Margaret Mitchell, from Gone with the Wind ch. 37
The former
slaves were now the lords of creation and, with the aid of the Yankees, the
lowest and most ignorant ones were on top. The better class
of them, scorning freedom, were suffering as severely as their white
masters. Thousands of house servants, the highest caste in the slave
population, remained with their white folks, doing manual labor which had been
beneath them in the old days. Many loyal field hands also refused to avail
themselves of the new freedom, but the hordes of "trashy free issue
niggers," who were causing most of the trouble, were drawn largely from
the field-hand class.
In slave days,
these lowly blacks had been despised by the house negroes
and yard negroes as creatures of small worth. Just as Ellen had done, other
plantation mistresses throughout the South had put the pickaninnies
through courses of
training and elimination to select the best of them for the positions of
greater responsibility. Those consigned to the fields were the ones least
willing or able to learn,
the least energetic, the least honest and trustworthy, the most vicious and
brutish. And now this class, the lowest in the black social order, was making
life a misery for the South.
Aided by the
unscrupulous adventurers who operated the Freedmen's Bureau and urged on by a fervor of Northern hatred almost religious in its
fanaticism, the former field hands found themselves suddenly elevated to the
seats of the mighty. There they conducted themselves as creatures of small
intelligence might naturally be expected to do. Like monkeys or small children
turned loose among treasured objects whose value is beyond their
comprehension, they ran wild --either from perverse pleasure in destruction or
simply because of their ignorance.
To the credit of the negroes,
including the least intelligent of them, few were actuated by malice and those
few had usually been "mean niggers" even in slave days. But they
were, as a class, childlike in mentality, easily led and from long habit
accustomed to taking
orders. Formerly their white masters had given the orders. Now they had a new
set of masters, the Bureau and the Carpetbaggers, and their orders were:
"You're just as good as
any white man, so act that way.
Just as soon as you can vote the Republican ticket,
you are going to have the white
man's property. It's as good as yours now. Take it, if you can get it!”
Dazzled by
these tales, freedom became a never-ending pinic, a
barbecue every day of the week, a carnival of idleness and theft and insolence.
Country negroes flocked into the cities, leaving the
rural districts without labor to make the crops. Atlanta was crowded with them
and still they came by the hundreds, lazy and dangerous as a result of the new
doctrines being taught them. Packed into squalid cabins, smallpox, typhoid and
tuberculosis broke out among them. Accustomed to the care of their mistresses
when they were ill in slave days, they did not know how to nurse themselves or
their sick. Relying upon their masters in the old days to care for their aged
and their babies, they now had no sense of responsibility for their helpless.
And the Bureau was far too interested in political matters to provide the care
the plantation owners had once given.
Abandoned negro children ran like frightened animals about the town
until kind-hearted white people took them into their kitchens to raise. Aged
country darkies, deserted by their children, bewildered and panic stricken in
the bustling town, sat on the curbs and cried to the ladies who passed: "Mistis, please Ma'm, write mah old Marster down in Fayette
County dat Ah's up hyah,
He'll come tek dis ole nigger home agin. 'Fo'
Gawd, Ah done got nuff of
dis freedom!"
The Freedmen's
Bureau, overwhelmed by the numbers who poured in upon them, realized too late a
part of the mistake and tried to send them back to their former owners. They
told the negroes that if they would go back, they
would go as free workers, protected by written contracts specifying wages by
the day. The old darkies went back to the plantations gladly, making a heavier
burden than ever on the poverty-stricken planters who had not the heart to turn
them out, but the young ones remained in Atlanta. They did not want to be
workers of any kind, anywhere. Why work when the belly is full?
For the first
time in their lives the negroes were able to get all the whisky they might
want. In slave days, it was something they never tasted except at Christmas,
when each one received a "drap" along with
his gift. Now they had not only the Bureau agitators and the Carpetbaggers
urging them on, but the incitement of whisky as well, and outrages were
inevitable. Neither life nor property was safe from them and the white people,
unprotected by law, were terrorized. Men were insulted on the streets by
drunken blacks, houses and barns were burned at night, horses and cattle and
chickens stolen in broad daylight, crimes of all varieties were committed and
few of the perpetrators were brought to justice.
But
these ignominies and dangers were as nothing compared with the peril of white
women, many bereft by the war of male protection, who lived alone in the
outlying districts and on lonely roads. It was the large number of outrages on
women and the ever-present fear for the safety of their wives and daughters
that drove Southern men to cold and trembling fury and caused the Ku Klux Klan
to spring up overnight. And it was against this nocturnal organization that the
newspapers of the North cried out most loudly, never realizing the tragic
necessity that brought it into being. The North wanted every member of the Ku
Klux hunted down and hanged, because they had dared take the punishment of crime into
their own hands at a time when the ordinary processes of law and order had been
overthrown by the invaders.