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By Root 1473 0

into his place again,—not as a slave, but as a good producer.” Freedom had been forced upon the slave, an Alabama judge told a grand jury in Pike County, and it behooved the South to show compassion for the “faithful old negro” who was now an involuntary freedman without the experience, the self-reliance, or the ability to understand and appreciate his new status. “He may have been the companion of your boyhood,” he reminded them; “he may be older than you, and perhaps carried you in his arms when an infant. You may be bound to him by a thousand ties which only a southern man knows, and which he alone can feel in all their force.” Nor could the freedman be blamed for the “excesses” that had characterized the transition in his status. “He has always been a child in intellect,” Charles C. Jones, Jr., explained to his mother, while sympathizing with “severe trials” she had experienced, “improvident, incapable of appreciating the obligations of a contract, ignorant of the operation of any law other than the will of his master, careless of the future, and without the most distant conception of the duties of life and labor now devolved upon him.”56

Even if whites chose to view the old ties with varying degrees of sympathy, they could readily appreciate the forcefulness and timeliness of the argument. Now that the slaves had been freed, through no fault of their own, the burden of emancipation demanded of the old slaveholding class the same exercise of paternal solicitude and authority; indeed, the need had never been greater. If anything, the very suddenness of freedom, thrust upon an unprepared people, had increased the master’s obligations and duty to a race possessing neither the physical nor the mental resources to care for themselves. “They are like grown up children turned adrift in the world,” Eliza Andrews observed. “The negro is something like the Irishman in his blundering good nature, his impulsiveness and improvidence, and he is like a child in having always had someone to think and act for him.” What had characterized slavery, many whites continued to argue, had been a kind of benevolent patriarchy. Even if slavery had been sometimes oppressive, even if it had not been free of excesses and defects, even if it had brutalized some bondsmen, this much-maligned institution, according to its practitioners, had given the bulk of the race a necessary protection which freedom now threatened to remove. “How much better off they were when slaves!” a Mississippi planter affirmed. “A man would see to his own niggers, like he would to his own stock. But the niggers now don’t belong to anybody, and it’s no man’s business whether they live or die.”57

If dependency on the master had protected and sustained the Negro as a slave, what would happen to him as a freedman? How would he manage to survive in a hostile and competitive environment, exposed now to unfriendly whites, his own innate vices, and a free-market economy? Such questions grew out of a tradition of proslavery argument, and the answer seemed no less obvious after emancipation. Without the patriarchal guidance and support of the former master, the African race would surely exterminate itself. “The child is already born who will behold the last negro in the State of Mississippi,” a Natchez newspaper affirmed in early 1866. Whatever agreement existed among whites about the future of the Negro as a free man invariably revolved around the conviction that he would sink lower and lower in the social scale, that he would dissipate the civilizing influences he had acquired from contact with his master, and that he could never survive the competitive struggle for life with a superior race. The antislavery movement, in other words, would soon discover that in abolishing slavery it had abolished the race itself.58

Historical analogies came quickly to mind. The freed slaves now faced a doom not unlike that of the other inferior and degraded species in their midst—the Indian. If anything, the African race might diminish at an even more rapid rate. “They’re a-goin’ faster’n the Injins,