The morning of the last day, the sergeant-at-arms flung wide the door, announcing General Schofield, who, entering with Colonels Campbell, Wherry and Mallory, of his Staff, was escorted to the Speaker’s stand. He came to protest against constitutional clauses disqualifying white Virginians. He said: “You cannot find in Virginia a full number of men capable of filling office who can take the oath you have prescribed. County offices pay limited salary; even a common labourer could not afford to come from abroad for the purpose of filling them. I have no hesitation in saying that I do not believe it possible to inaugurate a government upon that basis.” It was a business man’s argument, an appeal to patriotism and common sense. It failed. When he went out, they called him “King Schofield,” and retained those clauses in the instrument which they ratified that night when the hands on the clocks of the Capitol pointed to twelve and the Midnight Constitution came to birth.
When General Schofield left in 1868 to become Secretary of War, the leading paper said: “General Schofield has been the best of all the military commandantsplaced over the Southern States. He has saved Virginia from much humiliation and distress that other States have suffered.” What he did for Virginia, General Gillem, General Hancock and some other commanders tried to do for districts under their command. General Stoneman, who succeeded General Schofield, also fought the test-oath clauses.
When our Committee of Nine went to Washington to protest against those clauses, General Schofield appeared with them before President-elect Grant and one of General Grant’s first acts as President was to arrange with Congress that Virginia should have the privilege of voting upon those clauses and the constitution separately, and that other States should have like privileges in regard to similar clauses in their constitutions.
Every American should study the history in detail of each Southern State during the period of which I write. He should acquaint himself at first hand with the attitude of the South when the war closed, and in this connection I particularly refer my reader to the address Governor Allen delivered to the people of Louisiana before going to Mexico, where he died in exile; and to the addresses of Perry, of South Carolina, and Throckmorton, of Texas.[19]He should compare the character and costs of the first legislatures and conventions assembling and the character and costs of the mongrel bodies succeeding them. He will then take himself in hand and resolve never to follow blindly the leadership of any party, nor attempt to put in practice in another man’s home the abstract theories of speculative humanitarians.
SECRET SOCIETIES
Secret Societies
Loyal League, White Camelias, White Brotherhood, Pale Faces, Ku Klux
Parent of all was the Union or Loyal League, whose history may be briefly summarised: Organisation for dignified ends in Philadelphia and New York in 1862-3; extension into the South among white Unionists; formation, 1866, of negro leagues; admission of blacks into “mixed” leagues; rapid withdrawal of native whites and Northern settlers until leagues were composed almost wholly of negroes dominated by a few white political leaders. Churches, halls, schoolhouses, were headquarters where mystic initiation rites, inflammatory speeches, military drills, were in order. The League’s professed object was the training of the negro to his duties as a citizen. It made him a terror and forced whites into the formation of counter secret societies for the protection of their firesides.
“To defend and perpetuate freedom and the Constitution, the supremacy of law and the inherent rights of civil and religious freedom, and to accomplish the objects of the organisation, I pledge my life, my fortune and my sacred honour.” This was the oath in part. Members were sworn to vote only for candidates endorsed by the league. The ritual appealed to the negro’s superstition. The catechism inculcated opposition to the Democratic Party, fealty to the Radical Republican, condemnation of Southern whites as traitors.Candidates for membership were conducted to the Council Chamber; here, the Marshal rapped the league alarm, the Sentinel called, “Who comes under our signal?” Answer given, the door opens cautiously, countersign is demanded, and given in the “Four Ls”—the right hand pointing upward with the word, “Liberty,” sinking to shoulder level with “Lincoln,” dropping to the side with “Loyal,” folding to the breast with “League.” The Council receives the novitiates standing, as they march in arm in arm, singing, “John Brown’s Body” and take positions around the altar before which the President stands in regalia.
The altar is draped with the flag, on which lies an open Bible, the Declaration of Independence, a sword, ballot-box, sickle, and anvil or other toy emblems of industry. At first the room may be in darkness with sounds of groans and clanking chains issuing from corners. The chaplain calls the league to prayer, invoking Divine vengeance on traitors. From a censer (sometimes an old stove vase) upon the altar blue flames, “fires of liberty,” leap upward. The Council opens ranks to receive novitiates; joining hands, all circle round the altar, singing, “The Star-Spangled Banner” or other patriotic air. Novitiates lay hands upon the flag, kiss the Bible and swear: “I will do all in my power to elect true and loyal men to all offices of trust and profit.” Instructions in pass-words, signals, etc., are given. Secret business is transacted.
Negroes were drilled, armed and marched about. Into League rooms social features were introduced, League literature was read aloud, feminine branches were formed. Leagues furnished a secret service bureau. Coloured servants told what happened in white houses. “My cook and I were children together,” a friend tells me. “As we grew up, she made me readand write her letters. One day, after freedom, she said, ‘Miss, put ’tin dar fuh Jeems tuh write me suppin funny nex’ time he do write. We has to have all our letters read out in church an’ when dere’s anything funny, de folks laugh.’ Soon she ceased asking my services. Through this plan of having letters read out in church leagues and bureaus collected information of happenings in private homes from far and wide. Such gleanings might be useful in revealing political or self-protective movements among whites, in hunting a man down; or serving his political or social enemy, or would-be robber.”
In a South Carolina mansion, Mrs. Vincent and her daughter Lucy lived alone except for a few faithful ex-slaves. A cabin on the edge of the plantation was rented to Wash, a negro member of the Loyal League, whose organiser was Captain Johnson, commander of a small garrison in a nearby town. The captain was fond of imposing fines upon whites against whom negroes entered complaint. There seemed nice adjustment between fines and defendants’ available cash. One day Wash, pushing past Lucy’s maid into the Vincent parlor, said to Lucy’s mother, “I’se come to cote Miss Lucy.” “Leave the house!” “I ain’ gwi leave no such a thing! I’se gwi marry Lucy an’ live here wid you.” Lucy appeared. “I’se come to ax you to have me. I’se de ve’y man fuh you to hitch up wid. Dis here place b’long to me. You b’long to me.” She whipped out a pistol and covered him. “Run! Run for your life!” He ran. When he was out of pistol-shot, he turned and yelled: “You d—d white she-cat! I’ll make you know!” She caught up a musket and fired. Balls whistled past his head; he renewed his flight.
Next morning, as the ladies, pale and miserable, sat at breakfast, a squad of soldiers filed in, took seats,helped themselves and ordered the butler around. The ladies rose and were arrested. A wagon was at the door. “Please, marsters,” said black Jerry humbly, “lemme hitch up de kerridge an’ kyar Mistiss an’ Miss Lucy in it. ’Taint fitten fuh ’em to ride in a waggin—an’ wid strange mens.” His request was refused. The ladies were arraigned before Captain Johnson on charge that they had used insulting language to Mr. Washington Singleton Pettigru; and that Lucy, “in defiance of law and morals and actuated by the devil,” had “without provocation” fired on him with intent to kill. A fine of $1,000 or six months in jail was imposed. “I have not so much money!” cried Mrs. Vincent. “Jail may change your mind,” said the captain. They were committed to a loathsome cell, their determination alone preventing separation.
Lawyers flocked to their defense; the captain would hear none. Towards nightfall the town filled with white men wearing set faces. The captain sent for one of the lawyers. The lawyer said: “Unless you release those ladies from the jail at once, no one can tell what may happen. But this I believe: you, nor a member of your garrison, will be alive tomorrow.” They were released; fine remitted; the captain left in haste. An officer came from Columbia to investigate “disorder in the district.” He condemned Johnson’s course and tried to reassure the community. It came out that Johnson had received information that Mrs. Vincent held a large, redeemable note; he had incited Wash to “set up” to Miss Lucy, urging that by marrying her he would become the plantation’s owner: “Call in your best duds and ask her to marry you. If she refuses, we will find a way to punish her.” Wash, it was thought, had fled the country. The negro body-servant of Lucy’s dead brother had felt that the duty of avenger devolved uponhim, and in his own way he had slain Wash and covered up the deed.
A white congregation was at worship in a little South Carolina church when negro soldiers filed in and began to take seats beside the ladies. The pastor had just given out his text; he stretched forth his hands and said simply: “Receive the benediction,” and dismissed his people. A congregation in another country church was thrown into panic by balls crashing through boards and windows; a girl of fourteen was killed instantly. Black troops swung by, singing. Into a dwelling a squad of blacks marched, bound the owner, a prominent aged citizen, pillaged his house, and then before his eyes, bound his maiden daughter and proceeded to fight among themselves for her possession. “Though,” related my informant with sharp realism, “her neck and face had been slobbered over, she stood quietly watching the conflict. At last, the victor came to her, caught her in his arms and started into an adjoining room, when he wavered and fell, she with him; she had driven a knife, of which she had in some way possessed herself, into his heart. The others rushed in and beat her until she, too, was lifeless. There was no redress.”
In black belts, where such things happened and where negroes talked openly of killing out white men and taking white women for wives, the whites, few in number, poorly armed and without organisation, scattered over the country and leading themselves in no insignificant proportion the lives of the hunted, faced a desperate situation. Many who chanced to give offense to the ruling faction or who by force of character were considered obstacles to its advancement, found themselves victims of false charges, and, chased by troops, had to leave their families and dwell in swamps or other hiding-places. Compelled by necessity to labour in the field,white gentlemen going to their toil, let down gaps in surrounding fences so that they might fly at a moment’s notice, and plowed with saddles on their horses’ backs. Northerners, and Southerners who did not live in that day and in black belts, can form no conception of the conditions which gave rise to the white secret societies of which the most widely celebrated is the Ku Klux.
Larger in numbers and wider in distribution was the order of the Knights of the White Camelia, originating in Louisiana; small protective bodies consolidating May 23, 1867, in New Orleans, took this title. Extension over the United States was purposed. Its first article of faith was preservation of the integrity of the white race, and, in government, white supremacy. At the door of the Council Chamber the blindfolded candidate for initiation vowed: “The cause of our race must triumph;” and “We must all be united as are the flowers that grow on one stem.” He swore “Never to marry any woman but of the white race.” Mongrel legislatures were enacting laws about co-education and intermarriage of races; the whites were a “bewildered people.” In Mississippi, the order of the Knights of the White Rose was modelled on the White Camelias; in Alabama, the White Brotherhood and the White League; there were Pale Faces, Union Guards, and others, all of which, with the White Camelias, may be included in the Ku Klux movement.
The Ku Klux originated near Pulaski, Tennessee, 1866, in something akin to a college boys’ frolic. Some young ex-Confederates, of good families, finding time heavy on their hands after war’s excitement, banded together in a fraternity, with initiation rites, signals, oaths of secrecy, and a name after the Greek, kyklos, a circle, corrupted into kuklos, kuklux, and adding klan. Their “den” was a deserted house near the town. Theyrode at night in queer disguises; at first, without other object than diversion. Their fear and fame spread; branches were formed in other counties and States. In their pranks and negro superstition, whites found weapon for protection and defense. Through troubled neighbourhoods, white horsemen riding in noiseless procession, restored peace by parade and sometimes by sterner measures.
MRS. DAVID R. WILLIAMS, OF SOUTH CAROLINA
(Daughter of Governor Miller)
From a portrait by Osgood, photographed by Reckling & Sons
Notices left as warnings on doors or pinned to town-pumps or trees bore cross-bones and skull in red ink, and such inscriptions as:
K K KThe Raven Croakedand we are come to Look on the Moon.The Lion Tracks the Jackalthe Bear the WolfOur Shrouds are BloodyBut the Midnight is Black.The Serpent and Scorpion are Ready.Some Shall Weep and Some Shall Pray.Meet at SkullFor Feast of the Wolf andDance of the Muffled Skeletons.The Death Watch is SetThe Last Hour Cometh.The Moon is Full.Burst your cerements asunderMeet at the Den of the Glow-WormThe Guilty Shall be Punished.
I have felt defrauded of my rights because I never saw a Ku Klux; my native Virginia seems not to have had any. I have seen them abundantly, however, through the eyes of others. One of my cousins went, during K. K. days, to be bridesmaid to a Georgia cousin. One night, as she and the bride-elect sat on the piazza, there appeared in the circular driveway a white apparitionof unearthly height, on a charger in white trappings. Behind came another and another, the horses moving without sound; they passed in silent review before the girls, each spectre saluting. With cold chills running down her spine, Sue asked, “Whatare they?” Her companion laughed. “Haven’t you been saying you wanted to see the Ku Klux?” News enough next morning! A white man had been found tied to a tree, and over his head, pinned to the bark, a notice written in his blood, warning him to leave the county at once unless he desired to be carried out by a pathway to—a grave with headstone neatly drawn and showing epitaph with date of death, completed the sentence. He had been flogged and a scratch on his breast showed whence red ink had been drawn. As soon as untied, he left for parts unknown.
Neighbourhood darkeys had eyes big as saucers. Many quarters had been visited. Sable uncles and aunties shook their heads, muttering: “Jedgment Day ’bout tuh come. Gab’el gwi blow his ho’n an’ sinners better be a-moanin’ an’ a-prayin’. Yes, my Lawd!” And: “’Tain’t jes one Death a-ridin’ on a pale horse! it’s tens uv thousan’s uv ’em is ridin’ now. Sinner, you better go pray!” A few who had been making themselves seriously obnoxious observed terrified silence and improved demeanour. An expert chicken-thief had received a special notice in which skulls and cross-bones and chicken-heads and toes were tastefully intermixed. Others were remembered in art designs of the “All-Seeing Eye,” reminder that they were being watched.
The white man was a receiver of stolen goods and instigator of barn-burnings; had been tried for some one of his offenses and committed to the penitentiary, only to be pardoned out by the State Executive. In a North Carolina case of which I heard, a negro firebugwho could not be brought to justice through law, though the burning of two barns and a full stable were traced to him, disappeared as if the earth had swallowed him up after a night in which all the darkeys around smelled brimstone and saw fiery-eyed and long-tailed devils at large. People were hard put to it for protection against fire-fiends.
In a South Carolina newspaper a notice appeared from a man who gave warning that he would take vengeance into his own hands if incendiaries fired his property again.
The Ku Klux ruled its members with iron rod. Mr. M., of the order in Tazewell, N. C., was building a cabin on his place for a negro who had come under ban because of evil influence over other negroes; word had been passed that he was to be crowded out. A message reached Mr. M.: “Do not let this negro come on your place. K. K. K.”, with due skull and cross-bones accompaniment. To close friends of the order Mr. M. said: “My rights shall not be abridged by the Klan.” The cabin was finished on Saturday. Sunday he asked a visitor: “Let’s take a stroll in the woods and a look at Henry’s cabin.” When they came to where the cabin had stood, Mr. M. exclaimed: “Why, what does this mean? Lo and behold, the cabin and everything is torn down and the logs scattered every which-a-way!” “And what’s this?” his friend asked, pointing to three new-made graves with pine head-boards, inscribed respectively in epitaph to Mr. M., Henry, and Henry’s wife, Mr. M.’s death dated the ensuing Sabbath. On a tiny hillock was a small gallows with grapevine attachment. As one of the order, Mr. M. knew enough to make him ill at ease. Friends begged him to leave the country for a time, and he went. “This may look like tyranny,” said my informant, “but Mr. M. ought tohave heeded the first message. The order could only do effective work through unfailing execution of sentence.”
Between a young lady and the son of a house in which she was a guest, a tender passion arose. He had mysterious absences lasting half or all night, after which his horse would be found in the stables, lathered with foam. The family rallied him on his devotion to a fair demoiselle in an adjoining county. Though under cold treatment from the guest, he gave no other explanation until one day he conducted her and his sister into his room, locked the door, swore them to secrecy, drew from its hiding-place up the chimney a Ku Klux outfit and asked them to make duplicates for a new Klan he was forming. The lovers came to understanding; the girl reproached him: “Why did you not tell me before?” “I did not know if you could keep a secret. I have a public duty to perform; the liberty of my men can be imperiled by a careless word.”
The widow of a Ku Klux captain tells me that one night, when her husband was absent on duty in a town where whites were in terror because the negroes were threatening to burn it, her own house was fired. She was in bed, her new-born baby at her side; stealthy steps were heard under her window. Her old black mauma was afraid to go to the window and look out. There was a smell of fire; the mauma ran to the door and shrieked alarm. A shout answered from the cellar, where a faithful negro man-servant was putting out flames. He had let the incendiaries go away thinking their purpose fulfilled. The returning husband, sorely perplexed, said: “I do not see how I can do my duty by my family and the public. I must give up my Klan.” “No,” she answered. “All have to take turns in leaving their own unprotected. I let you go into the army. Someone must lead, and your men will not follow and obey any one else as they will you.” He had been their captain in the Confederate Army.
To a Loyal League jury or magistrate a prisoner on trial had but to give the League signal to secure acquittal. A convicted and sentenced criminal would be pardoned by a Loyal League Governor. Klans took administration of justice into their own hands because courts were ineffective. In a den, regularly established and conducted, a man would be tried by due process before judge and jury, with counsel appointed for defense; evidence would be taken, the case would be argued; the jury would render verdict; the judge would dismiss the case or pronounce sentence. The man on trial might or might not be present. A Ku Klux captain tells me that great effort was made to give fair trials; acquittals were more frequent than convictions. But when the court imposed sentence, sentence was carried out.
In the hill country of South Carolina, a one-armed ex-Confederate, a “poor white,” made a scanty living for his large family by hauling. Once, on a lonely road when his load was whiskey, he was surrounded by negro soldiers, who killed him, took possession of the whiskey and drank it. Ring-leaders were arrested and lodged in jail; some were spirited away to Columbia and released; a plan was afoot to free the rest, among them the negro captain who had boasted of his crime, and flouted the whites with their powerlessness to punish him. The prison was surrounded one night by silent, black-robed horsemen on black-draped horses moving without sound; jailer and guards were overpowered; cells entered; prisoners tried—if proceedings interrupted by confessions and cries for mercy can be called trial. Sentences were pronounced. The black-robed, black-masked circle chanted “Dies Iræ, Dies Illa.” The town awoke froma night of seeming peace and silence to behold dead bodies swinging from the trees.[20]
The Stevens Mystery, of Yanceyville, N. C., has never been unravelled; the $5,000 reward which President Grant offered for answer to the question, “Who killed Stevens?” was never won, though skilled detectives tried for it. Stevens was a scalawag. He achieved his sobriquet, “Chicken Stevens,” through being chased out of his native county for stealing chickens. One of his adherents, when quite drunk, said before an audience of two thousand negroes: “Stevens stole chickens; that elected him to the Legislature; if he steals turkeys, it will elect him to Congress.” The pleasantry was cheered to the echo. Stevens was charged with instigating riots and barn-burnings. He received a mystic warning to leave the country. He did not go.
One day, while court was in full session, he was seen in the Court Room, in conversation with several people; was seen to leave in amicable company with a citizen who parted with him and went out by the street door, while Stevens entered a county office where clerks were busy; several persons recalled seeing and speaking to him here, but nobody could remember seeing him alive afterwards. Yet hall and offices were thronged with his adherents. He was soon missed by the negroes who set a guard around the building. Next day he was found in the Grand Jury Room, sitting bolt upright, dead, strangled or with his throat cut, I forget which. This room opened on the hall through which a stream of people, white and black, had been passing all day; a negro cabin commanded a view of the window; a negro janitor held the key.
Kirke’s cut-throats, sent down by Governor Holden, arrested prominent citizens and carried them to Raleigh. No evidence for conviction could ever be found, and they were liberated. Stevens’ death has been charged to Ku Klux; also, to his confederates, who, it is said, received instructions from headquarters to “kill off Stevens,” meaning politically, which they construed literally. I have been told that one of the slayers is living and that at his death, a true statement will be published showing who killed Stevens and how.
These stories are sufficient to show the good and the evil of Ku Klux; there is public peril in any secret order which attempts to administer justice. Uniform and methods employed to justifiable or excusable ends by one set of people were employed to ends utterly indefensible by another. The Radicals were quick to profit by Ku Klux methods; and much was done under the name and guise that the Klan did not do. Yet, in its own ranks were men reckless, heedless, and wicked, avengers of personal grudges.
The Invisible Empire, as the Klan was called in its organisation in 1867 under the leadership of Grand Wizard, General Nathan Bedford Forrest, and with men like General Dudley Du Bose, of Georgia, for division commanders, had a code that might have served for Arthur’s Round Table. Its first object was “To protect the weak, innocent and defenseless from the indignities, wrongs and outrages of the lawless, the violent and the brutal; to relieve the injured and oppressed, to succour the suffering and unfortunate, especially the widows and orphans of Confederate soldiers.” Its second: “To protect and defend the Constitution of the United States and all laws passed in conformity thereto.” Its third: “To aid and assist in the execution of all constitutional laws, and toprotect the people from unlawful seizure and from trial except by their peers in conformity to the laws of the land.”
“Unlawful seizure” was practiced in South Carolina, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and other States, where white men would be arrested on blank warrants or no warrant at all; carried long distances from home, held for weeks or months; and then, as happened in some famous cases, be released without ever having been brought to trial; in other instances, they were beaten; in others, committed to penitentiaries; in others, it was as if the earth had swallowed them up—they have never been heard from. Some agency was surely needed to effect ends which the Klan named as object of its existence; that the Klan was effective of these ends in great degree no one conversant with facts will deny, nor will they deny that “Tom-foolery” and not violence was its most frequent weapon.
Where Ku Klux rode around, negroes ceased to venture out after dark. Some told tales of ghastly nocturnal visitors who plead for a drink of water, saying, “Dee ain’ had nay drap sence de Yankees killed ’em at Gettysburg. An’ den, suh, when you han’ ’em er gode-full, dee say: ‘Kin you let me have de bucket? I’se jes come f’om hell an’ I’se scotchin’ in my insides.’ An’ den, mun, dat ar hant des drink down dat whole bucket at a gulp, an’ I hyern it sizzlin’ down his gullet des same ez you done flung it on de coals! I ain’ gwi fool longer nothin’ lak dat! Some folks say it’s white folks tryin’ tuh skeer we-all, but, suh, I b’lieve it’s hants-er Ole Satan one!” Terrible experience it was when “A hant—or suppin nur—wid er hade mighty nigh high ez er chimley ud meet a nigger in de road an’ say: ‘I come f’om torment (hell) tuh shake han’s wid you!’ An’ de nigger—he didn’ wanter do it, but hefeared tuh ’fuse—he tooken shuck han’s wid dat ar hant, an’ dat ar han’ what he shuck was a skelumton’s—de bones fa’r rattle!”
The regular Ku Klux costume was a white gown or sheet, and a tall, conical pasteboard hat; for the horse a white sheet and foot-mufflers. Black gown, mask and trappings, and red ones, were also worn; bones, skulls of men and beasts, with foxfire for eyes, nose and mouth, were expedients. A rubber tube underneath robe or sheet, or a rubber or leather bag, provided for miraculous consumption of water. In negro tales of supernatural appearances, latitude must be allowed for imagination. A Ku Klux captain tells me that one night as he rose up out of a graveyard, one of his negroes passed with a purloined gobbler in possession; he touched the negro on the shoulder. The negro dropped the turkey and flew like mad, and the turkey flew, too. Next morning, the darkey related the experience to his master (omitting the fowl). “How tall was that hant, George?” “Des high ez a tree, Marster! an’ de han’ it toch my shoulder wid burnt me lak fire. I got mutton-suet on de place.” “I was about three feet taller than my natural self that night,” says Captain Lea. George wore a plaster on his arm and for some time complained that it was “pa’lised.”
Klans and Union Leagues came to an end conjointly when carpet-bag rule was expiring. The Invisible Empire was dissolved formally by order of the Grand Wizard, March, 1869. It had never been a close organisation, and “dens” and counterfeit “dens” continued in existence here and there for awhile, working good and evil. Ku Klux investigations instituted by State authorities and the Federal Government were travesties of justice. Rewards offered for evidence to convict caused innocent men to be hunted down, arrested,imprisoned, and on false accusation and suborned testimony, convicted and committed to State prisons or sent to Sing Sing. The jails of Columbia, at one time, overflowed with the first gentlemen of the state, thrown into filthy cells, charged with all manner of crimes.
The Union League incited to murder and arson, whipped negroes and whites. But I never heard of Union Leaguers being tried for being Union Leaguers as Ku Klux were tried for being Ku Klux. There are no Southerners to contend that the Klan and its measures were justifiable or excusable except on the grounds that the conditions of the times called for them; informed Northerners will concede that the evils of the day justified or excused the Klan’s existence. For my part, I believe that this country owes a heavy debt to its noiseless white horsemen, shades of its troubled past.[21]
THE SOUTHERN BALLOT-BOX
The Southern Ballot-Box
Free negroes could vote in North Carolina until 1835, when a Constitutional Convention, not without division of sentiment, abolished negroid franchise on the ground that it was an evil. Thereafter, negroes first voted in the South in 1866, when the “Prince of Carpet-Baggers,” Henry C. Warmouth, who had been dismissed from the Federal Army, conferred the privilege in a bogus election; he had a charity-box attachment to every ballot-box and a negro dropping a ballot into one had to drop fifty cents into the other, contributions paying Warmouth’s expenses as special delegate to Washington, where Congress refused to recognize him. He returned to Louisiana and in two years was governor and in three was worth a quarter of a million dollars and a profitable autograph. “It cost me more,” said W. S. Scott, “to get his signature to a bill than to get the bill through the Legislature”—a striking comparison, for to get a bill through this Legislature of which Warmouth said, “there is but one honest man in it,” was costly process. Warmouth said of himself, “I don’t pretend to be honest, but only as honest as anybody in politics.”
Between the attitude of the army and the politicians on the negro question, General Sherman drew this comparison: “We all felt sympathy for the negroes, but of a different kind from that of Mr. Stanton, which was not of pure humanity but of politics.... I did not dream that the former slaves would be suddenly,without preparation, manufactured into voters.... I doubted the wisdom of at once clothing them with the elective franchise ... and realised the national loss in the death of Mr. Lincoln, who had long pondered over the difficult questions involved.”
April Fool’s Day, 1870, a crowd clustered around General Grant in the White House; a stroke of his pen was to proclaim four millions of people, literate or illiterate, civilised or uncivilised, ready or unready, voters. When the soldier had signed the instrument politicians had prepared for him, the proclamation announcing that the Fifteenth Amendment had been added to the Constitution of the United States by the ratification of twenty-nine, some one begged for the historic pen, and he silently handed it over. One who was present relates: “Somebody exclaimed, ‘Now negroes can vote anywhere!’, and a venerable old gentleman in the crowd cried out, ‘Well, gentlemen, you will all be d—d sorry for this!’ The President’s father-in-law, Dent, Sr., was said to be the speaker.” In Richmond, the Dent family had seen a good deal of freedmen. Negroes voted in 1867, over two years prior to this, Congress by arbitrary act vesting them with a right not conferred by Federal or State Constitutions. They voted for delegates to frame the new State Constitutions; then on their own right to vote!—this right forming a plank in said Constitutions.
The Southern ballot-box was the new toy of the Ward of the Nation; the vexation of housekeepers and farmers, the despair of statesmen, patriots, and honest men generally. Elections were preceded by political meetings, often incendiary in character, which all one’s servants must attend. With election day, every voting precinct became a picnic-ground, to say no worse. Negroes went to precincts overnight and camped out.Morning revealed reinforcements arriving. All sexes and ages came afoot, in carts, in wagons, as to a fair or circus. Old women set up tables and spread out ginger-cakes and set forth buckets of lemonade. One famous campaign manager had all-night picnics in the woods, with bonfires, barrels of liquor, darkeys sitting around drinking, fiddling, playing the banjo, dancing. The instant polls opened they were marched up and voted. Negroes almost always voted in companies. A leader, standing on a box, handed out tickets as they filed past. All were warned at Loyal Leagues to vote no ticket other than that given by the leader, usually a local coloured preacher who could no more read the ballots he distributed than could the recipients. Fights were plentiful as ginger-cakes. The all-day picnic ended only with closing of polls, and not always then, darkeys hanging around and carrying scrapping and jollification into the night.
How their white friends would talk and talk the day before election to butlers, coachmen, hoers and plowers, on the back porch or at the woodpile or the stables; and how darkeys would promise, “Yessuh, I gwi vote lak you say.” And how their old masters would return from the polls next day with heads hung down, and the young ex-masters would return mad, and saying, “This country is obliged to go to the devil!”
There were a great many trying phases of the situation. As for example: Conservatives were running General Eppa Hunton for Congress. Among the General’s coloured friends was an old negro, Julian, his ward of pity, who had no want that he did not bring to the General. Election day, he sought the General at the polls, saying: “Mars Eppie, I want some shingles fuh my roof.” “You voted for me, Julian?” “Naw, naw, Mars Eppie, I voted de straight Publikin ticket,suh.” He got the shingles. When “Mars Eppie” was elected, Julian came smiling: “Now, Mars Eppie, bein’ how as you’s goin’ to Congress, I ’lowed you mought have a leetle suppin tuh gimme.” A party of young lawyers tried to persuade their negro servant to vote with them. “Naw, naw,” he said. “De debbul mought git me. Dar ain’t but two parties named in de Bible—de Publikins an’ Sinners. I gwi vote wid de Publikins.”
In everything but politics, the negro still reposed trust in “Ole Marster;” his aches, pains, “mis’ries,” family and business troubles, were all for “Ole Marster,” not for the carpet-baggers. The latter feared he would take “Ole Marster’s” advice when he went to the polls, so they wrought in him hatred and distrust. The negro is not to blame for his political blunders. It would never have occurred to him to ask for the ballot; as greatness upon some, so was the franchise untimely thrust upon him, and he has much to live down that would never have been charged against him else.
“Brownlow’s armed cohorts, negroes principally,” one of my father’s friends wrote from Tennessee in 1867, “surround our polls. All the unlettered blacks go up, voting on questions of State interest which they do not in the least understand, while intelligent, tax-paying whites, who must carry the consequences of their acts, are not allowed to vote. I stayed on my plantation on election day and my negroes went to the polls. So it was all around me—white men at home, darkeys off running the government. Negro women went, too; my wife was her own cook and chambermaid—and butler, for the butler went.”
Educated, able, patriotic men, eager to heal the breaches of war, anxious to restore the war-wrecked fortunes of impoverished States, would have to standidly by, themselves disfranchised, and see their old and faithful negroes marched up to the polls like sheep to the shambles and voted by, and for the personal advancement of, political sharpers who had no solid interest in the State or its people, white or black. It would be no less trying when, instead of this meek, good-natured line, they would find masses of insolent, armed blacks keeping whites from the polls, or receive tragic evidence that ambushed guards were commanding with Winchesters all avenues to the ballot-box. Not only “Secesh” were turned back, but Union men, respectable Republicans, also; as in Big Creek, Missouri, when a citizen who had lost four sons in the Union Army was denied right to vote. “Kill him! kill him!” cried negroes when at Hudson Station, Virginia, a negro cast a Conservative ticket.
“This county,” says a Southerner now occupying a prominent place in educational work for the negro, “had about 1,600 negro majority at the time the tissue ballot came into vogue. It was a war measure. The character and actions of the men who rode to power on the negro ballot compelled us to devise means of protection and defense. Even the negroes wanting to vote with us dared not. One of my old servants, who sincerely desired to follow my advice and example in the casting of his ballot, came to me on the eve of election and sadly told me he could not. ‘Marster,’ he said, ‘I been tol’ dat I’ll be drummed outer de chu’ch ef I votes de Conserv’tive ticket.’ A negro preacher said: ‘Marse Clay, dee’ll take away my license tuh preach ef I votes de white folks’ ticket.’ I did not cease to reproach myself for inducing one negro to vote with me when I learned that on the death of his child soon afterwards, his people showed no sympathy, gave no help, and that he had to make the coffin and dig thegrave himself. I would have gone to his relief had I known, but he was too terrorised to come to me. I did not seek to influence negro votes at the next election; I adopted other means to effect the issue desired.”
“If the whites succeed at the polls, they will put you back into slavery. If we succeed, we will have the lands of the whites confiscated and give every one of you forty acres and a mule.” This scare and bribe was used in every Southern State; used over and over; negroes only ceased to give credence when after Cleveland’s inauguration they found themselves still free. On announcement of Cleveland’s election, many negroes, prompt to choose masters, hurried to former owners. The butler of Dr. J. L. M. Curry (administrator of the Peabody Education Fund), appeared in distress before Dr. Curry, pleading that, as he now must belong to some one, Dr. Curry would claim him. An old “mammy” in Mayor Ellyson’s family, distracted lest she might be torn from her own white folks and assigned to strangers, put up piteous appeal to her ex-owners.
From the political debauchery of the day, men of the old order shrank appalled. Even when the test-oath qualification was no longer exacted and disabilities were removed, many Southerners would not for a time touch the unclean thing; then they voted as with averted faces, not because they had faith in or respect for the process, but because younger men told them the country’s salvation demanded thus much of them. If a respectable man was sent to the Legislature or Congress, he felt called upon to explain or apologise to a stranger who might not understand the circumstances. His relatives hastened to make excuse. “Uncle Ambrose is in the Legislature, but he is honest,” Uncle Ambrose’s nieces and nephews hurried to tell before the suspicious “Honourable” prefixed to his name brought judgment on agood old man who had intended no harm, but had got into the Legislature by accident rather than by design—who was there, in fact, by reason of circumstances over which he had no control. The few representative men who got into these mixed assemblies had difficulty in making themselves felt. Judge Simonton, of the United States Circuit Court (once President of the Charleston Library Association, Chairman of the Board of School Commissioners, bearer of many civic dignities besides), was member of a reconstruction legislature. He has said: “To get a bill passed, I would have to persuade a negro to present it. It would receive no attention presented by me.”
Negroes were carried by droves from one county to another, one State to another, and voted over and over wherever white plurality was feared. Other tricks were to change polling-places suddenly, informing the negroes and not the whites; to scratch names from registration lists and substitute others. Whites would walk miles to a registration place to find it closed; negroes, privately advised, would have registered and gone. When men had little time to give to politics, patriotism was robust if it could devote days to the siege of a Registration Board, trying to catch it in place in spite of itself.
The Southerner’s loathing for politics, his despair, his inertia, increased evils. “Let the Yankees have all the niggers they want,” he was prone to say. “Let them fill Congress with niggers. The only cure is a good dose!” But with absolute ruin staring him in the face, he woke with a mighty awakening. Taxpayers’ Conventions issued “Prayers” to the public, to State Governments, to the Central Government; they raised out of the poverty of the people small sums to send committees to Washington; and these committees were forestalled by Radical State Governments who, withopen State Treasuries to draw upon, sent committees ahead, prejudicing the executive ear and closing it to appeal.
The most lasting wrong reconstruction inflicted upon the South was in the inevitable political demoralisation of the white man. No one could regard the ballot-box as the voice of the people, as a sacred thing. It was a plaything, a jack-in-the-box for the darkeys, a conjurer’s trick that brought drinks, tips and picnics. It was the carpet-bagger’s stepping-stone to power. The votes of a multitude were for sale. The votes of a multitude were to be had by trickery. It was a poor patriot who would not save his State by pay or play. Taxation without representation, again; the tissue ballot—a tiny silken thing—was one of the instruments used for heaving tea—negro plurality—into the deep sea.
“As for me,” says a patriot of the period, “I bless the distinguished Virginian who invented the tissue ballot. It was of more practical utility than his glorious sword. I am free to say I used many tissue ballots. My old pastor (he was eighty and as true and simple a soul as ever lived) voted I don’t know how many at one time, didn’t know he was doing it, just took the folded ballot I handed him and dropped it in, didn’t want to vote at all.” Others besides this speaker assume that General Mahone invented the tissue ballot, but General Mahone’s intimates say he did not, and that to ask who invented the tissue ballot is to ask who struck Billy Patterson. Democrats waive the honour in favor of Republicans, Republicans in favor of Democrats; nobody wants to wear it as a decoration. For my part, I think it did hard work and much good work, and quietly what else might have cost shedding of blood.
“We had a trying time,” one citizen relates, “whennegroes gained possession of the polls and officered us. Things got simply unendurable; we determined to take our town from under negro rule. One means to that end was the tissue ballot. Dishonest? Will you tell me what honesty there was, what reverence for the ballot-box, in standing idly by and seeing a horde of negroes who could not read the tickets they voted, cram our ballot-boxes with pieces of paper ruinous to us and them? We had to save ourselves by our wits. Some funny things happened. I was down at the precinct on Bolingbrook Street when the count was announced, and heard an old darkey exclaim: ‘I knows dat one hunderd an’ ninety-seben niggers voted in dis distric’, an’ dar ain’ but th’ee Radicule ballots in de box! I dunno huccum dat. I reckon de Radicule man gin out de wrong ones. I knows he gin me two an’ I put bofe uv ’em in de box.’”
Tissue ballots were introduced into South Carolina by a Republican named Butts, who used them against Mackey, another Republican, his rival for Congressional honours; there was no Democratic candidate. Next election Democrats said: “Republicans are using tissue ballots; we must fight the devil with fire.” A package arrived one night at a precinct whereof I know. The local Democratic leader said: “I don’t like this business.” He was told: “The Committee sent them up from the city; they say the other side will use them and that we’ve got to use them.”
According to election law, when ballots polled exceeded registration lists, a blindfolded elector would put his hand in the box and withdraw until ballots and lists tallied. Many tissue ballots could be folded into one and voted as a single ballot; a little judicious agitation after they were in the box would shake them apart. A tissue ballot could be told by its feel; an electorwould withdraw as sympathy or purchase ran. Voting over at the precinct mentioned, the box was taken according to regulations into a closed room and opened. Democrats and Republicans had each a manager. The Republican ran his hand into the box and gave it a stir; straightway it became so full it couldn’t be shut, ballots falling apart and multiplying themselves. The Republican laughed: “I have heard of self-raising flour. These are self-raising ballots! Butts’ own game!” That precinct went Democratic.
So went other precincts. Republicans had failed on tissues. A Congressional Committee, composed of Senators McDonald of Indiana, Randolph of New Jersey, and Teller of Colorado, came down to inquire into elections. Republicans charged tissue ballots on Democrats. But, alas! one of the printers put on the stand testified that the Republicans had ordered many thousand tissue ballots of him, but he had failed to have them on time!
There were other devices. Witness, the story of the Circus and the Voter. “A circus saved us. Each negro registering received a certificate to be presented at the polls. Our people got a circus to come through and made a contract with the managers. The circus let it be known that registration certificates would be accepted instead of admission tickets, or entrance fees, we agreeing to redeem at admission price all certificates turned over to us. The arrangement made everybody happy—none more than the negroes, who got a better picnic than usual and saw a show besides. The circus had tremendous crowds and profited greatly. And one of the most villainous tickets ever foisted upon a people was killed quietly and effectually.”
An original scheme was resorted to in the Black Belt of Mississippi in order to carry the day. An importantlocal election was to be held, and the whites felt that they could not afford to lose. But how to keep out the black vote was a serious question. Finally, a bright young fellow suggested a plan. For a week preceding election, he collected, by paying for it, negro hair from barbers serving negroes, and he got butchers to save waste blood from slaughter-pens. The night before the election, committees went out about a mile on every road and path leading to the town, and scattering wool and blood generously, “pawed up the ground” with foot-tracks and human body imprints. Every evidence of furious scuffle was faithfully carried out. The day dawned beautiful and bright, but not a black vote was cast—not a negro was to be seen. Hundreds had quit farm-work to come to vote, but stopped aghast at the appalling signs of such an awful battle, and fled to their homes in prompt and precipitate confusion.
I heard a good man say, with humour and sadness, “I have bought many a negro vote, bought them three for a quarter. To buy was their terms. There was no other way. And we couldn’t help ourselves.” “There were Federal guards here and they knew just what we were doing,” another relates, “knew we were voting our way any and everybody who came up to vote, had seen the Radicals at the same thing and knew just what strait we were in. I voted a dead man knowingly when some one came up and gave his name. I did the same thing unknowingly. I heard one man ask of a small funeral procession, ‘Who’s dead?’ ‘Hush!’ said his companion, ‘It’s the man that’s just voted!’” “I never voted a dead man,” a second manager chimes in, “but I voted a man that was in Europe. His father was right in front of the ballot-box, telling about a letter just received from his son, when up comes somebody in that son’s name and votes. The old man was equal tothe occasion. ‘Why, my dear boy!’—had never seen the other before—‘so glad you got back in time to cast your vote!’ and off they walked, arms around each other.”
“The way we saved our city,” one says, “was by buying the Radical manager of the election. We were standing right under the statue of George Washington when we paid the $500 he demanded. These things are all wrong, but there was no other way. Some stood off and kept clean hands. But a thing had to be done, and we did it, not minding the theoretical dirt. The negroes were armed with ballots and bayonets, and the bayonets were at our breasts. Our lands were taxed until we were letting our homes go because we could not pay the taxes, while corrupt officials were waxing fat. We had to take our country from under negro rule any way we could.” It was not wounds of war that the Southerner found it hard to forget and forgive, but the humiliation put upon him afterward, and his own enforced self-degradation.
I do not wish to be understood as saying that the Southerner re-won control of local government by only such methods as described; I emphasize the truth that, at times, he did use them and had to use them, because herein was his deep moral wound. He employed better methods as he could; for instance, when every white man would bind himself to persuade one negro to vote with him, to bring this negro to the polls, and protect him from Radical punishment. Also, he availed himself of weak spots in the enemy’s armour. Thus in Hancock County, Georgia, in 1870, Judge Linton Stephens challenged voters who had not paid poll-tax, and, when election managers would not heed, had them arrested and confined, while their places were supplied and the election proceeded. The State Constitution,framed by the Radicals themselves, called for this poll-tax—a dollar a head—and its application to “educational purposes.” The extravagant Radical regime, falling short of bribing money, remitted the poll-tax in lieu thereof. Judge Stephens caught them. Governor Bullock disapproved his action; United States Marshal Seaford haled him before United States Commissioner Swayze. The Federal Grand Jury ignored the charge against him, and that was the end of it. The Judge had, however, been put to expense, trouble, and loss of time.
THE WHITE CHILD
The White Child
Upon the Southern white child of due age for schooling the effects of war fell with cruel force.
The ante-bellum planter kept a tutor or governess or both for his children; his neighbours’ children sometimes attended the school which he maintained for his own. Thus, were sons and daughters prepared for academy and college, university, finishing school. Private schools were broken up quite generally by the war. It became quite the custom for the mother or an elder sister to fill the position of instructor in families on big plantations. Such schooling as this was none too plentiful in rural Dixie just after the war. Sisters of age and capacity to teach did not stay in one family forever. Sometimes they got married; though many a beautiful and brilliant girl sacrificed her future for little brothers and sisters dependent upon her for mental food. The great mass of Southern women had, however, to drop books for broomsticks; to turn from pianos and guitars and make music with kettles and pans. Children had to help. With labour entirely disorganised, in the direst poverty and the grasp of such political convulsions as no people before them had ever endured, the hour was strenuous beyond description, and it is no wonder if the claims of children to education were often overlooked, or, in cruel necessity, set aside.
Sometimes neighbours clubbed together and opened an “old field school,” paying the teacher out of a common fund subscribed for the purpose; again, a manwho could teach went around, drummed up pupils at so much a head, opened a school and took chances on collection of dues. Many neighbourhoods were too poor for even such expedients; to get bread itself was a struggle to which children must lend labour. The seventies found few or no rural districts without a quota of half-grown lads and lassies unable to read and write. It was no strange thing to see little white boys driving a plow when they were so small they had to lift their hands high to grasp the handles; or little white girls minding cows, trotting to springs or wells with big buckets to fill, bending over wash-tubs, and working in the crops.
The public school system was not put in operation at once, and if it had been, could not have met conditions of the hour. Planters lived far apart; roads in some sections long unworked, in others lately plowed by cannons or wagon-trains, were often impassable for teams—if people were so fortunate as to have teams; and much more so for little feet; then, too, the reign of fear was on; highways and by-ways were infested by roving negroes; many were harmless; would, indeed, do a child a kindness; but some were dangerous; the negro, his own master now, was free to get drunk at other times than Christmas and corn-shucking. An argument against the success of the public as of the “old field” school, lay in the strong spirit of caste animating the high-born Southerner. It was against his grain to send his children—particularly his daughters—to school with Tom, Dick and Harry; it did not please him for them to make close associates of children in a different walk of life—the children of the “poor white trash.” This spirit of exclusiveness marks people of position today, wherever found. Caste prejudice was almost inoperative, however, having small chance to pick andchoose. Gaunt poverty closed the doors of learning against the white child of the South, while Northern munificence was flinging them wide to the black.
Soon as war ended, schools for negroes were organised in all directions with Government funds or funds supplied by Northern charity; and under Northern tutelage—a tutelage contributing to prejudice between the races. These institutions had further the effect of aggravating the labour problem—a problem so desperate for the Southern farmer that he could not turn from it to give his own child a chance for intellectual life.
He was not pleasantly moved by touching stories that went North of class-rooms where middle-age, hoary-head and pickaninny sat on the same bench studying the same page, all consumed with ambition to master the alphabet. It did not enter into these accounts that the plows and hoes of a sacked country had been deserted for the A B C book. He resented the whole tendency of the time, which was to make the negro despise manual labour and elevate book-learning above its just position. Along with these appealing stories did not go pictures of fields where white women and children in harness dragged plows through furrows; the artists did not portray white children in the field wistfully watching black children trooping by to school; had such pictures gone North in the sixties and seventies, some would have said, so bitter was the moment, “Just retribution for the whites,” but not the majority. The great-hearted men and women of the North would have come to the rescue.
“There were two reasons for Northern indifference to the education of the Southern white child,” an embittered educator says; “natural prejudice against the people with whom they had been at war, and the feelingthat the negro had been persecuted—had been ‘snatched from his happy home in Africa’ (they forgot they had done more than a full share of the snatching); brought over here and sold into slavery (they forgot they had done more than a full share of the selling), and thereby stripped of all his brilliant opportunities of life in Africa and the advancement he might else have had; the Southern white man, instead of sending him to college, had made him work in the fields; to even up matters now, the negro must go to college and the white man work in the fields. This was the will of Providence and they its executors.”
The two reasons given—undue prejudice against the Southern white and overweening pity for the negro—were the grand disposing cause of Northern indifference to the white child and abnormal sensibility about everything concerning the black. But at the bottom was ignorance of actual conditions here. The one story was put before them, the other was not. It was not to the interests of Freedmen’s Bureau agents to let the other be known; and, of course, the business of teachers and missionaries was to make out the strongest case possible in order to draw funds for negro education. The negro’s ignorance, in a literary sense, could hardly be exaggerated, nor his poverty; but he was a laborer and an artisan and held recuperative power in his hands.
It was not in the thought of the proud old planter to cry for help; it was his habit to give, not take; he and his wife and children made as little parade as possible of their extremities to their nearest neighbour; such evidences as would not down were laughed over with a humour inherent as their spirit of independence.
In 1867, Mrs. Sarah Hughes said: “Since leaving Kentucky last December, I have travelled many thousand miles in the South; I have seen spreading outbefore me in sad panorama solitary chimneys, burned buildings, walls of once happy homes, grounds and gardens grown with weeds and briers; groups of sad human faces; gaunt women and children; old, helpless men; young men on crutches, and without arms, sick, sad, heart-broken. Words cannot describe the destitute condition of the orphaned children. It excites my deepest commiseration. The children of the dead soldiers are wandering beggars, hand in hand with want. Except in large cities, there are no schools or homes for the fatherless. An attractive academy has been built near Atlanta by citizens of Northern cities for the children of the freedmen; and it is in a flourishing condition,” etc. An editorial in a newspaper of the day reads: “The white children of the South are growing up in pitiful neglect, and we are wrong to permit it.”
General Pope, commanding Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Florida, wrote General Grant, April 14, 1867: “It may be safely said that the remarkable progress made in the education of these people (the negroes), aided by noble charitable institutions of Northern societies and individuals, finds no parallel in the history of mankind. If the white people exhibit the same indisposition to be educated that they do now, five years will have transferred intelligence and education so far as the masses are concerned, to the coloured people of the district.” Does it not seem incredible that an Anglo-Saxon should regard with complacency a situation involving the supreme peril of his race, should consider it cause of congratulation? The state of affairs was urged as argument that the negro was or quickly would be qualified for exercise of the franchise with which he had been invested and his late master deprived.
The Sunday School acquired new interest and significance. I remember one that used to be held in summerunder the trees near a blacksmith’s shop, in which Webster’s Spelling Book divided attention with the New Testament. The school was gotten up by a planter in kindly effort to do what he could for the poor children in the neighbourhood. There were grown girls in it who spelled out rather than read Bible verses. On weekdays, the planter’s daughter received and taught free of charge a class of poor whites. A Georgia friend, who was a little boy at the close of the war, tells me: “The Sunday Schools made more impression upon me than any other institution of the period. There were, I suppose, Sunday Schools in plenty before and during the war, but somehow they seemed a new thing thereafter.”
This movement was at once an expression of a revival of religious sentiment (there was a strong revival movement at the time), the desire for social intercourse, and an effort to advance the educational interests of the young, who in countless instances were deprived of ordinary means of instruction. Hon. Henry G. Turner wrote of the conditions of that day: “Cities and great tracts of country were in ashes. Colleges and schools were silent, teachers without pupils, pupils without teachers. Even the great charities and asylums were unable to take care of lunatics, the deaf and the blind.... Repudiation by States of bonds, treasury notes, and other obligations issued during the war reduced to penury thousands of widows and orphans, and many people too old to start life over again.” Congress demanded this repudiation at the point of the bayonet.
The South was not unmindful of her orphans; there were early organised efforts such as the land was capable of making; the churches led in many of these. And there were efforts of a lighter order, such as the bazaarwhich the Washington and Lee Association held in Norfolk. The Baltimore Society for the Liberal Education of Southern Children was a notable agency. Individual effort was not lacking. Few did more according to their might than Miss Emily V. Mason, who provided for many orphans gravitating towards her at a time when she was paying for her nieces’ board with family silver, a spoon or a fork at a time. One of her most sympathetic aides was a Miss Chew, of the North, with whom during the entire war she had maintained an affectionate correspondence begun in times of peace. Illustrative of a rather odd form of relief is this extract from a letter by Mrs. Lee to Miss Mason:
“My dear Miss Em, did I ever write you about a benevolent lady at the North who is anxious to adopt two little ‘rebel’ children, five or six years old—of a Confederate officer—and she writes General Lee to recommend such a party to her. She wants them of gentle blood. I have no doubt there are a great many to whom such an offer would be acceptable. Do you know of any?” In regard to Baltimore’s work, she says: “How can we ever repay our kind friends in Baltimore for all they have done for us?” When the Confederate General, John B. Hood, died, he left a number of very young children in poor circumstances; one of their benefactors was the Federal General McClellan, I have heard.
Doubtless many hands were outstretched from the North in some such manner as is indicated in Mrs. Lee’s letter. Thousands would have extended help in every way had the truth been known. What the Southern white child really needed, however, was the removal of an oppressive legislation which was throttling his every chance in life, and a more temperate view on the part of the dominant section of the negro question—aquestion that was pressing painfully at every point upon his present and future. He had a right to an equal chance in life with the negro.
That quality in Northern people which made them pour out money for the freedmen, would have stirred their sense of justice to the white child had the situation been clear to them. One of the earliest homes for orphans of Confederate soldiers was established at Macon by William H. Appleton, of New York, at the suggestion of his friend, Bishop Beckwith, of Georgia. Vanderbilt and Tulane Universities, the Seney benefactions to Emory and Wesleyan Colleges, and other evidences of awakening interest in the South’s white youth, will occur at once to my readers. Chief of all was the Peabody Fund, in which white and black had share. Dr. Sears, of Boston, first administrator, was sharply blamed by William Lloyd Garrison and others because he did not make mixed schools a condition of bestowal upon whites; his critics grew quiet when shown that, under the terms of the gift, such a course would divert the whole fund to white children.
To illustrate white need: Late as 1899, I heard, through Miss Sergeant, Principal of the Girls’ High School, Atlanta, of a white school in the Georgia mountains where one short shelf held all the books—one grammar, one arithmetic, one reader, one history, one geography, one spelling-book. Starting at the end of the first bench, a book would pass from hand to hand, each child studying a paragraph. There are schools of scrimped resources now, where young mountaineers make all sorts of sacrifices and trudge barefoot seemingly impossible distances to secure a little learning. Nobody in these communities dreams of calling for outside help and sympathy, and when help is tendered, it must be with the utmost circumspection and delicacy,or native pride is wounded and rejects. Appalachia is a region holding big game for people hunting chances to do good.
MISS EMILY V. MASON
Photograph by Vianelli, Italy
The various Constitutional Conventions adopted public school systems for their commonwealths. In Virginia, it was not to go into operation until 1871, after which there was to be as rapid extension as possible and full introduction into all counties by 1876. The convention made strenuous efforts, as did that of every other State, to force mixed schools, in which, had they succeeded, the white child’s chance of an education would have suffered a new death.
Early text-books used in public schools grated on the Southerner; they were put out by Northern publishing houses and gave views of American history which he thought unjust and untrue. The “Southern Opinion” printed this, August 3, 1867: “In a book circulating in the South as history, this occurs: ‘While the people of the North were rejoicing because the war was at an end, President Lincoln, one of the best men in the world, was cruelly murdered in Washington by a young man hired by the Confederates to do the wicked deed.’ It calls Lee ‘a perjured traitor;’ says ‘Sherman made a glorious march to the sea;’ prints ‘Sheridan’s Ride’ as a school recitation.” To comprehension of the Southern mind as it was then and is now in some who remember, it is essential that we get its view of the “Ride” and the “March.”
“Have you seen a piece of poetry,” a representative Southern woman wrote another in the fall of 1865, “called ‘Sheridan’s Ride’? If you can get it, do send it to me. I want to see if there isn’t some one smart enough to reply to it and give a true version of that descent of armed ruffians upon store-rooms, stables, hen-roosts and ladies’ trunks—even tearing the jewelry fromtheir persons—even robbing the poor darkies of their watches and clothing. Not a single Confederate soldier did they encounter. They ought to live in history! My Vermont friend, Lucy Adams, says these things ‘are not true, no one at the North believes them, they are impossible.’ But we know they are true. I was very anxious to send you Sherman’s speech at Cincinnati—perhaps you have seen it—in which he unblushingly sanctions all the outrages committed by his men. I really think some notice ought to be taken of it, but our papers, you see, are all ruined now; and in New York, only ‘The News’ dares publish anything true.... I have found a copy, but this says at ‘Lancaster, Ohio’; perhaps he said the same thing twice; it was at the close of a grand speech: ‘Soldiers, when we marched through and conquered the country of the rebels, we became owners of all they had; and I don’t want you to be troubled in your consciences for taking, while on our great march, the property of the conquered rebels—they had forfeited their right to it.’”