CHAPTER II SOME OF ITS DIFFICULTIES AND FALLACIES SOME OF ITS DIFFICULTIES AND FALLACIES Such was the relation between the whites and the blacks of the South when emancipation came. It remains now to show what changes have taken place since that time; how these changes have come about, and what errors have been committed in dealing with the Race-question which still affect the two races. The dissension which has come between the two races has either been sown since the Negro’s emancipation or is inherent in the new conditions that have arisen. When the war closed, and the emancipation of the Negroes became an established fact, the first pressing necessity in the South was to secure the means of living; for in sections where the armies had been the country had been swept clean, and in all sections the entire labor system was disorganized. The internal management of the whole South, from the general government[Pg 30] of the Confederate States to the domestic arrangement of the simplest household among the slave-holding class, had fallen to pieces. [Pg 30] In most instances—indeed, in all of which the writer has any knowledge—the old masters informed their servants that their homes were still open to them, and that if they were willing to remain and work, they would do all in their power to help them. But to remain, in the first radiant holiday of freedom, was, perhaps, more than could be expected of human nature, and most of the blacks went off for a time, though later a large number of them returned.[15] In a little while the country was filled with an army of occupation, and the Negroes, moved partly by curiosity, partly by the strangeness of the situation, and, perhaps mainly, by the lure of the rations which the Government immediately began to distribute, not unnaturally flocked to the posts of the local garrisons, leaving the fields unworked and the crops to go to destruction. From this time began the change in the Negroes and in the old relation between them[Pg 31] and the whites; a change not great at first, and which never became great until the Negroes had been worked on by the ignorant or designing class who, in one guise or another, became their teachers and leaders. In some places the action of military commanders had already laid the ground for serious misunderstanding by such orders as those which were issued in South Carolina for putting the Negroes in possession of what were, with some irony, termed “abandoned lands.” The idea became widespread
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