uess General Howard
will have a tough job. I don't envy him.

_Nov. 21._ There is a large number of old planters who are offering
their lands at very low rates, and so many tempting chances are
offered to Northern men. The tide of emigration southward doesn't yet
set very strong, however. I think the great drawback is the feeling
that the South is still intolerant of Yankees. The rabble and the
young men are still clinging to the hope that they are going to have
their own way about managing the nigger, somehow or other, as soon as
they get rid of the United States forces, and they know very well that
Yankees who come among them will not agree with them about the best
way of "making him work," for they won't believe that he will ever
work till he is _made_ to. Now, to tell the truth, I don't believe
myself that the present generation of negroes will work as they were
formerly obliged to, and therefore the race will not produce so much
cotton in this generation as they did five years ago. The change is
too great a one to be made in a day. It will take many years to make
an economical and thrifty man out of a freedman, and about as long to
make a sensible and just employer out of a former slaveholder. It is
not at all likely that the Southern community will tax itself to
educate the negro yet for a good while, and I have my doubts whether
the system of education thus far carried on through the benevolence of
Northern and English communities can be kept up much longer. It is a
laudable and a noble work, but I fear it can't be sustained after the
novelty is over. There seems to be a lethargy creeping over our
community on this subject, which is very hard to shake off. The
feeling is somewhat general that the negro must make the most of his
chances and pick up his a, b, c's as he can. Moreover, there is a mass
of ignorance in the South under _white_ skins, which is likely to give
us more immediate trouble, politically, than the ignorance of the
negro, for that latter is not as yet armed with the suffrage. Of
course there is not much enthusiasm about sending teachers South to
teach the poor whites, so the negro suffers from the magnitude of the
undertaking, from his remoteness from view, and the general
disposition among mankind to let everybody hoe their own weeds so long
as they don't shade one's own garden.

I hear that General Howard went to Edisto with the view of reconciling
the squatter negroes with the claims of the