And what is surprising, above all, in the freedman's condition, is, not that it shows a recuperative power, but that it has such a wonderful suddenness in the recoil. It is not a growth, but a spring. It reverses the nihil per saltum of the philosophers. In watching them, one is constantly reminded of those trances produced by some violent blow upon the head, from which the patient suddenly recovers with powers intact. One looks for a gradual process, and beholds a sudden illumination. This abates a little of one's wrath at slavery, perhaps, though the residuum is quite sufficient; but it infinitely enhances one's hopes for the race set free. It shows that they have simply risen to the stature of men, and must be treated accordingly.
And, indeed, when one thinks how unexampled in our tame experience is the event which has thus suddenly raised them from their low estate, one must expect to find something unexampled in the result. This is true even where liberty has come merely as a thing to be passively received; but in many cases the personal share of the freedman has been anything but passive. What can most of us know of the awful thrill which goes through the soul of a man, when, having come over a hundred miles of hourly danger out of slavery to our lines, with rifle-bullets whizzing round him and bloodhounds on the trail behind, he counts that for a preliminary trip only, and, having thus found the way, goes back through that hundred miles of peril yet again, and brings away his wife and child? As Hawthorne's artist flung his hopeless pencil into Niagara, so all one's puny literary art seems utterly merged and swept away in the magnificent flood of untaught eloquence with which some such nameless man will pour out his tale. Two things seem worth recording, and no third: the passionate emotions of the humblest negro, as they burst into language at such a time,—and the very highest triumph of the very greatest dramatic genius, if perchance some Shakespeare or Goethe could imagine a kindred utterance. Anything intermediate must be worthless and unavailing.
Now there is no doubt, that, under this great stimulus, the freedmen will do their part; the anxious question is, whether we of the North are ready to do ours. Our part consists not chiefly in money and old clothes, nor even in school-books and teachers. The essential thing which we need to give them is justice; for that must be the first demand of every rational being. Give them justice, and they can dispense even with our love. Give them the most exuberant and zealous love, and it may only hurt them, if it leads us to subject them to fatal experiments, and to fancy them exceptions to the universal laws.
Cochin well says,—"To have set men at liberty is not enough: it is necessary to place them in society." That American emancipation should be a success is more important to every one of us than the whole sugar-crop of Louisiana or the whole rice-crop of Georgia. Secure this result, and the future opens for this nation a larger horizon than the most impassioned Fourth-of-July orator in the old times dared to draw. Fail in this result, and the future holds endless disorders, with civil war reappearing at the end. If, therefore, there be any general principle to assert, any essential method to inculcate, its adoption is the most essential statesmanship. Twenty millions of white men, with ballots and school-houses, will be tolerably sure to thrive, whatever be the legislation: legislation for them is secondary, because they are assured in their own strength. But four millions of black men, just freed, and as yet unprovided with any of these tools,—the fate of the nation may hinge on a single error in legislating for them.
Now there are but two systems possible in dealing with an emancipated people. All minor projects are modifications of these two. There is the theory of preparation, under some form, and there is the theory of fair play. Preparation is apprenticeship, prescription,—the bargains of the freedman made for him, not by him. Fair play is to remove all obstructions, including the previous monopoly of the soil,—to recognize the freedman's right to all social and political guaranties, and then to let him alone.
There is undoubtedly room for an honest division of opinion on this fundamental matter, among persons equally sincere. Even among equally well-informed persons there may be room for difference, although it will hardly be denied that those who favor the theory of "preparation" are in general those who take a rather low view of the capacities of the emancipated race. The policy pursued in Louisiana, for instance, was undoubtedly based at the outset, whatever other reasons have since been adduced, on the theory that the freedmen would labor only under compulsion. I have seen an elaborate argument, from a leading officer in that Department, resting the whole theory on precisely this assumption. "The negro, born and reared in ignorance, could not for years be taught to properly understand and respect the obligations of a contract. His ideas of freedom were merged in the fact that he was to be fed and clothed and supported in idleness." Whatever excuses may since have been devised for the system, this was its original postulate. To suppose it true would be to reject the vast bulk of evidence already accumulated, all demonstrating the freedmen's willingness to work. Yet if the assumption be false, any system founded on it must be regarded by the freedmen as an insult, and must fail, unless greatly modified.
In organizing emancipation, one great principle must be kept steadily in mind. All men will better endure the total withholding of all their rights than a system which concedes half and keeps back the other half. This has been admirably elucidated by De Tocqueville in his "Ancien Régime," in showing that the very prosperity of the reign of Louis XVI. prepared the way for its overthrow. "The French found their position the more insupportable, the better it became.... It often happens that a people which has endured the most oppressive laws without complaint, and as if it did not feel them, throws them off violently the instant the burden is lightened,... and experience shows that the most dangerous moment to a bad government is usually that in which it begins to mend. The evil which one suffers patiently as inevitable seems insupportable as soon as he conceives the idea of escaping it. All that is then taken from abuses seems to uncover what remains, and render the feeling of it more poignant. The evil has become less, it is true, but the sensibility is keener."
Every one who is familiar with the freedmen knows that this could not be a truer description of their case, if every word had been written expressly for them. The most timid laborer on the remotest plantation will not bear from his superintendent or his teacher the injustice he bore from his master. The best-disciplined black soldier will not take from his captain one half the tyranny which his overseer might safely have inflicted. Freedom they understand; slavery they understand. When they become soldiers, they know that part of their civil rights are to be temporarily waived; and as soon as they can read, they study the "Army Regulations," to make sure that they concede no more. Neither as citizens nor as soldiers do they retain the faculty of dumb, dead submission which sustains them through every conceivable wrong while enslaved. Before a blow from his master the slave helplessly cowers, and takes refuge in silent and inert despair. He draws his head into his shell, like a turtle, and simply endures. Liberate him, he quits the shell forever, and the naked palpitating tissue is left bare. Afterwards, every touch reaches a nerve, and every nerve excites a whole muscular system in reflex action.
I remember an amusing incident which took place while I was on picket at Port Royal. Complaints began to come in against a certain neighboring superintendent, an ex-clergyman, whose demeanor was certainly not creditable to his cloth, but whose offences would have seemed slight enough in the old plantation times. Still they were enough to exasperate the people under his charge, and the ill feeling extended rapidly among the black soldiers, many of whom had been slaves on that very island. At last their captain felt it necessary to interfere. "Has it ever occurred to you, my dear Sir," he one day asked the superintendent, "that you are in some danger from these soldiers whom you meet every day with their guns in the picket paths?"—The official colored and grew indignant. "Do you mean to say, Sir, that your men are forming a conspiracy to murder me?"—"By no means," returned the courteous captain. "I trust you will find my soldiers too well disciplined for any such impropriety. But you may not have noticed that the regiment has at present exceedingly poor guns which often go off at half-cock, so that no one can be held responsible. It was but the other day that one of our own officers was shot dead by such an accident,"—which was unhappily true,—"and consider, my dear Sir, how very painful"——"I understand you, I understand you," interrupted the excited divine, putting spurs to his horse. It was a remarkable coincidence that we never heard another complaint from that plantation.
It was this new-born sensitiveness that brought to so sudden a close the attempted apprenticeship of the British West Indies. Cochin, the wisest recent critic, fully recognizes this connection of events. "Either the regulations were incomplete, or the masters failed in their observance, or such failures were not repressed, so that the slaves were in many places maltreated and mutinous. In proportion as the moment of freedom approached, some broke loose prematurely from their duties, others aspired prematurely to their rights. Patience long delayed is easier than patience whose end is approaching; it is at the last moment that one grows weary of waiting."