Meanwhile the Christmas holidays were effecting a change in the prospects of free labor for the coming year. I never witnessed in so short a time so complete a revolution in public feeling. One day it seemed that everybody was in despair, complaining that the niggers wouldn’t work; the next, everybody was rushing to employ them. And the freedmen, who, before Christmas, had refused to make contracts, vaguely hoping that lands would be given them by the government, or leased to them by their owners, now came forward to make the best terms they could. The presence of the Bureau at this time in the South was an incalculable benefit to both parties. It inspired the freedmen with confidence, and persuaded them, with the promise of its protection, to hire out once more to the Southern planters. The trouble was, that there was not labor enough in the State to supply the demand. Many negroes had enlisted in the war; others had wandered back to the slave-breeding States from which they had been sold; others had become small proprietors; and others had died, in consequence of the great and sudden change in their circumstances which the war had brought about.
CHAPTER LII.
A RECONSTRUCTED STATE.
It seemed impossible for the people of Mississippi—and the same may be said of the Southern people generally—to understand the first principle of the free-labor system. Their notions of it were derived from what they had seen of the shiftless poor whites about them, demoralized by an institution that rendered labor disreputable. They could not conceive of a man devoting himself voluntarily to hard manual toil, such as they had never seen performed except under the lash. Some compulsory system seemed to them indispensable. Hence the new black codes passed by the reconstructed legislatures of several States.
Mississippi, like South Carolina, on returning to the fold of the Union, from which those innocent lambs had strayed, made haste to pass apprentice laws, vagrant laws, and laws relating to contracts and labor, designed to bring back the freedmen under the planters’ control. “An Act to regulate the Relation of Master and Apprentice,” passed in November, 1865, provides that “all freedmen, free negroes, and mulattoes, under the age of eighteen, who are orphans,” or are not maintained by their parents, shall be apprenticed “to some competent and suitable person,”—the former owner to “have the preference;” that “the said apprentices shall be bound by indenture, in the case of males until they are twenty-one years old, and in case of females until they are eighteen years old”; that said master or mistress shall have power to inflict “moderate corporal chastisement”; that in case the apprentice leaves them without their consent, he may be committed to jail, and “punished as provided for the punishment of hired freedmen, as may be from time to time provided for by law,”—the meaning of which is clear, although the grammatical construction is muddy; and that any person who shall employ, feed, or clothe an apprentice who has deserted his master, “shall be deemed guilty of a high misdemeanor,” and so forth.
It will be seen that, by this act, (approved November 22d, 1865,) not merely children without means of support may be thus bound out under a modified system of slavery, but that young girls, and lads of from fourteen to eighteen, capable not only of supporting themselves, but of earning perhaps the wages of a man or woman, may be taken from the employment of their choice and compelled to serve without wages the master or mistress assigned them by the court.
“An Act to amend the Vagrant Laws of the State” provides that “all freedmen over the age of eighteen years, found on the second Monday in January, 1866, or thereafter, with no lawful employment or business,” (as if no man was ever honestly without employment,) “or found unlawfully assembling themselves together either in the day or night time, shall be deemed vagrants, and on conviction thereof shall be fined in the sum of not exceeding fifty dollars, and imprisoned at the discretion of the court not exceeding ten days”; provided, however, that in case any freedman “shall fail for five days after the imposition of said fine to pay the same, that it shall be, and is hereby, made the duty of the sheriff of the proper county to hire out said freedman to any person who will for the shortest period of service pay said fine or forfeiture and all costs.”
A bill “To confer Civil Rights on Freedmen, and for other Purposes,” enacts “That all freedmen, free negroes, and mulattoes may sue and be sued, implead and be impleaded in all the courts of law and equity of this State, and may acquire personal property and choses in action, by descent or purchase, and may dispose of the same, in the same manner, and to the same extent that white persons may: Provided that the provisions of this section shall not be so construed as to allow any freedman, free negro, or mulatto to rent or lease any lands or tenements, except in incorporated towns and cities.”
Not to speak of the gross injustice of this last provision, what shall be said of the wisdom of that legislation which prohibits an entire laboring class from acquiring real estate in the country, where their presence and energies are indispensable, and holds out an inducement for them to flock to the towns, which are crowded with them already, but where alone they can hope to become freeholders?
Another section of this bill enacts that freedmen shall be competent witnesses in all cases where freedmen are parties to the suit, or where a crime is alleged to have been committed by a white person upon the person or property of a freedman. But it does not give them the power to testify in cases in which only white persons are concerned. All the negro testimony bills which I have seen, passed by the legislatures of the reconstructed States under gentle pressure from Washington, are marked by this singular inconsistency. If the negro is a competent witness in cases in which his own or his fellow’s interests are involved, he is certainly a competent witness in cases involving only the interests of white persons. He is permitted to give evidence when there may exist a temptation for him to swear falsely, and not when there is no such temptation. By the enactment of such laws the whites are in reality legislating against themselves. Even Governor Humphreys—late Rebel general, but now the reconstructed executive of the “loyal” State of Mississippi, elected for his services in the Confederate cause—in his message to this same legislature, favoring the admission of negroes into the courts as an indispensable step towards ridding the State of the military power, and of “that black incubus, the Freedman’s Bureau,” made this suggestive statement:—
“There are few men living in the South who have not known many white criminals to go ‘unwhipt of justice’ because negro testimony was not permitted in the courts.”