A Picture of the Desolated States, and the Work of Restoration. 1865-1868

by J. T. Trowbridge

“The Southerner is generous in some things, and honorable in many; but he is not yet a good citizen for a republic. That is the whole trouble. He must be made so, or stand back for his children. He needs a firm, resolute guidance—not unkindly unless he will have it so—but firm, always firm. The moment we waver, he wavers. When he fully and finally understands that his old undue political importance is irrevocably a thing of the past, he will take the first step on the road to valuable citizenship. But between Andrew Johnson and the ‘Great Democratic Reaction,’ he has come to believe in the speedy overthrow of the Republican party, and in the restoration of the slave dynasty to reign over a dominant party, composed of Southern extremists and Northern doughfaces.”

That among these freedmen till lately slaves, there are many who have very inadequate notions of the value and importance of the ballot, and whose knowledge of our political institutions, is very limited, is undoubtedly true; but they hardly suffer even in these respects by comparison with the ignorant poor whites of the South; a class much slower to learn on these subjects than the most stupid of the negroes, and among the latter there are men who in intellect and eloquence are the peers of any of the white legislators of the South, brilliant as some of them have been. In the report of the debates of the Constitutional Convention in Arkansas, which adjourned in March last, we find a speech of W. H. Gray, a full-blooded negro, and till recently a slave, but at that time a member of the Convention, on this very subject, which may safely be placed by the side of any speech of any white Senator or Representative from that State in either House of Congress. We have read carefully the debates of the fathers of the American Republic on the Declaration of Independence, and we can find in them nothing more manly or statesmanlike in tone, or more logical in argument, than the speech of this negro orator. It is a defense of the right of his people to suffrage which it would be very difficult for any white man to gainsay or refute. The question of Impartial Suffrage was before the Convention, and Mr. Gray said:—

“Now, sir, having stood by the government and the old flag in times of trouble, when the Republic trembled with the throes of civil war, from centre to circumference, from base to cope, for this and other considerations we are here not to ask charity at the hands of the honorable body, but to receive, at the hands of the people of Arkansas in convention assembled, the apportionment of our rights, as assigned by the Reconstruction Acts of Congress. I am here, sir, to see those rights of citizenship engrafted in the organic law of this State. The gentleman from White County does not seem to recognize the fact that the present constitution is not in accordance with the Constitution of the United States, guaranteeing to each State a republican form of government. The gentleman from White says the negro cannot become a citizen. The fact is patent that we have exercised those rights under the constitution in all the States except South Carolina, and voted for that time-honored instrument—the Federal Constitution—by voting for the men that ratified it. As free men, we were not denied the right of suffrage under the State laws on account of color. It seems as though the gentleman had read the history of our country to little purpose, or at least not as I have.... Again the gentleman denies us the right of suffrage on the ground of our ignorance. Why, sir, for every negro vote registered in this State I can duplicate it with the vote of a white man that can neither read or write; and still we are charged with ignorance. I do not deny it, but we are not isolated. If these men can vote, I see no injustice in permitting me to vote also. And in this connection I would say that the colored people of this State met in convention in this city, in 1865, for the purpose of considering their condition and prospects, and then asked simply for the most remote recognition of their rights, but it was unheeded. I then said that I had an unshaken confidence in the eventual justice of the American. Since then we have crossed the Rubicon, as a nation, and cannot recede if we would.... We are told a republican form of government must rest upon the intelligence and virtue of the masses, and that we have not these qualifications; they are qualities that are at least susceptible of improvement. In other races of men—and they were not largely displayed when the Huns, Vandals, and other tribes were laying waste the fair fields of Italy, or when the Danes and Normans were making sad havoc of your ancestral estates—our condition would compare favorably with that of England, as described by Macaulay, at the time of the conquest of the island by the legions of Cæsar, when he says the condition of the people was little better than that of the Sandwich Islanders. We were not far behind those who sold civilized women along the banks of the James for 200 pounds of tobacco, or less. Nor has our intelligence, even in a barbarous state, been much below the level of those who ate the acorns falling from the lofty oak of Dodona, and worshipped the tree from which they fell. The civilization of the nineteenth century is the product of 800 years; and with this start ahead, with all the wealth, intelligence, and power and prestige of a great government, men pretend to believe that they are afraid of negro domination, afraid that 4,000,000 of negroes, scattered over this vast country, will rule 30,000,000 of intelligent white people. They cannot believe it. But they are endeavoring to work on the prejudices of the masses, to produce outrage and bloodshed; and, if possible, what they pretend to deprecate, a war of races. But, sir, this I do not fear, so long as we are led by the best minds of the nation, and count in our ranks those distinguished men of both sections, whose gleaming swords were seen flashing on many a skirmish line and in the smoke of battle. The gentleman says we are not citizens, by the highest judicial decision. That decision, sir, travelled outside of American History, outside of the presence of the courts; and hence I regard Chief Justice Taney as the American Jeffries. Could I afford to trust my dearest rights in the hands of men who hold up such a decision as the measure of my rights, and at the same time profess to be my best friends? I beg respectfully to decline such friendship—men who are willing to consign us to a system of peonage worse than slavery, a system that strips us of every right or privilege, and turns us bound hand and foot over to the tender mercies of mob law....

“Man cannot prevent it, for God has written it in burning characters across the pages of American History—emblazoned it as upon a sign-board, and hung it on the brows of the Rocky Mountains—‘This is the asylum for the oppressed of all nations, and all people.’ This is according to the original contract, drawn up by those patriotic men of the Revolution, and I believe they were honest when they declared that ‘All men are created equal.’ I believe the hand of an angel guided the pen that wrote those words, and that they were recorded in heaven. God intends you shall keep the original contract. The acting in bad faith by the children of those good men, has cost the country a million lives—the flower of the land—and untold sums of wealth. I believe He intends to demand its fulfillment now, and I plant myself upon the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, as defined by the framers of those documents, and expounded by the leading men of that period, and claim that they secure me my rights, if honestly and faithfully executed. Settle at once and forever the question of human rights by giving us equality before the law. Then, and not till then, will peace come to our borders. Until that is done, capital will not seek investment within our limits, nor will immigration flow to a State that continues to oppress and crush the laborer. Arkansas has tried it for thirty years, and she is still comparatively a vast forest. With an extent of territory sufficient for an empire,—stretching from Missouri on the north to Louisiana and Texas on the south, from the Cherokee territory on the west to where her eastern front looks out on the Father of Waters; with internal streams sufficiently navigable to bear the commerce of an empire to the sea,—thirty years a State and not a railroad worth the name, no means of inter-communication, except that employed in a by-gone age. Not a respectable school-house, and her primeval forests still keeping silent guard along her watercourses: and why? because her soil was desecrated by Slavery. It was here this Moloch of the nineteenth century reared his altars and sacrificed his human victims. God has removed the idol and shattered the altars, and those that opposed it, like the devotees that cast themselves before the Hindoo car of Juggernaut, will be crushed beneath the progress of the age.”

The pictures of the condition of the South in the beginning of the present year were gloomy in the extreme. We have taken in preference the testimony of moderate men who have spent some months in the South during the early part of the present year. One of these, a Mr. D., for a long time, and we believe still, connected with the “Cincinnati Gazette,” gives in January, 1868, the following summary of the condition of affairs from his own personal observation:—

“There is literally ‘no show’ for an outspoken Union man. He is socially ostracized; nobody will trade with him. If he be a farmer, his horses are stolen, his stock dies suddenly, his fences mysteriously disappear, ‘spontaneous combustion’ destroys his out-houses; and if he is still foolish enough to misunderstand these ‘manifestations of Providence,’ he is accidentally shot, or some equally broad hint is given him to leave. To learn these facts, leave the railroad towns and live in the interior for a few months, and you will get your fill. I believe that even Andrew Johnson himself might be reformed, provided he could visit Mississippi incog., and stay at the house of a Union man even a fortnight.

“But to know Rebeldom in its truest character, you must leave its dealings with white men, and view its dealings with the negro. It could not be expected that the relations existing between the whites and their late chattels would be very decidedly cordial, for it will be years ere former owners can calmly view what was once their property and source of wealth now toiling for themselves; but still common humanity would dictate a treatment toward the negroes fully as generous as that usually extended to brutes. Villainy of the whites is the cause of three fourths of the destitution among the negroes. In four cases in five where he has worked for a white man, either on shares or wages, the negro has been defrauded out of his earnings. If a crop has been raised on shares, it is disposed of by the land-owner, and if the laborer receives one half his dues he is most fortunate; if he is employed by the year, he is turned adrift as soon as crops are gathered, and he is given but a moiety of his wages; when he asks for the balance due, he is cursed and threatened, and, if he persists in his demand, he is knocked down, or, more often, shot; if he resents the blow, his death is certain, for no negro dare strike a white man here, unless there be a company of soldiers present. To kill a negro is no crime here, and I have heard men talk of their exploits in this line with the utmost complacency. The only protection that the colored man now has in the South is the Freedmen’s Bureau, backed up by Federal bayonets. Break up the Bureau before reconstruction is effected, and the colored race will be exterminated in ten years, unless a ‘war of races’ ensues, and the whites be brought to their senses thereby. It appears to be the policy of not a few leaders to bring about such a conflict. The excessive tyranny practiced upon the poor blacks, and the appeals to the prejudices and baser passions of the whites, tend to that end, and certainly must have that object.

“Great destitution prevails in the interior of Alabama and Mississippi, but it is by no means so severe as has been represented. Here again is another fiendish device of the opponents of reconstruction. The colored laborer is defrauded out of most of his earnings. As a consequence, he is in want, and his family are nigh to starvation. This is heralded forth to the world as an evidence of the negro’s natural laziness and disability to take care of himself. If the whites had dealt justly and generously by their colored laborers, they would not now be asking alms of the North, nor begging relief of government. It makes me mourn for the white race when I witness their oppression of the negro. A just Providence cannot permit such iniquities to be perpetrated.

“The prime cause of Southern want is the laziness of the whites. The Southern climate is notoriously enervating, and is made the excuse for not working by the ‘privileged classes.’ At every cross-roads doggery, every shop, and every store in every town and village, is to be found a crowd of long-haired, stalwart fellows engaged in whittling sticks, chewing tobacco, and cursing the negro—three things which they do well and industriously follow up. Without a dollar, save what they make or defraud their laborers out of, they spend their time, week in and week out, in idleness, regretting ‘old times,’ instead of turning to work and industriously striving to retrieve their fallen fortunes. They have land in abundance, but this few only will sell, lest the negroes get a foothold and become property owners. The South is by no means as impoverished as has been represented. The Southern people still have in abundance all the elements of wealth, and it only requires industry among the whites, and encouragement and fair dealing toward the colored laborers, to raise the late Rebel States to even a higher state of prosperity than they ever before enjoyed.”

Still amid all this gloom and darkness there were some gleams of light. Education is and has been, for the past two years, advancing in the South with a rapidity hitherto unknown. Heretofore in most of the Southern States, everywhere except in the large towns, education was only the boon of the wealthy, and the poor white had almost as little chance of learning to read and write as the slave, to whom all knowledge of books was prohibited by law under the severest penalties. But now, thanks to the efforts of the philanthropic citizens of the North, the Missionary Associations, Home Missionary Societies, Freedmen’s Aid Societies and Commissions, and to the Freedmen’s Bureau, there were thousands of schools where the negro and the child of the poor white were taught the elements of knowledge, and an intense rivalry, in which truth compels us to say the negro child oftenest came out winner, ensued between the two in regard to the rapid acquisition of knowledge.