The Freedmen's Savings Bank

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Monograph

Identifikator:: 175265076X

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-129631

Document type:: Monograph

Author:: Fleming, Walter Lynwood http://d-nb.info/gnd/120660560X

Title:: The Freedmen's Savings Bank

Place of publication:: Chapel Hill

Publisher:: Univ. of North Carolina Press

Year of publication:: 1927

Scope:: x, 170 S.

Digitisation:: 2021

Collection:: Economics Books

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Chapter

Document type:: Monograph

Structure type:: Chapter

Title:: Chapter I. The negro at the close of the Civil War

Collection:: Economics Books

16 THE FREEDMEN’S SAVINGS BANK obtain an education, and to be like the old masters. There was enthusiasm to get all the good that freedom could give, but conflicting with this was a general notion that freedom meant either less work or no work. Negro women frequently declined to work in the fields or as servants. Negro men proved that they were free by neglecting their crops to go hunting and fish- ing and to camp meeting. Intemperance was widespread, while swindlers found the credulous people an easy prey, and the savings went for such luxuries as excursions, circuses, jewelry, and subscription books. After a while too many of the abler Negroes went into politics instead of farming. Though land was cheap the Negroes secured titles to but little of it. Most of them became tenants, and after a period of experimen- tation the share system was adopted to govern the division between landlord and tenant. This, with the accompanying credit system and crop- lien was good enough at such a time to enable a very thrifty and energetic laborer to get a start, but for the average Negro it meant the removal of incentive to progress. Those who purchased land were frequently tricked by rascals into buying bad titles. The result was that the better class of Negroes in a few years went to the towns and cities; the whites of the black belt gradually left the plan- tations for the villages and cities and entered the industries or the professions. So with absentee landlords and inefficient overseers the Negro tenants were left more and more to their own incompetent ways. The removal of the personal

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