E. S. P. to C. P. W.
Boston, May 3. As soon as I can get complete information from Liverpool about my claim on the insurance company,159 I shall settle with them and be ready to settle with yourself, G., and Folsom. Are you not ashamed to put in your own private pocket the proceeds of the hard labor of the poor abused negro? I think you cannot have read the Tribune and Independent lately, or you would not be so depraved.
The sarcastic allusion in this last letter to the Tribune and the Independent refers to two letters which had lately appeared in those papers respectively, the one signed “J. A. S.,” the other anonymous. Both were from Beaufort, and both attacked Mr. Philbrick for a letter which he had recently written (February 24) to the New York Evening Post. This letter was the presentation which he had planned to make proving from his own experience that it was possible to raise cotton cheaper by free labor than had been possible by slave labor.160 In it Mr. Philbrick had also stated his belief that the land-sales would be an injury to the negro if they enabled him to buy at $1.25 an acre land which was already worth much more and would, after the war, rise still higher in value, for such purchases would be made largely as speculations, and would destroy all incentive to labor. The points of attack selected by the writers in the Independent and the Tribune were Mr. Philbrick’s rate of wages,—why did he not pay his hands $2.50 a day?—his views on the land-sales, which, they said, showed his desire to make of the negroes an “agricultural peasantry,” as dependent upon great landed proprietors as ever they had been in their days of slavery, and the course he had pursued relative to his own purchases in land. “His own statements of his intentions induced the almost universal belief that he desired to buy land for the purpose of testing the industrial capabilities of the negroes, and when they had justified his confidence in this respect, that he would sell them the lands in small allotments at the cost to himself.” His actual performance now, on the other hand, was to put the price of his lands “further from their reach than before,” fixing it “according to the increased value which their labor and proved capacity have given them.” To these three accusations Mr. Philbrick made reply in two letters. First, as to the auction-sales, he agreed “that the good faith of the Government should have been kept in regard to the promised homesteads, however we may differ in opinion as to the expediency of making the promise at this time.” Second, as to his scale of wages, he maintained that, on his plantations, “whenever the amount of work done in a day approaches the standard of a day’s work in the North, the wages also approach the limit of Northern wages, under similar conditions.”161 Third, as to his alleged promise to sell his land to negroes at cost, he said, “I am not aware that I have ever committed myself to any definite plans for disposing of this land; for I have not been able to digest or mature any plan satisfactory to myself.”162
There is nothing vital in these two letters of Mr. Philbrick’s which is new to the reader of these pages. They are based on his firm belief that it was no kindness to the negro to make discriminations in his favor.
Mr. Philbrick’s message to his superintendents about the increased pay demanded by ‘Siah and Pompey, and his advice to W. C. G. in the matter of corn planted between the rows of cotton were as follows: