ed
idea that the landowner must also own the black man tilling his land,
and that any assertion of freedom of action on the part of that black
man was insubordination equivalent to criminal revolt, and any dissent
by the black man from the employer's opinion or taste intolerable
insolence. Nor should it be forgotten that the urgent necessity of
negro labor for that summer's crop could hardly fail to sharpen the
nervous tension then disquieting Southern society.

_Restless Foot-loose Negroes_

It is equally natural that the negro population of the South should at
that time have been unusually restless. I have already mentioned the
fact that during the Civil War the bulk of the slave population
remained quietly at work on the plantations, except in districts
touched by the operations of the armies. Had negro slaves not done so,
the Rebellion would not have survived its first year. They presented
the remarkable spectacle of an enslaved race doing slaves' work to
sustain a government and an army fighting for the perpetuation of its
enslavement. Some colored people did, indeed, escape from the
plantations and run into the Union lines where our troops were within
reach, and some of their young men enlisted in the Union army as
soldiers. But there was nowhere any commotion among them that had in
the slightest degree the character of an uprising in force of slaves
against their masters. Nor was there, when, after the downfall of the
Confederacy, general emancipation had become an established fact, a
single instance of an act of vengeance committed by a negro upon a
white man for inhumanity suffered by him or his while in the condition
of bondage. No race or class of men ever passed from slavery to
freedom with a record equally pure of revenge. But many of them,
especially in the neighborhood of towns or of Federal encampments,
very naturally yielded to the temptation of testing and enjoying their
freedom by walking away from the plantations to have a frolic. Many
others left their work because their employers ill-treated them or in
other ways incurred their distrust. Thus it happened that in various
parts of the South the highroads and byways were alive with foot-loose
colored people.

I did not find, so far as I was informed by personal observation or
report, that their conduct could, on the whole, be called lawless.
There was some stealing of pigs and chickens and other petty
pilfering, but rather less than might have b