A Former Slave Owner Complains of “Negro Problem”

FRANCES BUTLER LEIGH, Letter to a Friend in England (1867)

While Betty Powers experienced the era of Reconstruction with the optimism of the newly freed, Frances Butler Leigh wrote defiant and discouraging letters from her father’s Sea Island plantation on St. Simon’s Island, Georgia. She and her father, divorced years earlier from Leigh’s mother, the British actress and antislavery advocate Frances Kemble, moved from Philadelphia to the plantation just after the war ended in a failed effort to keep the family’s estate afloat. Within a few years, she sold the plantation and moved to England, where she wrote Ten Years on a Georgia Plantation Since the War in 1883, a memoir defending the Old South.

S. Simon’s Island: June 23, 1867

Dearest S ——, We are, I am afraid, going to have terrible trouble by-and-by with the Negroes, and I see nothing but gloomy prospects for us ahead. The unlimited power that the war has put into the hands of the present government at Washington seems to have turned the heads of the party now in office, and they don’t know where to stop. The whole South is settled and quiet, and the people too ruined and crushed to do anything against the government, even if they felt so inclined, and all are returning to their former pursuits, trying to rebuild their fortunes and thinking of nothing else. Yet the treatment we receive from the government becomes more and more severe every day, the last act being to divide the whole South into five military districts, putting each under the command of a United States general, doing away with all civil courts and law. Even D —— who you know is a Northern republican, says it is most unjustifiable, not being in any way authorised by the existing state of things, which he confesses he finds very different from what he expected before he came. If they would frankly say they intend to keep us down, it would be fairer than making a pretence of readmitting us to equal rights, and then trumping up stories of violence to give a show of justice to treating us as the conquered foes of the most despotic Government on earth, and by exciting the negroes to every kind of insolent lawlessness, to goad the people into acts of rebellion and resistance.

The other day in Charleston, which is under the command of that respectable creature General S —— , they had a firemen’s parade, and took the occasion to hoist a United States flag, to which this modern Gesler1 insisted on everyone raising his cap as he passed underneath. And by a hundred other such petty tyrannies are the people, bruised and sore, being roused to desperation; and had this been done directly after the war it would have been bad enough, but it was done the other day, three years after the close of the war.

The true reason is the desire and intention of the Government to control the elections of the South, which under the constitution of the country they could not legally do. So they have determined to make an excuse for setting aside the laws, and in order to accomplish this more fully, each commander in his separate district has issued an order declaring that unless a man can take an oath that he had not voluntarily borne arms against the United States Government, nor in any way aided or abetted the rebellion, he cannot vote. This simply disqualifies every white man at the South from voting, disfranchising the whole white population, while the negroes are allowed to vote en masse.

This is particularly unjust, as the question of negro voting was introduced and passed in Congress as an amendment to the constitution, but in order to become a law a majority of two-thirds of the State Legislatures must ratify it, and so to them it was submitted, and rejected by all the Northern States with two exceptions, where the number of negro voters would be so small as to be harmless. Our Legislatures are not allowed to meet, but this law, which the North has rejected, is to be forced upon us, whose very heart it pierces and prosperity it kills. Meanwhile, in order to prepare the negroes to vote properly, stump speakers from the North are going all through the South, holding political meetings for the negroes, saying things like this to them: “My friends, you will have your rights, won’t you?” (“Yes,” from the negroes.) “Shall I not go back to Massachusetts and tell your brothers there that you are going to ride in the street cars with white ladies if you please?” (“Yes, yes,” from the crowd.) “That if you pay your money to go to the theatre you will sit where you please, in the best boxes if you like?” (“Yes,” and applause.) This I copy verbatim from a speech made at Richmond the other day, since which there have been two serious negro riots there, and the General commanding had to call out the military to suppress them.

These men are making a tour through the South, speaking in the same way to the negroes everywhere. Do you wonder we are frightened? I have been so forcibly struck lately while reading Baker’s “Travels in Africa,” and some of Du Chaillu’s lectures,2 at finding how exactly the same characteristics show themselves among the negroes there, in their own native country, where no outside influences have ever affected them, as with ours here. Forced to work, they improve and are useful; left to themselves they become idle and useless, and never improve. Hard ethnological facts for the abolitionists to swallow, but facts nevertheless.

It seems foolish to fill my letter to you with such matters, but all this comes home to us with such vital force that it is hard to write, or speak, or think of anything else, and the one subject that Southerners discuss whenever they meet is, “What is to become of us?”

Affectionately yours,

F——

Frances Butler Leigh, Ten Years on a Georgia Plantation Since the War (London: Richard Bentley & Son, Publishers in Ordinary to her Majesty the Queen, 1883), 66–71.

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