TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE RECONSTRUCTION OF SOCIETY IN LOUISIANA.
THIS war, if it lasts much longer, will have one compen- sation. It will give to North America a generation of statesmen. Nothing has been more remarkable throughout its course than the way in which the somewhat gelatinous intellect of the men of the Northern States, soft because never annealed by irresistible external pressure, has been gradually hardening—acquiring, as it were, bone and substance, and sharp, almost angular, definition. We do not despair, should it last six years, of finding an American who doubts whether the Constitution came down from heaven ready engrossed, who can understand principles as well as the verdicts of the Supreme Court, who perceives that the argu- ment "our people feel" is not precisely equivalent to moral law. Abraham Lincoln's proclamations, rough-hewn as they still are in thought, and wholly unshapen in form, are beginning to have in them a quality apart from the sturdy uprightness which was always there, one which, if it were but a little more polished in expression, all England would recognize as statesmanship. Mr. Seward, of course, is un- teachable, for opposition though it elicits cannot impart capacity ; but Mr. Welles, though he has not built a Warrior, has organized the blockade of three thousand miles of coast, and mosquito fleets which control ten thousand miles of river ; Mr. Stanton, though not a Carnot, keeps half a million of soldiers well armed, well fed, and well contented ; and Mr. Chase, though not a heaven-born financier, has induced a people impatient of taxes to double their taxation, to contemplate quadrupling it, to bear with an inconvertible paper currency, to run up a national debt equal to that of France, and to distribute that debt in morsels so small that a proposal to repudiate would provoke a civil war. In 1858 there was not a man in the Union outside the little circle of Southern leaders who really knew what "government" meant, who had ever considered for ten minutes how to hold down a hostile population, or what manner of resources a great war would require, or in what way opinion could be made an armed as well as an executive force. Even Englishmen can now check off a dozen such men upon their fingers, and Englishmen naturally miss all but those few leaders who have enjoyed opportunities of touching the national imagination. The scores of generals, governors, commissioners, and politi- cians who are learning in the old States, in the West, in the Border Land, and on the Southern coast, the difficult lesson of administration among a people not all of one mind, who are holding unruly States, levying conscripts among men of hostile opinions, organizing frontier clans,—for opinion can create a clan as well as pedigree,—feeding armies who out- number the population, arming whole populations without money, and building fleets without trained artificers— these men escape, of course, English attention. How is any one of us all, unless he happens to his misfortune to think a black a human being, or to imagine that a Yankee can be saved, or to believe it possible that politics may exist west of long. 11°, or to be subject to some fanaticism of the same kind, to leave the Times and the share list, and Professor Max Muller, and study what General Saxton is doing in the Carolinian swamps, or note what progress has been made in turning the right bank of the Mississippi into a region habit- able by men who do not wear revolvers ? Still a few men are visible even to English eyes who are becoming entitled to rank among statesmen, and one of the very first among them is the officer in command in Louisiana.
We never remember to have read—this generation most certainly has never seen—a document more remarkable than the order by which General Banks revolutionizes the social arrangements of the great State of Louisiana. It contains one clause of which we most cordially disapprove, as at once futile and tyrannical, and two or three more the expe- diency of which we seriously doubt, and it is written through- out in that vile semi-literary style, full . of talk about " the ,yellow harvest waving over the crimson field," which we aban- doned when we gave up knee-breeches and coloured raiment. But apart from the one evil clause, and the blemishes which are purely of form, it is an order of which the boldest statesman in Europe might well feel proud, an order full, not only of that audacity which only revolutions and aristocracies breed, but of that constructive capacity, that force which belongs to Founders, which is too apt to be miserably absent from both. just realize for one moment the task before General Banks. Here was a vast State as large as a European kingdom, barely subdued into a seeming quiescence, occupied and owned by men at heart hostile to his regime, tilled by a race who a year since were slaves and are not yet freemen, impatient of labour, burning with new hopes, believing that in some dim way Utopia was for them about to arrive. The collision between the two seta of ideas, between white and black, capital and labour, slave and slave-driver, had ended in ruining both, in the cessation of cultivation, and; except where troops were detached at enormous cost to maintain same ap- pearance of order, in the suspension of social life. There was no crop and no revenue, New Orleans was fed by imported sup- plies, the half-emancipated slaves needed rations nearly as much as the soldiery, the sullen planters were eating up the remains of their capital, too proud to beg for the labour they had com- manded, too uninventive to dispense, as New Englanders might have done, with its assistance. In their midst was a General too powerful, indeed, to make overt resistance safe, but hampered by a conflict of ideas in his own camp and in the capital from which he had received his instructions, with undefined powers, with daily and exhausting responsibilities other than social organization, with endless labour still re- maining to be accomplished, and with unsubdued armies to which the Louisianians are affiliated by a hundred ties hover- ing upon the outskirts of the State. And then realize for one moment the course which General Banks adopted. Boldly turning upon all his difficulties, at once upon sullen planters and excited negroes, both parties in Washington and the soldiery under his own command, he set himself to the re- organization of civil society throughout Louisiana, set him- self to reconcile an utter social change with perfect social order—the emancipation of a slave proletariat with continued labour, a state of conquest with the Yankee arrangement of society, the authority of a dominant army with freedom of com- merce, of manufactures, and of agriculture. We do not say that he has succeeded—success in a task which would tax the most experienced of statesmen must remain to be proved by time ; but we do say that he has secured the first requisite of success, has changed a slave society into one which, though free, will labour, and can march. In an order of twenty-five paragraphs he has, first of all, without naming 'the word "emancipation," still less splitting hairs about loyal and disloyal owners totally abolished slavery. All its inci- dents are prohibited. The lash on which it is based is abo- lished. No negro can be punished by his master, or divorced from his wife, or deprived of his children, or sold off the plantation, or forbidden with due notice to exchange his service, or debarred from education, or deprived of goaffood, medical attendance, and a rate of wages fixed for the moment by an impartial though arbitrary power. All that distin- guishes the slave from the man who toils because without toil he would starve, is abolished, and the slave raised at once to the condition of a fairly paid labourer who once a year may hire himself out to the best-paying work or kindliest master at his own discretion. The crop is rendered liable for his wages, while, the country being divided into school districts, a Unionist judge called provost-marshal and invested with military power is appointed for each, before whom every black can make his complaint of ill-treatment or insufficient pay. In return the newly emancipated man is bound to give ten hours' work a day, under penalty of im- prisonment, to be as respectful as interest makes the white employe, to remain one year with one master, and not to quit the boundaries of the estate—a provision visibly temporary: The soldiery are prohibited from interfering with the labourers or with the planters, and the overseers alone, al- ways the worst class in the South, are threatened with military law. The planter thus regains the command of the tillers and with it the means of making his estate profitable, on the single condition of paying fair wages for secure labour, and. of so bearing himself to his "hands " that they shall not at the end of the year sacrifice their cottages, and their gardens, and their cat-like attachment to localities, rather than work with him again. He is changed from a Southern slaveholder into an English proprietor. On the other hand, the black labourer gains all the social rights of citizenship—that property in wife, and home, and child, and income, which middle-class Englishmen think such trifles till somebody threatens them among themselves, fair wages, right of choice as to service, education, and, we suspect, but do not know, political power, on the single condition of not turning vagrant, or squatter, or deserting his employer just before the annual crop has to be gathered in. The whole social disorganized economy is restored, and restored upon the principles which free societies accept,—a feat in the time and with the means at General Banks' disposal almost without a parallel. All the fears expressed by all parties, the dread of the negroes wandering on to the wild lands, of capital deserting the State, of the blacks being held to slavery under other forms, are all alike dispelled.
Paper decrees, however, are one thing, and raising a crop by free labour in a tropical State quite another ; will the two classes concerned accept ? General Banks thinks they will, and, after much reflection, we agree with him. The negro is enormously benefited, relieved of the three griev- ances he always when speaking openly pleaded first, and which, if unheroic, at least appeal to universal workman sym- pathies. He cannot be struck, he cannot be "sold away South," and he cannot be deprived of his wages. If the provost-marshals d3 their duty, he will be by comparison very comfortable; and the provost-marshals will be appointed and removed by the General whose reputation depends upon the suc- cess of his plan. Our only dread is that the negro will be too happy by half, too little disposed to resent small infractions of his rights, too willing to exchange the respect which the General so strictly enjoins for his ancient servility. Then, as to the planter, he has two very grave motives for ac- cepting the new plan. If he does not, he will be exiled, losing his lands under the Confiscation Act ; and if he does, the arrangement will pay him excellently well. Gene- ral Banks, with a wise moderation, has made the con- tract at first bear slightly against the negro, fixing wages, for instance, on a scale which will give the ordinary "field hand " food, lodging, clothing, and about four shillings a week, or without clothing seven shillings, and about two- thirds of that amount for his wife. Half of this, again, need not be paid till the end of the year, i.e., till the crop can be hypothecated, though precautions are taken that the labourer should not be robbed in the end. Take an estate of 500 hands. The planter always had to give rations, food, and lodging, and his only loss, therefore, is 5,0001. in wages, less than a third of his minimum profits in an ordinary year, which third the difference between unwilling and willing labour will more than make up. Possessed of capital and longing for ease, the planter will not hesitate long, or, if he does, for we must look facts in the face, the esurient New Englander hungering for hands, and cotton fields, and sugar- canes will not. In twelve months we believe cultivation will be restored upon a free basis, and the planter once convinced that wages pay him as well as the negro will be careless of a return to a system really pleasant only in the household power it left within his hands. It is within doors, where the negro is no longer an animal, that the difference will be felt, and within doors that the new system will need most careful surveillance.
The experiment may fail, but it is one of which General Banks may be proud; but we cannot say as much for the political portion of the decree. That temptation to over- govern which is the besetting sin of able administrators seems in this matter to have disturbed an otherwise states- manlike judgment. His position was, it is true, a difficult one, for in circumstances which admit only of absolute power moderated from Washington he is obliged to set up a nominally free State municipality. Still ho might have adopted schemes leas needlessly tyrannical than the one his order seems—for one important datum is wanting— intended to establish. His course, bound as he was in the withes of that hopeless Constitution, was clearly either to exact an oath of allegiance from every voter, and so give him- self a small but working representation through which to govern, waiting for time to change the sullen acquiescence of the majority into orderly if submissive support, or by admit- ting negroes to the suffrage to have given himself a clear and permanent, yet not unjust, control of the polls,—and we are not absolutely certain that this is not among his plane. At all events, ho does not carry it out, but instead imposes oath or exile as the only alternatives, and declares that he will treat " indifference," which is his best bridge between hos- tility and loyalty, "as a crime." A. moment before dealing with planters like a statesman, he suddenly deals with politicians like a theologian, and actually insists on their assuming the appearance of mental change. This is tyranny simply, of a bad because useless kind, and our appreciation of the first part of the order cannot blind us to the injurious impotence of the second. We trust that it may be reconsidered, for if not General Banks will find that instead of the difficult task of a tree statesman—the change of open foes into luke- warm but quiet friends, he will have to commence the far easier but inferior work of the mere conqueror—to replace a class whom he has himself made hostile by one which is friendly, but brings him no addition to his strength. He has the New Englanders already ; he should gain the planters, not merely place a New Englander where a planter stood.
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