culture. I found a very few instances of original secessionists also
manifesting a willingness to give the free-labor experiment a fair trial.
I can represent the sentiments of this small class in no better way than
by quoting the language used by an Alabama judge in a conversation with
me. "I am one of the most thoroughly whipped men in the south," said he;
"I am a genuine old secessionist, and I believe now, as I always did, we
had the constitutional right to secede. But the war has settled that
matter, and it is all over now. As to this thing of free negro labor, I do
not believe in it, but I will give it a fair trial. I have a plantation
and am going to make contracts with my hands, and then I want a real
Yankee to run the machine for me; not one of your New Yorkers or
Pennsylvanians, but the genuine article from Massachusetts or Vermont--one
who can not only farm, but sing psalms and pray, and teach school--a real
abolitionist, who believes in the thing just as I don't believe in it. If
he does not succeed, I shall consider it proof conclusive that you are
wrong and I am right."

I regret to say that views and intentions so reasonable I found confined
to a small minority. 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. As Colonel Thomas,
assistant commissioner of the Freedmen's Bureau in Mississippi, in a
letter addressed to me, very pungently expresses it: "The whites esteem
the blacks their property by natural right, and, however much they may