“The refusal of these people to make contracts for labor another year completely deranges all the regular and matured plans of our farmers. They know not what provision to make for feeding their employees; what extent of soil to mark out for seed; what kind of crops to cultivate, or what calculations to make upon their operations. If they sow, they are not certain to what extent they can reap; and if they attempt a variety of crops, (including tobacco,) they have no assurance whatever that their labor will not forsake them at the very moment that it is most indispensable.
“A friend in Amherst suggests that the powers that be should issue an order to the effect that all who do not get homes, or show they have a support within themselves, by the 1st day of January, 1866, will, on the 10th of said month, (nine days’ notice being given,) be hired out to the highest bidder. Such an order would, in his opinion, cause all except the most worthless to secure homes before the 20th of December. These suggestions certainly seem to us to have wisdom in them, and to meet the difficulties, to some extent, that now so seriously embarrass and retard agricultural pursuits; and we respectfully commend them to the attention of the proper authorities. One thing is certain, that if the negroes are not made to enter into contracts, and to keep them when made, the most ruinous consequences will result to our farming interests, and provisions enough will not be made to feed our people another year. Some fanatics and deluded persons, we know, will laugh at this idea, and tell us that the South has never been so prosperous in the past as she will be in the future under our present system of labor. But taking the most favorable view of the subject, it is still manifest to every one at all familiar with the real condition of things, that freed negro labor never was and never can be made productive—that is to say, accumulative or progressive; and that any reliance upon the voluntary work of free negroes, beyond what is absolutely necessary to their sustenance, is both vain and foolish. And we predict now, with regret and pain, what the results will certainly show, that there will henceforth be a steady and permanent decline in all the productions of the South dependent upon negro labor, as there has been in the French and British emancipation islands; and that the negro himself will steadily lose all the civilization which contact with his master has given him, and finally relapse into his native barbarism.”
At the same time they were busy inducing these people, who were steadily losing all civilization and about to relapse into their native barbarism, to emigrate to Liberia; by way, it should seem, of hastening the process. One colony had already been sent off, and the papers made much of an address, written by the negro emigrants to their “best friends,” to wit, their old masters,[[50]] wherein they were made to hint a conviction, in substance the same with that so current in the bar-rooms, that “Virginia is no place for free niggers.”
The people of Lynchburg were all Johnson men. That is, they believed the President disposed to exact less of them than his party wanted, and they were bound to praise the bridge that promised to carry them safely over. Here, as elsewhere, “sound conservative views” were greatly in demand; these “views” being always found to have a relation, more or less intimate, to the negro. “No man,” exclaimed one of the papers, “can fail to see that our future is pregnant with the most momentous issues, and that it will require the union of all right-thinking men to save our country from the blasting curse of a false and most destructive radical sentiment pervading it.” To resist this destructive radical sentiment, the union of all the old parties was urged. They felt sure their members would be promptly admitted, and thought it a very great outrage that any opposition should be made to their participation in the organization of the House.
[48]. His “playing Yankee” consisted in a clumsy attempt to make the President believe that Sir Frederick Bruce, the new British Minister, was waiting in the ante-room to see him.
[49]. “Intelligent contrabands” all seem to have the money-making faculty well developed. Here is a table of the incomes of some of the freedmen about Newbern, North Carolina, during the third year of the war:
Three hundred and five persons, not employed by the Government, but working at trades of their own, returned a total income of $151,562, the average of all incomes being $496 92.
| George Hargate, turpentine farmer | $3,000 |
| Ned Huggins, tar and turpentine | 3,150 |
| E. H. Hill, missionary and trader | 2,000 |
| W. A. Ives, carpenter and grocer | 2,400 |
| George Gordon, turpentine | 1,500 |
| Adam Hymen, turpentine | 1,300 |
| Samuel Collins, dry goods and groceries | 1,200 |
| Benjamin Whitfield, grocery and eating-house | 1,500 |
| Hasty Chatwick, turpentine | 1,000 |
| Limber Lewis, staves, wood, and shingles | 1,500 |
| George Physic, grocer | 1,500 |
| Sylvester Mackey, undertaker | 1,000 |
| Charles Bryan, cartman | 1,000 |
| John H. Heath, shoemaker | 1,000 |
| William Long, lumberman | 1,200 |
| John Bryan, cotton farmer | 1,100 |
| Hogan Conedy, cooper and tar maker | 1,000 |
| Danzey Heath, grocer and baker | 1,500 |