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The underlying causes of this situation are complicated but
discernible. And one of the chief, outside the carelessness of
the nation in letting the slave start with nothing, is the
widespread opinion among the merchants and employers of
the Black Belt that only by the slavery of debt can the Negro
be kept at work. Without doubt, some pressure was necessary
at the beginning of the free-labor system to keep the listless
and lazy at work; and even to-day the mass of the Negro
laborers need stricter guardianship than most Northern laborers.
Behind this honest and widespread opinion dishonesty
and cheating of the ignorant laborers have a good chance to
take refuge. And to all this must be added the obvious fact
that a slave ancestry and a system of unrequited toil has not
improved the efficiency or temper of the mass of black
laborers. Nor is this peculiar to Sambo; it has in history been
just as true of John and Hans, of Jacques and Pat, of all
ground-down peasantries. Such is the situation of the mass of
the Negroes in the Black Belt to-day; and they are thinking
about it. Crime, and a cheap and dangerous socialism, are the
inevitable results of this pondering. I see now that ragged
black man sitting on a log, aimlessly whittling a stick. He
muttered to me with the murmur of many ages, when he said:
"White man sit down whole year; Nigger work day and night
and make crop; Nigger hardly gits bread and meat; white man
sittin' down gits all. It's wrong." And what do the better
classes of Negroes do to improve their situation? One of two
things: if any way possible, they buy land; if not, they
migrate to town. Just as centuries ago it was no easy thing for
the serf to escape into the freedom of town-life, even so
to-day there are hindrances laid in the way of county laborers.
In considerable parts of all the Gulf States, and especially in
Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas, the Negroes on the
plantations in the back-country districts are still held at forced
labor practically without wages. Especially is this true in
districts where the farmers are composed of the more ignorant
class of poor whites, and the Negroes are beyond the reach of
schools and intercourse with their advancing fellows. If such
a peon should run away, the sheriff, elected by white suffrage,
can usually be depended on to catch the fugitive, return
him, and ask no questions. If he escape to another county, a
charge of petty thieving, easily true, can be depended upon to
secure his return. Even if some unduly officious person insist
upon a trial, neighborly comity will probably make his conviction
sure, and then the labor due the county can easily be
bought by the master. Such a system is impossible in the
more civilized parts of the South, or near the large towns and
cities; but in those vast stretches of land beyond the telegraph
and the newspaper the spirit of the Thirteenth Amendment is
sadly broken. This represents the lowest economic depths of
the black American peasant; and in a study of the rise and
condition of the Negro freeholder we must trace his economic
progress from the modern serfdom.
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