Returning to his office, he invited me to sit down, and commenced talking freely of the condition and prospects of the country. The area of corn-land planted was small; but the soil had been resting two or three years, the season had been favorable, and the result was an excellent crop. “We shall probably have a surplus to dispose of for other necessaries.” The county had not one third the number of horses, nor one tenth the amount of stock, it had before the war. Many families were utterly destitute. They had nothing whatever to live upon until the corn-harvest; and many would have nothing then. The government had been feeding as many as fifteen hundred persons at one time.
“How many of these were blacks?”
“Perhaps one fifth.”
“How large a proportion of the population of the county are blacks?”
“Not quite one half.”
“The colored population require proportionately less assistance, then, than the white?” He admitted the fact. “How happens it?” I inquired; for he had previously told me the old hackneyed tale, that the negroes would not work, and that in consequence they were destined to perish like the Indians.
“They’ll steal,” said he; and he made use of this expression, which he said was proverbial: “An honest nigger is as rare as a lock of har on the palm of my hand.”
“But,” I objected, “it seems hardly possible for one class of people to live by stealing in a country you describe as so destitute.”
“A nigger will live on almost nothing,” he replied. “It isn’t to be denied, however, but that some of them work.”
He criticised severely the government’s system of feeding the destitute. “Hundreds are obtaining assistance who are not entitled to any. They have only to go to the overseers of the poor appointed by government, put up a poor mug, and ask for a certificate in a weak voice; they get it, and come and draw their rations. Some draw rations both here and at Fredericksburg, thus obtaining a double support, while they are well able to work and earn their living, if left to themselves. The system encourages idleness, and does more harm than good. All these evils could be remedied, and more than half the expense saved the government, if it would intrust the entire management of the matter in the hands of citizens.”