197 An Impartial View (1865)

There is at present no danger of another insurrection against the authority of the United States on a large scale and the people are willing to reconstruct their State governments and to send their senators and representatives to Congress. But as to the moral value of these results, we must not indulge in any delusions. There are two principal points to which I beg to call your attention. In the first place, the rapid return to power and influence of so many of those who but recently were engaged in a bitter war against the Union has had one effect which was certainly not originally contemplated by the government. Treason does, under existing circumstances, not appear odious in the south. The people are not impressed with any sense of its criminality. And, secondly, there is as yet among the southern people an utter absence of national feeling.

The principal cause of that want of national spirit which has existed in the south so long and at last gave birth to the rebellion was that the southern people cherished, cultivated, idolized their peculiar interests and institutions in preference to those which they had in common with the rest of the American people. Hence the importance of the negro question as an integral part of the question of union in general and the question of reconstruction in particular. That the result of the free labor experiment made under circumstances so extremely unfavorable should at once be a perfect success, no reasonable person would expect. Nevertheless a large majority of the southern men with whom I came into contact announced their opinions with so positive an assurance as to produce the impression that their minds were fully made up. In at least nineteen cases of twenty the reply I received to my inquiry about their views on the new system was uniformly this: “You cannot make the negro work without physical compulsion.”

A belief, conviction, or prejudice, or whatever you may call it so widely spread and apparently so deeply rooted as this is certainly calculated to have a very serious influence upon the conduct of the people entertaining it. It naturally produced a desire to preserve slavery in its original form as much and as long as possible. And you may perhaps remember the admission made by one of the provisional governors, over two months after the close of the war, that the people of his State still indulged in a lingering hope slavery might yet be preserved or to introduce into the new system that element of physical compulsion which would make the negro work. Here and there planters succeeded for a limited period to keep their former slaves in ignorance or at least doubt about their new rights. But the main agency employed for that purpose was force and intimidation. In many instances negroes who walked away from the plantations or were found upon the roads were shot or otherwise severely punished, which was calculated to produce the impression among those remaining with their masters that an attempt to escape from slavery would result in certain destruction. A large proportion of the many acts of violence committed is undoubtedly attributable to this motive.

Aside from the assumption that the negro will not work without physical compulsion, there appears to be another popular notion prevalent in the south which stands as no less serious an obstacle in the way of a successful solution of the problem. It is that the negro exists for the special object of raising cotton, rice, and sugar for the whites and that it is illegitimate for him to indulge like other people in the pursuit of his own happiness in his own way. Although it is admitted that he has ceased to be the property of a master, it is not admitted that he has a right to become his own master. An ingrained feeling like this is apt to bring forth that sort of class legislation which produces laws to govern one class with no other view than to benefit another. This tendency can be distinctly traced in the various schemes for regulating labor which here and there see the light.

As to what is commonly termed “reconstruction”, it is not only the political machinery of the States and their constitutional relations to the general government but the whole organism of southern society that must be reconstructed, or rather constructed anew so as to bring it in harmony with the rest of American society. The difficulties of this task are not to be considered overcome when the people of the south take the oath of allegiance and elect governors and legislatures and members of Congress and militia captains. The true nature of the difficulties of the situation is this: The general government of the republic has, by proclaiming the emancipation of the slaves, commenced a great social revolution in the south but has as yet not completed it. Only the negative part of it is accomplished. The slaves are emancipated in point of form but free labor has not yet been put in the place of slavery in point of fact.

In my dispatches from the South I repeatedly expressed the opinion that the people were not yet in a frame of mind to legislate calmly and understandingly upon the subject of free negro labor. When the rebellion was put down they found themselves not only conquered in a political and military sense but economically ruined. In which direction will these people be most apt to turn their eyes? Leaving the prejudice of race out of the question, from early youth they have been acquainted with but one system of labor and with that one system they have been in the habit of identifying all their interests.

They know of no way to help themselves but the one they are accustomed to. Another system of labor is presented to them, which however, owing to circumstances which they do not appreciate, appears at first in an unpromising light. To try it they consider an experiment which they cannot afford to make while their wants are urgent. They have not reasoned calmly enough to convince themselves that the trial must be made. It is indeed not wonderful that, under such circumstances, they should study not how to introduce and develop free labor but how to avoid its introduction and how to return as much and as quickly as possible to something like the old order of things. Nor is it wonderful that such studies should find an expression in their attempts at legislation. But the circumstance that this tendency is natural does not render it less dangerous and objectionable. The practical question presents itself: Is the immediate restoration of the late rebel States to absolute self-control so necessary that it must be done even at the risk of endangering one of the great results of the war and of bringing on in those States insurrection or anarchy, or would it not be better to postpone that restoration until such dangers are passed? If, as long as the change from slavery to free labor is known to the southern people only by its destructive results, these people must be expected to throw obstacles in its way, would it not seem necessary that the movement of social “reconstruction” be kept in the right channel by the hand of the power which originated the change until that change can have disclosed some of its beneficial effects?

One reason why the southern people are so slow in accommodating themselves to the new order of things is that they confidently expect soon to be permitted to regulate matters according to their own notions. Every concession made to them by the government has been taken as an encouragement to persevere in this hope and, unfortunately for them, this hope is nourished by influences from other parts of the country. Hence their anxiety to have their State governments restored at once, to have the troops withdrawn, and the Freedmen’s Bureau abolished although a good many discerning men know well that, in view of the lawless spirit still prevailing, it would be far better for them to have the general order of society firmly maintained by the federal power until things have arrived at a final settlement. If therefore, the national government firmly and unequivocally announces its policy not to give up the control of the free-labor reform until it is finally accomplished, the progress of that reform will undoubtedly be far more rapid and far less difficult than it will be if the attitude of the government is such as to permit contrary hopes to be indulged in.

Source: Report by General Carl Schurz, Senate Executive Documents, 39th Congress, 1st session (1866), I, No. 2, 13-40. https://archive.org/details/americanhistoryt00ivunse/page/452/mode/2up