Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Three).djvu/216

 hotels or country taverns, fellow travelers on railroads or steamboats, men who had served as officers or private soldiers in the war, men who had stayed at home and whatever different opinions or feelings as to other subjects they might cherish, or with whatever degree of heat or moderation they might express them—on one point they were substantially unanimous with very, very few individual exceptions: “The negro will not work without physical compulsion. He is lazy. He is improvident. He is inconstant. He may sometimes work a little spell to earn some money, and then stop working to spend his money in a frolic. We want steady, continuous work, work that can be depended upon. To get that out of him a negro needs physical compulsion of some sort.”

The first of my own personal observations led me to surmise that the success of negro free labor would depend not only on the aptitudes of the laborer, but also on those of the employer. Shortly after my arrival at Hilton Head, General Gillmore, the commander of that district, an officer of high character and great intelligence, took me over the bay to Beaufort, a town on one of the sea-islands celebrated for the quality of the cotton raised there. The plantations had been deserted by their owners at the approach of our forces, had been taken possession of by our government, and then leased to various parties. I was to visit a plantation near by which was managed by such a lessee, a Massachusetts man. We first had to pass through fields cultivated on their own account by freedmen, mostly refugees from other parts of the State, who had arrived there but a short time before. These first attempts of recently emancipated slaves to set up for themselves would have looked rather discouraging had we not known the unfavorable circumstances of haste and disorder under which they had been made. But when we reached the plantation we were to