from place to place, stealing by the way; they preferred a life of
idleness and vagrancy to that of honest and industrious labor; they either
did not show any willingness to enter into contracts, or, if they did,
showed a stronger disposition to break them than to keep them; they were
becoming insubordinate and insolent to their former owners; they indulged
in extravagant ideas about their rights and relied upon the government to
support them without work; in one word, they had no conception of the
rights freedom gave, and of the obligations freedom imposed upon them.
These complaints I heard repeated with endless variations wherever I went.
Nor were they made without some show of reason. I will review them one
after another.

_Unwillingness to work_.--That there are among the negroes a good many
constitutionally lazy individuals is certainly true. The propensity to
idleness seems to be rather strongly developed in the south generally,
without being confined to any particular race. It is also true that the
alacrity negroes put into their work depends in a majority of cases upon
certain combinations of circumstances. It is asserted that the negroes
have a prejudice against working in the cultivation of cotton, rice, and
sugar. Although this prejudice, probably arising from the fact that the
cotton, rice, and sugar fields remind the former slave of the worst
experiences of his past life, exists to some extent, it has not made the
freedmen now on the plantations unwilling to cultivate such crops as the
planters may have seen fit to raise. A few cases of refusal may have
occurred. But there is another fact of which I have become satisfied in
the course of my observations, and which is of great significance: while
most of the old slaveholders complain of the laziness and instability of
their negro laborers, the northern men engaged in planting, with whom I
have come into contact, almost uniformly speak of their negro laborers
with satisfaction, and these northern men almost exclusively devote