The Negro in the Civil War [antikvár]

I. INTRODUCTION The time-worn myth that life in the old South was heavenly and that the slaves enjoyed an idyllic existence is repeated to this day. Hear, for example, an eminent professor, R. S. Cotterill, writing in the year 1936: From the physical side his working hours were long but not strenuous; from the psychological side, since he had never known freedom, he looked upon slavery not as a dégradation but as a routine. He took no thought of the future nor needed to. In sickness and in health, in his childhood and his old âge he was assured of an income proportioned to his necessities and not to his productiveness. This legend not only assures us of the slaves' content-ment but it does something more. It tells us that the people who were enslaved—the Negro people—were, in any case, fit only to be slaves. We are assured that the Negro was, to quote a "standard historian," James Schouler, possessed of "innate patience, docility and child-like simplicity"; he was "an imitator and non-moralist, he learned deceit and libertinism with facility his mind was not analytical" and he was "easily intimidated, incapable of deep plots." In plain English, says Schouler, the Negro was "sensuous, stupid, brutish, obedient." From these two falsehoods—that slavery was delightful and that, in any case, the Negro was suited only for slavery—arises a third falsehood: that the American Negro rarely rebelled against his enslavement. To quotesi work published in 1937, the Negro slave was "quiee cómpla-cent." And from these same distortions come thé errone-