Been in the Storm So Long_ The Aftermath of Slavery - Leon F. Litwack [271]
The logic of the argument seemed irresistible. If a master did not look out for the welfare of the ex-slave, no one else would, including the ex-slave himself. Nor could the unfortunate Negro be blamed for the innate vices and defects he shared with most tropical peoples—what a Mississippi planter called the “indisposition to provide for the future by sustained industry and persevering efforts.” The typical Negro, as the whites viewed him, worked only to satisfy immediate wants; he was careless or thoughtless of anything beyond the present. Unlike most whites, he was not motivated by a desire for gain; hence, he was apt to do nothing after earning a little money until starvation forced him back to work.60 If the arguments about improvidence and the absence of initiative had a familiar ring about them, they had traditionally characterized upper-class and employer attitudes toward laboring peoples, white and black. A Georgia planter reflected this view when he advised some fellow planters that the problems they now faced were class rather than racial in nature. “I’ll tell you how ’t is: a free nigger’s jest like any low-down white fellow,—pull off your coat and work with him, and he does well enough; put it on and go off to town, and he shirks.”61
In forecasting the doom of the Afro-American race, many whites hastened to add their regrets that this should be the outcome of emancipation. The paternal spirit manifested itself in expressions of sympathy and remorse and in outbursts of nostalgia. “If you had seen them in slave days,” one planter told an English visitor, “what a merry, rollicking, laughing set they were! Now they are care-worn and sad. You hardly hear them laugh now as they used to do.” When the first postwar governor of Mississippi declared that the Negro was “destined to extinction, beyond all doubt,” he thought it “alarming” and “appalling” and hoped he might be mistaken; a South Carolina magistrate “pitied” the freedmen for their inability to understand the freedom thrust upon them; and the Virginia planter who expected the race to “first become pauper and then disappear” still wished the freedmen well and “sincerely” hoped they would disappoint his expectations. But there was good reason to suspect that professions of this kind were not altogether sincere. That is, the former ruling class had a peculiar stake in black failure.62
While traveling by rail through the countryside of western Tennessee, J. T. Trowbridge, the northern journalist and author, caught occasional glimpses of homeless ex-slaves huddled around the campfires in their makeshift settlements, warming their hands and watching with curiosity as the train rolled by them. The conversation he overheard of his fellow passengers might have been repeated almost anywhere in the South when native whites came across such scenes:
“That’s freedom! that’s what the Yankees have done for ’em!”
“They’ll all be dead before spring.”
“The Southern people were always their best friends. How I pity them! don’t you?”
“Oh, yes, of course I pity them! How much better off they were when they were slaves!”
What dismayed Trowbridge were not the remarks themselves (he had heard them so often) but the expressions of “grim exultation” and the “ ‘I-told-you-so!’ air of triumph” that accompanied them, as though their prophecies were their desires. “The slave-owners, having foretold that freedom would prove fatal to the bondman, experienced a satisfaction in seeing their predictions come true. The usual