Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 1.djvu/367

Rh 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 themselves to the cultivation of cotton. A good many Southern planters, in view of the fact, expressed to me their intention to engage Northern men for the management of their plantations. This circumstance would seem to prove that under certain conditions the