That all negroes were not treated badly, or that slavery invariably meant misery, can be easily proved by any one who takes the trouble to investigate, even in the most superficial manner. When the news of emancipation gradually spread through the remote regions of the South, there were hundreds and probably thousands of negroes who declined absolutely to take advantage of the freedom given them. Many most pathetic cases of devotion and love were made manifest. Even to-day there are numbers of aged colored men and women who are remaining with their old-time owners and declining to regard emancipation as logical or reasonable.
Not long ago, a Northern writer while traveling through the South found an aged negro, whom he approached with a view to getting some interesting passages of local history. To his surprise he found that the old man had but one idea. That idea was that it was his duty to take care of and preserve his old master's grave. When the war broke out, the old hero was the body-servant or valet of a man, who, from the very first, was in the thick of the fight against the North. The colored man followed his soldier-master from place to place, and when a Northern bullet put an end to the career of the master, the servant reverently conveyed the body back to the old home, superintended the interment, and commenced a daily routine of watching, which for more than thirty years he had never varied.
All the relatives of the deceased had left the neighborhood years before, and the faithful old negro was the only one left to watch over the grave and keep the flowers that were growing on it in good condition. As far as could be learned from local gossip, the old fellow had no visible means of subsistence, securing what little he needed to eat in exchange for odd jobs around neighboring houses. No one seemed to know where he slept, or seemed to regard the matter as of any consequence. There was about the jet black hero, however, an air of absolute happiness, added to an obvious sense of pride at the performance of his self-imposed and very loving task.
Instances of this kind could be multiplied almost without end. The negro as a free man and citizen retains many of the most prominent characteristics which marked his career in the days before the war. Now and again one hears of a negro committing suicide. Such an event, however, is almost as rare as resignation of an office-holder or the death of an annuitant. Indifference to suffering and a keen appreciation of pleasure, make prolonged grief very unusual among Afro-Americans, and in consequence their lives are comparatively joyous.
One has to go down South to appreciate the colored man as he really is. In the North he is apt to imitate the white man so much that he loses his unique personality. In the Southern States, however, he can be found in all his original glory. Here he can be regarded as a survival of preceding generations. In the South, before the war, the truism that there is dignity in toil was scarcely appreciated at its full worth. The negro understood, as if by instinct, that he ought to work for his white master, and that duties of every kind in the field, on the road and in the house, should be performed by him. For a white man who worked he entertained feelings in which there was a little pity and a great deal of contempt. He has never got over this feeling, or the feeling which his father before him had. Down South to-day the expression "po' white trash" is still full of meaning, and the words are uttered by the thick-lipped, woolly-headed critics with an emphasis and expression the very best white mimic has never yet succeeded in reproducing.
George Augustus Sala, one of England's oldest and most successful descriptive writers, talks very entertainingly regarding the emancipated slave. The first trip made to this country by the versatile writer referred to was during the war.
He returned home full of prejudices, and wrote up the country in that supercilious manner European writers are too apt to adopt in regard to America. Several years later he made his second trip, and his experiences, as recorded in "America Revisited," are much better reading, and much freer from prejudice.
"For full five and thirty years," he writes, "had I been waiting to see the negro 'standing in the mill pond.' I saw him in all his glory and all his driving wretchedness at Guinneys, in the State of Virginia. I own that for some days past the potential African, 'standin' in de mill pond longer than he oughter' had been lying somewhat heavily on my conscience. My acquaintance with our dark brethren since arriving in this country had not only been necessarily limited, but scarcely of a nature to give me any practical insight into his real condition since he has been a free man--free to work or starve; free to become a good citizen or go to the devil, as he has gone, mundanely speaking, in Hayti and elsewhere. Colored folks are few and far between in New York, and they have never, as a rule, been slaves, and are not even generally of servile extraction. In Philadelphia they are much more numerous. Many of the mulatto waiters employed in the hotels are strikingly handsome men, and on the whole the sable sons of Pennsylvania struck me as being industrious, well dressed, prosperous, and a trifle haughty in their intercourse with white folks.
"In Baltimore, where slavery existed until the promulgation of Lincoln's proclamation, the colored people are plentiful. I met a good many ragged, shiftless, and generally dejected negroes of both sexes, who appeared to be just the kind of waifs and strays who would stand in a mill pond longer than they ought to in the event of there being any convenient mill pond at hand. But the better class darkeys, who have been domestic slaves in Baltimore families, seemed to retain all their own affectionate obsequiousness of manner and respectful familiarity. Again, in Washington, the black man and his congeners seemed to be doing remarkably well. At one of the quietest, most elegant and most comfortable hotels in the Federal Capital, I found the establishment conducted by a colored man, all of whose employes, from the clerks in the office to the waiters and chambermaids, were colored. Our chambermaid was a delightful old lady, and insisted ere we left that we should give her a receipt for a real old English Christmas plum pudding.
"But these were not the mill pond folk of whom I was in quest. They were of the South, as an Irishman in London is of Ireland, but not in it. I had a craving to see whether any of the social ashes of slavery lived their wonted fires. Away down South was the real object of my mission, and in pursuit of that mission I went on to Richmond."