His true and fast friends, the abolitionists, equalized him per saltum to his master as a voter and office-holder. This single measure was sure to make deadly enemies of white and black in the south, and to bring a war of races in which the superior one was bound to conquer and become absolute. This war did come, and was fought out. Profound peace has reigned for some years, and the negroes now contentedly stay away from the polls, and manifest no aspiration whatever for office and place.
His same friends gave the ex-slave equality with his old master under the criminal law. He had this in slavery only when charged with a capital offence; and if he was charged with a graver one of the non-capital offences, such as breaking and entering a dwelling, stealing something of considerable value, he was brought before a statutory court of justices of the peace, and if upon his summary trial he was convicted, his punishment was usually a short term in jail, the sheriff to give him so many lashes each day until he had received the full number adjudged in his sentence. I never heard of one that was seriously injured by this kind of punishment. It never gave him any permanent mental anguish. His conscience approved whipping as the most fit punishment for every offence. The crimes of negroes mentioned above in this paragraph were very infrequent. Their many peccadillos were in practice wholly ignored by the law, and given over to private and domestic jurisdiction. Cuffee would sometimes indulge a sudden craving for fresh meat by appropriating a shoat or grown lamb, or he would gratify a watering mouth by stealthy invasion of melon patches or sweet potato patches and banks. And he was prone to other small larcenies. If caught,—which was very far from always happening,—he was whipped; and that was the last of it. Now he must replace the bounty of his master which sheltered, clothed, and fed him comfortably all his life by living from hand to mouth. His forecast utterly undeveloped, and more and more losing the work habit, there is often but one way for him to avoid starving or freezing, and that is to get the necessaries of life by various acts which are crimes in the law. It is but a scanty supply that he thus manages to get. His year is nearly always, from beginning to end, but an alternation of short feasts upon the cheapest fare, and prolonged fasts. Yet in the eye of the stern and severe law how many gross offences does he commit by doing only the things which, if he did not do, he could not keep soul and body together. And so he is brought before every court of any criminal jurisdiction, and when convicted, as he generally is, for he is nearly always guilty,—not in conscience, but guilty under the law which his emancipators have put him under,—often he cannot find a friend to pay his fine, and he must work it out in the chain-gang. The city has its chain-gang, the county has its chain-gang, and the State works or farms out its convicts. The percentage of whites among these convicts is very small. Often when you encounter a gang at work you cannot find a single white person in it. These negro convicts are many, many. As fast as one’s time expires his place is filled by another. Disease, decay of energy from irregular food supply, growing habits of idleness, and other things in the train, bring forth tramps more plentifully, and from these the chain-gangs are more and more largely recruited. These slaves of punishment work under the eyes of guards furnished with the best of small-arms loaded to kill. The most of them work in shackles. If they do not work as their superintendents think they ought, they are strapped. I have seen them working in the rain, as I never saw required of slaves. At night they are put to sleep in a crowded log-pen, all of them chained together, the chain being made fast to each bunk. The guards are practised marksmen, known to be men who will promptly and resolutely “do their duty.” This hell-like life constantly keeps each convict watching for opportunity to make a dash for liberty. If the guards have anything like fair shots when he starts, one more unmarked and soon forgotten grave is dug and filled in the paupers’ burial ground, and that is the earthly end of this poor derelict of the human race. Suppose he gets safely away from the guard. In a few minutes the unleashed dogs are yelping on his track. In the old days even the negro dogs were fed and tended by slaves, and almost every dog in the land seemed to love negroes. But these bloodhounds in the convict camps have been bred into a deadly hatred of every negro. Escaping Cuffee is usually caught. Then more of the paddle, heavier shackles, chains at night stronger and more taut, and the bosses harder to satisfy as he works under greater hindrances—these make his lot more hell-like than it was before.
It is a melancholy proof of the insufficient dietary and bad hygiene of the common negroes that these convicts fatten in spite of their cruel hardships.
The long-term convicts, farmed out to coal and other mine owners and various manufacturers, and private employers, I know but little of from observation. But what I hear makes me believe that their condition is worse than that of those just described. This is to be expected, for two reasons. First, they are worked for profit by persons whose only interest is to get the largest possible product out of their labor. The labor exacted by the owner, bear in mind, would not be severe enough either to impair the market value or check vigorous reproduction of his slaves. Second, the places where these convicts are worked are more or less retired, and thus the employer escapes scrutiny nearly all the year. Think of a negro who, receiving a twenty years’ sentence for burglariously stealing a ham when he was hungry, is put to work in the coal mine! Who ever hears of him afterwards? He is soon forgotten by his wife, who takes another husband, and by his children either skulking here and there to shun the officer, or toiling in a chain-gang. Here is indeed a bitter slavery—bitterer by far than any West Africa ever knew. There the slave does not labor underground and out of the sun so dear to him. His manumission comes mercifully in many ways, long before the expiration of twenty years—the sacrifice may need a victim; he may starve; he may fall sick and be cast out in the bush. But the mine slave—the mine boss will not whip him hard enough to give him even short rest from his work, work, work; he shall always have enough of raiment, food, and sleep to keep him able to work, work, work; when he gets very sick the mine doctor will patch him up and send him back to his work, work, work; he will work, work, work out his twenty years in this hell hole. Miss Landon in her immortal invective against child labor exclaims:
“Good God! to think upon a child
That has no childish days,
No careless play, no frolics wild,
No words of prayer and praise!”
This factory child that never knew any of the proper joys of a child is without either sweet memory or unavailing wish. But the mine slave, the most of whose former life was passed in the open air, how he pines for the splendor of his loved sun by day; how in his bunk he recalls his rounds by night when the Seven Stars, the Ell and Yard and Job’s Coffin were his clock and the North Star his compass. Each part of the revolving year whispers to him when he is at work or dreaming. Christmas suggests the jug with the corn-cob stopper, the ’possum cooked brown, the yams exuding their sugary juice, the banjo picker and his song, the fiddle playing a dancing tune, and the floor shaking under the thumping footfalls; the cold weather following suggests the ’possum and ’coon hunt; the early spring brings what he used to call the corn-planting birds and their lively calls; and on and on his thoughts go over mocking-bird, woodpecker, early peaches and apples, full orchards spared by frost, the watermelon, solitary and incomparable among all things for a negro to eat, his Sunday fishings and rabbit hunts, his church and society meetings, this and that dusky love who fooled him into believing that he was dearer to her than husband or any other man, especially some yellow girl, his nonesuch, exceeding all other women as the watermelon excels all other produce of tree or vine,—on and on his thoughts go over what he can never have again. I need not say a word for the white victims of child labor, for their race is rousing for their rescue, and I know its power to achieve. But I do feel that it is my duty to put that friendless, forgotten, long-term negro convict in the minds of my southern readers. If he must be a convict, do not farm him out to mine operators or where he will be worked behind any screen. Put all our convicts, both felony and misdemeanor, upon the public roads until they need only a little working now and then, say I. There the convicts will not be worked for profit, nor in secret.
The total of the negroes suffering in southern slavery from all causes falls in amount far below that alone which has come upon him because he was stupidly subjected to the white man’s criminal law, and not given reformatories and other belongings of the system which we are perfecting for juvenile offenders. The suffering in slavery was occasional only, and soon over. The present suffering of the negroes under the criminal law is constant, and is to be found rife in every locality. The aggregate of the felony and misdemeanor convicts of Georgia now at hard labor is about 4,500. The convicts sentenced by city and town police courts for short terms of days I cannot give with any approximate accuracy. I think it probable that the number of those convicted each year in the municipal courts is somewhat larger than that of those convicted in the State courts. By reason of a late wholesale reduction of felonies the number of long-term convicts does not increase,—it is at a standstill,—but the number of the misdemeanor and municipal convicts steadily increases. More than nine-tenths of those in each one of the three classes are negroes. The stench, filth, and discomfort of their nights and the hardship of their days, who can describe? How it moves my pity to see, as I often do, the convict toiling incessantly for long hours, impeded and tortured by his iron shackles, the paddle at hand, and a double-barrel or Winchester frowning over him, each to be used on occasion by somebody who cares nothing for and has no interest in him. Weary as the worker may be, a word from the boss gives new impetus to his pick or shovel. Here is the only place I have ever known on American soil where one can find “poor, oppressed, bleeding Africa.” How different it was with the slave offender! It mattered not what was the charge against him, he had persons related to him both in interest and affection who would intercede powerfully at his call. Wherever he might be,—in the sheriff’s hands, or locked up by the overseer in the gin-house,—a messenger-service as secret and more sure than wireless telegraphy even if not as quick, was at his command; and some child, white or colored, or favorite servant would carry his entreaties to the Big House. And the justices, or ole master or the overseer, would be influenced by a word from ole miss, or the tears of young miss, or the importunity of young master. In the end Cuffee’s punishment would be made tolerable; and after it was over he would the next night at the cabin brag joyfully of the many friends he had and what great things they had done for him—the children of his master present and showing more gladness than himself.
Which of the two was the more humane and christian punitive system for the negro? Which of the two was the better for him? That of slavery, or that produced by the conditions which his professed friends put in place of slavery?
I assert it most solemnly that I never saw a negro slave worked in shackles and under a loaded firearm, neither by his master nor an overseer, nor by their command, nor by an officer of the law; and, further, that I never had information or report that such had been done.
When their emancipators led the negroes out of their cabins into their new life it was something like throwing our domestic animals into the forest and desert, where they, without formed habits of self-maintenance and without knowledge of the new environment, must live, if they can live, only in competition with their wild brothers and sisters knowing the environment and who are self-maintaining experts therein. That comparison serves somewhat. But this comes nearer: Suppose children between the ages of eight and twelve, who have never been taught to do anything for themselves, to be taken away from their parents, and settled among a people lately made bitterly hostile to the children, as the whites were made to the negroes by the effort of the emancipators to give political equality—nay, supremacy—to the latter. Those emancipated children must subsist themselves. How little they could earn by begging or work. They would have to steal to live. Those that did not steal, and for whom no companion would steal, would perish. The philanthropists who founded this infantile colony would have outdone but by a very little those who thrust the reluctant negroes into freedom.