tions already made lead to the conclusion that at least a score of persons were engaged in the murder, only three or four of whom have been arrested. A negro who was supposed to have communicated some information to the authorities in respect to the matter has also been murdered; and anonymous letters have been circulated in which it is distinctly announced that any one will be killed who aids in bringing the murderers to punishment.

one of them

enter the car, He responded

In Newberry District a case has recently occurred in which the negroes took justice into their own hands. It appears that in a car which was standing on the track were three or four women and two Rebel soldiers, a Texan. A negro sergeant had occasion to and was roughly ordered out by the Texan. to the effect that he knew his business and should mind it. The two Rebel soldiers thereupon seized him and undertook to thrust him out. He resisted, and the Texan stabbed him, inflicting what was supposed to be a mortal wound. In an hour the two Rebels were caught by the negro soldiers of the regiment to which the sergeant belonged; and in three hours more the Texan had been tried by drum-head courtmartial, shot, and buried. The other Confederate escaped while they were taking him up for trial, and will not be retaken.

During the early part of the season the whole up-country was filled with negroes, brought up last fall by their owners to keep them out of the way of the Yankees. These are drifting back to the coast districts at the rate of two to three hundred per week. In not a few instances they report that they have been turned from the plantations, which report is, in some cases, probably true.

I find very few negroes who seem willing to make contracts for the coming year. Many appear to have a notion that they can live more easily and comfortably by job work. A considerable number are anxious to become landholders,

by lease or by time purchases. Large numbers are "waitin' fur Janawry," hoping, as near as I can learn, that some change for the better will occur at that time. The great body of the freedmen have worked during this season for wholly inadequate wages, and seem, under the circumstances, to have worked with reasonable faithfulness.

XXIV.

SOCIAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE SOUTH-CAROLINIANS.

AIKEN, October 24, 1865.

HE importance of soap and water as elements in civili

THER

except such as would be dam

zation have been much ignored or overlooked. I am satisfied that if the people of this State, with all their belongings and surroundings, aged by water, could be thoroughly washed at least once a week, a year would show a very material advance toward civilization. I do not now speak of inward or mental foulness, though doubtless a weekly cleansing in this regard would be beneficial; but I am convinced that he would be a great public benefactor who could prevail upon the common people of South Carolina to make good use of soap and water. Thrift and tidiness are handmaids of cleanliness; and if it were possible to bring the latter into the homes of the poorer classes of this State, I make no doubt that the next generation would find here the material prosperity of Massachusetts.

I am too much a traveller-not in foreign lands, but in my own country -to be upset in my equanimity by even a wide departure from the average cleanliness of New England housewives, and I very readily make allowance for dif

ference of custom; but, after all this, I cannot help remarking what general negligence and slovenliness there is in the houses of the poorer and so-called lower class of inhabitants, and how easily people accommodate themselves to conditions that could not exist a week in any Northern community.

Personal cleanliness is much more general than household cleanliness, whence I conclude that there is something radically rotten in the labor system of the State. It would seem that negroes are natural slovens, or that the relation of master and slave has ruined them in this regard. It would also seem that master and mistress have either not cared, or have been unable, to insist upon the right and proper thing in this respect.

Any thoughtful traveller will notice that the aggregate number of white men in the State of ages ranging from twenty-five to forty-five is comparatively small; and he cannot help remarking with pain and sorrow that the majority of them are idlers or semi-vagabonds. I don't forget that the whole labor system of the State is thoroughly demoralized and disorganized; and the sad thing is, not that so many men are out of regular business, but that so many are using no endeavor to get into business. I have talked with hundreds who have done nothing since the war closed, and don't intend doing anything before next spring at best.

"I saw a very painful thing the other day," said an intelligent gentleman to me at Columbia one evening; "it was the only son of one of our first families driving an expresswagon. His father was killed in the war, your government has taken the house and grounds, and he is actually supporting his mother and sister by driving a hack!"

"Is labor honorable?" I asked.

"Well, but you see we are not accustomed to manual labor: it has always been counted degrading, and it is really humiliating that Henry should drive a hack!"

"Better that than starvation?" I queried.

3

"O, well, of course; but then his friends would gladly have helped him along till he could find something less degrading than hack-driving."

I judge, from various conversations I have had with young men, that no considerable number are likely, just at present, to pain their friends by engaging in any useful employment. Lads of sixteen to twenty are plenty enough at all loafingplaces, and their talk is not at all encouraging to one hopeful of the future.

The negro, bad as his condition is, seems to me, on the whole, to accommodate himself more easily than the white to the change of situation. He does n't like plantation work, and moves, day by day, in a great wave of life, toward the sea-coast. He can't tell you why he is going toward Charleston. It is vagabondism with some; it is a blind instinct for freedom and proximity to the Yankee with others. Just how all these negroes who have deserted the plantation manage to live no one can tell; but live in some way, and without very much stealing, they do. Half a dollar will start a whole family in trade, and a negro woman in Columbia, to whom that amount had been given, was next day selling corn-cake and peaches on a corner near the post-office, where I found her on every succeeding day of my stay. I asked a middle-aged colored man who had a little stand under a large tree near the church in which the Convention met, how all the negroes who had quit the plantations managed to get along. "Dun know, sah, but 'pears like dey got 'long somehow."

I should say that the real question at issue in the South is, not "What shall be done with the negro?" but "What shall be done with the white?" It is both absurd and wicked to charge that the negroes, as a class, are not at work. Their vitality is at least thirty or forty per cent greater than that of the average whites. They can support their cheap lives with very little labor, and the niggardly

short-sightedness of the planters prevents them from becoming landholders: why should they concern themselves to do much work? Of course the whites are forever complaining. They demand that all labor shall be, as heretofore, in the hands of the blacks; and all ease and profit, as heretofore, in the hands of themselves.

If the nation allows the whites to work out the problem of the future in their own way, the negro's condition in three years will be as bad as it was before the war. All that force and spirit and energy which made them such bitter enemies of the government is now turned into a channel for the overwhelming of the blacks. The viciousness that could not overturn the nation is now mainly engaged in the effort to retain the substance of slavery. What are names if the thing itself remains?

more

There is, of course, another side to this labor question. White men don't know how to work, and the organization of society has been such that in many cases this is their misfortune rather than their fault. Take the useful occupations of mason, carpenter, blacksmith, by which so many men at the North find support, comfort, and even opulence, than half the blacksmiths, most of the brick-masons, and nearly all the hundred or more carpenters that I have seen were colored men. The few white men one meets who seem anxious to go into business really don't know what to do. The resources of tact, handicraft, and intelligence at the command of a Northern man are not at their command. They will get a wood contract, or will establish a line of hauling-wagons, or open a store. Going into trade " seems a very common resort; and as a consequence, small shops are exceedingly numerous, and are daily increasing.

66

Really, the promise of the morrow is not wholly encouraging. Existence has supported itself so long on the shoulder of the slave that it has few resources of its own; and numbers. of men who would be at something by which the lease on