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By Root 1103 0

with an exasperating regularity. After sustaining still further losses, the young planter finally threw up his hands in disgust and left the plantation to take up residence in nearby Marion, where he remained the rest of his life. On October 3, 1865, some five months after his return from military service, Davis made his final journal entry as a prospective postwar planter: “Farewell Old Farm Book! to record the future work of free negroes beside your content would disgrace the past. The work and profits of the best labor system ever established have been written on these pages—the past was brilliant but the future is dismal, gloomy.”17

With undisguised smugness (as if they had anticipated precisely this outcome), punctuated with proper expressions of alarm, outrage, and exasperation, occasionally tempered with a degree of commiseration, the dispossessed slaveholding class observed the fatal effects of emancipation on the Negro character and the plantation economy. Everywhere he went in the South, a northern journalist reported, people talked about little else. “Let conversation begin where it will, it ends with Sambo.” Expecting the worst, the white South prepared to believe almost anything, and with few exceptions it heard only an accumulation of irritations, grievances, and horror tales. The incidents and themes kept repeating themselves, resting as they did on long-held assumptions about the character and limited capacity of the African race. Released from the care and discipline of the master, “no longer stimulated by the ‘Must!’,” the freedman by his behavior revealed how necessary that bondage had been. He refused to work, preferring a life of idleness, dissipation, and vagrancy; and even when he worked, “what is done is badly done.” He entertained extravagant notions about his freedom—“idleness, plenty of good food and fine clothes,” not to mention that imminent forty acres and a mule. His natural inclination to theft manifested itself even more blatantly in freedom. “I’m sure they were all thieves in Africa. Wherever you read about them they’re always the same.” Freed from all restraint, he had become “fearfully licentious,” “saucy and rude,” “insubordinate and insolent,” “lazy, thieving, lying, ignorant, brutish,” “shiftless, improvident, idle,” “skulking, shuffling, and worthless,” and “an unmitigated nuisance.” After all that had been done for him, he evinced “not as much gratitude … as many of the inferior animals.” Although his legal status had been altered, his basic character remained the same, and that only invited future troubles. “Thar ain’t no good side to ’em,” an old South Carolina planter explained. “You can’t find a white streak in ’em, if you turn ’em wrong side outwards and back again.… All the men are thieves, and all the women are prostitutes. It’s their natur’ to be that way, and they never’ll be no other way. They ain’t worth the land they cover.”18

If planters suspected their blacks of deliberately slowing the pace of labor, few of them cared to deal with the more obvious implications of such a move. Rather, they preferred to assign responsibility not only to peculiar racial characteristics but to lax discipline, Federal interference, and, perhaps most critically, a rising generation of blacks who had not been inculcated with a proper regard for time, industry, and the Protestant work ethic. “The old hands are passing away,” a Texas planter lamented. “The young ones do not learn to work. No authority is exercised by parents to teach them to work or understand the value of time, industry and economy.” Under present conditions, an Arkansas planter concurred, the number of blacks “trained from childhood to hard labor” was rapidly diminishing and the new generation was therefore bound to be “worthless.” The same considerations prompted an Alabama planter to rely on his “old, trained hands” to make a crop. “Such as were once considered secondrate,” he observed, “are now the best.” Actually, these were simply variations on what had become a popular postwar theme among whites—that unless blacks