“Now I want the old system played out. But,” continued G——, “if the Freedmen’s Bureau is withdrawn, things will work back again into their old grooves. The nigger is going to be made a serf, sure as you live. It won’t need any law for that. Planters will have an understanding among themselves: ‘You won’t hire my niggers, and I won’t hire yours;’ then what’s left for them? They’re attached to the soil, and we’re as much their masters as ever. I’ll stake my life, this is the way it will work. The country will be no better off than it ever was. To make a farming and manufacturing country, like you have at the North, we must put the nigger out of the way. For this reason, I hope the cotton crop this year will be a failure. And I not only hope, but I know it will. There a’n’t labor enough in the country; the planters are going to bid against each other, and make contracts they won’t be able to keep, and that’s going to put the Old Harry into the freedmen.”
I remarked that, as long as the demand for labor exceeded the supply, planters would continue to bid against each other, and that the plan he had suggested, by which the freedman was to be made a serf without the aid of legislation, would thus be defeated.
“Let the Bureau be taken away,” he replied, “and planters will come into the arrangement. That is, all honorable ones will; and if a man hasn’t honor enough to come in, he’ll be scared in. If he hires my niggers, or yours, he’ll be mobbed.”
Mr. H——, of Lowndes County, often joined in our conversation. “I don’t believe my friend G—— here believes half he says. I am sure the South is going to make this year a million bales,—probably much more. One thing planters have got to learn: the old system is gone up, and we must begin new. It won’t do to employ the old overseers; they can’t learn to treat the freedmen like human beings. I told my overseer the old style wouldn’t do,—the niggers wouldn’t stand it,—and he promised better fashions; but it wasn’t two days before he fell from grace, and went to whipping again. That just raised the Old Scratch with them; and I don’t blame ’em.”
H—— went on to say that it was necessary now to treat the negroes like men. “We must deal justly with them;” he had a great deal to say about justice. “We must reason with them,—for they are reasonable beings;” and he repeated some of the excellent homilies with which he had enlightened their consciences and understandings.
“’Formerly,’ I said to them, ‘you were my slaves; you worked for me, and I provided for you. You had no thought of the morrow, for I thought of that for you. If you were sick, I had the doctor come to you. When you needed clothes, clothes were forthcoming; and you never went hungry for lack of meal and pork. You had little more responsibility than my mules.
“’But now all that is changed. Being free men, you assume the responsibilities of free men. You sell me your labor, I pay you money, and with that money you provide for yourselves. You must look out for your own clothes and food, and the wants of your children. If I advance these things for you, I shall charge them to you, for I cannot give them like I once did, now I pay you wages. Once if you were ugly or lazy, I had you whipped, and that was the end of it. Now if you are ugly and lazy, your wages will be paid to others, and you will be turned off, to go about the country with bundles on your backs, like the miserable low-down niggers you see that nobody will hire. But if you are well-behaved and industrious, you will be prosperous and respected and happy.”
“They all understood this talk,” added H——, “and liked it, and went to work like men on the strength of it. If every planter would begin that way with his freedmen, there’d be no trouble. There’s everything in knowing how to manage them.”
“If anybody knows how to manage them, you do,” said G——. Then turning to me: “H—— is the shrewdest manager in this country. There’s a good story about his managing a nigger and a horse;—shall I tell it, H——?”
“Go ahead,” said H——, laughing.