UNITED-STATES - MISCELLANEOUS 



§ I. Negroes in cities and in the country. 



On January ist., 1863, Abraham Lincoln solemnly proclaimed the free- 

 dom of the Slaves in the United States of America. This decree for which 

 preparation had been made by the antislavery resolutions passed in Con- 

 gress in June and July, 1862, was followed by the federal laws of June 28th., 

 1864 and December i8th., 1865, and by those passed in the separate States, 

 that at various dates granted the negroes the fuU enjoyment of the civil 

 and poUtical rights of all American citizens. 



In i860 there were onlj^ 488,070 free negroes to 3,953,760 slaves, 

 that is 35.5 % of the total population, and by far the greater number 

 inhabited the Southern States. These States, the agricultural system of 

 which, characterized by the prevalence of immense plantations, was 

 based exclusively on negro labour, opposed the enfranchisement of the 

 slaves with all their might, conducting a long and bloody war, the war 

 of secession, with desperate persistence from i860 to 1865, when it ended 

 with their defeat. 



The negro slaves were almost entirely employed in field labour or in 

 the domestic service of their masters ; few were engaged in other 

 occupations : very few, comparatively, were included in the urban 

 population. 



It was natural that the emancipation should give rise to a migration 

 of the mass of the negro^s to the cities : yet emancipation alone would not 

 have sufficed to explain the intensity assumed by the movement, which 

 became a real exodus, had it not been accompained b}' a general change 

 in the conditions of the negroes about that time. And the change was, 

 from various points of view, rather for the worse than for the better. The 

 negroes after their emancipation, while still untrained for independence, 

 had to pass through a period of confusioh, of race and party hatred, of se- 

 vere economic crisis, misgovernment, excesses unrepressed and indeed 

 difficult to repress, in the isolation of the country districts. It will be enough 

 to refer to the proceedings of the Kii Klux Khiri, a mysterious organiz- 

 ation, composed of turbulent and violent persons, who often at night time, 

 their faces covered with horrible masks, visited the negro villages in large 

 mounted bands, destroyed the crops, burned the houses (sometimes even 

 those of the whites who sympathised with the negroes) and disappeared 

 leaving behind them confusion and terror, v.dthout any one knowing where 

 they had come from or whither they had gone. 



This state of things, lasting from the time of the emancipation up to 

 1872, tended as was natural, to increase the exodus of the negroes to the 

 towns : which offered them a better chance of fortune and greater safety. To 

 this must be added the psychological motive of which account must be taken 

 " the desire to move about a little, just to find out what freedom was like " 

 (see page 107) and the temptation, after all excusable in men compelled 

 from their birth to labour, to idle a little. The following figures 



