admit that the relations of masters and slaves have been destroyed by the
war and by the President's emancipation proclamation, they still have an
ingrained feeling that the blacks at large belong to the whites at large,
and whenever opportunity serves, they treat the colored people just as
their profit, caprice or passion may dictate." (Accompanying document No.
27.) 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.

Immediately after the emancipation of the slaves, when the general
confusion was most perplexing, the prevalent desire among the whites
seemed to be, if they could not retain their negroes as slaves, to get rid
of them entirely. Wild speculations were indulged in, how to remove the
colored population at once and to import white laborers to fill its place;
how to obtain a sufficient supply of coolies, &c., &c. Even at the present
moment the removal of the freedmen is strongly advocated by those who have
the traditional horror of a free negro, and in some sections, especially
where the soil is more adapted to the cultivation of cereals than the
raising of the staples, planters appear to be inclined to drive the
negroes away, at least from their plantations. I was informed by a
prominent South Carolinian in July, that the planters in certain
localities in the northwestern part of his State had been on the point of
doing so, but better counsel had been made to prevail upon them; and
Colonel Robinson, 97th United States Colored Infantry, who had been sent
out to several counties in southern Alabama to administer the amnesty
oath, reported a general disposition among the planters of that region to
"set the colored people who had cultivated their crops during the summer,
adrift as soon as the crops would be secured, and not to permit the negro