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“Did you wish to see me, General?” he asked.
“No! I’m looking for a man—a Union soldier not a turkey buzzard!” He dashed up to the clerk’s desk.
“Is Major Grant in his room?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Tell him I want to see him.”
“What can I do for you, General Worth?” asked the Major as he hastened to meet him.
“Major Grant, I understand you are a lawyer. You are a man of principle, or you wouldn’t have fought. When I meet a man that fought us I know I am talking to a man, not a skunk. This greasy sanctified Bureau Agent, has decided that I owe my hands fifteen hundred dollars. He knows it’s a lie. But his power is absolute. I have no appeal to a court. He has all the negroes under his thumb and he is simply arranging to steal this money. I want to pay you a hundred dollars as a retainer and have you settle with the Lord’s anointed, the Rev. Ezra Perkins for me.”
“With pleasure, General. And it shall not cost you a cent.”
“I’ll be glad to pay you, Major. Such a decision enforced against me now would mean absolute ruin. I can’t borrow another cent.”
“Leave Ezra with me.”
“Why couldn’t they put soldiers into this Bureau if they had to have it, instead of these skunks and wolves?” snorted the General.
“Well, some of them are a little off in the odour of their records at home, I’ll admit,” said the Major with a dry smile. “But this is the day of the carrion crow, General. You know they always follow the armies. They attack the wounded as well as the dead. You have my heartfelt sympathy. You have dark days ahead! The death of Mr. Lincoln was the most awful calamity that could possibly have befallen the South. I’m sorry. I’ve learned to like you Southerners, and to love these beautiful skies, and fields of eternal green. It’s my country and yours. I fought you to keep it as the heritage of my children.”
The General’s eyes filled with tears and the two men silently clasped each other’s hands.
“Send in your accounts by your clerk. I’ll look them over to-night and I’ve no doubt the Honourable Reverend Ezra Perkins will see a new light with the rising of tomorrow’s sun.”
And Ezra did see a new light. As the Major cursed him in all the moods and tenses he knew, Ezra thought he smelled brimstone in that light.
“I assure you, Major, I’m sorry the thing happened. My assistant did all the work on these papers. I hadn’t time to give them personal attention,” the Agent apologised in his humblest voice.
“You’re a liar. Don’t waste your breath.”
Ezra bit his lips and pulled his Mormon whiskers.
“Write out your decision now—this minute—confirming these accounts in double quick order, unless you are looking for trouble.”
And Ezra hastened to do as he was bidden.
The next day while the General was seated on the porch of the little hotel discussing his campaigns with Major Grant, Tom Camp sent for him.
Tom took the General round behind his house, with grave ceremony.
“What are you up to, Tom?”
“Show you in a minute! I wish I could make you a handsomer present, General, to show you how much I think of you. But I know yer weakness anyhow. There’s the finest lot er lightwood you ever seed.”
Tom turned back some old bagging and revealed a pile of fat pine chips covered with rosin, evidently chipped carefully out of the boxed place of live pine trees.
The General had two crochets, lightwood and waterpower. When he got hold of a fine lot of lightwood suitable for kindling fires, he would fill his closet with it, conceal it under his bed, and sometimes under his mattress. He would even hide it in his bureau drawers and wardrobe and take it out in little bits like a miser.
“Lord Tom, that beats the world!”
“Ain’t it fine? Just smell?”
“Rosin on every piece! Tom, you cut every tree on your place and every tree in two miles clean to get that. You couldn’t have made me a gift I would appreciate more. Old boy, if there’s ever a time in your life that you need a friend, you know where to find me.”
“I knowed ye’d like it!” said Tom with a smile.
“Tom, you’re a man after my own heart. You’re feeling rich enough to make your General a present when we are all about to starve. You’re a man of faith. So am I. I say keep a stiff upper lip and peg away. The sun still shines, the rains refresh, and water runs down hill yet. That’s one thing Uncle Billy Sherman’s army couldn’t do much with when they put us to the test of fire. He couldn’t burn up our water power. Tom, you may not know it, but I do—we’ve got water power enough to turn every wheel in the world. Wait till we get our harness on it and make it spin and weave our cotton,—we’ll feed and clothe the human race. Faith’s my motto. I can hardly get enough to eat now, but better times are coming. A man’s just as big as his faith. I’ve got faith in the South. I’ve got faith in the good will of the people of the North. Slavery is dead. They can’t feel anything but kindly toward an enemy that fought as bravely and lost all. We’ve got one country now and it’s going to be a great one.”
“You’re right, General, faith’s the word.”
“Tom, you don’t know how this gift from you touches me.”
The General pressed the old soldier’s hand with feeling. He changed his orders from a buggy to a two-horse team that could carry all his precious lightwood.
He filled the vehicle, and what was left he packed carefully in his valise.
He stopped his team in front of the Baptist parsonage to see Mrs. Durham about Allan McLeod.
“Delighted to see you, General Worth. It’s refreshing to look into the faces of our great leaders, if they are still outlawed as rebels by the Washington government.”
“Ah, Madam, I need not say it is refreshing to see you, the rarest and most beautiful flower of the old South in the days of her wealth and pride! And always the same!” The General bowed over her hand.
“Yes, I haven’t surrendered yet.”
“And you never will,” he laughed.
“Why should I? They’ve done their worst. They have robbed me of all. I’ve only rags and ashes left.”
“Things might still be worse, Madam.”
“I can’t see it. There is nothing but suffering and ruin before us. These ignorant negroes are now being taught by people who hate or misunderstand us. They can only be a scourge to society. I am heart-sick when I try to think of the future!”
There was a mist about her eyes that betrayed the deep emotion with which she uttered the last sentence.
She was a queenly woman of the brunette type with full face of striking beauty surmounted by a mass of rich chestnut hair. The loss of her slaves and estate in the war had burned its message of bitterness into her soul. She had the ways of that imperious aristocracy of the South that only slavery could nourish. She was still uncompromising upon every issue that touched the life of the past.
She believed in slavery as the only possible career for a negro in America. The war had left her cynical on the future of the new “Mulatto” nation as she called it, born in its agony. Her only child had died during the war, and this great sorrow had not softened but rather hardened her nature.
Her husband’s career as a preacher was now a double cross to her because it meant the doom of eternal poverty. In spite of her love for her husband and her determination with all her opposite tastes to do her duty as his wife, she could not get used to poverty. She hated it in her soul with quiet intensity.
The General was thinking of all this as he tried to frame a cheerful answer. Somehow he could not think of anything worth while to say to her. So he changed the subject.
“Mrs. Durham, I’ve called to ask your interest in your Sunday School in a boy who is a sort of ward of mine, young Allan McLeod.”
“That handsome red-headed fellow that looks like a tiger, I’ve seen playing in the streets?”
“Yes, I want you to tame him.”
“Well, I will try for your sake, though he’s a little older than any boy in my class. He must be over fifteen.”
“Just fifteen. I’m deeply interested in him. I am going to give him a good education. His father was a drunken Scotchman in my brigade, whose loyalty to me as his chief was so genuine and touching I couldn’t help loving him. He was a man of fine intellect and some culture. His trouble was drink. He never could get up in life on that account. I have an idea that he married his wife while on one of his drunks. She is from down in Robeson county, and he told me she was related to the outlaws who have infested that section for years. This boy looks like his mother, though he gets that red hair and those laughing eyes from his father. I want you to take hold of him and civilise him for me.”
“I’ll try, General. You know, I love boys.”
“You will find him rude and boisterous at first, but I think he’s got something in him.”
“I’ll send for him to come to see me Saturday.”
“Thank you, Madam. I must go. My love to Dr. Durham.”
The next Saturday when Mrs. Durham walked into her little parlour to see Allan, the boy was scared nearly out of his wits. He sprang to his feet, stammered and blushed, and looked as though he were going to jump out of the window.
Mrs. Durham looked at him with a smile that quite disarmed his fears, took his outstretched hand, and held it trembling in hers.
“I know we will be good friends, won’t we?”
“Yessum,” he stammered.
“And you won’t tie any more tin cans to dogs like you did to Charlie Gaston’s little terrier, will you? I like boys full of life and spirit, just so they don’t do mean and cruel things.”
The boy was ready to promise her anything. He was charmed with her beauty and gentle ways. He thought her the most beautiful woman he had ever seen in the world.
As they started toward the door, she gently slipped one arm around him, put her hand under his chin and kissed him.
Then he was ready to die for her. It was the first kiss he had ever received from a woman’s lips. His mother was not a demonstrative woman. He never recalled a kiss she had given him. His blood tingled with the delicious sense of this one’s sweetness. All the afternoon he sat out under a tree and dreamed and watched the house where this wonderful thing had happened to him.
IN the death of Mr. Lincoln, a group of radical politicians, hitherto suppressed, saw their supreme opportunity to obtain control of the nation in the crisis of an approaching Presidential campaign.
Now they could fasten their schemes of proscription, confiscation, and revenge upon the South.
Mr. Lincoln had held these wolves at bay during his life by the power of his great personality. But the Lion was dead, and the Wolf, who had snarled and snapped at him in life, put on his skin and claimed the heritage of his power. The Wolf whispered his message of hate, and in the hour of partisan passion became the master of the nation.
Busy feet had been hurrying back and forth from the Southern states to Washington whispering in the Wolf’s ear the stories of sure success, if only the plan of proscription, disfranchisement of whites, and enfranchisement of blacks were carried out.
This movement was inaugurated two years after the war, with every Southern state in profound peace, and in a life and death struggle with nature to prevent famine. The new revolution destroyed the Union a second time, paralysed every industry in the South, and transformed ten peaceful states into roaring hells of anarchy. We have easily outlived the sorrows of the war. That was a surgery which healed the body. But the child has not yet been born whose children’s children will live to see the healing of the wounds from those four years of chaos, when fanatics blinded by passion, armed millions of ignorant negroes and thrust them into mortal combat with the proud, bleeding, halfstarving Anglo-Saxon race of the South. Such a deed once done, can never be undone. It fixes the status of these races for a thousand years, if not for eternity.
The South was now rapidly gathering into two hostile armies under these influences, with race marks as uniforms—the Black against the White.
The Negro army was under the command of a triumvirate, the Carpet-bagger from the North, the native Scalawag and the Negro Demagogue.
Entirely distinct from either of these was the genuine Yankee soldier settler in the South after the war, who came because he loved its genial skies and kindly people.
Ultimately some of these Northern settlers were forced into politics by conditions around them, and they constituted the only conscience and brains visible in public life during the reign of terror which the “Reconstruction” régime inaugurated.
In the winter of 1866 the Union League at Hambright held a meeting of special importance. The attendance was large and enthusiastic.
Amos Hogg, the defeated candidate for Governor in the last election, now the President of the Federation of “Loyal Leagues,” had sent a special ambassador to this meeting to receive reports and give instructions.
This ambassador was none other than the famous Simon Legree of Red River, who had migrated to North Carolina attracted by the first proclamation of the President, announcing his plan for readmitting the state to the Union. The rumours of his death proved a mistake. He had quit drink, and set his mind on greater vices.
In his face were the features of the distinguished ruffian whose cruelty to his slaves had made him unique in infamy in the annals of the South. He was now preeminently the type of the “truly loyal”. At the first rumour of war he had sold his negroes and migrated nearer the border land, that he might the better avoid service in either army. He succeeded in doing this. The last two years of the war, however, the enlisting officers pressed him hard, until finally he hit on a brilliant scheme.
He shaved clean, and dressed as a German emigrant woman. He wore dresses for two years, did house work, milked the cows and cut wood for a good natured old German. He paid for his board, and passed for a sister, just from the old country.
When the war closed, he resumed male attire, became a violent Union man, and swore that he had been hounded and persecuted without mercy by the Secessionist rebels.
He was looking more at ease now than ever in his life. He wore a silk hat and a new suit of clothes made by a fashionable tailor in Raleigh. He was a little older looking than when he killed Uncle Tom on his farm some ten years before, but otherwise unchanged. He had the same short muscular body, round bullet head, light grey eyes and shaggy eyebrows, but his deep chestnut bristly hair had been trimmed by a barber. His coarse thick lips drooped at the corners of his mouth and emphasised the crook in his nose. His eyes, well set apart, as of old were bold, commanding, and flashed with the cold light of glittering steel. His teeth that once were pointed like the fangs of a wolf had been filed by a dentist. But it required more than the file of a dentist to smooth out of that face the ferocity and cruelty that years of dissolute habits had fixed.
He was only forty-two years old, but the flabby flesh under his eyes and his enormous square-cut jaw made him look fully fifty.
It was a spectacle for gods and men, to see him harangue that Union League in the platitudes of loyalty to the Union, and to watch the crowd of negroes hang breathless on his every word as the inspired Gospel of God. The only notable change in him from the old days was in his speech. He had hired a man to teach him grammar and pronunciation. He had high ambitions for the future.
“Be of good cheer, beloved!” he said to the negroes. “A great day is coming for you. You are to rule this land. Your old masters are to dig in the fields and you are to sit under the shade and be gentlemen. Old Andy Johnson will be kicked out of the White House or hung, and the farms you’ve worked on so long will be divided among you. You can rent them to your old masters and live in ease the balance of your life.”
“Glory to God!” shouted an old negro.
“I have just been to Washington for our great leader, Amos Hogg. I’ve seen Mr. Sumner, Mr. Stevens and Mr. Butler. I have shown them that we can carry any state in the South, if they will only give you the ballot and take it away from enough rebels. We have promised them the votes in the Presidential election, and they are going to give us what we want.”
“Hallelujah! Amen! Yas Lawd!” The fervent exclamations came from every part of the room.
After the meeting the negroes pressed around Legree and shook his hand with eagerness—the same hand that was red with the blood of their race.
When the crowd had dispersed a meeting of the leaders was held.
Dave Haley, the ex-slave trader from Kentucky who had dodged back and forth from the mountains of his native state to the mountains of Western North Carolina and kept out of the armies, was there. He had settled in Hambright and hoped at least to get the postoffice under the new dispensation.
In the group was the full blooded negro, Tim Shelby. He had belonged to the Shelbys of Kentucky, but had escaped through Ohio into Canada before the war. He had returned home with great expectations of revolutions to follow in the wake of the victorious armies of the North. He had been disappointed in the programme of kindliness and mercy that immediately followed the fall of the Confederacy; but he had been busy day and night since the war in organising the negroes, in secretly furnishing them arms and wherever possible he had them grouped in military posts and regularly drilled. He was elated at the brilliant prospects which Legree’s report from Washington opened.
“Glorious news you bring us, brother!” he exclaimed as he slapped Legree on the back.
“Yes, and it’s straight.”
“Did Mr. Stevens tell you so?”
“He’s the man that told me.”
“Well, you can tie to him. He’s the master now that rules the country,” said Tim with enthusiasm.
“You bet he’s runnin’ it. He showed me his bill to confiscate the property of the rebels and give it to the truly loyal and the niggers. It’s a hummer. You ought to have seen the old man’s eyes flash fire when he pulled that bill out of his desk and read it to me.”
“When will he pass it?”
“Two years, yet. He told me the fools up North were not quite ready for it; and that he had two other bills first, that would run the South crazy and so fire the North that he could pass anything he wanted and hang old Andy Johnson besides.”
“Praise God,” shouted Tim, as he threw his arms around Legree and hugged him.
Tim kept his kinky hair cut close, and when excited he had a way of wrinkling his scalp so as to lift his ears up and down like a mule. His lips were big and thick, and he combed assiduously a tiny moustache which he tried in vain to pull out in straight Napoleonic style.
He worked his scalp and ears vigourously as he exclaimed, “Tell us the whole plan, brother!”
“The plan’s simple,” said Legree. “Mr. Stevens is going to give the nigger the ballot, and take it from enough white men to give the niggers a majority. Then he will kick old Andy Johnson out of the White House, put the gag on the Supreme Court so the South can’t appeal, pass his bill to confiscate the property of the rebels and give it to loyal men and the niggers, and run the rebels out.”
“And the beauty of the plan is,” said Tim with unction, “that they are going to allow the Negro to vote to give himself the ballot and not allow the white man to vote against it. That’s what I call a dead sure thing.” Tim drew himself up, a sardonic grin revealing his white teeth from ear to ear, and burst into an impassioned harangue to the excited group. He was endowed with native eloquence, and had graduated from a college in Canada under the private tutorship of its professors. He was well versed in English History. He could hold an audience of negroes spell bound, and his audacity commanded the attention of the boldest white man who heard him.
Legree, Perkins and Haley cheered his wild utterances and urged him to greater flights.
He paused as though about to stop when Legree, evidently surprised and delighted at his powers said, “Go on! Go on!”
“Yes, go on,” shouted Perkins. “We are done with race and colour lines.”
A dreamy look came to Tim’s eyes as he continued, “Our proud white aristocrats of the South are in a panic it seems. They fear the coming power of the Negro. They fear their Desdemonas may be fascinated again by an Othello! Well, Othello’s day has come at last. If he has dreamed dreams in the past his tongue dared not speak, the day is fast coming when he will put these dreams into deeds, not words.
“The South has not paid the penalties of her crimes. The work of the conqueror has not yet been done in this land. Our work now is to bring the proud low and exalt the lowly. This is the first duty of the conqueror.
“The French Revolutionists established a tannery where they tanned the hides of dead aristocrats into leather with which they shod the common people. This was France in the eighteenth century with a thousand years of Christian culture.
“When the English army conquered Scotland they hunted and killed every fugitive to a man, tore from the homes of their fallen foes their wives, stripped them naked, and made them follow the army begging bread, the laughing stock and sport of every soldier and camp follower! This was England in the meridian of Anglo-Saxon intellectual glory, the England of Shakespeare who was writing Othello to please the warlike populace.
“I say to my people now in the language of the inspired Word, ‘All things are yours!’ I have been drilling and teaching them through the Union League, the young and the old. I have told the old men that they will be just as useful as the young. If they can’t carry a musket they can apply the torch when the time comes. And they are ready now to answer the call of the Lord!”
They crowded around Tim and wrung his hand.
Early in 1867, two years after the war, Thaddeus Stevens passed through Congress his famous bill destroying the governments of the Southern states, and dividing them into military districts, enfranchising the whole negro race, and disfranchising one-fourth of the whites. The army was sent back to the South to enforce these decrees at the point of the bayonet. The authority of the Supreme Court was destroyed by a supplementary act and the South denied the right of appeal. Mr. Stevens then introduced his bill to confiscate the property of the white people of the South. The negroes laid down their hoes and plows and began to gather in excited meetings. Crimes of violence increased daily. Not a night passed but that a burning barn or home wrote its message of anarchy on the black sky.
The negroes refused to sign any contracts to work, to pay rents, or vacate their houses on notice even from the Freedman’s Bureau.
The negroes on General Worth’s plantation, not only refused to work, or move, but organised to prevent any white man from putting his foot on the land.
General Worth procured a special order from the headquarters of the Freedman’s Bureau for the district located at Independence. When the officer appeared and attempted to serve this notice, the negroes mobbed him.
A company of troops were ordered to Hambright, and the notice served again by the Bureau official accompanied by the Captain of this company.
The negroes asked for time to hold a meeting and discuss the question. They held their meeting and gathered fully five hundred men from the neighbourhood, all armed with revolvers or muskets. They asked Legree and Tim Shelby to tell them what they should do. There was no uncertain sound in what Legree said. He looked over the crowd of eager faces with pride and conscious power.
“Gentlemen, your duty is plain. Hold your land. It’s yours. You’ve worked it for a lifetime. These officers here tell you that old Andy Johnson has pardoned General Worth and that you have no rights on the land without his contract. I tell you old Andy Johnson has no right to pardon a rebel, and that he will be hung before another year. Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner and B. F. Butler are running this country. Mr. Stevens has never failed yet on anything he has set his hand. He has promised to give you the land. Stick to it. Shake your fist in old Andy Johnson’s face and the face of this Bureau and tell them so.”
“Dat we will!” shouted a negro woman, as Tim Shelby rose to speak.
“You have suffered,” said Tim. “Now let the white man suffer. Times have changed. In the old days the white man said, ‘John, come black my boots’! And the poor negro had to black his boots. I expect to see the day when I will say to a white man, ‘Black my boots!’ And the white man will tip his hat and hurry to do what I tell him.”
“Yes, Lawd! Glory to God! Hear dat now!”
“We will drive the white men out of this country. That is the purpose of our friends at Washington. If white men want to live in the South they can become our servants. If they don’t like their job they can move to a more congenial climate. You have Congress on your side, backed by a million bayonets. There is no President. The Supreme Court is chained. In San Domingo no white man is allowed to vote, hold office, or hold a foot of land. We will make this mighty South a more glorious San Domingo.”
A frenzied shout rent the air. Tim and Legree were carried on the shoulders of stalwart men in triumphant procession with five hundred crazy negroes yelling and screaming at their heels.
The officers made their escape in the confusion and beat a hasty retreat to town. They reported the situation to headquarters, and asked for instructions.
THE spirit of anarchy was in the tainted air. The bonds that held society were loosened. Government threatened to become organised crime instead of the organised virtue of the community.
The report of crimes of unusual horror among the ignorant and the vicious began now to startle the world.
The Rev. John Durham on his rounds among the poor discovered a little negro boy whom the parents had abandoned to starve. His father had become a drunken loafer at Independence and the Freedman’s Bureau delivered the child to his mother and her sister who lived in a cabin about two miles from Hambright, and ordered them to care for the boy.
A few days later the child had disappeared. A search was instituted, and the charred bones were found in an old ash heap in the woods near this cabin. The mother had knocked him in the head and burned the body in a drunken orgie with dissolute companions.
The sense of impending disaster crushed the hearts of thoughtful and serious people. One of the last acts of Governor Macon, whose office was now under the control of the military commandant at Charleston, South Carolina, was to issue a proclamation, appointing a day of fasting and prayer to God for deliverance from the ruin that threatened the state under the dominion of Legree and the negroes.
It was a memorable day in the history of the people.
In many places they met in the churches the night before, and held all-night watches and prayer meetings. They felt that a pestilence worse than the Black Death of the Middle Ages threatened to extinguish civilisation.
The Baptist church at Hambright was crowded to the doors with white-faced women and sorrowful men.
About ten o’clock in the morning, pale and haggard from a sleepless night of prayer and thought, the Preacher arose to address the people. The hush of death fell as he gazed silently over the audience for a moment. How pale his face! They had never seen him so moved with passions that stirred his inmost soul. His first words were addressed to God. He did not seem to see the people before him.
“Lord, Thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations.
“Before the mountains were brought forth or ever Thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting Thou art God!”
The people instinctively bowed their heads, fired by the subtle quality of intense emotion the tones of his voice communicated, and many of the people were already in tears.
“Thou turnest man to destruction: and sayest, return, ye children of men.”
“Who knowest the power of thine anger?”
“Return, O Lord, how long? and let it repent Thee concerning Thy servants.”
“Beloved,” he continued, “it was permitted unto your fathers and brothers and children to die for their country. You must live for her in the black hour of despair. There will be no roar of guns, no long lines of gleaming bayonets, no flash of pageantry or martial music to stir your souls.
“You are called to go down, man by man, alone, naked and unarmed in the blackness of night and fight with the powers of hell for your civilisation.
“You must look this question squarely in the face. You are to be put to the supreme test. You are to stand at the judgment bar of the ages and make good your right to life. The attempt is to be deliberately made to blot out Anglo-Saxon society and substitute African barbarism.
“A few years ago a Southern Representative in a stupid rage knocked Charles Sumner down with a cane and cracked his skull. Now it is this poor cracked brain, mad with hate and revenge, that is attempting to blot the Southern states from the map of the world and build Negro territories on their ruins. In the madness of party passions, for the first time in history, an anarchist, Thaddeus Stevens, has obtained the dictatorship of a great Constitutional Government, hauled down its flag and nailed the Black Flag of Confiscation and Revenge to its masthead.
“The excuse given for this, that the lawmakers of the South attempted to reinslave the Negro by their enactments against vagrants and provisions for apprenticeship, is so weak a lie, it will not deserve the notice of a future historian. Every law passed on these subjects since the abolition of slavery was simply copied from the codes of the Northern states where free labour was the basis of society.
“Lincoln alone, with his great human heart and broad statesmanship could have saved us. But the South had no luck. Again and again in the war, victory was within her grasp, and an unseen hand snatched it away. In the hour of her defeat the bullet of a madman strikes down the great President, her last refuge in ruin!
“God alone is our help. Let us hold fast to our faith in Him. We can only cry with aching hearts in the language of the Psalmist of old, ‘How long, O Lord? how long!’
“The voices of three men now fill the world with their bluster—Charles Sumner, a crack-brained theorist; Thad-deus Stevens, a clubfooted misanthrope, and B. F. Butler, a triumvirate of physical and mental deformity. Yet they are but the cracked reeds of a great organ that peals forth the discord of a nation’s blind rage. When the storm is past, and reason rules passion, they will be flung into oblivion. We must bend to the storm. It is God’s will.”
The people left the church with heavy hearts. They were hopelessly depressed. In the afternoon, as the churches were being slowly emptied, groups of negroes stood on the corners talking loudly and discussing the meaning of this new Sunday so strangely observed. It began to snow. It was late in March and this was an unusual phenomenon in the South.
The next morning the earth was covered with four inches of snow, that glistened in the sun with a strange reddish hue. On examination it was found that every snow drop had in it a tiny red spot that looked like a drop of blood! Nothing of the kind had ever been seen before in the history of the world, so far as any one knew.
This freak of nature seemed a harbinger of sure and terrible calamity. Even the most cultured and thoughtful could not shake off the impression it made.
The Preacher did his best to cheer the people in his daily intercourse with them. His Sunday sermons seemed in these darkest days unusually tender and hopeful. It was a marvel to those who heard his bitter and sorrowful speech on the day of fasting and prayer, that he could preach such sermons as those which followed.
Occasionally old Uncle Joshua Miller would ask him to preach for the negroes in their new church on Sunday afternoons. He always went, hoping to keep some sort of helpful influence over them in spite of their new leaders and teachers. It was strange to watch this man shake hands with these negroes, call them familiarly by their names, ask kindly after their families, and yet carry in his heart the presage of a coming irreconcilable conflict. For no one knew more clearly than he, that the issues were being joined from the deadly grip of that conflict of races that would determine whether this Republic would be Mulatto or Anglo-Saxon. Yet at heart he had only the kindliest feelings for these familiar dusky faces now rising a black storm above the horizon, threatening the existence of civilised society, under the leadership of Simon Legree, and Mr. Stevens.
It seemed a joke sometimes as he thought of it, a huge, preposterous joke, this actual attempt to reverse the order of nature, turn society upside down, and make a thicklipped, flat-nosed negro but yesterday taken from the jungle, the ruler of the proudest and strongest race of men evolved in two thousand years of history. Yet when he remembered the fierce passions in the hearts of the demagogues who were experimenting with this social dynamite, it was a joke that took on a hellish, sinister meaning.
WHEN Charlie Gaston reached his home after a never-to-be-forgotten day in the woods with the Preacher, he found a ragged little dirt-smeared negro boy peeping through the fence into the woodyard.
“What you want?” cried Charlie.
“Nuttin!”
“What’s your name?”
“Dick.”
“Who’s your father?”
“Haint got none. My mudder say she was tricked, en I’se de trick!” he chuckled and walled his eyes.
Charlie came close and looked him over. Dick giggled and showed the whites of his eyes.
“What made that streak on your neck?”
“Nigger done it wid er axe.”
“What nigger?”
“Low life nigger name er Amos what stays roun’ our house Sundays.”
“What made him do it?”
“He low he wuz me daddy, en I sez he wuz er liar, en den he grab de axe en try ter chop me head off.”
“Gracious, he ’most killed you!”
“Yassir, but de doctor sewed me head back, en hit grow’d.”
“Goodness me!”
“Say!” grinned Dick.
“What?”
“I likes you.”
“Do you?”
“Yassir, en I aint gwine home no mo’. I done run away, en I wants ter live wid you.”
“Will you help me and Nelse work?”
“Dat I will. I can do mos’ anyting. You ax yer Ma fur me, en doan let dat nigger Nelse git holt er me.” Charlie’s heart went out to the ragged little waif. He took him by the hand, led him into the yard, found his mother, and begged her to give him a place to sleep and keep him.
His mother tried to persuade him to make Dick go back to his own home. Nelse was loud in his objections to the new comer, and Aunt Eve looked at him as though she would throw him over the fence.
But Dick stuck doggedly to Charlie’s heels.
“Mama dear, see, they tried to cut his head oft with an axe,” cried the boy, and he wheeled Dick around and showed the terrible scar across the back of his neck.
“I spec hits er pity dey didn’t cut hit clean off,” muttered Nelse.
“Mama, you can’t send him back to be killed!”
“Well, darling, I’ll see about it to-morrow.”
“Come on Dick, I’ll show you where to sleep!”
The next day Dick’s mother was glad to get rid of him by binding him legally to Mrs. Gaston, and a lonely boy found a playmate and partner in work, he was never to forget.
THE summer of 1867! Will ever a Southern man or woman who saw it forget its scenes? A group of oath-bound secret societies, The Union League, The Heroes of America, and The Red Strings dominating society, and marauding bands of negroes armed to the teeth terrorising the country, stealing, burning and murdering.
Labour was not only demoralised, it had ceased to exist Depression was universal, farming paralysed, investments dead, and all property insecure. Moral obligations were dropping away from conduct, and a gulf as deep as hell and high as heaven opening between the two races.
The negro preachers openly instructed their flocks to take what they needed from their white neighbours. If any man dared prosecute a thief, the answer was a burned barn or a home in ashes.
The wildest passions held riot at Washington. The Congress of the United States as a deliberative body under constitutional forms of government no longer existed. The Speaker of the House shook his fist at the President and threatened openly to hang him, and he was arraigned for impeachment for daring to exercise the constitutional functions of his office!
The division agents of the Freedman’s Bureau in the South sent to Washington the most alarming reports, declaring a famine imminent. In reply the vindictive leaders levied a tax of fifteen dollars a bale on cotton, plunging thousands of Southern farmers into immediate bankruptcy and giving to India and Egypt the mastery of the cotton markets of the world!
Congress became to the desolate South what Attila, the “Scourge of God” was to civilised Europe.
The Abolitionists of the North, whose conscience was the fire that kindled the Civil War, rose in solemn protest against this insanity. Their protest was drowned in the roar of multitudes maddened by demagogues who were preparing for a political campaign.
Late in August Hambright and Campbell county were thrilled with horror at the report of a terrible crime. A whole white family had been murdered in their home, the father, mother and three children in one night, and no clue to the murderers could be found.
Two days later the rumour spread over the country that a horde of negroes heavily armed were approaching Hambright burning, pillaging and murdering.
All day terrified women, some walking with babes in their arms, some riding in old wagons and carrying what household goods they could load on them, were hurrying with blanched faces into the town.
By night five hundred determined white men had answered an alarm bell and assembled in the court house. Every negro save a few faithful servants had disappeared. A strange stillness fell over the village.
Mrs. Gaston sat in her house without a light, looking anxiously out of the window, overwhelmed with the sense of helplessness. Charlie, frightened by the wild stories he had heard, was trying in spite of his fears to comfort her.
“Don’t cry, Mama!”
“I’m not crying because I’m afraid, darling, I’m only crying because your father is not here to-night. I can’t get used to living without him to protect us.”
“I’ll take care of you, Mama—Nelse and me.”
“Where is Nelse?”
“He’s cleaning up the shot gun.”
“Tell him to come here.”
When Nelse approached his Mistress asked, “Nelse, do you really think this tale is true?”
“No, Missy, I doan believe nary word uf it. Same time I’se gettin’ ready fur ’em. Ef er nigger come foolin’ roun’ dis house ter night, he’ll t’ink he’s run ergin er whole regiment! I hain’t been ter wah fur nuttin’.”
“Nelse, you have always been faithful. I trust you implicitly.”
“De Lawd, Missy, dat you kin do! I fight fur you en dat boy till I drap dead in my tracks!”
“I believe you would.”
“Yessum, cose I would. En I wants dat swo’de er Marse Charles to-night, Missy, en Charlie ter help me sharpen ’im on de grine stone.”
She took the sword from its place and handed it to Nelse. Was there just a shade of doubt in her heart as she saw his black hand close over its hilt as he drew it from the scabbard and felt its edge! If so she gave no sign.
Charlie turned the grindstone while Nelse proceeded to violate the laws of nations by putting a keen edge on the blade.
“Nebber seed no sense in dese dull swodes nohow!”
“Why ain’t they sharp, Nelse?”
“Doan know, honey. Marse Charles tell me de law doan ’low it, but dey sho hain’t no law now!”
“We’ll sharpen it, won’t we, Nelse?” whispered the boy as he turned faster.
“Dat us will, honey. En den you des watch me mow niggers ef dey come er prowlin’ round dis house!”
“Did you kill many Yankees in the war, Nelse?”
“Doan know, honey, spec I did.”
“Are you going to take the gun or the sword?”
“Bofe um ’em chile. I’se gwine ter shoot er pair er niggers fust, en den charge de whole gang wid dis swode. Hain’t nuttin’ er nigger’s feard uf lak er keen edge. Wish ter God I had a razer long es dis swode! I’d des walk clean froo er whole army er niggers wid guns. Man, hit ’ud des natchelly be er sight! Day’d slam dem guns down en bust demselves open gittin’ outen my way!”
When the sun rose next morning the bodies of ten negroes lay dead and wounded in the road about a mile outside of town. The pickets thrown out in every direction had discovered their approach about eleven o’clock. They were allowed to advance within a mile. There were not more than two hundred in the gang, dozens of them were drunk, and like the Sepoys of India, they were under the command of a white Scalawag. At the first volley they broke and fled in wild disorder. Their leader managed to escape.
This event cleared the atmosphere for a few weeks; and the people breathed more freely when another company of army regulars marched into the town and camped in the school grounds of the old academy.