Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/336

312 state. During the civil war the resources of the South had wholly been devoted to the support of the Confederate Government and its armies, and therefore, economically speaking, wasted. The Confederate money in the hands of the Southern people was absolutely worthless. Want and misery stared them in the face. Their sustenance, for the time being, depended on the crops to be raised that summer. Until then the plantations had been cultivated by slave labor. But the slaves had been declared free. During the war a large number of the negroes had still remained on the plantations doing their accustomed work. But the complete discomfiture of the Southern armies made the decree of emancipation effective everywhere. Negro slavery had come to a sudden end, and thus the whole agricultural labor system of the South, the only labor system known and believed in by the Southern people, was entirely upset and made inoperative.

It is not surprising that, mortified by their defeat and chafing under the urgent necessities of their situation, the white people of the South should have been in a desperate state of mind—a state of mind eminently unfitted for calm and judicious reasoning, and especially for the solution of problems calling for equanimity and patience. But for this excited state of mind they would perhaps at once have recognized the fact that the emancipation of the slaves was irrevocable, and that the only sensible and profitable course open to the late master class was to accommodate themselves to the new order of things as best they could and to set the former slaves to work as free laborers, peaceably, in a friendly spirit, and on fair terms. But two things stood in the way. One was a traditional and stubborn prejudice. Wherever on my tour of investigation I tried to discuss with Southern men the immediate problem to be solved, which I did every day, I was constantly met by the assertion, “You cannot