Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/499

 INDUSTRIAL REORGANIZATION IN ALABAMA 483

gusted with northern employers. Truman reported, after an experience of one season, that "it is the almost universal testi- mony of the negroes themselves, who have been under the super- vision of both classes and I have talked with many with a view to this point that they prefer to labor for a southern employer." 20

Northern capital came in after the war, but northern labor did not, though the planters offered every inducement. Land was offered to white purchasers at ridiculously low rates, but the northern white laborer did not come. He was afraid of the South with its planters and negroes. The poorer classes of native whites, however, profited by the low prices and secured a foothold on the better lands. So general was the unbelief in the value of the free negro as a laborer, especially in the bureau districts, and so signally had all inducements failed to bring native white laborers from the North, that determined efforts were made to obtain white labor from abroad. Immigration societies were formed, with officers in the state and headquarters in the northern cities. These societies undertook to send south laboring people in families especially German at so much per head. The planter turned with hope to white labor, of the superiority of which he had so long been hearing, and he wished very much to give it a trial. The advertisements in the newspapers read much like the old slave advertisements: so many head of healthy, industrious Germans of good character delivered f. o. b., New York, at so much per head. One of the white labor agencies in Alabama undertook to furnish "immigrants of any nativity and in any quantity " to take the place of negroes. Children were priced at the rate of $50 a year; women, $100; men, $150; they them- selves providing board and clothes. One of every six Germans was warranted to speak English. 21 Most of these agencies were

"Report to the President, April 9, 1866; also Harper's Monthly Magazine, January, 1874; Mrs. Leigh, Ten Years in a Georgia Plantation; oral accounts. On account of the general failure of the northern men who invested capital in the South in 1865 and 1866, there grew up in the business world an unfavorable feeling against the South, which for the remainder of reconstruction days had to struggle against adverse business opinion. (Harper's Magazine, January, 1874.)

n Selma Times, December 4, 1865. Nearly all the newspapers printed adver- tisements of the immigration societies.