CHAPTER II.

THE NEGRO.

In the back country of Virginia, and on the borders of North Carolina, it becomes clear that our common English notions of the negro and of slavery are nearer the truth than common notions often are. The London Christy Minstrels are not more given to bursts of laughter of the form "Yah! Yah!" than are the plantation hands. The negroes upon the Virginian farms are not maligned by those who represent them as delighting in the contrast of crimson and yellow, or emerald and skyblue. I have seen them on a Sunday afternoon, dressed in scarlet waistcoats and gold-laced cravats, returning hurriedly from "meetin'," to dance break-downs, and grin from ear to ear for hours at a time. What better should we expect from men to whom until just now it was forbidden, under tremendous penalties, to teach their letters ?

Nothing can force the planters to treat negro freedom save from the comic side. To them the thing is too new for thought, too strange for argument; the ridiculous lies on the surface, and to this they turn as a relief. When I asked a planter how the blacks prospered under freedom, his answer was, "Ours don't much like it. You see, it necessitates monogamy. If I talk about the 'responsibilities of freedom,' Sambo says, 'Dunno 'bout that; please, mass' George, me want two wife.'" Another 'planter tells me, that the only change that he can see in the condition of the negroes since they have been free, is that formerly the supervision of the overseer forced them occasionally to be clean, whereas now nothing on earth can make them wash. He says that, writing lately to his agent, he received an answer to which there was the following postscript: "You ain't sent no

sope. You had better sent sope: niggers is certainly needing sope."

It is easy to treat the negro question in this way; easy, on the other hand, to assert that since history fails us as a guide to the future of the emancipated blacks, we should see what time will bring, and meanwhile set down negroes as a monster class of which nothing is yet known, and, like the compilers of the Catalan map, say of places of which we have no knowledge, "Here be giants, cannibals, and negroes." As long as we possess Jamaica, and are masters upon the African west coast, the negro question is one of moment to ourselves. It is one, too, of mightier import, for it is bound up with the future of the English in America. It is by no means a question to be passed over as a joke. There are five millions of negroes in the United States; juries throughout ten States of the Union are mainly chosen from the black race. The matter is not only serious, but full of interest, political, ethnological, historic. In the South you must take nothing upon trust; believe nothing you are told. Nowhere in the world do "facts" appear so differently to those who view them through spectacles of yellow or of rose. The old planters tell you that all is ruin— that they have but half the hands they need, and from each hand but a half-day's work: the new men, with Northern energy and Northern capital, tell you that they get on very well.

The old Southern planters find it hard to rid themselves of their traditions; they cannot understand free blacks, and slavery makes not only the slaves but the masters shiftless. They have no cash, and the Metayer system gives rise to the suspicion of some fraud, for the negroes are very distrustful of the honesty of their former masters.

The worst of the evils that must inevitably grow out of the sudden emancipation of millions of slaves have not shown themselves as yet, in consequence of the great amount of work that has to be done in the cities of the South, in repairing the ruin caused during the war by fire and want of care, and in building places of business for the Northern capitalists. The negroes of Virginia and North Carolina have flocked down to the towns and ports by the thousand, and find in Norfolk,

Richmond, Wilmington, and Fort Monroe employment for the moment. Their absence from the plantations makes labour dear up country, and this in itself tempts the negroes who renain on land to work sturdily for wages. Seven doliars a month at the then rate equal to one pound-with board and lodging, were being paid to black field-hands on the corn and tobacco farms near Richmond. It is when the city works are over that pressure will come upon the South.

Already the negroes are beginning to ask for land, and they complain loudly that none of the confiscated lands have been assigned to them. "Ef yer dun gib us de land, reckon de ole massas 'll stari de niggahs," was a plain, straightforward summary of the negro view of the negro question, given me by a white-bearded old "uncle" in Richmond, and backed by every black man within hearing in a chorus of "Dat's true, for shore ;" but I found up the country, that the planters are afraid to let the negroes own or farm for themselves the smallest plot of land, for fear that they should sell ten times as much as they grew, stealing their "crop" from the granaries of their employers.

At a farm near Petersburg, owned by a Northern capitalist, 1000 acres, which before emancipation had been tilled by 100 slaves, now needed, I was told, but forty freedmen for their cultivation; but when I reached the place, I found that the former number included old people and women, while the forty were all hale men. The men were paid upon the tally system. A card was given them for each day's work, which was accepted at the plantation store in payment for goods supplied, and at the end of the month money was paid for the remaining tickets. The planters say that the field hands will not support their old people; but this means only that, like white folk, they try to make as much money as they can, and know that if they plead the wants of their wives and children, the whites will keep their aged folk.

That the negro slaves were lazy, thriftless, unchaste, and thieves, is true; but it is as slaves, and not as negroes, that they were all these things; and, after all, the effects of slavery upon the slave are less terrible than its effects upon the master. The moral condition to which the planter class had been

brought by slavery, shows out plainly in the speeches of the rebel leaders. Alexander H. Stephens, Vice-President of the Confederacy, declared in 1861 that "Slavery is the natural and moral condition of the negro. . . . I cannot permit myself to doubt," he went on, "the ultimate success of a full recognition of this principle throughout the civilized and enlightened world. . . . negro slavery is in its infancy."

There is reason to believe that the American negroes will justify the hopes of their friends: they have made the best of every chance that has been given them as yet; they were good soldiers, they are eager to learn their letters, they are steady at their work :-in Barbadoes they are industrious and well-conducted; in La Plata they are exemplary citizens. In America the coloured labourer has had no motive to be industrious.

General Grant assured me of the great aptness at soldiering shown by the negro troops. In battle they displayed extraordinary courage, but if their officers were picked off they could not stand a charge; no more, he said, could their Southern masters. The power of standing firm after the luss of leaders is possessed only by regiments where every private is as good as his captain and colonel, such as the North-western and New England volunteers.

Before I left Richmond, I had one morning fourd my way into a school for the younger blacks. There were as many present as the forms would hold—sixty, perhaps, in all—and three wounded New England soldiers, with pale thin faces, were patiently teaching them to write. The boys seemed quick and apt enough, but they were very raw-only a week or two in the school. Since the time when Oberlin first proclaimed the potential equality of the race, by admitting negroes as freely as white men and women to the college, the negroes have never been backward to learn.

It must not be supposed that the negro is wanting in abilities of a certain kind. Even in the imbecility of the Congo dance we note his unrivalled mimetic power. The religious side of the negro character is full of weird suggestiveness; but superstition, everywhere the handmaid of ignorance, is rife among the black plantation-hands. It is thought that the punishment with which the shameful rites of Obi-worship have been visited

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has proved, even in the city of New Orleans, insufficient to prevent them. Charges of witchcraft are as common in Virginia as in Orissa in the Carolinas, as in Central India, the use of poison is often sought to work out the events foretold by some noted sorceress. In no direction can the matter be followed out to its conclusions without bringing us face to face with the sad fact, that the faults of the plantation negro are every one of them traceable to the vices of the slavery system, and that the Americans of to-day are suffering beyond measure for evils for which our forefathers are responsible. We ourselves are not guiltless of wrong-doing in this matter if it is still impossible openly to advocate slavery in England, it has at least become a habit persistently to write down freedom. We are no longer told that God made the blacks to be slaves, but we are bade remember that they cannot prosper under emancipation. All mention of Barbadoes is suppressed, but we have daily homilies on the condition of Jamaica. The negro question in America is briefly this is there, on the one hand, reason to fear that, dollars applied to land decreasing while black mouths to be fed increase, the Southern States will become an American Jamaica? is there, on the other hand, ground for the hope that the negroes may be found not incapable of the citizenship of the United States? The former of these two questions is the more difficult, and to some extent involves the latter can cotton, can sugar, can rice, can coffee, can tobacco, be raised by white field-hands? If not, can they be raised with profit by black free labour? Can co-operative planting, directed by negro overlookers, possibly succeed, or must the farm be ruled by white capitalists, agents, and overseers ?

It is asserted that the negro will not work without compulsion; but the same may be said of the European. There is compulsion of many kinds. The emancipated negro may still be forced to work-forced as the white man is forced in this and other lands, by the alternative, work or starve! This forcing, however, may not be confined to that which the laws of natural increase lead us to expect; it may be stimulated by bounties on immigration.

The negro is not, it would seem, to have a monopoly of