“He’s likely a damn Yankee, though he claims he’s from Georgia,” Freeland’s friend, the Colonel, had said. “But he’s got a scheme for getting the niggers back in their place. He says they’re dying like flies on the roads, they’ll be glad to get back to work. Just bide your time, old man, we’ll have all our niggers back. Where can they go?”
The master did not rise to greet his guest. He hated the sniveling oaf. But before the cart went rumbling back along the drive the owner of Freelands had parted with precious dollars.
Similar transactions were being carried on all over the South that spring.
“Were the planters willing to bestow the same amount of money upon the laborers as additional wages, as they pay to runners and waste in dishonest means of compulsion, they would have drawn as many voluntary and faithful laborers as they now obtain reluctant ones. But there are harpies, who, most of them, were in the slave trade, and who persuade planters to use them as brokers to supply the plantations with hands, at the same time using all means to deceive the simple and unsophisticated laborer.”[22]
But things were stirring in the land. Frederick Douglass in Rochester sending out his paper—sending it South! The handsome, popular Francis L. Cardoza, charming young Negro Presbyterian minister in New Haven, Connecticut, resigning his Church and saying, “I’m going South!”
“What!” his parishioners exclaimed.
“Going to Charleston, South Carolina.” And he grinned almost impishly while they stared at him, wondering if they had heard right. Francis Cardoza had been in school in Europe while the Anti-Slavery Societies were lighting their fires. Having finished his work at the University of Glasgow, he had accepted a call from New Haven. But now he heard another call—more urgent. He packed up his books. He would need them in South Carolina—land of his fathers.
Three colored refugees from Santo Domingo pooled their assets and started a paper in New Orleans. They called it the New Orleans Tribune, and published it as a daily during 1865. After that year it continued as a weekly until sometime in 1869. It was published in French and English, and copies were sent to members of Congress. Its editor, Paul Trevigne, whose father had fought in the War of 1812, wanted to bring Louisiana “under a truly democratic system of labor.” He cited a new plan of credit for the people being tried in Europe. “We, too, need credit for the laborers,” he wrote. “We cannot expect complete and perfect freedom for the workingmen, as long as they remain the tools of capital and are deprived of the legitimate product of the sweat of their brow.”[23]
It was in September that a friend in South Carolina sent Douglass a clipping from the Columbia Daily Phoenix, certainly not an Abolitionist sheet. It was dated September 23, 1865, and as Douglass read his face lighted up with joy. Here was the right and proper challenge to Provisional Governor Perry—a challenge from within his own state! “A large meeting of freedmen, held on St. Helena Island on the 4th instant” had adopted a set of resolutions—five clearly stated, well-written paragraphs. Douglass reprinted the entire account in his own paper, crediting its source. People read and could scarcely believe what they read—coming as it did from the “ignorant, servile blacks” in the lowlands.
1. Resolved, That we, the colored residents of St. Helena Island, do most respectfully petition the Convention about to be assembled at Columbia, on the 13th instant, to so alter and amend the present Constitution of this state as to give the right of suffrage to every man of twenty-one years, without other qualifications than that required for the white citizens of the states.