heir
imagination was wholly incapable of grasping the fact that their
former slaves were now free. And yet they had to deal with this
perplexing fact, and practically to accommodate themselves to it, at
once and without delay, if they were to have any crops that year.

Many of them would frankly recognize this necessity and begin in good
faith to consider how they might meet it. But then they stumbled
forthwith over a set of old prejudices which in their minds had
acquired the stubborn force of convictions. They were sure the negro
would not work without physical compulsion; they were sure the negro
did not, and never would, understand the nature of a contract; and so
on. Yes, they "accepted the situation." Yes, they recognized that the
negro was henceforth to be a free man. But could not some method of
force be discovered and introduced to compel the negro to work? It
goes without saying that persons of such a way of thinking labored
under a heavy handicap in going at a difficult task with a settled
conviction that it was really "useless to try." But even if they did
try, and found that the negro might, after all, be induced to work
without physical compulsion, they were apt to be seriously troubled by
things which would not at all trouble an employer accustomed to free
labor. I once had an argument with a Georgia planter who vociferously
insisted that one of his negro laborers who had objected to a whipping
had thereby furnished the most conclusive proof of his unfitness for
freedom. And such statements were constantly reinforced by further
assertion that they, the Southern whites, understood the negro and
knew how to treat him, and that we of the North did not and never
would.

This might have been true in one sense, but not true in another. The
Southerner knew better than the Northerner how to treat the negro as a
slave, but it did not follow that he knew best how to treat the negro
as a freeman; and just there was the rub. It was perhaps too much to
expect of the Southern slaveholders, or of Southern society generally,
that a clear judgment of the new order of things should have come to
them at once. The total overturning of the whole labor system of a
country, accomplished suddenly, without preparation or general
transition, is a tremendous revolution, a terrible wrench, well apt to
confuse men's minds. It should not have surprised any fair-minded
person that many Southern people for a time clung to the accustom