as a freeman; and just there was the rub. It was perhaps too much to
expect of the Southern slaveholders, or of Southern society generally,
that a clear judgment of the new order of things should have come to
them at once. The total overturning 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 for a time 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.


_Restless Foot-loose Negroes_

It is equally natural that the negro population of the South should at
that time have been unusually restless. I have already mentioned the
fact that during the Civil War the bulk of the slave population
remained quietly at work on the plantations, except in districts
touched by the operations of the armies. Had negro slaves not done so,
the Rebellion would not have survived its first year. They presented
the remarkable spectacle of an enslaved race doing slaves' work to
sustain a government and an army fighting for the perpetuation of its
enslavement. Some colored people did, indeed, escape from the
plantations and run into the Union lines where our troops were within
reach, and some of their young men enlisted in the Union army as