Above all else loomed the negro problem. Five millions of whites and three and a half millions of blacks were to live together. Thomas Jefferson had said, "Nothing is more certainly written in the Book of Fate than that these people are to be free; _nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government_. _Nature, habit, opinion have drawn indelible lines between them._"[92] And it may truly be said of Jefferson that he was, as quite recently he was declared to be by Dr. Schurman, President of Cornell University, the "apostle of reason, and reason alone."
What system of laws could Southern conventions and legislatures frame, that would enable them to accomplish what Jefferson had declared was impossible? This was the question before these bodies when called together in 1865-66 by Johnson to rehabilitate their States. Two dangers confronted them. One was, armed bands of negroes, headed by returning negro soldiers. Mr. Lincoln had feared this. Early in April of that very year, 1865, he said to General Butler: "I can hardly believe that the South and North can live in peace unless we can get rid of the negroes, whom we have armed and disciplined, and who have fought with us, to the amount, I believe, of one hundred and fifty thousand." Mississippi, and perhaps one other State, to guard against the danger from this source, enacted that negroes were only to bear arms when licensed. This law was to be fiercely attacked.
The other chief danger was that idleness among the negroes would lead to crime. It soon became apparent that the negro idea was that freedom meant freedom from work. They would not work steadily, even for their Northern friends, who were offering ready money for labor in their cotton fields, and multitudes were loitering in towns and around Freedmen's Bureau offices. Nothing seemed better than the old-time remedies, apprenticeship and vagrancy laws, then found in every body of British or American statutes. These laws Southern legislatures copied, with what appeared to be necessary modifications, and these laws were soon assailed as evidence of an intent to reduce the negro again to slavery. Mr. James G. Blaine, in his "Twenty Years," selected the Alabama statutes for his attack. In the writer's book, "Why the Solid South," pp. 31-36, the Alabama statutes cited by Mr. Blaine are shown to be very similar to and largely copied from the statutes of Vermont, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island.