The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 | Page 8

time, skill in laying out labor, and in
the increase of the wants that stimulate industry, that his early
misgivings as to the capacity and disposition of the freed negro to take
care of himself were finally put to rest. But a disposition to take care of
himself and a disposition to be faithful to the interests of others are two
very different things. At emancipation, the negroes' stimulants to
making money were very strong. In the first impulse of their zeal they

were everywhere erecting chapels and schools, raising large sums for
the support of their ministers and schoolmasters; they were everywhere
building houses, buying land, and laying the foundation of that settled
well-being which time has continually made firmer. Then, too, money
was plentiful, sugar bore a high price, and, notwithstanding the
churlishness of many planters, more, perhaps, were eager to retain their
hands by offering the highest possible wages, and even higher in many
cases than the estates would bear. Nor were the blacks at all averse to
making money. But though the Jamaica negro does not object to work,
he dearly loves to cheat. The keenest Yankee that ever skinned a flint,
cannot approach him in trickiness. This native trait has been sharpened
to the utmost by the experience of slavery, which left him with the
profound conviction that 'Buckra'[7] was fair plunder. The poor fellow
could not be very severely blamed for thinking thus, for certainly he
had been fair plunder for Buckra from time immemorial. Accordingly,
the first few years after emancipation appear on many estates to have
been passed in a continual struggle on the part of the negroes to see
how much they could get out of the planters and how little they could
give in return. They knew they had the whip hand of massa, and they
were not slow to profit by the knowledge. They would saunter to their
work at eight or nine o'clock in the morning, dawdle through it with
intensely provoking unfaithfulness till three or four in the afternoon,
and then would raise a prodigious uproar if they were not paid as
liberally as if they had done an honest day's work. The poor planter
meanwhile was at his wits' end. It was of no use to turn them off and
hire another set, for, like the fox in the fable, he knew he should only
fare the worse. If the estate was large enough to stand the strain for two
or three years, and the manager was a man of self-control enough to
keep his temper, and firmness enough to persevere in a winnowing of
the whole region round about, treating them meanwhile with decency,
and paying them honestly and promptly, he would at last be able to get
a set of trusty hands, and give all the negroes of the neighborhood such
an understanding of him that they would be ready, if they went to work
for him, to leave off cheating, and honestly earn their wages. A friend
of mine took an abandoned estate in 1854, and though for two or three
years he was tortured like a bear at a stake, he succeeded at last, by the
most scrupulous fairness on his own part, and by not tolerating the least

dishonesty in a hand, in creating such a public sentiment among his
laborers, that for their own credit they would themselves expose the
dishonesty of a comrade. Now, he has as many laborers, and profitable
ones, as he needs. But how many planters could be expected to have the
principle or patience to carry out such a course of discipline? The ruin
of the estates, or rather the acceleration of their inevitable ruin, is justly
attributed, in large measure, to the planters, to their imperious bearing
toward the enfranchised blacks, to their harsh expedients for keeping in
dependence the large and much the best class of blacks, who wanted to
become freeholders, to the slackness and unfaithfulness with which the
wages of the people were often paid, to the debasing influences of the
plantation, which drove off the more self-respecting, and to the waste,
dishonesty, and shortsightedness inevitable in the management of
several hundred estates mainly by middlemen. But on the other hand, it
is not to be forgotten that the African barbarian, brought a heathen from
home, and plunged into the deeper darkness of a compulsory
heathenism, rigorously secluded by jealous cupidity from every ray of
intellectual, and, so far as possible, of spiritual light, liable to cruel
punishment if he snatched a few hours from his rest or his leisure to
listen to the missionary, from whom alone he heard words of heavenly
comfort or of human sympathy, condemned to a lifetime of unrequited
labor--it must not be forgotten that he could not