Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Three).djvu/228

 It is equally natural that the negro population of the South should at that period have been unusually restless. I have already mentioned that during the Civil War the bulk of the slave population remained quietly at work on the plantations except in districts touched by the operations of the armies. Had the negro slaves not done so, the rebellion would not have survived its first year. They presented the remarkable spectacle of an enslaved race doing slaves' work to sustain a government and an army fighting for the perpetuation of its enslavement. Stories were told of house-slaves accompanying their masters to the field, or taking care of their unprotected families left behind, with a sentimental attachment truly touching. Some colored people would indeed escape from the plantations and run into the Union lines where our troops were within reach, and some of their young men would enlist in the Union army as soldiers. But there was nowhere any commotion among them that had in the slightest degree the character of an uprising, in force, of slaves against their masters. Nor was there, when after the downfall of the Confederacy, general emancipation had become an established fact, a single instance of an act of vengeance committed by a negro upon a white man for inhumanity suffered by him or his, while in the condition of bondage. No race or class of men ever passed from slavery to freedom with a record equally pure of revenge. But many of them, especially in the neighborhood of towns or of Federal encampments, very naturally yielded to the temptation of testing and enjoying their freedom by walking away from the plantations to have a frolic. Many others left their work because their employers ill-treated them or in other ways incurred their distrust. Thus it happened that in various parts of the South the highroads and by-ways were alive with foot-loose colored people.