man are almost as far from the masses as we of the North are.
Moreover, that any opinion savors of the "Yankee"--in other words, is
new to the South--is a fact that even prevents its consideration by the
great body of the people. Their inherent antagonism to everything from
the North--an antagonism fostered and cunningly cultivated for half a
century by the politicians in the interest of Slavery--is something that
no traveller can photograph, that no Northern man can understand, till
he sees it with his own eyes, hears it with his own ears, and feels it
by his own consciousness. That the full freedom of the negroes would be
acknowledged at once is something we had no warrant for expecting. The
old masters grant them nothing, except at the requirement of the
nation,--as a military and political necessity; and any plan of
reconstruction is wrong which proposes at once or in the immediate
future to substitute free-will for this necessity.

Three fourths of the people assume that the negro will not labor, except
on compulsion; and the whole struggle between the whites on the one hand
and the blacks on the other hand is a struggle for and against
compulsion. The negro insists, very blindly perhaps, that he shall be
free to come and go as he pleases; the white insists that he shall come
and go only at the pleasure of his employer. The whites seem wholly
unable to comprehend that freedom for the negro means the same thing as
freedom for them. They readily enough admit that the Government has made
him free, but appear to believe that they still have the right to
exercise over him the old control. It is partly their misfortune, and
not wholly their fault, that they cannot understand the national intent,
as expressed in the Emancipation Proclamation and the Constitutional
Amendment. I did not anywhere find a man who could see that laws should
be applicable to all persons alike; and hence even the best men hold
that each State must have a negro code. They acknowledge the overthrow
of the special servitude of man to man, but seek through these codes to
establish the general servitude of man to the commonwealth. I had much
talk with intelligent gentlemen in various sections, and particularly
with such as I met during the conventions at Columbia and Milledgeville,
upon this subject, and found such a state of feeling as warrants little
hope that the present generation of negroes will see the day in which
their race shall be amenable on