“Then I said, ‘If you won’t work for him, will you work for me?’ I never saw faces light up so in my life. ‘Yes, master! Yes, master!’ ‘But,’ said I, ‘ten dollars a month is all I can afford to pay.’ That made no difference, they said; they’d rather work for ten dollars, and be sure of their pay, than for twenty-five dollars, and be cheated out of it. I gave them a day to think of it: then they all came forward and made contracts, with one exception. They went right to work with a will: I won’t ask men to do any better than they have been doing. They are having their Christmas frolic now, and it’s as merry a Christmas as ever you saw!”
I met with many planters in the situation of Honest M——. Having made arrangements to run their plantations, and got in the necessary supplies, they had discovered that “the niggers wouldn’t contract.” They were then trying to lease their lands to Northern capitalists.
I have seldom met a more anxious, panic-stricken set of men than the planters I saw on the steamer going down to Vicksburg to hire freedmen. Observing the success of Northern men, they had suddenly awakened to the great fact that, although slavery was lost, all was not lost, and that there was still a chance to make something out of the nigger. They could not hire their own freedmen, and were going to see what could be effected with freedmen to whom they were not known. Each seemed to fear lest his neighbor should get the start of him.
“They’re just crazy about the niggers,” said one, a Mississippian, who was about the craziest of the set,—“crazy to get hold of ’em.”
“But,” I remarked, “they say the freedmen won’t work.”
“Well, they won’t,” said my Mississippi friend, unflinchingly.
“Then what do you want of them?”
“Well, I found everybody else was going in for hiring ’em, and if anything was to be made, I didn’t want to be left out in the cold.” Adding with great candor and earnestness: “If everybody else would have refused to hire ’em anyhow, that would have just suited me: I’d have been willing to let my plantation go to the devil for one year, just to see the free niggers starve.”
I saw this gentleman afterwards in Vicksburg, and was not deeply grieved to learn that he had failed to engage a single freedman. “They are hiring to Northern men,” said he, bitterly; “but they won’t hire to Southern men anyhow, if they can help it.”
“How do you account for this singular fact?” I asked.