This haughty planter-race, having utterly failed in its last great pretension in bitterness of spirit still cherished its disdain for those it could not conquer, into which disdain the education of two hundred and fifty years of irresponsible ownership of laborers has concentrated the egotism, the selfishness and the cruelty thus engendered.
The intelligence of this class was never commensurate with its wealth. Schools were necessarily few in the South during the existence of slavery, and family feuds and favoritisms notoriously controlled the distribution of the honors of those that did exist, and social and political distinction depended upon culture in no degree. Hence there was little to spur the laggard, or to encourage and inspire genius, and the actual ignorance, or at best, the superficial scholarship of “the first families” was astounding. Since the war, poverty and aversion to the North have materially lessened southern patronage of northern schools, and under the “carpet-bag” administration the higher schools of the State, and the common schools in country districts in which the aggregate number of pupils did not warrant the opening of more than one school, were accessible to colored students; a recognition of equality which the whites would not tolerate; and so they consigned themselves to ignorance.
The class formerly known as “sand-hillers,” “crackers,” or “poor white trash,” were lazy, filthy and ignorant, and frequently degraded below the level of the slaves. These, with the class next above them in the social scale—the “working people,” who owned few or no slaves, and labored with their own hands on small farms, or as mechanics, experienced a social promotion nearly equal to that of the slaves; as emancipation, the ravages of war, and a more general distribution of land, through confiscation and sales for delinquent taxes, broke up the land monopoly and political retainership which had so long existed to the opulence of the planters, and the semi-mendicity of the lower classes.
The confederate service had also given acceptable occupation and wages, and even some inferior military titles to men who had formerly begged, or stolen, or starved, rather than earn their bread by honest labor; and such military glory, won in defence of “The Lost Cause,” could not be utterly ignored in the contest for recognition of some sort.
The class called “respectable people,” consisting of artists, merchants and professional men, teachers, &c., whose title to recognition rested upon wealth and culture, probably received the change with the most equilibrity, while the freedmen had everything to gain, and nothing to lose.
The most ignorant of them well knew that it was to “de Yankees,” “de Lincum sogers, de United States,” or “Mar’s Lincom,” that they were indebted for emancipation. The raving of their masters against northern abolitionists was, to them, quite sufficient evidence that somehow the war had its origin, near or remote, in northern antagonism to slavery.
History will never fail to record the good behavior of the freedmen of the southern states of America, the causes of which were manifold.
The experiences and legends of the slaveship, and centuries of repetition of similar evidence, had taught the African that there were other powers, stronger than brute force, which he could not command.
Again, he was not self-liberated. The brother of his master had been his deliverer (whatever may have been his motive), and gratitude, the moral attraction of gravitation, is the strongest moral power in the universe; which the All-Father well knew when He sent His Son to suffer.