there is
labor to till it. Land owners are driven to competing for laborers and
tenants to work their plantations.

Owing to his ignorance of business matters and to a long-established
habit of submission, the Negro after emancipation was placed at a great
disadvantage in his dealings with the white man. His right to move from
one plantation to another became, therefore, the Negro tenant's method
of enforcing consideration from the planter. He might not dispute the
planter's accounts, because he was not capable of doing so, and it was
unprofitable to attempt it, but if he felt aggrieved he could move.

This was the significance of the exodus in some of the southern states
which took place about 1879, when 40,000 people left the plantations in
the Black Belts of Louisiana and Mississippi and went to Kansas. The
masses of the colored people were dissatisfied with the treatment they
were receiving from the planters and made up their minds to move to "a
free country," as they described it. At the same time it was the attempt
of the planter to bind the Negro tenant who was in debt to him to his
place on the plantation that gave rise to the system of peonage that
still exists in a mitigated form in the South today.

When the Negro moved off the plantation upon which he was reared he
severed the personal relations which bound him to his master's people.
It was just at this point that the two races began to lose touch with
each other. From this time on the relations of the black man and white,
which in slavery had been direct and personal, became every year, as the
old associations were broken, more and more indirect and secondary.
There lingers still the disposition on the part of the white man to
treat every Negro familiarly, and the disposition on the part of every
Negro to treat every white man respectfully. But these are habits which
are gradually disappearing. The breaking down of the instincts and
habits of servitude and the acquisition by the masses of the Negro
people of the instincts and habits of freedom have proceeded slowly but
steadily. The reason the change seems to have gone on more rapidly in
some cases than others is explained by the fact that at the time of
emancipation 10 per cent of the Negroes in the United States were
already free, and others, those who had worked in trades, many of whom
had hired their own time from their masters, had become more or less
adapted to the competitive conditions of free s