The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet ItHelper, Hinton Rowan
History
The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It
Helper, Hinton Rowan
Slavery -- United States
Too hot in the South, and too unhealthy there--white men "can't stand
it"--negroes only can endure the heat of Southern climes! How often are
our ears insulted with such wickedly false assertions as these! In what
degree of latitude--pray tell us--in what degree of latitude do the rays
of the sun become too calorific for white men? Certainly in no part of the
United States, for in the extreme South we find a very large number of
non-slaveholding whites over the age of fifteen, who derive their entire
support from manual labor in the open fields. The sun, that bugbear of
slaveholding demagogues, shone on more than one million of free white
laborers--mostly agriculturists--in the slave States in 1850, exclusive
of those engaged in commerce, trade, manufactures, the mechanic arts, and
mining. Yet, notwithstanding all these instances of exposure to his wrath,
we have had no intelligence whatever of a single case of _coup de
so-leil_. Alabama is not too hot; sixty-seven thousand white sons of toil
till her soil. Mississippi is not too hot; fifty-five thousand free white
laborers are hopeful devotees of her out-door pursuits. Texas is not too
hot; forty-seven thousand free white persons, males, over the age of
fifteen, daily perform their rural vocations amidst her unsheltered air.
It is stated on good authority that, in January, 1856, native ice, three
inches thick, was found in Galveston Bay; we have seen it ten inches thick
in North Carolina, with the mercury in the thermometer at two degrees
below zero. In January, 1857, while the snow was from three to five feet
deep in many parts of North Carolina, the thermometer indicated a degree
of coldness seldom exceeded in any State in the Union--thirteen degrees
below zero. The truth is, instead of its being too hot in the South for
white men, it is too cold for negroes; and we long to see the day arrive
when the latter shall have entirely receded from their uncongenial homes
in America, and given full and undivided place to the former.
Too hot in the South for white men! It is not too hot for white women.
Time and again, in different counties in North Carolina, have we seen the
poor white wife of the poor white husband, following him in the
harvest-field from morning till night, binding up the grain as it fell
from his cradle. In the immediate neighborhood from which we hail, there
are not less than thirty young women, non-slaveholding whites, between
the ages of fifteen and twenty-five--some of whom are so well known to us
that we could call them by name--who labor in the fields every summer; two
of them in particular, near neighbors to our mother, are in the habit of
hiring themselves out during harvest-time, the very hottest season of the
year, to bind wheat and oats--each of them keeping up with the reaper; and
this for the paltry consideration of twenty-five cents per day.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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