the nation, and so during their great war it was decidedly in the ascendent. And since the war, the tendency of legislation and of administration has been in that direction: and this tendency will probably become stronger, at all events it will be more needed, as the United States increase in area and population.

Who are necessarily Hostile to England.

Englishmen also may be reminded that almost all the abuse and insults Americans have heaped upon us have been the manufacture of Democratic brains, and, till Fenianism arose, came chiefly from Southern men. We cannot wish success to that party from which we have never received fair and courteous—I would even say, rational—treatment, and which now encloses in its bosom all our deadliest enemies in the United States. If formerly we regarded the accusations they brought against us, and the motives they imputed to us, as the hallucinations of disordered minds, we must now expect still livelier sallies, in order that they may not fall below the mark of Fenian animosity. In any difficulty which may arise between this country and the United States, the Democratic leaders are precluded, for the sake of the Irish vote, from recognising right or reason; and they must go on in this groove. The Republicans are under no such demoralising necessity. Of course it would be unwise in a traveller or a diplomatist to show decided preferences for any particular party; but it is well to know where you are likely to find friends. The manufacturing and commercial element of the Republican party is alone disposed by circumstances to feel ill-will towards us. But all this will die out as soon as the good sense of the American people has made the discovery of the degree to which they are crippled and impoverished by the pestilent heresy of protection.

But to go back to the subject of the black vote. It does not appear to me that this will always be given on the Republican side. The African will be too ignorant to judge for himself; and though he will never want for Northern advisers, he will have others nearer home, and in some cases will, I think, be influenced by those who employ him; and not unfrequently he may even wish, as the negro is the most imitative of all the races of mankind, to vote, not as his sable brethren, but as his old master votes. The whites will act as one man; the negroes will never be able to do so; and in States where the colours are pretty evenly balanced, a few deserters would incline the scale in favour of the old Southern party.

I mentioned that while in the office of the Freedmen’s Bureau at Washington, before I entered the South, it struck me that its establishment could not be justified on grounds of wisdom. What I saw in the South confirmed this supposition. Mischief, I thought, had been done by it. The whites might safely, and ought in good policy to, have been left to settle the labour question with their old slaves. They quite understood that it would be ruin to themselves if they failed to satisfy them, and that they could only do this by making them feel that they were fairly and kindly treated. The future of the whites entirely depended on this; and they saw the necessity of it so clearly that they might, without any interference on the part of the North, which could do no good, have been left to arrange with the blacks how the new system was to be worked. These were the two parties to the new labour-and-wages contract; and the Freedmen’s Bureau could have no voice in the matter.

Impolicy of the Freedmen’s Bureau.

The industrial question evidently came first, because it is on labour primarily that the existence of a nation depends. But the Bureau establishes itself in some town; and what does this mean? That the blacks need protection—of course from their old masters, for there are no other people on whom to cast this imputation. And what does the Bureau itself give out that it will do? It proposes to educate the negro. This implies that the first thing to be attended to is not labour, but something else, and that a matter which in the order of nature occupies only a secondary place. It implies too that during the time education is being carried on, labour must be suspended, for one cannot be in the school and in the field at the same time. And what is the use and value of education in the eyes of the negro? Just this—that it will fit him for the situation of a clerk, or for keeping a shop. At all events it is no preparation for field labour. In these ways it appears that the Bureau implanted, at a most critical time, false and mischievous ideas which will inflict much suffering both on blacks and whites, and which it will be very difficult to counteract. There would have been no reason why the Government should not have sent, without any flourish of trumpets, a commissioner into each State of the South, to see that the blacks were fairly treated, if the whites had anywhere shown a disposition to treat them otherwise.