Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 10.djvu/500

 484 THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF SOCIOLOGY

great frauds, and only wanted an advance payment on a carload of Germans who did not exist. In a few instances some laborers were actually shipped in ; but they at once demanded an advance of pay, and then deserted. Like the bounty jumpers, they played the game time and time again. The influence of the radical north- ern press was also used to discourage emigration to the South ; 22 consequently white immigration into the state did not amount to anything, 23 and the Black Belt received no help from the North or from abroad, and had to fall back upon the free negro.

In the white counties there had been no hope or desire for alien immigration. The people and the country were so desper- ately poor that the stranger would never think of settling there. Many of the whites in moderate circumstances living near the Black Belt took advantage of the low price of rich lands and acquired small farms in the prairies, but there was no influx of white labor to the Black Belt from the white counties. 24 Nearly every man, woman, and child in the white districts had to go to work to earn a living. Many persons lawyers, public men, teachers, ministers, physicians, merchants, overseers, managers, and even women who had never before worked in the fields or at manual occupations, were now forced to do so because of loss of property, or because they could not live by their former occupations. 25


 * Northern Alabama Illustrated, p. 378.

"Selma Times, December 4, 1865 ; New York Times, July 2, 1866.

in moderate circumstances away from the richer lands of the prairie and canebrake, leaving that section to the few slaveholders and the immense number of slaves. Emancipation thus left on the finest lands of the state a shiftless laboring popula- tion, which still retains possession. Now, as in slavery times, the white prefers not to work as a field hand in the Black Belt when he can get more independent work elsewhere. And, besides, he does not wish to live among the negroes. Negro slavery kept whites from settling on the fertile lands ; the negro keeps whites from taking possession now.
 * The greatest evil of slavery was its tendency to drive the whites who were

Mobile Daily Times, October 21, 1860; Montgomery Advertiser, March 21, 1866; DeBow's Review, March 18, 1866.

A number of young women of Montgomery, who were once wealthy, worked in the printing-office of the Advertiser. One of them was a daughter of a former president of the United States. Many women became teachers, displacing men who then went to the fields. Disabled soldiers generally tried teaching.

There seems to be a belief that emancipation had a good effect in driving to