Black and White: Land, Labor, and Politics in the SouthFortune, Timothy Thomas
History
Black and White: Land, Labor, and Politics in the South
Fortune, Timothy Thomas
African Americans -- Southern States; Southern States -- Economic conditions; United States -- Race relations
Next to this class is the great labor force of the South, the class
upon whose ample shoulders have fallen the weight of Southern labor
and inhumanity for lo! two hundred years--_the black man_. Time was,
yesterday, it appears to me, when this great class were all of _one_
condition, driven from the rising to the setting of the sun to enrich
men who were created out of the same sod, and in the construction of
whose mysterious mechanism, mental and physical, the great God
expended no more time or ingenuity. Up to the close of the Rebellion,
of that gigantic conflict which shook the pillars of republican
government to their center, the great black population were truly the
"mudsills" of Southern society, upon which rested all the industrial
burdens of that section; truly, "the hewers of wood and the drawers of
water;" a people who, in the mysterious providence of God, were torn
root and branch from their savage homes in that land which has now
become to them a dream "more insubstantial than a pageant faded," to
"dwell in a strange land, among strangers," to endure, like the
children of Israel, a season of cruel probation, and then to begin
life in earnest; to put their shoulders to the wheel and assist in
making this vast continent, this asylum of the oppressed of the world,
the grandest abode of mingled happiness and woe, and wealth and
pauperization ever reared by the genius and governed by the
selfishness and cupidity of man. And to-day, as in the dark days of
the past, this people are the bone and sinew of the South, the great
producers and partial consumers of her wealth; the despised, yet
indispensable, "mudsills" of her industrial interests.
A Senator of the United States from the South, whose hands have been
dyed in the blood of his fellow citizens, and who holds his high
office by fraud and usurpation, not long since declared that his State
could very well dispense with her black population. That population
outnumbers the white three to one; and by the toil by which that State
has been enriched, by the blood and the sweat of two hundred years
which the soil of that State has absorbed, by the present production
and consumption of wealth by that black population, we are amazed at
the ignorance of the great man who has been placed in a "little brief
authority." The black population cannot and will not be dispensed
with; because it is so deeply rooted in the soil that it is a part of
it--the most valuable part. And the time will come when it will hold
its title to the land, by right of purchase, for a laborer is worthy
of his hire, and is now free to invest that hire as it pleases him
best. Already some of the very best soil of that State is held by the
people this great magnus in the Nation's councils would supersede in
their divine rights.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account