In most cases, the hostility to the Freedman’s Bureau seemed to be general in its nature, not specific. Men regarded it as tyrannical and humiliating that Government hirelings should be sent among them to supervise their relations with their old slaves; but, in practice, they were very glad of the supervision. It was a degrading system, they argued, but, so long as it existed, the negroes could not be controlled except by the favor of the Bureau agents, “and so, of co’se, we have to use them.” When the agents were removed from this prevailing respect for their powers, few opportunities were lost to show them the estimation in which they were held.
A steamboat was lying at the New Orleans levee, discharging a quantity of very miscellaneous freight. Among it was what the captain called “a lot of nigger’s plunder.” The entire worldly effects of a negro family seemed to be on board with little confinement from trunks or boxes. Half a dozen squalling chickens were carried over the gang-plank by the old auntie, in one hand, while in the other was held a squalling picaninny. A bundle of very dirty and ragged bed-clothes, tied up with the bed-cord, came next. There was a bedstead, apparently made with an ax, and a table, on which no other tool could by any chance have been employed. A lot of broken dishes, pots, and kettles followed. Then came an old bureau. The top drawer was gone, the bottom drawer was gone, the middle one had the knobs broken off, the frame remained to show that a looking-glass had once surmounted it, and two of the feet were broken off.
“By the powers, there’s the Freedman’s Bureau,” exclaimed one of the group of Southern spectators standing on the guards. An agent of the Freedman’s Bureau, in uniform, was within hearing, and the taunting laugh that rang over the boat seemed especially meant for his ears. To have resented, or noticed it, in that crowd, would have been at least foolish, if not worse. The agent was fortunate to escape with no more pointed expression of the public opinion concerning his office and duties.
Little change in the actual Unionism of the people could be seen since the surrender. In the year that had intervened, they had grown bolder, as they had come to realize the lengths to which they might safely go. They were “loyal” in May, 1865, in the sense of enforced submission to the Government, and they are loyal in the same sense in May, 1866. At neither time has the loyalty of the most had any wider meaning. But scarcely any dream of further opposition to the Government. A “war within the Union,” for their rights, seems now to be the universal policy—a war in which they will act as a unit with whatever party at the North favors the fewest possible changes from the old order of things, and leaves them most at liberty to regulate their domestic institutions in their own way.
Nothing but the prevalent sense of the insecurity attending all Southern movements, during the political and social chaos that followed the surrender, prevented a large immigration from the North in the winter of 1865-’66. That the openings which the South presents for Northern capital and industry are unsurpassed, has been sufficiently illustrated. With a capital of a few thousand dollars, and a personal supervision of his work, a Northern farmer, devoting himself to cotton-growing, may count with safety on a net profit of fifty per cent, on his investment. With a good year and a good location he may do much better. Through Tennessee and the same latitudes, east and west, he will find a climate not very greatly different from his own, and a soil adapted to Northern cereals as well as to the Southern staple. The pine forests still embower untold riches; the cypress swamps of the lower Mississippi and its tributaries, only await the advent of Northern lumbermen to be converted into gold-mines; the mineral resources of Northern Georgia and Alabama, in spite of the war’s developments, are yet as attractive as those that are drawing emigration into the uninhabited wilds across the Rocky Mountains. But capital and labor—especially agricultural labor—demand security.
Along the great highways of travel in the South, I judge investments by Northern men to be nearly as safe as they could be anywhere. The great cotton plantations bordering the Mississippi are largely in the hands of Northern lessees; and few, if any of them have experienced the slightest difficulty from any hostility of the inhabitants. So, along the great lines of railroad, and through regions not too remote from the tide of travel and trade, there are no complaints. It is chiefly in remote sections, far from railroads or mails, and isolated among communities of intense Southern prejudices, that Northern men have had trouble.
Whenever it is desirable to settle in such localities, it should be done in small associations. A dozen families, living near each other, would be abundantly able to protect themselves almost anywhere in the cotton-growing States.
Whoever contemplates going South, in time for the operations of 1867, should not delay his first visit later than November, 1866. Between October and January last, the prices of lands through the South, either for lease or sale, advanced fully fifty per cent. Upland cotton plantations can now be bought, in most localities, in tracts of from one hundred up to five thousand acres, for from eight to twenty dollars per acre; and the richest Mississippi and Red River bottom plantations do not command, in most cases, over forty dollars; the price being generally reckoned only on the open land prepared for the culture of cotton. But purchases should be made and arrangements for labor perfected before the New Year’s rush comes on.