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LIFE AND TIMES OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS 337

"Nature itself in those States, comes to the rescue of the negro, fights
his battles, and enables him to exact conditions from those who would
unfairly treat and oppress him. Besides being dependent upon the roughest
and flintiest kind of labor, the climate of the South makes such labor uninviting
and harshly repulsive to the white man. He dreads it, shrinks from it, and
refuses it. He shuns the burning sun of the fields and seeks the shade of the
verandas. On the contrary, the negro walks, labors, and sleeps in the sunlight
unharmed. The standing apology for slavery was based upon a knowledge of
this fact. It was said that the world must have cotton and sugar, and that only
the negro could supply this want; and that he could be induced to do it only
under the 'beneficent whip' of some bloodthirsty Legree. The last part of this
argument has been happily disproved by the large crops of these productions
since Emancipation; but the first part of it stands firm, unassailed and
unassailable.

"Even if climate and other natural causes did not protect the negro from
all competition in the labor-market of the South, inevitable social causes
would probably effect the same result. The slave system of that section has
left behind it, as in the nature of the case it must, manners, customs, and
conditions to which free white laboring men will be in no haste to submit
themselves and their families. They do not emigrate from the free North,
where labor is respected, to a lately enslaved South, where labor has been
whipped, chained, and degraded for centuries. Naturally enough such emigration
follows the lines of latitude in which they who compose it were born.
Not from South to North, but from East to West "the Star of Empire takes its
way."

"Hence it is seen that the dependence of the planters, land-owners, and
old master-class of the South upon the negro, howewr galling and humiliating
to Southern pride and power, is nearly complete and perfect. There is
only one mode of escape for them, and that mode they will certainly not
adopt. It is to take off their own coats, cease to whittle sticks and talk politics
at cross-roads, and go themselves to work in their broad and sunny fields of
cotton and sugar. An invitation to do this is about as harsh and distasteful to
all their inclinations as would be an invitation to step down into their graves.
With the negro, all this is different. Neither natural, artificial, nor traditional
causes stand in the way of the freedman to labor in the South. Neither the
heat nor the fever-demon which lurks in her tangled and oozy swamps
affrights him, and he stands to-day the admitted author of whatever prosperity,
beauty, and civilization are now possessed by the South, and the admitted
arbiter of her destiny.