Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Three).djvu/215

 replied that it might work to some extent so long as the Federal soldiers were at hand. But would not the troops soon be withdrawn? And would not the people of the Southern States right soon be left to manage their own affairs? Was not that the policy of the Administration? He had concluded so from what he had heard people say and from what he had seen in the papers. I must see, therefore, that the emancipation business would never work. He pronounced this like a conclusive judgment.

I greatly startled him, as it seemed, with the suggestion, that, deeming the successful employment of negroes as free laborers impossible, he might sell the larger part of his plantation and himself cultivate a small part of it as a farmer. The idea that he should work with his hands, as a farmer, seemed to strike him as ludicrously absurd. He told me with a smile that he had never done a day's work of that kind in his life. He had learned to manage a plantation with slaves on it. But to do a farmer's work—that evidently could not be thought of. Neither did it seem to him possible to sell the plantation and to use the money in some other business pursuit. He could not make any guess as to what his land might sell for. There had not been an acre of land sold in his neighborhood as far back as he could remember. And who would think of buying land there under present circumstances?—He mused for a while in sad silence, and said at last, “No, I can't sell my plantation. We must make the nigger work somehow.”

I give this initial conversation so elaborately because I heard it substantially repeated in an endless variety of expressions, scores, aye, hundreds of times during my three months' journey through the Gulf States. I sought conversation with everybody that I could reach—planters large and small, merchants, lawyers, physicians, clergymen, guests I met at city