Last winter in the United States

by F. Barham Zincke

Who are now Schoolmasters in the South.

One of the most lamentable results of the great cataclysm that ensued on the close of the war, has been that almost a complete end has been put to the education of Southern children. Formerly many were sent to the North, but now parents have neither the inclination nor the means to continue this practice. In the South itself schools did not abound; and of those which existed before the war the greater number have followed the fate of so many other Southern things. Some effort is being made to remedy this. In one of the Southern cities I had been advised to call on a gentleman who would be able to give me information on these matters. I found him at last, after some trouble, teaching a private school of his own. He was engaged in giving a French lesson. I remember him as a remarkably handsome and well-mannered man. On my saying something which implied astonishment at finding him so employed, he replied that his profession was that of a lawyer; but that since the war he had not been allowed to practise, because he was unable to take the oaths which the North had imposed on all who had held any office in the South during the war. But he added, ‘I am not in bad company, for many of the best men in the South, beginning with General Lee, are employed in teaching.’

While I was in the South the conventions were sitting. These were assemblies elected under the new system of universal suffrage, including the blacks, for the purpose of drawing up new constitutions for their several States. Of course where the negroes were numerically in the ascendant, the majority of the convention were either negroes or negro nominees. I felt a repugnance to witness this degradation of the whites; still it would have been foolish to have let pass the opportunity for seeing what indications the blacks gave of fitness for equal political power; and, as the governor of the State I was then in offered to take me to the convention and introduce me to some of the members, I accepted the offer. We had been talking on the irrepressible subject of the negro, and I had said I thought the blacks ought to be put on exactly the same footing as the whites. He had assented to this idea, as it sounded very much like what he was there to maintain. But I am not quite sure that he altogether approved of my explanation, when I went on to say that what I meant was, ‘that the negro should be left to work or starve, just as the white man was in New York, in England, and everywhere else; that I did not at all see why the negro should be petted, and patted on the back, and have soup given to him, while he was doing nothing, and have expectations raised in his mind that something would soon be done for him, which treatment could not in the end be of any advantage at all to him, while it was very costly to the whites.’ His reply to this was the offer I just mentioned to take me to the convention and introduce me to some of the members who were among the leading partisans of the negro race in the State.

I was present for two hours in this convention; during that time no speeches were made; I was therefore unable to judge in this manner of the intelligence and animus of the black members. I did not, however, leave the convention without a short conversation with one of them. He was a man of unmixed African blood, and, seeing me conversing with the white whom he regarded as the head of his party, he left his place in the house, and came up to me and held out his hand. I extended mine in return. On taking hold of it, he accosted me with the words,

‘Sir, you then believe that the franchise is a God-given right.’

I said ‘that was not my belief.’

‘Why?’ he asked, rather astonished.

‘Because,’ I said, ‘it was given to you by Mr. Lincoln and the North.’

‘No, sir,’ he replied, ‘it is a God-given right.’

The Southern Conventions.