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By Root 1265 0

them to Charleston from New York,” a South Carolina planter said of the Dutchmen he had hired. “I fed them far better than ever I thought of feeding my hands, even gave them coffee and sourkrout, when, what should they do but demand butter for their bread and milk for their coffee, and the next thing the whole crowd left me.” The Freedmen’s Bureau in Virginia concluded that recent efforts to recruit foreign immigrants to replace blacks had been unsuccessful, and an English traveler in that state thought he knew why: “Swedes, Germans, and Irishmen had been imported; but the Swedes refused to eat cornbread, the Germans sloped away north-west-ward, in the hope of obtaining homesteads, and the Irishmen preferred a city career. It seems that the South will have need of Sambo yet awhile …” Nor did the attempts to recruit native whites for domestic service successfully overcome the stigma that still attached itself to that kind of labor. “I tried to hire some white women to live with & assist my family with their work,” a South Carolina planter testified. “They do not like the idea of becoming ‘Help.’ ”36

The more the white South experimented with white labor, the more the employer class came to appreciate the relative advantages of black labor, free or slave. Such admissions did not always come easily, and whites hastened to add that in “the professions, in the counting house, in the workshops of the artisan, in the factory, and on the wave,” the white man had no superior. But in the fields, as the cultivator of the great southern staples, the Negro remained “unequalled,” both for his skills and his enduring powers. The experience of a Louisiana sugar planter prompted him to estimate that “one able-bodied American negro of ordinary intelligence is worth at least two white emigrants. He understands the business, and he has the advantage of being acclimated.” Appreciative of this fact, he was willing to pay even higher wages for blacks than for whites. “You may think this extravagant; but during the unsettled state of affairs for the last two years, I have had to try both, and I base my opinion not on my prejudices, but on my experience.” With equal candor, the president of the Virginia Agricultural Society reminded the delegates to a State Farmers’ Convention in 1866 that “we have in the labor of the freedmen a decided advantage over other portions of the world.” After employing both foreign and native white workers, he concluded that “the world cannot produce a more skillful and efficient farm laborer than a well-trained Virginia negro who is willing and able to work.” And for all the difficulties he had encountered with his freedmen, Edward Barnwell Heyward, the South Carolina rice planter, remained convinced that he could turn them into a productive labor force. “The negroes themselves begin to see our superiority and recognise in us their true Master. We are the only people who can ever get them to do any thing, and I confess I do not look with much pleasure to the time when their places will be supplied by these still more savage Germans as white labourers.”37

Despite the experiments with white workers, despite all the talk about replacing blacks, despite the calumnies heaped on the freedmen, the conclusion reached by most practical-minded ex-slaveholders was that the Negro remained ideally suited for their purposes. He had already proven himself “peculiarly adapted by nature” to the cultivation of cotton, rice, and sugar, working under temperatures and conditions that would wilt any white man. “The African don’t mind it,” an Alabama planter noted, “the white man won’t stand it.” And so it came down to familiar discussions of racial traits. When a Virginia planter and manufacturer affirmed that the African race made ideal agricultural laborers, he enumerated their principal virtues as “docility, tractability and affectionate disposition”—that is, “just the material desirable and necessary.” Nor were blacks any less valuable, some insisted, as domestics: the black nurse was “more affectionate, more attached, and more devoted