The act “To confer Civil Rights on the Freedmen,” proceeds to make the following provisions, which look much more like wrongs: “That every freedman, free negro, and mulatto shall, on the second Monday of January, one thousand eight hundred and sixty-six, and annually thereafter, have a lawful home or employment,” (of course on any terms that may be offered him,) “and shall have written evidence thereof, as follows, to wit: If living in any incorporated city, town, or village, a license from the Mayor thereof; and if living outside of any incorporated city, town, or village, from the member of the Board of Police of his beat, authorizing him or her to do irregular and job work, or a written contract, as provided in section sixth of this act; which licenses may be revoked for cause, at any time, by the authority granting the same.”
Section sixth enacts: “That all contracts for labor made with freedmen, free negroes, and mulattoes, for a longer period than one month, shall be in writing and in duplicate; ... and said contracts shall be taken and held as entire contracts; and if the laborer shall quit the service of the employer before expiration of his term of service, without good cause, he shall forfeit his wages for that year up to the time of quitting.” But who is to be the judge with regard to the “good cause?” The white man, of course, and not the negro.
“Section 7. Be it further enacted, That every civil officer shall, and every person may, arrest and carry back to his or her legal employer any freedman, free negro, or mulatto, who shall have quit the service of his or her employer before the expiration of his or her term of service.”
Section ninth provides that if any person “shall knowingly employ any such deserting freedman, free negro, or mulatto, or shall knowingly give or sell to any such deserting freedman, free negro, or mulatto any food, raiment, or other thing, he or she shall be guilty of a misdemeanor, and upon conviction, shall be fined not less than twenty-five dollars, and not more than two hundred dollars and the costs.”
These extracts—which I have made verbatim from an authorized copy of the recent State laws, with only such abridgments as were necessary to compress them within reasonable limits—show plainly enough what ideas prevail in the late Slave States on the subject of free labor. The design of all such enactments is simply to place both the labor and the laborer in the power of the employer, and to reorganize slavery under a new name. The fact that they are practically set aside and annulled by the military power and the Freedmen’s Bureau, does not set aside or annul the spirit which dictated them. This still animates the people of the South; and I was often plainly told that as soon as the States were fully restored to their rights, just such laws as these would certainly be put in force. I remarked to a Mississippi planter, “Do you not think it was unwise for your Legislature to pass such a code of laws?” “Yes, it was unwise, at this time,” he replied, not understanding the scope of my question. “We showed our hand too soon. We ought to have waited till the troops were withdrawn, and our representatives admitted to Congress; then we could have had everything our own way.”
Since the admission of negro testimony in the civil courts of the State, the freedmen’s courts had been discontinued,—greatly to the disadvantage of the colored race. The civil courts could hardly be induced to give the negro’s cause a hearing. There were some exceptions; and at Vicksburg I found a judge who seemed inclined to administer justice without regard to the prejudice against color. This was Judge Yerger, an original Union man,—one of the seven (against seventy-eight) who voted No, on the adoption of the ordinance of secession in the Convention of 1861; the same who, when asked by a member what title should be given to that act, replied, “Call it An Ordinance for the Abolition of Slavery and the Desolation of the South.”
Yerger was the President of the new Convention that reconstructed the State. That Convention was animated by a very different temper from that shown by the new Legislature. The Convention was composed of the best men in Mississippi, who went prepared to do what the Government at Washington had a right to expect of rebellious States returning to their allegiance; the Legislature was made up of a different class, elected after the people of the South had been encouraged in their animosity and arrogance by the discovery that treason was not to be punished, nor made particularly odious. The Convention was governed by men of large influence and liberal views; the Legislature was controlled by narrow-minded intermeddlers, mostly from the poorer districts of the State, where the inhabitants hated the negroes the more by way of revenge for having owned so few.
It was claimed by the better class that the Legislature did not represent them, and there was talk of calling another State Convention. But the Legislature, although it did not carry out the views of the more enlightened and progressive citizens, nor reflect in any way the sentiments of the great mass of true Union men in the South, namely, the blacks, represented quite faithfully the majority by which it was elected.
I have already alluded to the organizing of the State militia,—an abuse that unfortunately received the sanction of the Administration. The only possible excuse for it was the cry raised regarding anticipated negro insurrections. To guard against danger from a class whose loyalty and good behavior during the war challenged the admiration of the world, arms were put into the hands of Confederate soldiers who had returned to their homes reeking with the blood of the nation. Power was taken from the friends of the government and put into the hands of its enemies. The latter immediately set to work disarming the former. They plundered their houses, under the pretence of searching for weapons; committing robberies, murders, and other atrocities, with authentic reports of which pages might be filled. Neither were white men, known to sympathize with the Union party of the North, safe from their violence. Governor Humphreys himself, startled by the magnitude of the evil that had been called into existence, told Colonel Thomas that he had been obliged to disband several militia companies already organized, “on learning that they were sworn to kill negroes asserting their independence, and to drive off Northern men.”
Of what was being done by private parties outside of the militia organizations, a curious glimpse is given in the following “general order,” published in the Holmesville (Miss.) “Independent”:—