THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
solution of the problem of negro free labor would be easy, but that it could be accomplished, or at least that a shrewd Yankee, blessed with a good stock of common sense and energy and experience in the ways of free labor, and unhampered by any prejudice as to what the negro could or could not do with or without physical compulsion, might be just the person to point out the way in which that problem could best be solved.
I am far from saying that all Northern men who undertook the management of Southern plantations were equally successful; nor is it probable that all were as capable as our lessee at Beaufort. I met, indeed, in the course of my tour of investigation, an Iowa farmer who managed a large cotton plantation in another State on the same principles and had a similar story of success to tell. Another Northern man who had a timber-cutting contract to fill, told me that the negroes he employed were equal to the best laborers he had ever had to do with, while a contractor for railroad work near a town complained to me that many of the negroes he had engaged were so much attracted by the delights of town-life that they could not be depended upon for steady work. That Southern white men should quite generally have been rather querulous as to the new order of things did not at all surprise me. Their situation was indeed trying in the extreme. It could not have been more unpropitious for a calm contemplation of the requirements of the time.
I shall never forget my first impressions of Charleston. We ran into Charleston Harbor early in the morning. As we passed Fort Sumter—then a shapeless mass of brick and rubbish into which the bombardment had battered the old masonry—the city of Charleston lay open to our view; on the left a row of more or less elegant dwellings, on the right such buildings as are usually seen in the neighborhood of
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