CHAPTER IX.THE SITUATION.“Peace fool!I would have peace and quietness, but the fool will not.”Shakespere.Uncle Jesse, as the reader is by this time aware, was a man of influence among his neighbors, few of whom, of either race, were capable of such just and comprehensive views of their political and social relations.Little influenced by color prejudice (which is common to both races, though from widely different causes and in various degrees, throughout the United States), he possessed great reverence for law, as such; a fact mainly due to a residence of several years among the law-abiding people of that portion of the State of Ohio known as The Western Reserve, at a period when his mind was peculiarity receptive.Born a slave in 1834, he seized the first opportunity offered by the late war, to flee from bondage and learn to live like a man.Aunt Phebe preferred to wait with their two little children, her invalid mother, and aged grandfather, for the coming of the “Yankees,” which was confidently and hopefully expected.And so in 1867 Uncle Jesse returned and found her and their children free, and thriving, in the same cabin in whichhe left them, though the “big house” was vacant, and the plantation in new hands.At that time the Southern States were rife with utter lawlessness and bitter animosities; and acts of malicious and cruel outrage were frequent occurrences.From the first settlement of the State, society had been divided into many and antagonistic classes, throughout which, however, prevailed an universal and sycophanticaping, each class of that above it; while the upper stratum sat in serene security of social distinction—fortune or misfortune, personal respectability or degradation, culture or ignorance, plethora or poverty,allwere forgotten or obscured in the penumbra of that formidable and enigmatical wordbirth, untitled though it must be.Now that the old landmarks had to some extent been swept away, there followed a general and tumultuous scramble in the debris, each being anxious to secure all that was possible, or failing, to resent the affront of another’s success.Thus the worst elements and characteristics of every class were made prominent.Families bred in opulence, and accustomed to claim the unpaid toil of others as their rightful due, and to believe political leadership and oligarchal control their birth-right, and who, like their ancestors for generations, cherished contempt for all who worked for their own subsistence, found extreme humiliation in laboring for their own bread, and submitting to the legal restrictions imposed by the generalgovernment, controlled as it was by those they had formerly derided as the “mud-sills” of the North, even though those restrictions were equitable and generous. In resentment of the equal citizenship conferred upon their former chattled slaves, they committed, and defended in each other, such outrages upon the persons and property of the negroes and resident northern whites, as are not even admissable between civilized enemies at open war.Not a few planters who formerly owned thousands of acres of land, and from three to five thousand slaves, were, by the failure of the Rebellion, for the success of which they had staked all their possessions, as poor as the “cracker” families, which had formerly “squatted” like caterpillars and locusts upon the skirts of their plantations. They were even sometimes subjected to these as magistrates and officials, as they often were to their former slaves.This haughty planter-race, having utterly failed in its last great pretension in bitterness of spirit still cherished its disdain for those it could not conquer, into which disdain the education of two hundred and fifty years ofirresponsible ownership of laborershas concentrated the egotism, the selfishness and the cruelty thus engendered.The intelligence of this class was never commensurate with its wealth. Schools were necessarily few in the South during the existence of slavery, and family feuds and favoritisms notoriously controlled the distribution of the honors of those that did exist, and social and political distinction depended upon culture in no degree.Hence there was little to spur the laggard, or to encourage and inspire genius, and the actual ignorance, or at best, the superficial scholarship of “the first families” was astounding. Since the war, poverty and aversion to the North have materially lessened southern patronage of northern schools, and under the “carpet-bag” administration the higher schools of the State, and the common schools in country districts in which the aggregate number of pupils did not warrant the opening of more than one school, were accessible to colored students; a recognition of equality which the whites would not tolerate; and so they consigned themselves to ignorance.The class formerly known as “sand-hillers,” “crackers,” or “poor white trash,” were lazy, filthy and ignorant, and frequently degraded below the level of the slaves. These, with the class next above them in the social scale—the “working people,” who owned few or no slaves, and labored with their own hands on small farms, or as mechanics, experienced a social promotion nearly equal to that of the slaves; as emancipation, the ravages of war, and a more general distribution of land, through confiscation and sales for delinquent taxes, broke up the land monopoly and political retainership which had so long existed to the opulence of the planters, and the semi-mendicity of the lower classes.The confederate service had also given acceptable occupation and wages, and even some inferior military titles to men who had formerly begged, or stolen, or starved, ratherthan earn their bread by honest labor; and such military glory, won in defence of “The Lost Cause,” could not be utterly ignored in the contest for recognition of some sort.The class called “respectable people,” consisting of artists, merchants and professional men, teachers, &c., whose title to recognition rested upon wealth and culture, probably received the change with the most equilibrity, while the freedmen had everything to gain, and nothing to lose.The most ignorant of them well knew that it was to “de Yankees,” “de Lincum sogers, de United States,” or “Mar’s Lincom,” that they were indebted for emancipation. The raving of their masters against northern abolitionists was, to them, quite sufficient evidence that somehow the war had its origin, near or remote, in northern antagonism to slavery.History will never fail to record the good behavior of the freedmen of the southern states of America, the causes of which were manifold.The experiences and legends of the slaveship, and centuries of repetition of similar evidence, had taught the African that there were other powers, stronger than brute force, which he could not command.Again, he was not self-liberated. The brother of his master had been his deliverer (whatever may have been his motive), and gratitude, the moral attraction of gravitation, is the strongest moral power in the universe; which the All-Father well knew when He sent His Son to suffer.This deliverer, this brother, believed inlaw, the invisibility and incomprehensibility of which appealed to the superstition of the emancipated slaves. This northern brother had struggled desperately with the tyrant, poured out his treasure and shed his blood without stint in the conflict; and having conquered, stood with weapons in either hand, to command the peace in the name of this invisible and incomprehensiblelaw; while the religious, industrial, and educational influences which he summoned from his northern home, coming up while yet the atmosphere was tremulous with the sounds of expiring conflict, brought food for hungry bodies, intellects and souls; healing for lacerated spirits; and the vesture of a better civilization for the nakedness of the black, and the mail-chafed form of the white.Women who pressed to the battle-front with a cup of water for the lips of the dying, and a pillow for the wounded head that lay upon the bloody sward, from hearts baptized to self-sacrifice, and pens lit with the zeal of the Nazarene, sent white-winged, burning messages all over the news-reading North; and while from thousands of homes there, brave men came with flaunting flags, and beating drums, and booming cannons, singing as they marched:“We are coming, Father Abr’am,Three hundred thousand more,”and“We’ll hang Jeff Davis on a sour apple tree.”(and voluntarily broke that pledge,) from out those same homes stole a procession of women, not clandestinely, not timidly, but brave of soul and strong of heart and inflexible of purpose, though without ostentation. The bible and spelling-book were their only weapons, and their song was of “the mercies of the Lord forever,” and their “trust under the feathers of His wings!” “Neither the terror by night,” “the arrow by day,” “the pestilence in darkness,” nor “destruction at noon,” nor the “thousand falling on their right hand,” and on their left, could make them afraid; “because they had made the Lord their strength, even the Most High their refuge.” They went forth to “tread upon the lion and the adder, the young lion and the dragon.” Scorn, insult, slander, poverty, loneliness, sickness and death, they trampled under their feet; for “through the work of the Lord were they made glad,” and they “triumphed in the work of His hands.”Away on in the Elysian fields of heaven, when the cycles of eternity shall have encircled the universe, and rolled back upon their track in such repeated and intricate mazes as only the Infinite mind can trace, they shall receive from the lips of the ransomed of all nations, “the blessing of those once ready to perish”; and the blessed assurance that the torch they lit in the freedman’s hut, lit a beacon that illumined the world.If the South is saved to civilization, its chief human savior was “the nigger school-teacher.”To these evidences of kindly interest on the part of theNorthern people, and the influence of, and confidence implied in the immediate presence of feminine representatives of the best and most peaceable element of the North, certainly not less is due than to the natural timidity of the race, or their great faith in ultimate Divine deliverance, which needed intelligent direction.Evidently the most difficult lesson, and yet that most needed by all the former inhabitants of the southern states isreverence for, trust in, and submission to law. The old habit of irresponsible authority, of domination instead of true democracy—the idea that the sovereign citizen may be superior to the law enacted by the popular will, is hard to eradicate.Like the writhing beheaded serpent, which responds with slow-dying malice to the glow of the sun that does not make night because its green eyes are sightless, beheaded slaveocratic feudalism blindly ejects its spite at inevitable oncoming civilization.Through the philanthropic movements which have been indicated, an entirely new ingredient was injected among the heterogeneous elements of southern society which were seeking a new basis, and a few northern soldiers, enamored of the delicious climate and naturally productive soil to which war and conquest had introduced them, and from which slavery had formerly excluded them, brought their families from Northern homes, or married daughters of this sunny land, and became permanent residents. Then followed capitalists, allured by the numerousapparently good investments the almost universal bankruptcy afforded.With these came money, and such industry, enterprise, skill and public spirit as was before unknown in that slavery-cursed land; and the pecuniary results of which the Southerner can only account for by supposed political corruption or downright stealing from the public funds—the most familiar means.Still the formerly favored class, true to its arrogance, and not ignored by those accustomed to worship at its shrine, ranks the possessor of one of its patronymics, especially if garnished by military title won or sustained in confederate service, among the most enviable of men; for “The Lost Cause” is as dear to South Carolinians as ever—an ideal worshiped all the more devoutly because of its unreality, and with demonstration necessarily somewhat restrained.
CHAPTER IX.THE SITUATION.“Peace fool!I would have peace and quietness, but the fool will not.”Shakespere.Uncle Jesse, as the reader is by this time aware, was a man of influence among his neighbors, few of whom, of either race, were capable of such just and comprehensive views of their political and social relations.Little influenced by color prejudice (which is common to both races, though from widely different causes and in various degrees, throughout the United States), he possessed great reverence for law, as such; a fact mainly due to a residence of several years among the law-abiding people of that portion of the State of Ohio known as The Western Reserve, at a period when his mind was peculiarity receptive.Born a slave in 1834, he seized the first opportunity offered by the late war, to flee from bondage and learn to live like a man.Aunt Phebe preferred to wait with their two little children, her invalid mother, and aged grandfather, for the coming of the “Yankees,” which was confidently and hopefully expected.And so in 1867 Uncle Jesse returned and found her and their children free, and thriving, in the same cabin in whichhe left them, though the “big house” was vacant, and the plantation in new hands.At that time the Southern States were rife with utter lawlessness and bitter animosities; and acts of malicious and cruel outrage were frequent occurrences.From the first settlement of the State, society had been divided into many and antagonistic classes, throughout which, however, prevailed an universal and sycophanticaping, each class of that above it; while the upper stratum sat in serene security of social distinction—fortune or misfortune, personal respectability or degradation, culture or ignorance, plethora or poverty,allwere forgotten or obscured in the penumbra of that formidable and enigmatical wordbirth, untitled though it must be.Now that the old landmarks had to some extent been swept away, there followed a general and tumultuous scramble in the debris, each being anxious to secure all that was possible, or failing, to resent the affront of another’s success.Thus the worst elements and characteristics of every class were made prominent.Families bred in opulence, and accustomed to claim the unpaid toil of others as their rightful due, and to believe political leadership and oligarchal control their birth-right, and who, like their ancestors for generations, cherished contempt for all who worked for their own subsistence, found extreme humiliation in laboring for their own bread, and submitting to the legal restrictions imposed by the generalgovernment, controlled as it was by those they had formerly derided as the “mud-sills” of the North, even though those restrictions were equitable and generous. In resentment of the equal citizenship conferred upon their former chattled slaves, they committed, and defended in each other, such outrages upon the persons and property of the negroes and resident northern whites, as are not even admissable between civilized enemies at open war.Not a few planters who formerly owned thousands of acres of land, and from three to five thousand slaves, were, by the failure of the Rebellion, for the success of which they had staked all their possessions, as poor as the “cracker” families, which had formerly “squatted” like caterpillars and locusts upon the skirts of their plantations. They were even sometimes subjected to these as magistrates and officials, as they often were to their former slaves.This haughty planter-race, having utterly failed in its last great pretension in bitterness of spirit still cherished its disdain for those it could not conquer, into which disdain the education of two hundred and fifty years ofirresponsible ownership of laborershas concentrated the egotism, the selfishness and the cruelty thus engendered.The intelligence of this class was never commensurate with its wealth. Schools were necessarily few in the South during the existence of slavery, and family feuds and favoritisms notoriously controlled the distribution of the honors of those that did exist, and social and political distinction depended upon culture in no degree.Hence there was little to spur the laggard, or to encourage and inspire genius, and the actual ignorance, or at best, the superficial scholarship of “the first families” was astounding. Since the war, poverty and aversion to the North have materially lessened southern patronage of northern schools, and under the “carpet-bag” administration the higher schools of the State, and the common schools in country districts in which the aggregate number of pupils did not warrant the opening of more than one school, were accessible to colored students; a recognition of equality which the whites would not tolerate; and so they consigned themselves to ignorance.The class formerly known as “sand-hillers,” “crackers,” or “poor white trash,” were lazy, filthy and ignorant, and frequently degraded below the level of the slaves. These, with the class next above them in the social scale—the “working people,” who owned few or no slaves, and labored with their own hands on small farms, or as mechanics, experienced a social promotion nearly equal to that of the slaves; as emancipation, the ravages of war, and a more general distribution of land, through confiscation and sales for delinquent taxes, broke up the land monopoly and political retainership which had so long existed to the opulence of the planters, and the semi-mendicity of the lower classes.The confederate service had also given acceptable occupation and wages, and even some inferior military titles to men who had formerly begged, or stolen, or starved, ratherthan earn their bread by honest labor; and such military glory, won in defence of “The Lost Cause,” could not be utterly ignored in the contest for recognition of some sort.The class called “respectable people,” consisting of artists, merchants and professional men, teachers, &c., whose title to recognition rested upon wealth and culture, probably received the change with the most equilibrity, while the freedmen had everything to gain, and nothing to lose.The most ignorant of them well knew that it was to “de Yankees,” “de Lincum sogers, de United States,” or “Mar’s Lincom,” that they were indebted for emancipation. The raving of their masters against northern abolitionists was, to them, quite sufficient evidence that somehow the war had its origin, near or remote, in northern antagonism to slavery.History will never fail to record the good behavior of the freedmen of the southern states of America, the causes of which were manifold.The experiences and legends of the slaveship, and centuries of repetition of similar evidence, had taught the African that there were other powers, stronger than brute force, which he could not command.Again, he was not self-liberated. The brother of his master had been his deliverer (whatever may have been his motive), and gratitude, the moral attraction of gravitation, is the strongest moral power in the universe; which the All-Father well knew when He sent His Son to suffer.This deliverer, this brother, believed inlaw, the invisibility and incomprehensibility of which appealed to the superstition of the emancipated slaves. This northern brother had struggled desperately with the tyrant, poured out his treasure and shed his blood without stint in the conflict; and having conquered, stood with weapons in either hand, to command the peace in the name of this invisible and incomprehensiblelaw; while the religious, industrial, and educational influences which he summoned from his northern home, coming up while yet the atmosphere was tremulous with the sounds of expiring conflict, brought food for hungry bodies, intellects and souls; healing for lacerated spirits; and the vesture of a better civilization for the nakedness of the black, and the mail-chafed form of the white.Women who pressed to the battle-front with a cup of water for the lips of the dying, and a pillow for the wounded head that lay upon the bloody sward, from hearts baptized to self-sacrifice, and pens lit with the zeal of the Nazarene, sent white-winged, burning messages all over the news-reading North; and while from thousands of homes there, brave men came with flaunting flags, and beating drums, and booming cannons, singing as they marched:“We are coming, Father Abr’am,Three hundred thousand more,”and“We’ll hang Jeff Davis on a sour apple tree.”(and voluntarily broke that pledge,) from out those same homes stole a procession of women, not clandestinely, not timidly, but brave of soul and strong of heart and inflexible of purpose, though without ostentation. The bible and spelling-book were their only weapons, and their song was of “the mercies of the Lord forever,” and their “trust under the feathers of His wings!” “Neither the terror by night,” “the arrow by day,” “the pestilence in darkness,” nor “destruction at noon,” nor the “thousand falling on their right hand,” and on their left, could make them afraid; “because they had made the Lord their strength, even the Most High their refuge.” They went forth to “tread upon the lion and the adder, the young lion and the dragon.” Scorn, insult, slander, poverty, loneliness, sickness and death, they trampled under their feet; for “through the work of the Lord were they made glad,” and they “triumphed in the work of His hands.”Away on in the Elysian fields of heaven, when the cycles of eternity shall have encircled the universe, and rolled back upon their track in such repeated and intricate mazes as only the Infinite mind can trace, they shall receive from the lips of the ransomed of all nations, “the blessing of those once ready to perish”; and the blessed assurance that the torch they lit in the freedman’s hut, lit a beacon that illumined the world.If the South is saved to civilization, its chief human savior was “the nigger school-teacher.”To these evidences of kindly interest on the part of theNorthern people, and the influence of, and confidence implied in the immediate presence of feminine representatives of the best and most peaceable element of the North, certainly not less is due than to the natural timidity of the race, or their great faith in ultimate Divine deliverance, which needed intelligent direction.Evidently the most difficult lesson, and yet that most needed by all the former inhabitants of the southern states isreverence for, trust in, and submission to law. The old habit of irresponsible authority, of domination instead of true democracy—the idea that the sovereign citizen may be superior to the law enacted by the popular will, is hard to eradicate.Like the writhing beheaded serpent, which responds with slow-dying malice to the glow of the sun that does not make night because its green eyes are sightless, beheaded slaveocratic feudalism blindly ejects its spite at inevitable oncoming civilization.Through the philanthropic movements which have been indicated, an entirely new ingredient was injected among the heterogeneous elements of southern society which were seeking a new basis, and a few northern soldiers, enamored of the delicious climate and naturally productive soil to which war and conquest had introduced them, and from which slavery had formerly excluded them, brought their families from Northern homes, or married daughters of this sunny land, and became permanent residents. Then followed capitalists, allured by the numerousapparently good investments the almost universal bankruptcy afforded.With these came money, and such industry, enterprise, skill and public spirit as was before unknown in that slavery-cursed land; and the pecuniary results of which the Southerner can only account for by supposed political corruption or downright stealing from the public funds—the most familiar means.Still the formerly favored class, true to its arrogance, and not ignored by those accustomed to worship at its shrine, ranks the possessor of one of its patronymics, especially if garnished by military title won or sustained in confederate service, among the most enviable of men; for “The Lost Cause” is as dear to South Carolinians as ever—an ideal worshiped all the more devoutly because of its unreality, and with demonstration necessarily somewhat restrained.
“Peace fool!
I would have peace and quietness, but the fool will not.”
Shakespere.
Uncle Jesse, as the reader is by this time aware, was a man of influence among his neighbors, few of whom, of either race, were capable of such just and comprehensive views of their political and social relations.
Little influenced by color prejudice (which is common to both races, though from widely different causes and in various degrees, throughout the United States), he possessed great reverence for law, as such; a fact mainly due to a residence of several years among the law-abiding people of that portion of the State of Ohio known as The Western Reserve, at a period when his mind was peculiarity receptive.
Born a slave in 1834, he seized the first opportunity offered by the late war, to flee from bondage and learn to live like a man.
Aunt Phebe preferred to wait with their two little children, her invalid mother, and aged grandfather, for the coming of the “Yankees,” which was confidently and hopefully expected.
And so in 1867 Uncle Jesse returned and found her and their children free, and thriving, in the same cabin in whichhe left them, though the “big house” was vacant, and the plantation in new hands.
At that time the Southern States were rife with utter lawlessness and bitter animosities; and acts of malicious and cruel outrage were frequent occurrences.
From the first settlement of the State, society had been divided into many and antagonistic classes, throughout which, however, prevailed an universal and sycophanticaping, each class of that above it; while the upper stratum sat in serene security of social distinction—fortune or misfortune, personal respectability or degradation, culture or ignorance, plethora or poverty,allwere forgotten or obscured in the penumbra of that formidable and enigmatical wordbirth, untitled though it must be.
Now that the old landmarks had to some extent been swept away, there followed a general and tumultuous scramble in the debris, each being anxious to secure all that was possible, or failing, to resent the affront of another’s success.
Thus the worst elements and characteristics of every class were made prominent.
Families bred in opulence, and accustomed to claim the unpaid toil of others as their rightful due, and to believe political leadership and oligarchal control their birth-right, and who, like their ancestors for generations, cherished contempt for all who worked for their own subsistence, found extreme humiliation in laboring for their own bread, and submitting to the legal restrictions imposed by the generalgovernment, controlled as it was by those they had formerly derided as the “mud-sills” of the North, even though those restrictions were equitable and generous. In resentment of the equal citizenship conferred upon their former chattled slaves, they committed, and defended in each other, such outrages upon the persons and property of the negroes and resident northern whites, as are not even admissable between civilized enemies at open war.
Not a few planters who formerly owned thousands of acres of land, and from three to five thousand slaves, were, by the failure of the Rebellion, for the success of which they had staked all their possessions, as poor as the “cracker” families, which had formerly “squatted” like caterpillars and locusts upon the skirts of their plantations. They were even sometimes subjected to these as magistrates and officials, as they often were to their former slaves.
This haughty planter-race, having utterly failed in its last great pretension in bitterness of spirit still cherished its disdain for those it could not conquer, into which disdain the education of two hundred and fifty years ofirresponsible ownership of laborershas concentrated the egotism, the selfishness and the cruelty thus engendered.
The intelligence of this class was never commensurate with its wealth. Schools were necessarily few in the South during the existence of slavery, and family feuds and favoritisms notoriously controlled the distribution of the honors of those that did exist, and social and political distinction depended upon culture in no degree.Hence there was little to spur the laggard, or to encourage and inspire genius, and the actual ignorance, or at best, the superficial scholarship of “the first families” was astounding. Since the war, poverty and aversion to the North have materially lessened southern patronage of northern schools, and under the “carpet-bag” administration the higher schools of the State, and the common schools in country districts in which the aggregate number of pupils did not warrant the opening of more than one school, were accessible to colored students; a recognition of equality which the whites would not tolerate; and so they consigned themselves to ignorance.
The class formerly known as “sand-hillers,” “crackers,” or “poor white trash,” were lazy, filthy and ignorant, and frequently degraded below the level of the slaves. These, with the class next above them in the social scale—the “working people,” who owned few or no slaves, and labored with their own hands on small farms, or as mechanics, experienced a social promotion nearly equal to that of the slaves; as emancipation, the ravages of war, and a more general distribution of land, through confiscation and sales for delinquent taxes, broke up the land monopoly and political retainership which had so long existed to the opulence of the planters, and the semi-mendicity of the lower classes.
The confederate service had also given acceptable occupation and wages, and even some inferior military titles to men who had formerly begged, or stolen, or starved, ratherthan earn their bread by honest labor; and such military glory, won in defence of “The Lost Cause,” could not be utterly ignored in the contest for recognition of some sort.
The class called “respectable people,” consisting of artists, merchants and professional men, teachers, &c., whose title to recognition rested upon wealth and culture, probably received the change with the most equilibrity, while the freedmen had everything to gain, and nothing to lose.
The most ignorant of them well knew that it was to “de Yankees,” “de Lincum sogers, de United States,” or “Mar’s Lincom,” that they were indebted for emancipation. The raving of their masters against northern abolitionists was, to them, quite sufficient evidence that somehow the war had its origin, near or remote, in northern antagonism to slavery.
History will never fail to record the good behavior of the freedmen of the southern states of America, the causes of which were manifold.
The experiences and legends of the slaveship, and centuries of repetition of similar evidence, had taught the African that there were other powers, stronger than brute force, which he could not command.
Again, he was not self-liberated. The brother of his master had been his deliverer (whatever may have been his motive), and gratitude, the moral attraction of gravitation, is the strongest moral power in the universe; which the All-Father well knew when He sent His Son to suffer.
This deliverer, this brother, believed inlaw, the invisibility and incomprehensibility of which appealed to the superstition of the emancipated slaves. This northern brother had struggled desperately with the tyrant, poured out his treasure and shed his blood without stint in the conflict; and having conquered, stood with weapons in either hand, to command the peace in the name of this invisible and incomprehensiblelaw; while the religious, industrial, and educational influences which he summoned from his northern home, coming up while yet the atmosphere was tremulous with the sounds of expiring conflict, brought food for hungry bodies, intellects and souls; healing for lacerated spirits; and the vesture of a better civilization for the nakedness of the black, and the mail-chafed form of the white.
Women who pressed to the battle-front with a cup of water for the lips of the dying, and a pillow for the wounded head that lay upon the bloody sward, from hearts baptized to self-sacrifice, and pens lit with the zeal of the Nazarene, sent white-winged, burning messages all over the news-reading North; and while from thousands of homes there, brave men came with flaunting flags, and beating drums, and booming cannons, singing as they marched:
“We are coming, Father Abr’am,Three hundred thousand more,”
and
“We’ll hang Jeff Davis on a sour apple tree.”
(and voluntarily broke that pledge,) from out those same homes stole a procession of women, not clandestinely, not timidly, but brave of soul and strong of heart and inflexible of purpose, though without ostentation. The bible and spelling-book were their only weapons, and their song was of “the mercies of the Lord forever,” and their “trust under the feathers of His wings!” “Neither the terror by night,” “the arrow by day,” “the pestilence in darkness,” nor “destruction at noon,” nor the “thousand falling on their right hand,” and on their left, could make them afraid; “because they had made the Lord their strength, even the Most High their refuge.” They went forth to “tread upon the lion and the adder, the young lion and the dragon.” Scorn, insult, slander, poverty, loneliness, sickness and death, they trampled under their feet; for “through the work of the Lord were they made glad,” and they “triumphed in the work of His hands.”
Away on in the Elysian fields of heaven, when the cycles of eternity shall have encircled the universe, and rolled back upon their track in such repeated and intricate mazes as only the Infinite mind can trace, they shall receive from the lips of the ransomed of all nations, “the blessing of those once ready to perish”; and the blessed assurance that the torch they lit in the freedman’s hut, lit a beacon that illumined the world.
If the South is saved to civilization, its chief human savior was “the nigger school-teacher.”
To these evidences of kindly interest on the part of theNorthern people, and the influence of, and confidence implied in the immediate presence of feminine representatives of the best and most peaceable element of the North, certainly not less is due than to the natural timidity of the race, or their great faith in ultimate Divine deliverance, which needed intelligent direction.
Evidently the most difficult lesson, and yet that most needed by all the former inhabitants of the southern states isreverence for, trust in, and submission to law. The old habit of irresponsible authority, of domination instead of true democracy—the idea that the sovereign citizen may be superior to the law enacted by the popular will, is hard to eradicate.
Like the writhing beheaded serpent, which responds with slow-dying malice to the glow of the sun that does not make night because its green eyes are sightless, beheaded slaveocratic feudalism blindly ejects its spite at inevitable oncoming civilization.
Through the philanthropic movements which have been indicated, an entirely new ingredient was injected among the heterogeneous elements of southern society which were seeking a new basis, and a few northern soldiers, enamored of the delicious climate and naturally productive soil to which war and conquest had introduced them, and from which slavery had formerly excluded them, brought their families from Northern homes, or married daughters of this sunny land, and became permanent residents. Then followed capitalists, allured by the numerousapparently good investments the almost universal bankruptcy afforded.
With these came money, and such industry, enterprise, skill and public spirit as was before unknown in that slavery-cursed land; and the pecuniary results of which the Southerner can only account for by supposed political corruption or downright stealing from the public funds—the most familiar means.
Still the formerly favored class, true to its arrogance, and not ignored by those accustomed to worship at its shrine, ranks the possessor of one of its patronymics, especially if garnished by military title won or sustained in confederate service, among the most enviable of men; for “The Lost Cause” is as dear to South Carolinians as ever—an ideal worshiped all the more devoutly because of its unreality, and with demonstration necessarily somewhat restrained.