Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Three).djvu/245

 States” as self-governing bodies on the North Carolina plan would, at that time, have put the whole legislative and executive power of those States into the hands of men ignorant of the ways of free labor society, who sincerely believed that the negro would not work without physical compulsion and was generally unfit for freedom, and who were then pressed by the dire necessities of their impoverished condition to force out of the negroes all the agricultural labor they could with the least possible regard to their new rights. The consequences of all this were witnessed in the actual experiences of every day.

Had the National Government, immediately after the close of the war, given the former slave-holders clearly to understand that, however great the difficulties of the introduction of free labor in the South might be, those difficulties must—absolutely must—be overcome, and that the “late rebel States” would under no circumstances be restored to their constitutional position as self-governing States in the Union until those difficulties had been overcome and the free labor system was in peaceable and reasonably successful operation in the South, most of the perplexities would soon have yielded to honest and hopeful effort and appeared far less serious than the Southern men had originally thought them to be. Much trouble might thus have been avoided. But as soon as President Johnson permitted it to be understood that he purposed to restore those States to their self-governing functions without such preparation, the still existing pro-slavery spirit was naturally flushed with new hope. Word went round at once that soon the States would have full power again to control their own affairs, and that then, the emancipation edicts notwithstanding, the negro would be “put in his place.” No secret was made of this expectation. The provisional governor of South Carolina openly admitted that the people of his State still indulged in a