What new versions of law and justice the Mayor would have given, alas! were lost to the jurisprudence of the Sea Islands, and the case came to an ignoble ending; for Gawky Sam’s father had grown frightened at these successive additions to the fine, and the hen had been hastily carried back to the coop whence she was originally stolen. The Mayor, accordingly, imposed a fine of a dollar for the crime of the theft, and peace reigned again among the Aunties of Mitchelville.
Ludicrous as was the solemnity of these proceedings, they were, nevertheless, of value, as showing inherent ideas of justice. In the days of slavery every negro believed it right to steal, for was he not stolen, bodily, from himself? And from taking “Massa’s” property, it was no very hard step to taking that of other people. But with freedom have come better practices, and already we are assured that theft is comparatively rare.
Whoever has read what I have written about the cotton fields of St. Helena will need no assurance that another cardinal sin of the slave, his laziness—“inborn and ineradicable,” as we were always told by his masters—is likewise disappearing under the stimulus of freedom and necessity. Dishonesty and indolence, then, were the creation of slavery, not the necessary and constitutional faults of the negro character. May it not be reasonably hoped that the other great sin of the slave, his licentiousness, will yet be found to have its origin in the same system, and its end in the responsibilities of educated freedom?
Mrs. Stowe, in one of the most striking passages of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, suggests a comparison between Eva and Topsy, the one, the child of refined and educated parents, and coming of a race in which refinement and education had bettered the blood from generation to generation; the other, born of ages of oppression, barbarism, bestial ignorance and sin. The comparison might be pushed to a conclusion Mrs. Stowe does not draw. How can the brain, thus cramped and debased from father to son, at one bound, rise to the hight of the Anglo-Saxon mind, which these generations of culture have been broadening and strengthening? Enthusiasts tell us that the negro mind is to-day as good as that of the white; but I doubt if ten or fifteen years of education on these Sea Islands will prove it. They seem to me, in some cases, to have as much intellect as the whites; but it is in the rough, is torpid, needs to be vitalized and quickened, and brought under control. Things which require no strong or complex intellectual effort—how to read, how to manage their farms, or bargain for the sale of watermelons—they learn quickly and well. An average negro child will learn its letters, and read cleverly in the First Reader, in three months. The average of white children do little, if any, better. But the negroes who are to make rapid progress in the higher branches, or who are to be proficients in skilled labor, have not yet been found abundantly on the Sea Islands.
So their moral faculties seem to me to be torpid, like their minds. Their religion seems rather a paroxysm of the affections than an intelligent conviction; and it is only beginning to lay hold upon the realities of their daily lives. Their affections, whether toward God or toward their neighbors, are unquestionably lively, but of doubtful depth. One sees, however, scarcely a trace of revengeful feeling toward their old masters. If good passions are shallow, so, too, are bad ones. Nor do I see any element whatever out of which a negro insurrection could now, or ever could have been, evolved. The enterprise which risks present pains and dangers for future good is not now a characteristic of the Sea-Island negroes. If it come at all, it must come—as it has not yet, to some of the most cultivated peoples in the world—with the education and aspirations of comparative freedom.
Forts at Savannah.—Page [131].
CHAPTER XIII.
Pulaski—Savannah—Bonaventure.
From Hilton Head to Savannah, an inner passage among the Sea Islands is practicable for all vessels of light draught. General Gillmore, who accompanied us to Savannah with his staff, took our whole party on board his headquarters boat, a spacious side-wheel river steamer; and, about the middle of the afternoon we pushed off from the Hilton Head wharf, and were soon steaming rapidly along Scull Creek. On either side was the lush vegetation and low, flat scenery of the islands. Cultivated plantations were nearly always in sight; but they were mainly given over to the negroes, and but few of the former residences of the planters could now be seen. A magnificent beach on our left extended, apparently, half way from Fort Pulaski to Hilton Head; and the staff officers talked appetizingly of gallops along its entire length. During the whole afternoon we did not see one white man on the plantations; nor, probably, would we if we had searched them carefully. They have all fled to the misty, undefined “interior,” and abandoned the islands to the “niggers.”