RECONSTRUCTION IN THE SOUTH.
STATE Sovereignty is dead, but not State Rights. That is the short and pithy sentence in which a journal closely connected with the American Government sums up and defends the policy of President Johnson, and it is one, we fear, which describes it only too accurately. The President has been ill, and consequently inactive for some weeks, but the few steps he has taken indicate that he has made up his mind as to the policy to be pursued for the reconstruction of the South. The key-note of that policy is the subordination of every other object, the Union and abolition alone excepted, to the maintenance of " State Rights," that is the right of the white constituency to legislate independently for itself and for the blacks too. The President, it must be remembered, was bred a pro-slavery democrat, and although he joined and even led the abolitionists of Tennessee, arguing that slavery and the Republic could not exist together, he did not abandon the rest of his party's distinctive tenets. Indeed his hostility has never been directed so much against slavery in itself as against the aggregations of property to which slavery of necessity leads, and in a letter so recent as 3rd July he calls on the citizens of Gettysburg not to forget that the war has emancipated whites as well as blacks, set white men free " from the control of selfish and ambitious leaders to cherish and serve the Government." He obviously relies on the class known before the war as " mean whites" to guide and control the States, and has therefore steadily refused to interfere with State action. He declares distinctly that no State now in the Union has ever been legally out of it, and his organs ask whether if he has the power to widen the suffrage in North Carolina lie has not the same authority in New York or Massachussetts. Re- quests to impose new oaths, to influence the Conventions, to support the blacks in any way are steadily refused, and except as to the two essentials—obedience and abolition— each State is apparently to be left to go the way it may please. What that way will be is already becoming abundantly evident. The Southern population, it appears, considers that the new oath may be taken, for the Union has won the game in the field, and slavery is at end. As therefore they do not intend either to resist the Union or re-establish slavery, they think they may take the oath with safe and easy consciences. Accordingly they apply for par- dons in such numbers that in most of the States the old electors will within a few months be possessed of a clear majority, and be able to elect a Legislature possessed within the State of almost absolute power, and reflecting no opinions, or interests, or prejudices except their own. These Legisla- tures will have to deal first of all with the negro question, and the spirit in which they will deal with it may be guessed from the phrase they employ to describe their work. They call it " regulating the negro," and while every man who speaks in the South has his own plan of regulation, no one suggests that the negro should either be left alone, or placed on a legal equality with his rival, the white labourer. Even the Federal Generals seem to believe that the black cannot be left to the operation of the ordinary incentives to work, and authorize acts of compulsion not attempted towards the whites. In' exas, for example, the General has informed the population that slavery being extinct both races are entitled to equal rights, but at Galveston the municipality orders forced labour nevertheless. Every black seen abroad is seized, and if found to be a " masterless man," or without a home, is condemned there and then to work on • the municipal roads. In itself of course this practice is not only defensible, but resembles very closely the law actually in force in Great Britain, but then there is no attempt to apply it to vagrants of lighter colour. If the black man will not work he is condemned to the roads, but if the white man refuses he usually obtains a charitable ration. In Georgia the Governor recommends a body of negro laws, in Richmond the whites petition for aid against a coming black insurrection, and everywhere the authorities, military and civil, assent to a com- pulsory rate of wages. It is clear that the Southerners in giving up slavery have no intention of surrendering caste, or of turning their negroes into free artizans, and under President Johnson's theory of State Rights they will have ample power to " recon- struct " their prejudices into a system. They have only to dig- able the black from giving evidence against the white, and any great employer of labour may commit outrages with impunity. Nothing in the State Constitutions or the Constitution of the Union binds them not to fix a maximum for wages, there is no prohibition of laws " for the repression of insolence," or for depriving a race of the power of owning land, or for visit- ing with cruel penalties attempts at intermarriage. Vagrant laws may be made so stern as to fix negroes to the soil, com- pelling them to accept particular masters or none, and there is no constitutional obstacle to the establishment of internal passports. With laws such as these enforced, as they would be enforced, by whites, the negro would be in a position little better than that of a serf, compelled to labour submissively for wages worth only his bare subsistence, flogged if he dis- obeyed, disobedience being insolence, unable to seek a new master for want of a permit of travel, and liable if he evaded the law to be condemned to hard labour as a convicted vagrant. The alleviations of his ancient lot would be indeed few, for though his wife could not be taken away, or his children sold, or himself sentenced to punishment except by a magistrate's order, still if his wife were insulted or himself struck, cr his children worked into illnesses, he would for want of testimony have no power of legal redress. That position allows neither of content nor of progress, and being the position of the majority of labouring men would, like slavery, bring labour into discredit. Society would be based once more upon caste, the great employer would again rule, and within twenty years the pseudo-aristo- cratic and democratic systems would be again in armed col- lision. The Republic would rest in fact upon men who multiply very fast, who are physically brave and strong, but who have no motive whatever for supporting institutions of which they feel the harshness, but experience none of the benefits.
But may not the "mean whites," who have not benefited by slavery, and who will once again be ruined by the competition of half-paid labour, so control the elections that the State Legislatures will in their interest make the coloured race independent ? That is evidently Mr. Johnson's calculation, and he is strongly supported by a politician who ought to know the truth. Governor Bramlette, of Kentucky, the only slave State which has not decisively joined either party, is at this moment urging his people to adopt a constitutional amend- ment abolishing slavery for ever. In an address remarkable for its logical power he endeavours to convince the non-owning whites, who are to the slaveowners in the proportion of about eight to one, that their interests have been sacrificed for the benefit of a minority, that they are condemned to poverty that a few gentlemen may get rich. They cannot, he says, compete with men who pay no wages, and he urges them to abolish a privilege which is maintained out of their own pockets, which, so to speak, diminishes their own dinners and ruins the prospects of their children. Every word of his argument would apply equally to laws enforcing a maximum of wages against one particular class, and if he convinces his audience we shall willingly acknowledge that Mr. Johnson knows the people with whom he has to deal. Of coursegg that be the case, if the non-owning whites are ready, no matter from what motive, to make common cause with the slave the problem is greatly simplified, is reduced indeed to the difficulty of inducing races of different civilizations to live together in peace. But as yet all the evidence is on the other side. Fortunately for mankind as a whole, unfor- tunately for the South in this instance, men are governed rather by their ideas than their material interests, and caste feeling is an idea. The non-owning whites have perished in heaps to protect the owners' superiority over the slaves and
themselves equally, and in Tennessee, where they have abol- ished slavery, they have still passed laws directly intended to maintain their old aseendeney. Like the pauper noblesse of *Prussia, they guard their privileges most tenaciously when they are most evidently obstacles in their own way. There is little chance that the haughtier planters of Georgia, or Alabama, or the Carolinas will be more moderate than Tennesseans, and reconstruction by. States will, we fear, imply over the entire South the re-subjection of the labouring class to exceptional laws.
The experiment must be tried, for the President has de- termined on his course, and he can, if too strongly opposed, appeal to the democratic party, whose ideas are, on this point at least, in precise accord with his own. They also are ready to admit that slavery has been killed by the war, but they also uphold State Rights, and believe in their hearts that the negro must be coerced. But should the experiment once in motion visibly fail, we deny that the North is without a con- stitutional remedy. It is, we believe, still possible to esta- blish equality without destroying State Rights, or prolonging beyond endurance the military occupation. The Republicans acknowledge that when the clause prohibiting slavery has once been introduced into the Constitution even the South will obey. Let them, then, direct their efforts towards the introduction of one more clause, which if once carried out will be found a more potent protection for the negro than even the suffrage, which he may be afraid to use. The States are already dis- abled from passing any law to establish monarchy, or create hereditary aristocracy, or impair the obligation of a contract; let them be disabled also from establishing by law " any dis- tinctions, legal or social, based upon colour or descent." That clause will compel the planters, if they desire to narrow the suffrage, or punish vagrancy, or make insolence penal, or compel obedience by employed to employers, to include whites and blacks alike, and the whites can be fairly trusted to take care of themselves. The States may, for ex- ample, base the suffrage on education, which would at present exclude the negro, but then half the whites will be struck out too, and will very soon force themselves in. They dare not enforce a maximum for wages, which would hit a Yankee settler as heavily as a field hand, or compel every little farmer to produce his pass, or refuse a white man's evidence because he is very poor. They must treat all alike, and though of course in practice the white man would receive speedier justice, and sentences on the black man would be exceptionally severe, still a legal right to equality always raises the race which achieves it, and the next generation of negroes, educated, free, and industrious, would be in a posi- tion to secure that justice in practice which they would already enjoy by law. If they cannot the fault is theirs, and strongly as we have ',fought their battle, we do not wish to =tend that they should be treated as the spoiled children of the American household. Provided the arena is free and the judges impartial, it matters little to the world which side wins the game.
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