A similar and much stronger prejudice exists against the establishment of schools for the negro's benefit. If federal bayonets were to-day removed from our midst, not a colored school would be permitted in the State. The teachers, perhaps, would not be tarred and feathered and hung, as they would have been in old times, but ways and means innumerable would present themselves by which to drive them out.
The white citizens both of Vicksburg and Natchez have requested me not to establish freedmen schools inside their city limits, yet over one-half the population of these cities is composed of freed people—the class who are doing the work, toiling all day in the sun, while the white employers are reaping the benefit of their labor through superior knowledge, and are occupying their elegant leisure by talking and writing constantly about the demoralization of negro labor—that the negro won't work, &c.
It is nonsense to talk so much about plans for getting the negroes to work. They do now and always have done, all the physical labor of the south, and if treated as they should be by their government, (which is so anxious to be magnanimous to the white people of this country, who never did work and never will,) they will continue to do so. Who are the workmen in these fields? Who are hauling the cotton to market, driving hacks and drays in the cities, repairing streets and railroads, cutting timber, and in every place raising the hum of industry? The freedmen, not the rebel soldiery. The southern white men, true to their instincts and training, are going to Mexico or Brazil, or talk of importing labor in the shape of Coolies, Irishmen—anything—anything to avoid work, any way to keep from putting their own shoulders to the wheel.
The mass of the freedmen can and will support themselves by labor. They need nothing but justice before the courts of the land, impartial judges and juries, to encourage them in well-doing, or punish them for the violation of just laws, a chance to own the land and property they can honestly obtain, the free exercise of their right to worship God and educate themselves, and—let them alone.
The delegates to Washington think that it is their duty, peculiarly, to see the President and arrange the affairs of the negro. Why don't they attend to their own business, or make arrangements for the working of the disbanded rebel army in the cotton fields and workshops of the south? There are to-day as many houseless, homeless, poor, wandering, idle white men here as there are negroes in the same condition, yet no arrangements are made for their working. All the trickery, chicanery and political power possible are being brought to bear on the poor negro, to make him do the hard labor for the whites, as in days of old.
To this end the mass of the people are instinctively working. They steadily refuse to sell or lease lands to black men. Colored mechanics of this city, who have made several thousand dollars during the last two years, find it impossible to buy even land enough to put up a house on, yet white men can purchase any amount of land. The whites know that if negroes are not allowed to acquire property or become landholders, they must ultimately return to plantation labor, and work for wages that will barely support themselves and families, and they feel that this kind of slavery will be better than none at all.
People who will do these things, after such a war, and so much misery, while federal bayonets are yet around them, are not to be intrusted with the education and development of a, race of slaves just liberated.
I have made this letter longer than it should have been, and may have taxed your patience, yet I do not see how I could have said less, and expressed my views on the subject.
- I am, general, very respectfully, your obedient servant,
Colonel, Assistant Commissioner B. R. F. and A. L.
for Mississippi and N. E. Louisiana.
General Carl Schurz.
No. 28.
Colonel George D. Robinson, 97th United States colored troops, states as follows:
I was sent out to Connecuh, Covington, Coffee, Dale, and Henry counties, to administer the amnesty oath. I was at Covington myself, having officers under my orders stationed in the other four counties. I travelled through Connecuh and Covington; about the other counties I have reports from my officers. A general disposition was found among the planters to set the colored people who had cultivated their crops during the summer adrift as soon as the crops would be secured, and not to permit the negro to remain upon any footing of equality with the white man in that country.
In none of the above-named counties I heard of a justice of the peace or other magistrate discharging the duties of an agent of the Freedmen's Bureau, nor did I hear of any of them
