Southeastern Georgia

Southeastern Georgia

There is much want and suffering among the residents of
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Southeastern Georgia. I judge they did not very readily accept the situation last spring. However that may be, there is no question about two facts, -- they were despoiled of nearly all their property by the Rebel army, and have made but insignificant crops of all kinds during the present season. I am told that there are at least two thousand respectable white persons in and around Savannah alone who must live mainly on charity through the winter. I know, too, from conversation with many of the Convention delegates from this section, that there are numbers of such persons in nearly all the twenty-five or thirty nearest counties.

Of course this general destitution affects the negroes-even more seriously than the whites. I shall not exaggerate if I say that hundreds of them have already died in and about Savannah of actual starvation. What the combined effect of increased scarcity of food and increased severity of weather will be in the course of the next three months is easily conjectured. The military authorities and the officers of the Freedmen's Bureau have done, and will continue to do, all that is possible to relieve this widely-spread suffering; but they work at a double disadvantage, -- the prejudice of the whites and the ignorance of the blacks hindering their labors.

The negroes are badly treated in some of the counties west and northwest of the city. I fell in, on yesterday, with a gentleman who has been making a horseback tour in six or eight of them, in search of cotton. He says hundreds of negroes have been turned off the plantations during the month, with little or no money, and but a few bushels of corn, and that many of them will be actually forced into thieving to support life. He saw one negro woman horsewhipped very severely for some offence, and saw a negro man who had been shot in the arm for declining, at first, to be turned off the plantation where he had worked all summer. He also tells me that some of the members elect of
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the Legislature are pledged to resist all efforts to give the negro the right to sue or be heard as evidence in the courts.

I heard one man tell another, as I sat in the car while coming down from Augusta, that his father had just turned over forty negroes off his plantation, "with corn enough for a month or so." A South Carolina lady, a refugee in this State, told me of a case in the county adjoining this, on the north: she knew a planter who had turned all the old people off his place, and among them was a very aged woman, without children, who died in less than a week from want.

I hardly need add that the freedmen throughout this section are somewhat disinclined to make contracts for another season. The rice plantation negroes are very slow to comprehend the fact that freedom does not mean idleness, -- being the most degraded specimens of the race I have anywhere found. They generally seem without conscience in respect to the sin of theft, and almost infinite patience will be required to bring them out into an intelligent appreciation of their rights and responsibilities. One large planter tells me that he has offered twelve dollars per month for the season, without being able to get all the labor he wants. This case, however, I believe to be exceptional.

I have fallen in with a gentleman of middle age who was in the Rebel army about three years. He is a lawyer by profession, and is among the leading members of the bar in his section. He has been in the Legislature, and before the war was one of the most popular speakers in his district. He is a man of such ability that he was often invited to speak with Howell Cobb, Ben Hill, Lucius J. Gartrell, and other leading politicians. He claims to have been always a Union man, and says his service in the army was compulsory. He is now, at least, acting the part of a quiet, welldisposed citizen; and his advice is found of value by the officer in command in his city. I speak thus particularly, because I do not deem it advisable to give either his name or
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his residence. On a certain Sunday morning we two fell into some talk on the condition of the State and the prospects of the future. I found him, after a time, quite ready to speak, and he found me equally ready to listen. And this, almost word for word, is what he said: --

"I think you are mistaken, sir. Giving suffrage to the negro would not accomplish the ends you desire to reach, I'm afraid. Perhaps I'm prejudiced against him, but I doubt if suffrage would secure his freedom to him, for I know too well how he can be wound round the finger of a plausible white man. You've been about the State considerable, I reckon, but let me tell you just how I see things; and remember, I'm a native Georgian, and expect to live and die in my State.

"The negro's first want is, not the ballot, but a chance to live, -- yes, sir, a chance to live. You say the government has given him freedom, and that many good men in the North believe he must have the ballot to secure that freedom. I tell you he's not got his freedom yet, and is n't likely to get it right away. Why, he can't even live without the consent of the white man! He has no land; he can make no crops except the white man gives him a chance. He has n't any timber; he can't get a stick of wood without leave from a white man. We crowd him into the fewest possible employments, and then he can scarcely get work anywhere but in the rice-fields and cotton plantations of a white man who has owned him and given up slavery only at the point of the bayonet. Even in this city he can't get a pail of water from a well without asking a white man for the privilege. He can hardly breathe, and he certainly can't live in a house, unless a white man gives his consent. What sort of freedom is that?

"He has freedom in name, but not in fact. In many respects he is worse off than he was before you made him free, for then the property interest of his master protected him, and now his master's hand as well as the hand of everybody else is against him. True, he has the military here for his protection; but there are a thousand things done here every day under the colonel's very nose that he don't know anything about, and that he can't know anything about, -- things he could n't remedy if he did know about 'em. Then, besides, there are hundreds of wrongs
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of which he knows, that he can't reach and can't make right. 'Tis n't such whippings as he told you about that most wrong the negro; it's the small, endless, mean little injustice of every day that's going to kill him off. He's only partially protected now; take the troops away, and his chance would n't be as good as a piece of light-wood in a house on fire.

"Yes, I know there's talk of selling them into slavery again, but I don't see how you got hold of it. I know a good many of these men they've sent to the Legislature; and I know there 'll be private talk this session, even if there is n't open effort, to make the penal code take him back into the condition of slavery. It'll be called `involuntary servitude for the punishment of crime,' but it won't differ much from slavery. Why, I know men right here in this very town who believe in making the breaking of a contract a crime for which the nigger may be sold. They can do it. They can establish any system of crimes and punishments they please. I don't say they will do that, but I know many men who would vote for doing it. You Northern men can't see much of the real feeling here. Get the troops away and the State into Congress, and I give you my solemn word that I believe three fourths of the counties in the State would vote for such a penal code as would practically reduce half the negroes to slavery in less than a year.

"No, I have n't much faith in the idea that capital and labor will reconcile themselves. Things are exceptional here. Our capital is all in the hands of a few, and invested in great plantations. Our labor is all in the hands of a race supremely ignorant, and against whom we all have a strong prejudice. In my opinion, you can't reconcile these two interests unless you put the labor in subjection to the capital, that is, unless you give the white man control of the negro. Of course that can't again be allowed, and therefore there's an almost impassable gulf between the negro and freedom unless the government aids him.

"I'll tell you what I think you should have done. The policy of confiscation should be rigidly carried out at once. Mercy to the individual is death to the State; and in pardoning all the leading men, the President is killing the free State he might have built here. The landed aristocracy have always been the curse of the State, -- I say that as a man born and reared in Georgia
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and bound to her by every possible tie. Till that is broken down there can be no real freedom here for either the negro or the poor white. The result of the war gave you a chance you never will get again to overthrow that monopoly. The negroes and the poor whites are bitter enemies in many respects, but they agree in wanting land. You should have carried out your confiscation policy, -- divided up the great plantations into fifty-acre lots, and sold them to the highest and best bidders. That would have thrown some of the land into other large plantations, but it would have been fair, and would have given the poor whites and the negroes a chance. Give a man a piece of land, let him have a cabin of his own upon his own lot, and then you make him free. Civil rights are good for nothing, the ballot is good for nothing, till you make some men of every class landholders. You must give the negroes and the poor whites a chance to live, -- that's the first thing you should do. The negro has a great notion to get a piece of land, and you should help him along by that notion. What does he want of a vote? He would n't know how to use it, and 't would n't bring him anything to eat or wear if he had a dozen. Give him land, and then you touch his case exactly. He can get none now. There is n't one planter in a thousand who would sell him any; but if you 'd carried out your confiscation policy he could have bought it like anybody else.

"I said in a speech on last Fourth of July that we had always boasted of our country as the land of the free and the home of the oppressed, while in fact it had been the land of the oppressed and the home of the slave. I said, too, that I hoped the war had made it possible for men to be free without regard to color, so that we might boast more truly than England that our flag floats over no slave. I spoke very cautiously, but what little I said was enough to kill me politically in this county. I have sometimes thought I would go North and urge your people to take the first fruits of the victory, but I should not dare to come back here after speaking up there. I've wanted to write a letter to some leading newspaper; but if I should say what I honestly believe, I should be killed if it ever got out that I wrote it. There is n't any freedom of speech here, or anywhere in the State, unless you speak just as the Secessionists please to let you. I should be shot before to-morrow morning if I were to publicly say what I've said
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to you. Take the troops away, and off the great lines of travel there would be a reign of terror in a month. Your test oath is a bad thing. It sets an ugly precedent, and it will keep our best men out of Congress. I wish you could have reached your ends in some other way. But you've got it, and you'll have to enforce it. It will punish many who are not guilty, but it will accomplish final results which I want brought about as much as you do."

I have not met many men in this State who are more competent to speak upon the condition of the people than this captain. His remarks do not apply to this section alone. It seems to me that they are a powerful argument out of the mouth of a Southern advocate of the opposite policy, that the ballot in the hand of every man, white and black, is the only method of securing the rights of the humbler classes of all colors in the South. It will give them the power and eloquence of numbers. It will give them what party leaders will covet, and what the bitterest slave oligarchist in the whole list will not be above stooping to secure. To be sure, some should be owners of land; but the citizen, with the ballot in his hand, is a king in his own right, to whom all things are possible. Ownership of land in fee-simple does not necessarily include command of the ballot; but put into the negro's horny palm the simple right to vote, and he is at once installed into ownership of houses and lands and comforts and luxuries, from which only his own idleness or improvidence can dispossess him.