ine
to a crude and unsystematic communism; the negro quarters of the old
plantations are all huddled together in the centre, and, except where
the land owners have interfered to encourage a different life, there is
still too much promiscuousness in the relation of the sexes. The negro,
as a rule, has no ambition to become a land owner; he prefers to invest
his surplus money, when he has any, in personal and movable property.
In most cases where the blacks have been given the opportunity of buying
land on long time, and paying yearly installments out of the proceeds of
their annual crops, they have tired of the bargain after a year or two,
and abandoned the contract. The negro politicians and preachers are not
all that reformers and moralists would have them; the imitative faculty
of the African has betrayed the black politician into many of the
vicious ways of the white politician, and the colored preacher is
frequently not above "the pomps and vanity of this wicked world." All
this is the more unfortunate, as the blacks have a child-like confidence
in their chosen leaders, founded partly on their primitive character,
and partly on their distrust of the native whites. Both their
politicians and their preachers have given abundant evidence of their
insincerity during the excitement of emigration by blowing hot and
blowing cold; by talking to the negroes one way, and to the whites
another; and even to the extent, in some instances, of taking money to
use their influence for discouraging and impeding emigration. These are
some of the faults and misfortunes on the part of the blacks which enter
into the race troubles. The chief blame which attaches to the whites
is the failure to make a persistent effort, by education and kind
treatment, to overcome the distrust and cure the faults of the
negroes. The whites control, because they constitute the "property and
intelligence" of the South, to use the words of a democratic statesman;
this power should have been used to gain the confidence of the blacks.
Had such a course been taken, there would not have been the fear of
reenslavement, which actually prevails to a considerable extent among
the negroes. So long as a portion of the whites entertain the conviction
that the war of the sections will be renewed within a few years, as is
the case, the negroes will suspect and dread the class who would treat
them as enemies in case the war should come, and will seek to escape to
a section