I am certain that there can be no lower class of people than the North Carolina "clay-eaters," this being the local name for the poor whites. I have looked into the cabins of not a few of them, and have made inquiries concerning them of a considerable number of persons. I state a deliberate conclusion when I say that the average negroes are superior in force and intellect to the great majority of these clay-eaters. Many of them all of those not married -must be simply called vagabonds. They are generally without fixed home and without definite occupation. They are always thinly clad, their habitations are mere hovels, they are entirely uneducated, and many of them are hardly above beasts in their habits. Very few families have fifty dollars' worth of property of any kind. The men live most of the time in the woods, and generally keep one or two dogs and own a cheap rifle. The women are slatternly and utterly without any idea of decency or propriety; they cultivate a little corn, and sometimes a little patch of cow-peas, collards, or sweet potatoes. The whole class is bigoted and superstitious to the last degree; they generally believe in evil spirits, but rarely in a Divine Father. They are lazy and thriftless, mostly choose to live by begging or pilfering, and are more unreliable as farm hands than the worst of the negroes.

I find here as everywhere the complaint that the free negro will not work. There seems considerable demand for labor, yet, strangè as it may seem, the people are warm colonizationists. They talk much about importing white labor, which, of course, they can't get till they put it on such footing as it commands in the North. The idea of everybody is that labor must be kept out of good society; and so I hear much assertion to the effect that German laborers can be imported who will work for about ten or twelve dollars per month, and occupy the cabins which the negroes have vacated.

The fact, if not the name, of slavery remains in many of these central counties. An officer in our army, for twelve years a resident of the State, tells me that many of the people hope some system of peonage or apprenticeship will be established as soon as the State gets full control of her affairs; and an officer of the Freedmen's Bureau says that in some counties, from all he can learn, negroes are whipped almost as much now as ever.

"The war," says the Raleigh Sentinel in a late issue, "has settled a fact, that African slavery or involuntary servitude shall no longer exist in the United States, and we accept it as a fixed fact; but the principle whether African slavery is right or wrong, whether it is best, wisest for both races, that the slaves should be free, or whether it is just and right to the former slaveholders that they shall be free, or whether the slaves are of right entitled to be free, these are still open questions."

A Johnston County man told in my hearing, and with a great deal of gusto, how he managed his negroes. He could n't whip them, he said, because they'd sneak off to the provost marshal and complain of him. "But I'll be d-d if I don't get even with the cusses when they try to ride ahead; I jest tell 'em I'm in for a fight, and then I go into 'em for about ten minutes; they understand it, an' come down on thar knees right sudden." He told this with plain indications that he considered himself smart in thus retaining the essential feature of slavery.

A Moore County man whom I met at Raleigh had much to say of the marital relations of the negroes. He believed two thirds of the men would abandon their wives whenever the notion took them, and he doubted if one woman in six was true to her husband. He had no idea that any law could be made to reach this people in this regard, and expected their condition in respect to virtue would be worse hereafter than when they were slaves. He told me a story of a

negro who came to him, said he had two wives in Wilmington, but wanted to be married to a third for the war or so long as the Yankees held that city. This seemed to him such conclusive evidence of the negro's unfitness for freedom, that, though it proved nothing, I was glad to be able to match his story with one from the adjoining county of Harnett, to the effect that a white man, having a wife in Virginia, had applied to a magistrate to be married to another woman for forty days, and had tendered a bushel of sweet potatoes in payment for the job.

more

There is much hostility to the Freedmen's Bureau, hereabouts than I found in the western part of the State. The people claim that it "interferes with the regular operations of labor." I get this phrase from several different persons: just what it means is more than I can tell. I judge, however, from all I hear, that the farmers and small planters are disposed to retain their old relations to the negroes, and that the Bureau is acting as the black man's next friend.

Not a few persons seem to me to be trying to find a pretext for a general onslaught upon the negroes. They charge that the blacks are pretty generally organizing, and in many of the lower counties are drilling semi-weekly. I am not able to satisfy myself that there is any truth in these charges. That the negroes hold weekly meetings in some neighborhoods many of the delegates in the Freedmen's Convention told me; but they assured me that they were always of a social or religious character, and I have neither seen nor heard anything that causes me to doubt their word. Most of the blacks whom I meet seem to me unusually well informed as to the situation so far as it affects their race, and exceedingly anxious to bear themselves with propriety and decorum before all men.

As I have already said, there are the usual complaints about the idleness of the negroes. Some of them have, to

be sure, left their old homes; but I estimate that the number who have wandered away does not exceed one tenth of the aggregate. The others are, for the most part, quietly at work on the plantations and farms. "From our experience and observation," says the editor of the Progress, of Raleigh, a native, and a former slaveholder, "we believe that by treating the blacks justly, and paying them promptly, more will be produced, by good management, under the free-labor system than was under the old slave system."

XX.

SUMMARY OF THREE WEEKS' OBSERVATIONS IN NORTH

S

CAROLINA.

WILMINGTON, October 17, 1865.

PINDLING of legs, round of shoulders, sunken of chest, lank of body, stooping of posture, narrow of face, retreating of forehead, thin of nose, small of chin, large of mouth, this is the native North-Carolinian as one sees him outside the cities and large towns. There is insipidity in his face, indecision in his step, and inefficiency in his whole bearing. His house has two rooms and a loft, and is meanly furnished, — one, and possibly two, beds, three or four chairs, half a dozen stools, a cheap pine table, an old spinningwheel, a water-bucket and drinking gourd, two tin washbasins, half a dozen tin platters, a few cooking utensils, and a dozen odd pieces of crockery. Paint and whitewash and wall-paper and window-curtains are to him needless luxuries. His wife is leaner, more round-shouldered, more sunken of chest, and more pinched of face than her husband. He "chaws" and she " dips." The children of these two are large-eyed, tow-headed urchins, alike igno

rant of the decencies and the possibilities of life. In this house there is often neither book nor newspaper; and, what is infinitely worse, no longing for either. The day begins at sunrise and ends at dark; its duties are alike devoid of dignity and mental or moral compensation. The man has a small farm, and once owned six or eight negroes. How the family now lives, the propping hands of the negroes being taken away, is a mystery, even if one remembers the simple cheapness of mere animal life.

I am not speaking either of the white resident of the cities or of the "poor white," technically so named, but of the common inhabitant of the country, the man who pays a tax and votes, but never runs for office; who was a private in the Rebel army, but never anything more; who hates the Yankees as a matter of course, but has no personal illwill toward them; who believes in the Divine right of slavery, but is positive that a free negro cannot be made to work. He is hospitable enough in words and manner, but expects you to pay extravagantly in greenbacks or liberally in silver for a seat at his table and the use of his odd bed. His larder is lean, and his cookery is in the last degree wretched. He tenders "apple-jack," as an evidence of good-will, and wonders in a feeble way how a man can live who don't drink it at least half a dozen times a day. He likes to talk, and rarely has any work that prevents him from hanging on the fence to chat with the chance traveller who asks the road; but his conversation runs in an everlasting circle round the negro, with an occasional pause for the relation of personal adventures in the war. He receives two or three letters per year, perhaps, and wonders why a man should take a daily newspaper. He troubles himself very little about schools or education, but likes to go to meeting, and thinks himself well informed as to matters of theology. He believes the "abolishioners" brought on the war; but he does n't love Jeff Davis or Governor Vance. He "allers