THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
the question: “Well, Doctor, how does the insurrection in your county come on?”
I have here retold this story as I heard it from the lips of the General, who was a man of veracity, good sense, and sincere sympathy with the Southern people. I myself once had an argument with a Georgia planter who vociferously insisted that one of his negro laborers who objected to a whipping had thereby furnished the most conclusive proof of his unfitness for freedom. And such statements were constantly reinforced by further assertion, that they, the Southern whites, understood the negro and knew how to treat him, and that we of the North did not and never would. This might have been true in one sense, but not true in another. The Southerner knew better than the Northerner how to treat the negro as a slave. But it did not follow that he knew best how to treat the negro as a freedman. And just there was the rub. It was, perhaps, too much to expect of the Southern slave-holders or of Southern society generally, that a clear judgment of the new order of things should have come to them at once. The total overturn of the whole labor system of a country accomplished suddenly, without preparation or general transition, is a tremendous revolution, a terrible wrench, well apt to confuse men's minds. It should not have surprised any fair-minded person that many Southern people should, for a time, have clung to the accustomed idea that the landowner must also own the black man tilling his land, and that any assertion of freedom of action on the part of that black man was insubordination equivalent to criminal revolt, and any dissent by the black man from the employer's opinion or taste, intolerable insolence. Nor should it be forgotten that the urgent necessity of negro labor for that summer's crop could hardly fail to sharpen the nervous tension then disquieting Southern society.
[ 173 ]
