Page:Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1892).djvu/534

526 of that section has left behind it, as in the nature of the case it must, manners, customs, and conditions to which free white laboring men will be in no haste to submit themselves and their families. They do not emigrate from the free North, where labor is respected, to a lately enslaved South, where labor has for centuries been whipped, chained and degraded. Naturally enough such emigration follows the lines of latitude in which they who compose it were born. Not from South to North, but from East to West 'the Star of Empire takes its way.'

"Hence it is seen that the dependence upon the negro of the planters, land-owners, and the old master-class of the South, however galling and humiliating to Southern pride and power, is nearly complete and perfect. There is only one mode of escape for them, and that mode they will certainly not adopt. It is to take off their own coats, cease to whittle sticks and talk politics at cross-roads, and go themselves to work in their broad and sunny fields of cotton and sugar. An invitation to do this is about as harsh and distasteful to all their inclinations as would be an invitation to step down into their graves. With the negro all this is different. Neither natural, artificial nor traditional causes stand in the way of the freedman's laboring in the South. Neither the heat nor the fever-demon which lurks in her tangled and oozy swamps affrights him, and he stands to-day the admitted author of whatever prosperity, beauty, and civilization are now possessed by the South, and the admitted arbiter of her destiny.

"This, then, is the high vantage ground of the negro; he has labor; the South wants it, and must have it or perish. Since he is free he can now give it or withhold it; use it where he is, or take it elsewhere as he pleases. His labor made him a slave, and his labor can, if he will, make him free, comfortable, and independent. It is more to him than fire, swords, ballot-boxes, or bayonets. It touches the heart of the South through its pocket. This power served him well years ago, when in the bitterest extremity of destitution. But for it he would have perished when he dropped out of slavery. It saved him then, and it will save him again. Emancipation came to him surrounded by extremely unfriendly circumstances. It was not the choice or consent of the people among whom he lived, but against their will and a death struggle on their part to prevent it. His chains were broken in the tempest and whirlwind of civil war. Without food, without shelter, without land, without money, and without friends, he, with his children, his sick, his aged and helpless ones, were turned loose and naked to the open sky. The announcement of his freedom was instantly followed by an order from his master to quit his old quarters, and to seek bread thereafter from the hands of those who had given him his freedom. A desperate extremity was thus forced