“Have you no children who could support you?”
“You’s got ’em hired for you, sah. Dere’s John, an’ Ruthy, an’ Milly, an’ Jake. But dey’s got deir own fam’lies; an’ when man gits ole dey don’t care so much. Sometimes dey gib me piece o’ meat, and sometimes dey say dey haint got none for me; den it comes pretty hard on me an’ ole ’oman. You gibs me half ’lowance, sah; ef’t wasn’t for dat, I spec we couldn’t lib ’t all.”
The South is full of such cases. In most instances, to their credit be it said, the old masters give the worn-out negroes a little land to cultivate and houses to live in; but very often they have no ability to go further. Sometimes the children support their aged parents; sometimes, as here, they plead that they have their own families to maintain, and seem to feel sure that, rather than see them starve, the whites will take care of them. Northern lessees feel all their notions of conducting business on business principles outraged at the idea of having to support all the old negroes, in addition to hiring the young ones; but, in the main, their feelings get the better of their business habits. The instances are very rare in which old and helpless negroes, deserted by their children and by their former masters, are driven off or left to starve by the new-comers. In this case, the old man was allotted about an acre and a half of land, was furnished a house, and supplied with half rations; all of which was pure charity, as there was no possible way in which he could make any return to the hard-pressed lessee, who had already paid an exorbitant rent (twenty-five dollars per acre) to the old master for the land.
The wife of one of the head-drivers on a Louisiana plantation, had been for some months confined to the house, and most of the time to her bed, by a very curious gangrenous disease, which had attacked one foot. It became necessary, in the opinion of the physicians, as well as of the old woman herself, and of her husband, to amputate the entire foot. “It really is necessary in this case,” explained the physician privately; “But nine times out of ten, when these niggers will come to you and beg you to cut off a leg or an arm, there is no real need for any operation at all. They have a great notion for having amputations performed; and really, sir, I’m afraid that sometimes our young physicians have been tempted by the fine chance for an instructive operation, to gratify them when they should not.”
In many parts of the South, the number of these young physicians is somewhat startling. Young men who felt the desirability of having a profession, although without either necessity or desire for practicing it, have resorted to medicine, as at the North, under similar circumstances, they would have adopted the law. Medicine has been the aristocratic profession.
At the time appointed for the amputation, in the case of the driver’s wife, a young gentleman came to see the operation performed. He was the son of a South Carolina rice-planter. For two years he had not heard from his father, and he was very anxious to know whether I had observed the condition of the old homestead on Edisto, when among the Sea Islands, the previous spring. Formerly, he had been a rice-planter himself; but now he had to take up the practice of his profession; and he had thus of late been led to give his attention to some plan for organizing proper medical care for the poor negroes, who now had no kind masters, bound by self-interest, if not by affection, to secure them the best possible attendance. In short—to strip away his delicate circumlocution—he wanted to get a contract on the plantations by which each able-bodied negro would pay him fifty cents a month, (making a net profit of say fifty dollars a month from each plantation,) in return for which he would prescribe for them when they needed anything. He thought that if ten or fifteen plantations would give him such a contract, he would be able to live by it. I thought so too.
Like most South Carolinians he had no difficulty in expressing his political views. As to secession, he supposed it was settled by the argument of force. On that, and on slavery, the only thing the Southern people ought to do was simply to accept the situation. But to whip them back into the Union, and then keep out their representatives till the Northern States had prescribed a rule of suffrage for the South, which they wouldn’t adopt themselves, was a subversion of republican principles. “I’d stay forever without representation, first, and let them govern us as territories. But I tell you what our people will do; I say it with shame; but even South Carolinians, of whom I am particularly ashamed, will do it. They will all submit to whatever is required. They’ll do whatever Congress says they must; and so our only hope is in the noble and unexpected stand Johnson is taking for us.
“After all,” he continued, after a moment’s thought, “it’s very curious that we should be depending on such a man. I’m glad of his stand, because he’s on our side; but what a miserable demagogue he is and always was!”
We waited and waited for the physician in charge of the case, but he broke his engagement completely. When two or three days afterward, he was seen and asked about it, he explained that this young South Carolinian had told him he had been called in as a consulting physician in the case. “I thought it very strange; and I’m very cautious about these consulting physicians with whom I have no acquaintance. I lost a life through one of them once. I always called that death, killing by courtesy; and my conscience won’t stand any more of it; so sir, I stayed away.”