“After the breaking up of the rebellion I wrote to him, making inquiries concerning his condition. He replied, saying that he had come out of the war a poor man, and that he did not know how he was to relieve the destitution of his family. I immediately made application in his behalf to the War Department, and obtained for him a pardon, and a place under the government, in his own county, which he now fills, and which yields him a liberal income.”
CHAPTER LXXIV.
THE SEA ISLANDS.
The plantation negro of the great cotton and rice-growing States is a far more ignorant and degraded creature than the negro of Virginia and Tennessee. This difference is traceable to a variety of causes. First, the farmers of the slave-breeding States were formerly accustomed to select, from among their servants, the most stupid and vicious class, to be sold in the Southern market. To the same destination went all the more modern importations of raw savages from the coast of Africa. The negro is susceptible to the influences of civilization; and in the border States his intelligence was developed by much intercourse with the white race. His veins also received a generous infusion of the superior blood. The same may be said of house and town servants throughout the South. The slaves of large and isolated plantations, however, enjoyed but limited advantages of this sort; seeing little of civilized society beyond the overseer, whose lessons were not those of grace, and the poor whites around them, scarcely more elevated in the scale of being than themselves.
In South Carolina the results of these combined causes are more striking than in any other State. The excess of her black population, and the unmitigated character of slavery within her borders, afford perhaps a sufficient explanation of this fact. In 1860 she had 291,388 white, 402,406 slave, and 9,914 free colored inhabitants. Even these figures do not indicate the overwhelming predominance of black numbers in certain localities. In the poorer districts, as counties are here called, the whites are in a majority; while in certain others there were three and four times as many negroes as white persons. Herded together in great numbers, and worked like cattle, the habits of these wretched people, their comforts and enjoyments, were little above those of the brute. Under such circumstances it was hardly possible for them to make any moral or intellectual advancement, but often, even to the third generation, they remained as ignorant as when brought from the wilds of Africa.
It was owing much no doubt to this excessive black population and its degraded character, that labor appeared to be more disorganized, and the freedmen in a worse condition in South Carolina, than elsewhere. The Sea-Island question, however, had had a very marked and injurious effect upon labor in the State, and should be taken into consideration.
The most ignorant of the blacks have certain true and strong instincts, which stand them in the place of actual knowledge. Their faith in Providence has a depth and integrity which shames the halting belief of the more enlightened Christian. Next to that, and strangely blended with it, is the faith in the government which has brought them out of bondage. Along with these goes the simple and strong conviction, that, in order to be altogether free, and to enjoy the fruits of their freedom, they must have homes of their own. The government encouraged them in that belief and hope. Conscious of their own loyalty, and having a clear understanding of the disloyalty of their masters, they expected confidently, long after the war had closed, that the forfeited lands of these masters would be divided among them. It was only after earnest and persistent efforts on the part of the officers of the Bureau, to convince them that this hope was futile, that they finally abandoned it.
But by this time it had become known among the freed people of South Carolina and Georgia, that extensive tracts of land on the coast of these States had been set aside by military authority for their use. There the forty thousand bondmen who followed Sherman out of Georgia, together with other thousands who had preceded them, or come after, were established upon independent farms, in self-governing communities from which all white intruders were excluded. These settlements were chiefly upon the rich and delightful Sea Islands, which the Rebel owners had abandoned, and which now became the paradise of the freedmen’s hopes. “Go there,” they said, “and every man can pick out his lot of forty acres, and have it secured to him.”
With such fancies in his brain, the negro of the interior was not likely to remain contented on the old plantation, after learning that no acre of it was to be given him. He was naturally averse to accepting a white master, when he might be his own master elsewhere. His imaginative soul sang too, in its rude way:—
“Oh, had we some sweet little isle of our own,
In a blue summer ocean, far off and alone!”