Beaufort, S.C., March 11, 1862
What I see here only confirms my previous impressions gathered mainly from Olmsted and developed in the articles I wrote for the Independent. We can do nothing for these people until the cotton monopoly is broken down and a new state of political economy forces the cotton producer here to employ a new and cheaper machinery. Edward Pierce arrived here on Sunday in command of forty missionaries. They had better have kept away; things are not ripe for them yet and they are trying to force the course of nature. Yet the problem is a difficult one. We have now some 7000 masterless slaves within our line and in less than two months we shall have nearer 70,000, and what are we to do with them? I have not thought sufficiently to express an opinion. My present impression is in favor of a semi-military system for the present. District the territory, oblige the young to go to school, punish rigidly all thieving and violence, and then teach them all the first great lesson, that they must work to live; establish low wages and let the blacks support themselves or starve. If they choose to live in there own huts and cultivate their own land and so support themselves I see no objection, if the young went to school; but the first lesson must be work or starve. These blacks will not starve. They are just such as the white has made them and as we have heard them described. They are intelligent enough, but their intelligence too often takes the form of low cunning. They lie and steal and are fearfully lazy; but they will work for money and indeed are anxious to get work. They are dreadful hypocrites and tomorrow would say to their masters, as a rule, what today they say to us. As a whole my conclusion is that the race might be devoted, if man were what he should be; but he being what he is, it will be destroyed the moment the world realises what a field for white emigration the South affords. The inferior will disappear — how no man can tell — before the more vigorous race. The world has seen this happen before many times and this, though the newest, will not be the last instance. This war, I think, begins the new era from which, while freedom has much, the African has little to hope…
Some things in your letters filled me with astonishment and laughter. First and foremost among them was the idea of your new intimacy with Thurlow Weed — Thurlow of the unopened letter, Thurlow the unforgiving and corrupt, coming at this very time when the star of the injured Sumner — Sumner the philanthropist, the persecuted and the beaten — was no longer in the ascendant. Verily politics does give and take strange bed-fellows, and to find you working heart and hand with Weed, advising with him, confiding in him and believing in him, is something I did not dream to see. I am glad of it. The devil is not indeed so black as he is painted, and in this I think I see the last link needed in a political alliance — a Puritan and New York political confederacy — destined to be potent for good in the affairs of this Continent. Surely never did we need that all motives and all faculties should work together as we do now, and I hope lead and pestilence will spare me to do what I may as a member of the new league. . . .
