The leading men generally invite immigration, and are honest and sincere in their expression of desire for the influx of new life. They will, I am sure, do all they can to make the States safe and inviting for immigrants. In time even South Carolina will be as free as New York; but at present the masses of the people have little disposition of welcome for Northerners.
The late private soldiers of the Rebel army are the best class of citizens in the South. Generally speaking, they are disposed to go to work, though few of them know what work to do or to undertake. The bad classes are nearly all the women, who are as rebellious and as malignant as ever; most of the preachers, who are as hostile now as they were three years ago; many of the Rebel ex-officers who did n’t see active service; and more than half the young men who managed in one way or another to keep out of the army.
I often had occasion to notice, both in Georgia and the Carolinas, the wide and pitiful difference between the residents of the cities and large towns and the residents of the country. There is no homogeneity, but everywhere a rigid spirit of caste. The longings of South Carolina are essentially monarchical rather than republican; even the common people have become so debauched in loyalty that very many of them would readily accept the creation of orders of nobility. In Georgia there is something less of this spirit; but the upper classes continually assert their right to rule, and the middle and lower classes have no ability to free themselves. The whole structure of society is full of separating walls; and it will sadden the heart of any Northern man, who travels in either of these three States, to see how poor and meagre and narrow a thing life is to all the country people. Even with the best class of townsfolk it lacks very much of the depth and breadth and fruitfulness of our Northern life, while with these others it is hardly less materialistic than that of their own mules and horses. Thus Charleston has much intelligence and considerable genuine culture; but go twenty miles away and you are in the land of the barbarians. So Raleigh is a city in which there is love of beauty and interest in education; but the common people of the county are, at least, forty years behind the same class of people in Vermont. Moreover, in Macon are many very fine residences, and the city may boast of its gentility and its respect for the nourishing elegances of life; but a dozen miles out are large neighborhoods not yet half civilized. The contrast between the inhabitants of the cities and those of the country is hardly less striking than that between the various classes constituting the body of the common people. Going from one county into another is frequently going into a foreign country. Travel continually brings novelty, but with that always came pain. Till all these hateful walls of caste are thrown down, we can have neither intelligent love of liberty, decent respect for justice, nor enlightened devotion to the idea of national unity. “Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles?”
It has been the purpose of the ruling class apparently to build new barriers between themselves and the common people rather than tear away any of those already existing. I think no one can understand the actual condition of the mass of the whites of Georgia and the Carolinas, except by some daily contact with them. The injustice done to three fourths of them was hardly less than that done to all the blacks. There were two kinds of slavery, and negro slavery was only more wicked and debasing than white slavery. Nine of every ten white men in South Carolina had almost as little to do with even State affairs as the negroes had. Men talk of plans of reconstruction. That is the best plan which proposes to do most for the common people. Till civilization has been carried down into the homes and hearts of all classes, we shall have neither regard for humanity nor respect for the rights of the citizen.
Any plan of reconstruction is wrong that does not assure toleration of opinion and the elevation of the common people to the consciousness that ours is a republican form of government. Whether they are technically in the Union or out of the Union, it is the national duty to deal with these States in such manner as will most surely exalt the lower and middle classes of their inhabitants. The nation must teach them a knowledge of their own rights, while it also teaches them respect for its rights and the rights of man as man.
Stopping for two or three days in some back county, I was always seeming to have drifted away from the world which held Illinois and Ohio and Massachusetts. The difficulty in keeping connection with our civilization did not so much lie in the fact that the whole structure of daily life is unlike ours, nor in the other fact that I was forced to hear the Union and all loyal men reviled, as in the greater fact that the people are utterly without knowledge. There is everywhere a lack of intellectual activity; while as for schools, books, newspapers, why, one may almost say there are none outside the cities and towns!
Had schools abounded six years ago, I doubt if the masses of the South could have been forced into the war. “Why, d—n it,” said an Americus man to me, “the Union never hurt me, but I was the hottest Secessionist I reckon you ever saw. Howell Cobb made me so.” Talking with a Columbia gentleman about sectional characteristics he said, “We had one advantage over you: your people knew all about the war, while ours only knew they were fighting for their homes.” I asked, “But could you have made your men fight at all if they had understood the whole question at issue?” He answered, “O, when I said we had the advantage, I spoke from a military stand-point.”
In the important town of Charlotte, North Carolina, I found a white man who owned the comfortable house in which he lived, who had a wife and three half-grown children, and yet had never taken a newspaper in his life. He thought they were handy for wrapping purposes, but he could n’t see why anybody wanted to bother with the reading of them. He knew some folks spent money for them, but he also knew a-many houses where none had ever been seen. In that State I found several persons—whites, and not of the “clay-eater” class either—who never had been inside a school-house, and who did n’t mean to ’low their children to go inside one. In the upper part of South Carolina I stopped one night at the house of a moderately well-to-do farmer who never had owned any book but a Testament, and that was given to him. When I expressed some surprise at this fact, he assured me that he was as well off as some other people thereabouts. Between Augusta and Milledgeville I rode in a stage-coach in which were two of the delegates of the Georgia Convention. When I said that I hoped the day would soon come in which school-houses would be as numerous in Georgia as in Massachusetts, one of them answered, “Well, I hope it ’ll never come; popular education is all a d—n humbug, in my judgment”; whereupon the other responded, “That ’s my opinion too.” These are exceptional cases, I am aware, but they truly index the situation of thousands of persons.
The Southern newspapers generally have a large advertising patronage, and appear to be prospering quite to the satisfaction of their proprietors. But they are all local in character, and most of them are intensely Southern in tone; while as sources of general information, and particularly of political information, they are beneath notice. The Southern colleges have mostly suspended operations on account of the war. Efforts are making to reopen them, and those in Georgia will probably be in working order by next spring. But that best fruit of modern civilization, so plentiful in the North,—the common-school house,—is almost wholly unknown in the Carolinas and Georgia. I have scarcely seen a dozen in my whole journey, while a trip of the same number of miles in New York and New England would probably show me five hundred. Underneath this one little fact lies the whole cause of the war.
The situation is horrible enough when the full force of this fact is comprehended; yet there is a still lower deep,—there is small desire, even feeble longing, for schools and books and newspapers. The chief end of man seems to have been “to own a nigger.” The great majority of the common people know next to nothing, either of history or contemporaneous affairs; either of the principles of government or the acts of their own government; either of the work or thought of the present age; either of the desires or the purposes of nations. They get their information a
nd their opinions mainly from the local office-seekers. It is therefore inevitable that the one should be meagre and the other narrow. It is this general ignorance, and this general indifference to knowledge, that make a Southern trip such wearisome work. You can touch the masses with few of the appeals by which we move our own people. There is very little aspiration for larger life; and, more than that, there is almost no opportunity for its attainment. That education is the stairway to a nobler existence is a fact which they either fail to comprehend or to which they are wholly indifferent.
Where there is such a spirit of caste, where the ruling class has a personal interest in fostering prejudice, where the masses are in such an inert condition, where ignorance so generally prevails, where there is so little ambition for betterment, where life is so hard and material in its tone, it is not strange to find much hatred and contempt. Ignorance is generally cruel and frequently brutal. The political leaders of this people have apparently indoctrinated them with the notion that they are superior to any other class in the country. Hence there is usually very little effort to conceal the prevalent scorn of the Yankee,—this term being applied to the citizen of any Northern State. Any plan of reconstruction is wrong that tends to leave these old leaders in power. A few of them give certain evidence of a change of heart,—by some means save these for the sore and troubled future; but for the others, the men who not only brought on the war, but ruined the mental and moral force of their people before unfurling the banner of Rebellion,—for these there should never any more be place or countenance among honest and humane and patriotic people. When the nation gives them life and a chance for its continuance, it shows all the magnanimity that humanity can in such case afford.
In North Carolina there is a great deal of something that calls itself Unionism; but I know nothing more like the apples of Sodom than most of this North Carolina Unionism. It is a cheat, a will-o’-the-wisp, and any man who trusts it will meet with overthrow. There may be in it the seed of loyalty, but woe to him who mistakes the germ for the ripened fruit. In all sections of the State I found abundant hatred of some leading or local Secessionist; but how full of promise for the new era of national life is the Unionism which rests only on this foundation?
In South Carolina there is very little pretence of love for the Union, but everywhere a passionate devotion to the State; and the common sentiment holds that man guilty of treason who prefers the United States to South Carolina. There is no occasion to wonder at the admiration of the people for Wade Hampton, for he is the very exemplar of their spirit,—of their proud and narrow and domineering spirit. “It is our duty,” he says, in a letter which he has recently addressed to the people of the State,—“it is our duty to support the President of the United States so long as he manifests a disposition to restore all our rights as a sovereign State.” That sentence will forever stand as a model of cool arrogance, and yet it is in full accord with the spirit of the South-Carolinians. The war has taught them that the physical force of the nation cannot be resisted, and they will be obedient to the letter of the law; but the whole current of their lives flows in direct antagonism to its spirit.
In Georgia there is something worse than sham Unionism or cold acquiescence in the issue of battle: it is the universally prevalent doctrine of the supremacy of the State. In South Carolina, a few men stood up against the storm, but in Georgia that man is hopelessly dead who doubted or faltered. The common sense of all classes pushes the necessity of allegiance to the State into the domain of morals as well as into that of politics; and he who did not “go with the State” in the Rebellion is held to have committed the unpardonable sin. At Macon I met a man who was one of the leading Unionists in the winter of 1860–61. He told me how he suffered then for his hostility to secession, and yet he added, “I should have considered myself forever disgraced, if I had n’t heartily gone with the State when she decided to fight.” I believe it is the concurrent testimony of all careful travellers in Georgia, that there is everywhere only cold toleration for the idea of national sovereignty, and but little pride in the strength and glory and renown of the United States of America.
Much is said of the hypocrisy of the South. I found but little of it anywhere. The North-Carolinian calls himself a Unionist, but he makes no special pretence of love for the Union. He desires many favors, but he asks them generally on the ground that he hated the Secessionists. He expects the nation to recognize rare virtue in that hatred, and hopes it may win for his State the restoration of her political rights; but he wears his mask of nationality so lightly that there is no difficulty in removing it. The South-Carolinian demands only something less than he did in the days before the war, but he offers no plea of Unionism as a guaranty for the future. He rests his case on the assumption that he has fully acquiesced in the results of the war, and he honestly believes that he has so acquiesced. His confidence in South Carolina is so supreme that he fails to see how much the conflict meant. He walks by such light as he has, and cannot yet believe that destiny has decreed his State a secondary place in the Union. The Georgian began by believing that Rebellion in the interest of slavery was honorable, and the result of the war has not changed his opinion. He is anxious for readmission to fellowship with New York and Pennsylvania and Connecticut, but he supports his application by little claim of community of interest with other States. His spirit is hard and uncompromising; he demands rights, but does not ask favors; and he is confident that Georgia is fully as important to the United States as they are to Georgia.
The fact that such a large proportion of the offices in the gift of the people of these States have been filled with men who were officers in the Rebel army does not in itself furnish any argument against the good disposition of the people. The sentiment which voluntarily confers honor on a man who has shown personal bravery, who has been plucky and daring and gallant, is one we cannot afford to crush,—it is one of the strong moral forces of a nation, and deserves nurture rather than condemnation. Moreover, in not a few cases these ex-officers are of better will and purpose toward the government than any other men in their respective localities. It may not be pleasant to us to recognize this fact; but I am confident that we shall make sure progress toward securing domestic tranquillity and the general welfare just in proportion as we act upon it.
The other fact, that almost every candidate was defeated who did n’t “go with the State” during the war is one of serious import. It indicates a spirit of defiance to the nation, of determined opposition to the principle of national unity. So long as this spirit prevails, we can hope for no sound peace. It will not again marshal armies in the field. Such a thing is utterly beyond the range of possibilities so far as this generation or the next is concerned. A few untamed fire-eaters will bluster, and local politicians will brag, but the leaders are wiser than they were, and the people have had enough of war. But there are things quite as bad as open war; and one of these is a sullen and relentless antagonism to the idea of national sovereignty,—from which will breed passionate devotion to local interests, unending persecution of the freedmen, never-ceasing clamor in behalf of State rights, and continual effort to break away from the solemn obligations of the national debt.
That is the true plan of reconstruction which makes haste very slowly. It does not comport with the character of our government to exact pledges of any State which are not exacted of all. The one sole needful condition is, that each State establish a government whereby all civil rights at least shall be assured in their fullest extent to every citizen. The Union is no Union, unless there is equality of privileges among the States. When Georgia and the Carolinas establish governments republican in fact as well as in form, they will have brought themselves into harmony with the national will, and may justly demand readmission to their former political relations in the Union. It is no time for passion or bitterness, and it does not become our manhood to do anything for revenge. Let us have peace and kindly feeling; yet, that our peace may be no sham or shal
low affair, it is painfully essential that we keep these States awhile within national control, in order to aid the few wise and just men therein who are fighting the great fight with stubborn prejudice and hidebound custom. Any plan of reconstruction is wrong which accepts forced submission as genuine loyalty or even as cheerful acquiescence in the national desire and purpose.
Prior to the war we heard continually of the love of the master for his slave, and the love of the slave for his master. There was also much talk to the effect that the negro lived in the midst of pleasant surroundings, and had no desire to change his situation. It was asserted that he delighted in a state of dependence, and throve on the universal favor of the whites. Some of this language we conjectured might be extravagant; but to the single fact that there was universal good-will between the two classes every Southern white person bore evidence. So, too, during my trip through Georgia and the Carolinas they have generally seemed anxious to convince me that the blacks behaved well during the war,—kept at their old tasks, labored cheerfully and faithfully, did not show a disposition to be lawless, and were rarely guilty of acts of violence, even in sections where there were many women and children, and but few white men.
Yet I found everywhere now the most direct antagonism between the two classes. The whites charge generally that the negro is idle and at the bottom of all local disturbance, and credit him with most of the vices and very few of the virtues of humanity. The negroes charge that the whites are revengeful, and intend to cheat the laboring class at every opportunity, and credit them with neither good purposes nor kindly hearts. This present and positive hostility of each class to the other is a fact that will sorely perplex any Northern man travelling in either of these States. One would say, that, if there had formerly been such pleasant relations between them, there ought now to be mutual sympathy and forbearance, instead of mutual distrust and antagonism. One would say, too, that self-interest, the common interest of capital and labor, ought to keep them in harmony; while the fact is, that this very interest appears to put them in an attitude of partial defiance toward each other. I believe the most charitable traveller must come to the conclusion that the professed love of the whites for the blacks was mostly a monstrous sham or a downright false pretence. For myself, I judge that it was nothing less than an arrant humbug.
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