ignorant laborers have a good chance to take refuge. And to all
this must be added the obvious fact that a slave ancestry and a system
of unrequited toil has not improved the efficiency or temper of the
mass of black laborers. Nor is this peculiar to Sambo; it has in
history been just as true of John and Hans, of Jacques and Pat, of all
ground-down peasantries. Such is the situation of the mass of the
Negroes in the Black Belt to-day; and they are thinking about it.
Crime, and a cheap and dangerous socialism, are the inevitable results
of this pondering. I see now that ragged black man sitting on a log,
aimlessly whittling a stick. He muttered to me with the murmur of many
ages, when he said: "White man sit down whole year; Nigger work day and
night and make crop; Nigger hardly gits bread and meat; white man
sittin' down gits all. It's wrong." And what do the better classes of
Negroes do to improve their situation? One of two things: if any way
possible, they buy land; if not, they migrate to town. Just as
centuries ago it was no easy thing for the serf to escape into the
freedom of town-life, even so to-day there are hindrances laid in the
way of county laborers. In considerable parts of all the Gulf States,
and especially in Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas, the Negroes on
the plantations in the back-country districts are still held at forced
labor practically without wages. Especially is this true in districts
where the farmers are composed of the more ignorant class of poor
whites, and the Negroes are beyond the reach of schools and intercourse
with their advancing fellows. If such a peon should run away, the
sheriff, elected by white suffrage, can usually be depended on to catch
the fugitive, return him, and ask no questions. If he escape to
another county, a charge of petty thieving, easily true, can be
depended upon to secure his return. Even if some unduly officious
person insist upon a trial, neighborly comity will probably make his
conviction sure, and then the labor due the county can easily be bought
by the master. Such a system is impossible in the more civilized parts
of the South, or near the large towns and cities; but in those vast
stretches of land beyond the telegraph and the newspaper the spirit of
the Thirteenth Amendment is sadly broken. This represents the lowest
economic depths of the black American peasant; and in a study of the
rise and condition of the Negro freeholder we must