Last winter in the United States

by F. Barham Zincke

As I have already intimated, I frequently heard Southern people expressing an apprehension that a war of races was imminent. Their reasons were that the disappointment felt by the blacks at the smallness of their gains from emancipation was constantly deepening, and that their posture towards the whites was becoming very unsatisfactory. It is impossible, of course, to foresee what ignorant and excitable Africans may do. Still I think a war of races a most improbable event. The blacks have sense enough to know that there would be no chance of their coming victorious out of such a conflict; for they would be outnumbered by the whites, if all the Southern States are regarded as a single unit, which they most assuredly would be for the purposes of such a war; and they would be comparatively unarmed, without resources, and without organisation. They also know that, even if they were able to exterminate all the whites in the South, they would gain nothing by this; for that then they would only be putting themselves in the position of the Indian races, to be ousted from the land whenever it suited the convenience of the North. And they are well aware that in any rising they might contemplate they could expect no help from the Northern force that was sent at the end of the war into each State of the South to coerce the whites and protect the blacks. The feelings of these men, I believe, are well known; at all events, I heard one of them in a railway car in the South give expression to his own feelings on this point, and he did it so as to include his comrades. ‘They have sent us down here,’ his words were, ‘to look after the whites and take care of the blacks. But that is not what we are going to do. We are not going to help niggers to cut white men’s throats. If they move a finger against the whites, we are not going to mind colonels or generals, but will shoot every d—d nigger in the place.’ Nor is it possible to conceive the existence of any other feeling; for in no class in the United States is the antipathy to the negro race so strong as in that from which the army is recruited. This the negro knows very well.

The Blacks must Die Out.

But though I think that no war of this kind is to be dreaded, which would make very short work of the blacks, yet one cannot but think that their eventual extermination by moral and economical causes is inevitable. They have from the dawn of history been the chief export of Africa, but have never anywhere been capable of existing in a state of freedom on the same ground as any superior race. The superior race gets possession of all the means of living, all the trades, all the professions, all the land, and the inferior race is thus pushed out of existence. If Congress were to enact, and future Congresses to maintain the enactment, that south of the Ohio and Potomac no white man was ever to do any kind of field labour, or to follow the trades of carpentering or bricklaying, of shoemaking or tailoring, then there would be means provided for the subsistence of the black race, and it might possibly be kept up even in a state of freedom; but as none of these occupations will eventually be left them, their doom is as certain as anything can be in the affairs of men. Already, if a builder introduces into his yard, or places on any work in which he is engaged, a single coloured carpenter or mason, every person in his employ will strike work unless the man of colour, however unexceptionable he may be in his conduct, and however skilful in his trade, is instantly dismissed. All the stevedores at New Orleans were a few years ago of the coloured race. Some whites having taken to the employment, began to insist on the dismissal of all coloured people; and now there is not to be seen a single coloured stevedore on the quays of New Orleans. And just so eventually it must be with field labour. The South must be completely, or at the least largely, cultivated on the Northern farm-system: and then it will be seen that the whites will no more tolerate the companionship of the blacks in field labour than in anything else. A people who have not the means of living must die out, and so emancipation comes to be extinction.

Those who believe in the obliteration of the black race will speculate on the time required for such a consummation. Suppose then each generation is only able to leave behind it half its own numbers, this would bring the blacks to the vanishing point at about the end of a century, by which time the white population of the United States will probably outnumber that of the whole of Europe. The rate of decrease, however, may be much more rapid. Persons now living can recollect the time when a considerable quarter of the city of Boston was occupied by these people; but now, without emigration, they have almost entirely disappeared. This is attributed by the people of Boston to several causes. In a state of freedom they bring up very few children. The mortality also among them is very great, especially from consumption; and then there is the fact that in the second, or at latest the third generation, the mixed race becomes quite incapable of continuing itself. These facts are distressing to contemplate; but nothing is gained by refusing to look facts in the face, of whatever character they may be. It is an analogous fact that the red man has been swept away from the face of the continent that was his own, all the way from Boston to the Rocky Mountains; and the work of annihilation will soon be complete from the Atlantic to the Pacific. But this ordinance of nature, that a civilised and a savage race cannot coexist on the same soil, is no reason why the inferior race should be treated with unfairness, unkindness, or contempt.

Fusion of Races Impossible.

As to the fusion of the two races, history assures us that nothing of the kind has ever been accomplished, and that it is physically impossible. And it is fortunate for the progress of mankind that nature has put her veto upon it; otherwise that portion of the highest, and most advanced, and most richly endowed race of the human family, which has been placed on the grandest and most favourable stage for fresh development, would be sunk and degraded by admixture with the lowest race of all. The fact that in the long centuries during which the Greeks and the Romans occupied Western Asia and Northern Africa, they were unable to produce a mixed race capable of maintaining itself, may be suggested for the consideration of those who are advocating a scheme of ‘miscegenation’ between the Anglo-Saxon and the negro.

If we form our estimate of the condition of the South from considering the condition of its means of communication, we shall find it bad indeed. While I was there, some of its main lines of railway were running only one passenger train a-day. And, notwithstanding the infrequency of the trains, I observed in all the districts I passed through that there were very few passengers, and very little traffic. What ruin and desolation may be read in this single fact, when one remembers that a few years back the value of the raw produce exported from the Southern States amounted to between fifty and sixty million pounds a-year, and was greater than anything else of the kind in the world. What a vast amount of travelling must such a vast amount of business have given rise to! for not only was fifty or sixty million pounds’ worth of cotton, rice, sugar, turpentine, and tobacco to be sent out of the country, but there was also an equal value in food and manufactured goods to be brought in; for in the South they hardly grew or manufactured anything, except what they exported. Everything they consumed was imported. One cannot but contrast the stirring life which all this must have caused in every town, harbour, and railway, with their present deadness. The rails from Petersburg to Weldon are very much out of order, but one despairs of being able to convey in words an adequate idea of the state of disorder in which they are between the latter town and Wilmington. It was over this line, of 162 miles in length, that, during the war, the blockade-run goods and munitions of war were forwarded to Richmond and the front. At that time there were but small means for repairing or replacing worn-out rails. And as the trade of Wilmington is now dwindled to nothing, and this road is off the main line of communication with the South, there have as yet been no inducements or funds to set it right. The jolting on it is so great that the passengers are incessantly being thrown to a height of several inches from their seat; and that at last produces in some the effect which a gale at sea would have upon them. I believe that no English railway carriage with only four, or at most six wheels, could keep on such rails; but American carriages, having never less than eight wheels, have a much firmer hold.

CHAPTER VIII.

FIRST SIGHT OF A COTTON FIELD—SPANISH MOSS—A NIGHT ON THE RAILS—MANY KINDS OF SAMENESS IN AMERICA—MAIZE—ORDER OF SUCCESSION IN THE FOREST—ITS EXTENT—EVERGREENS IN THE SOUTHERN FOREST—POOR LAND IN THE SOUTH MAY BE MORE PROFITABLE THAN RICH LAND IN THE WEST—DEADNESS OF CHARLESTON—ITS HOTELS—A CHARLESTON SAM-WELLER—THE NAPLES OF THE UNITED STATES—FEW ENGLISH TRAVELLERS—SUFFERINGS OF SOUTHERN FAMILIES—WANT OF SCHOOLS—HOW THE DEFICIENCY IS BEING SUPPLIED—BLACKS SHOULD BE PUT ON SAME FOOTING AS WHITES—DIALOGUE WITH BLACK MEMBER OF CONVENTION—ANOTHER CONVENTION—ABLE BLACK MEMBER—SOUTH CAROLINA ORPHAN ASYLUM.

First Sight of a Cotton Field.