Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Three).djvu/258

 new condition together with its rights, was but natural. While on the whole their conduct was better than might have been expected, yet it was equally natural and equally deplorable—that the Southern whites, who had known the negro laborer only as a slave, and who had been trained only in the habits and ways of thinking of the master class, should have stubbornly clung to their traditional prejudice that the negro would not work without physical compulsion. From the fact that a large number of negroes actually did work without physical compulsion, they might have concluded that their prejudice was unreasonable; but—such is human nature—a prejudice is often the more tenaciously clung to, the more unreasonable it is. There was, therefore, a strong tendency among the whites to continue the old practices of the slavery system, to force the negro freedmen to labor for them. Thus the two races, whose well-being depended upon their peaceable and harmonious co-operation, confronted one another in a state of fretful irritation, aggravated by the pressing necessity of producing a crop that season, and embittered by race antagonism. That irritation would have been liable to break out in bloody conflicts on a large scale had not a superior restraining authority interposed. In fact it did so break out on a small scale in places where that authority was not present to make itself instantly felt. The Southern whites wished and hoped to be speedily restored to the control of their States by the reestablishment of their State Governments. To this end they were willing to recognize “the results of the war,” among them the abolition of slavery, in point of form. The true purpose was to use the power of the State Governments, legislative and executive, to reduce the freedom of the negroes to a minimum and to revive so much of the old slave code as was thought necessary to make the blacks work for the whites. This tendency was not