The hardest kind of work is looking for it.
The Southern Negro as a Property-Owner
BY LEONORA BECK ELLIS
BETWEEN the Southern negro as property and the Southern negro as a property-owner worthy of account, American progress has set its milestones thick and strongly marked. Yet, as mere years go, the time has been short indeed for a transition of meanings so vast.
The act of emancipation brought in its train several very serious problems, and more than one of these must be acknowledged to have grown graver with further-reaching complexities and involutions as the decades have passed. But in the present article these are not under consideration.
The point we desire to emphasize is that one of the most difficult questions brought to issue in the emancipation of the negro has already solved itself by what we are accustomed to call natural processes.
When the epochal pen-stroke fell and $3,000,000,000 worth of Southern property was suddenly obliterated as property, yet stood there in plain world’s view, like the metamorphosed dragon’s teeth, as men with the rights of men, there were masters of statecraft everywhere who faced one another blankly, asking how such a situation was to resolve itself. Not even the most sanguine saw any reason to hope that so complex an issue as that involved in the relation of the freedmen to the land could be brought to satisfactory or righteous solution until at least three or four generations had mingled dust with dust.
The relation of the freedmen to the soil! Here was the problem that must have given pause to an older state, a European nation, say, upon the eve of liberating at one stroke four millions of serfs.