Who Owns This Land

Henry Martyn Dexter, "What Ought to be Done with the Freedmen and With the Rebels?"

What ought to be done with the freedmen and with the rebels?: a sermon preached in the Berkeley Street Church, Boston, on Sunday April 23, 1865. (Boston : Nichols & Noyes, 1865). From Making of America

This excerpt depicts the former Confederates as traitors who have lost all property rights, and sees the freedmen as superior to northern ethnic groups.

If they are free to go where they choose, one thing is clear: they will] not come North, save in rarely exceptional cases... A frigid climate is intolerant of them; that they can only live and thrive where they would prefer to live and thrive, in those portions of the Union which, in temperature, most nearly resemble their native land. If left to themselves to choose, there can be no doubt that the great majority of them will prefer to live at the South as freemen, where they have so long lived as slaves; where the climate suits them where they are accustomed to the soil; and where constitutions like theirs are well-nigh indispensable for any successful agriculture. Those tropical cotton-fields, and sugar-plantations, and rice-swamps, where they have for generations delved sadly under the lash, must lie waste, or freedmen must take up the shovel and the hoe with the new elasticity and enthusiasm of a personal interest in their labor,. and beautify them with the joy of harvest. White men cannot do that work as well as they can, if; indeed, they could do it at all. The work needs to be done. The spindles and looms of the world famish for the cotton, and the markets are hungry for the rice and the sugar. There, where they can do what needs to be done, and what they need to do, and long to do, and what the world needs to have them do, is surely the place for them. Let them live at home. ...

The freedmen should be recognized as men, should be treated as men, and should be aided to take care of themselves as men. This once established, all becomes clear. We have now among us about the same number of foreign-born citizens (I do not include, of course, the children of foreign-born parents) as we shall have of freedmen, - say five millions; and a large proportion of these are quite as degraded in character, and as low in all brain-culture, as the blacks: but it has never so much as entered our heads to treat them as if they were not men; on the contrary, we have recognized them as men, and sought to aid them to take care of themselves as such. There are in our land, already, near 40,000 Chinese; near 30,000 Mexicans; near 5,000 Portuguese; as many Spaniards; 500 Islanders from the Pacific, and 150 Turks; who, as classes, would present quite as serious a question as to their suitableness for our citizenship as is presented by the negro class. I am not sure but the low, imbruted, Papal part of the two millions now among us, who were born in Ireland, presents a much more serious one; and yet we scarcely have thrown even any delay in the way of their blundering straight up to the ballot-box with a vote. We are confused on the negro question by the folly of our past. ...

After the advantages won for the nation in this struggle by the sagacity of negro pilots, and the intrepid fidelity of negro guides, and the heroic bravery of negro troops, it is an insult even more to our manliness than to theirs to deny that they are men; humble in culture, in most cases, to be sure... and, it may be, with a low average of some manly qualities; but still MEN; fit to be trusted and trained to take care of themselves,- fit to be welcomed to dwell by our side, and help bear our burdens and enjoy our triumphs. ...

They must be provided with a place where they can live as men. All men must be somewhere; and if we expect the freedmen to be industrious, and to support themselves and aid us by honest labor, they must have a home. If they are to till the soil, they must have the soil to till. If they are to inhabit South Carolina and other portions of the South whose climate and soil are congenial to them, they must have South Carolina and other Southern soil in possession. How shall they get it? Who owns it now? There can be but one answer.

By the law of the land, as things were before the Rebellion, 350,000 slavehlolders owned these four and a half millions of negroes,- now freedmen, and the land which they tilled. When those planters turned traitors to the United States, as ninety-nine in every hundred of them did, they distinctly renounced its protection of their social rights, including that to their deeded lands, and dared its heaviest penalties, in the expectation that they should readily resist its power, and establish a new government of their own, which would take up the defense of those social rights, and more than make them good against all claimants within and all force without. They deceived themselves. They staked all, and have lost all. The majesty of the Government which they despised has swept over them, and they lie prostrate and helpless before it. ...

They no longer own those broad plantations. The title has passed, through their treason and subsequent death, self-banishment, or conquest, into the hands of the nation which they sought to destroy, but which has fallen on them, and ground them to powder. Let the nation now divide this conquered, confiscated territory among the freedmen, by gift, or by sale on suitable terms, with due latitude of time of payment. Let it break up that old feudal, unrepublican monopoly of land in the hands of a few men of enormous wealth, and cut up the plantations into little farms, placing each able-bodied freedman in possession of a spot which, under suitable restrictions, he can make his own home, and leave to his children after him.