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Chapter io. The Tradition of Slavery
material welfare of the slaves, their health and productive standards, as any
good proprietor engaged in animal husbandry. As the slaves were his own
Negroes in a literal sense, he could develop the same pride, attachment, and
even affection, which the devoted proprietor-manager is likely to feel
toward his own livestock.
The apologetic literature of the South gave much stress to examples of
such pater nalistic idyls. Stories of the kindly relations between masters and
slaves are always particularly touching, both because they stand out against
the background of the intrinsic cruelty and arbitrariness implied in a system
under which some human beings were owned by others and because they
represent this unreserved feeling of kindness which we can hardly feel
toward other objects than those which are absolutely under our dominance
as are our domestic animals. It is commonly asserted that the slaves fared
particularly well in the slave-breeding and slave-exporting states of the
Upper South, and that they there also showed themselves to be ‘^happy”
in spite of the regularly recurring necessity of leaving near relatives when
they were sold into the Deep South.®
The rise in sickness and death rates which seems to have occurred follow-
ing the Civil War“ bears out the general opinion that the first economic
effect of freedom was a decreased level of living for the Negro people.
The implication would be that, since the plantation owners lost their
property interest in upholding a level of living which preserved the capital
value of the Negro, this level dropped below the subsistence standard.
Important for the development of the new labor structure into which
the freed Negro slaves were pressed and which has determined their
economic fate and, to a considerable extent, the economic history of the
South until this day was the fact that Emancipation was not related to any
change of mind on the part of white people. The reform was thrust upon
the South and never got its sanction. It became rather a matter of sectional
pride to resist the change to the utmost. When it became apparent that
the North could not, or wo\dd not, press its demands with force, the white
South found a revenge for the defeat in the War by undoing as far as
possible the national legislation to protect the freedman. This negative
direction of Southern political will is still, three generations after the Civil
War, apparent to the observer. The South did not want—and to a great
extent still does not want—^the Negro to be successful as a freedman. White
Southerners are prepared to abstain from many liberties and to sacrifice
many advantages for the purpose of withholding them from the Negroes.**
To the whites the temporary Negro vagrancy that followed the Civil
War^ must have appeared as a confirmation of their dominant conviction,
that most Negroes are inherently incapable of persistent work, unless kept
* See Chapter 6, Section a.
**
See Chapter ao.
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