The Broken Sword; Or, A Pictorial Page in Reconstruction

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Title: The Broken Sword; Or, A Pictorial Page in Reconstruction

Author: D. Worthington

Illustrator: James Dempsey Bullock

Release date: January 16, 2013 [eBook #41857]
Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BROKEN SWORD; OR, A PICTORIAL PAGE IN RECONSTRUCTION ***

The Broken Sword

A Pictorial Page in Reconstruction. By D. Worthington.

[Illustration: Alice Seymour]

THE BROKEN SWORD:

--OR--

A PICTORIAL PAGE IN RECONSTRUCTION

--BY--

D. WORTHINGTON.

WILSON, N. C.:

P. D. GOLD & SONS,
1901.

This work is respectfully inscribed to the

Daughters of the Confederacy

By the Author,

Who followed, as their fathers did, the "Southern
Cross."

INDEX.

CHAP. PAGE

Introductory. III

Looking Backward I 9
Our Scotch-Irish II 25
The Assassins of the Peace of the South III 34
Types and Shadows IV 45
Patriotic Men Deliberating V 60
The Mills Are Grinding VI 72
A Politician of the New School VII 85
Memorial Day VIII 96
The Broken Cruse IX 109
Freedom in Flower X 121
The Majesty of the Law XI 139
Home Again XII 146
A Knight of the White Camelia XIII 153
The Oath of Fealty XIV 174
The Black Diplomat XV 185
Under the Hammer XVI 197
A House Warming XVII 208
The Writ of Ejectment XVIII 218
The Coroner's Inquest XIX 232
A Daniel Come to Judgment XX 247
An Unseen Hand Upon the Lever XXI 259
An Hour With Dickens XXII 273
The Absent Minded Judge XXIII 281
The Dipping of the Red Stars XXIV 303
The Parting of the Ways XXV 316

ILLUSTRATED BY JAMES DEMPSEY BULLOCK.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

Page

Alice Seymour _Frontispiece_

"Ef yu wus to brake loose und drap, yu'd bust up
ebery scalyhorg inde Souf." 44

"Dare goes joshaway, now, wid Ole Glory strowed er
roun' him, steppin lak a rare-hoss over de tater
ridges." 84

"Kase de high shurruff he dun und seed what wuz
ergwine ter cum arter de bellion fell, und he
flopped ober ter de publikins"--"Ole Mars jon
haint ergwine ter flop nowheys," replied
Clarissa 120

"I'm ergwins back lak dat prodigle man dat et up
dem corn cobs way out yander to de tuther eend
o'de yearth." 173

INTRODUCTION.

"I have considered the oppressions that are done under the sun, and
on the side of the oppressor there is power."

In the enforcement of the policy of Reconstruction in the South, the
evidences were from day to day becoming so cumulative and decisive, that
nothing but the discipline of an enraged party, coupled with the
"spoils" principle, prevented the whole mass of the community from a
universal expression of its desire to have it abandoned. Reasoning men
everywhere felt that it must continue to multiply its mischiefs. "But,"
said its authors, "treason must be made odious, and the late
insurrectionary States must feel that there is a higher law than that
promulgated by their ordinances of secession."

The Spanish inquisition, now the abhorrence of all enlightened minds,
was long sustained in many centuries by the tyrants' plea of necessity.
In the burning of a thousand heretics the religious zealot saw the hand
of God; in the destruction of a thousand sorcerers, the fanatic
discerned the commonweal of the people; so in the whipcords with which
the people of the South were so mercilessly scourged, there was found an
antiseptic for the gangrenous wounds inflicted by the civil war. All
these cruelties were legalized, while bleeding humanity was sinking
under the burden of oppression. In the collision of exasperated
passions, it is the temper of aggression that always strikes the first
blow. The government of the South by carpet-baggers was essentially
oppressive and inquisitorial. It was, in its practical operation, a pure
and unadulterated despotism, superseding the protection guaranteed by
the Federal Constitution to each and every State. It was under the
dominion of an organized anarchy, with legislatures and courts of
justice, subordinated to a lawless assemblage of unprincipled men
calling themselves the representatives and judges of the people. Among
its necessarily implied powers was that of confiscation; and numbered in
its enumeration of brutalities, was a nameless crime that shocked the
moral sense of mankind. Reconstruction came upon the South with fearful
impulse.

Perhaps the "hour is on the wing," when a worthier hand will write the
history of the institutional age that was sandwiched between the slavery
civilization ante-dating the sixties, and that which minimized the
pernicious power of manhood suffrage at the close of the century; or
perhaps when that remnant that still survives in the weakness of age to

"Weep o'er their wounds, o'er tales of sorrow done.
Shoulder their crutch and show how fields are won."

shall have "passed over the river;" when the threnody of the "olden
days" which to us is like the music of Carrol along the hills of
Slimora, "pleasant, but mournful to the soul," shall be forgotten, some
ambitious youth will uplift the veil; will take a glance of the whole
horizon, and the south will unbosom her griefs that have been so long
concealed. It will not do for a hand that drew the sword to guide the
pen. By a law of our nature all passive impressions impair our moral
sensibilities. Contact with misery renders us callous to those
experiences; a constant view of vice lessens its deformity. If any
expression in this humble narrative shall appear ill-tempered, let me
say in the language of Themistocles at the battle of Salamis, "Strike,
but hear me." The whole country has long since repudiated the dogma that
"all men are born free and equal" and endowed with certain
imprescriptible and inalienable rights. This heresy of course found its
highest expression in the post-bellum amendments to the constitution,
and the remedial statutes which made their efficiency complete. The war
was the logical fulfillment of prophecies that had their forecast in the
public councils before the nullification doctrine was forced upon the
Senate by Mr. Calhoun. It sprang without extraneous aid from
uninterpretable expressions in the organic law, which were finally
explained away in the effusion of blood. Reconstruction, in the
conception of men who provided the sinews of war, was the prolific
aftermath; and in this harvest field, the gleaners plied their vocation
with merciless activity, reinforced in their villainies by the freedmen,
who, in an experimental way, were publicly evincing their unfitness for
citizenship. The Civil war gendered this brood that filled the South
with horror, and their disorders and tumults precipitated a crisis that
plunged the Southland into a paroxysm from the Potomac to the Rio
Grande. There was no refuge from an evil that was all-pervasive. The
great war with its pageants and sacrifices, its banners and generals,
its storming soldiery and reservoirs of human blood was almost thrust
out of the memory as the patriots of the sixties stood face to face to
the all-encompassing perils of reconstruction. They saw the flag of the
Union--the almost lifeless emblem of the genius of their
liberties--frown feebly at the promulgation of a law that disfranchised
300,000 American citizens. The old banner seemed to turn her eye to the
eagle at her staff-head and ask him to lend her his wide-spreading
pinions, that she might bend the wing and fly away from the polluted
spot--from the embodied forms of evil and ruin. Almost every utterance
of the complaining tongue that was syllabled into speech, was to this
effect: "Will our country--our civilization--withstand the shock?" Our
Southern characters had been enriched by an assemblage of all the
treasures which refined intellect could accumulate; we had wisely built
upon foundations of public virtue; our institutions had the permanency
of age and respectability, and exhibited everywhere the fullest maturity
of athletic vigor. The paroles of Southern soldiers amnestied them from
arrest for past military offences, but the clothing which their poverty
obliged them to wear marked the target at which the lawless and vicious
shot at their will. Personal and State rights were abridged until
nothing was left of the sovereignty of the barren commonwealths or the
enthralled individual. There were no juries of the vicinage but negroes;
and daily the broken-hearted people were unwittingly aggrandizing
rapacious officials. To the most depraved of the negroes the
carpet-baggers were constantly appealing with arguments that stirred
their blood. This narrative will not in an historical sense deal with
the subject of reconstruction; from its want of compactness and
continuity it would prove inefficient as a lesson or a guide. We
present, however, imperfect portraits of a few men and women who were
unfortunately in the pathway of the storm that stripped the husbandman
of the fruits of his labor, the Southron of his liberty, stifled the
cries of the distressed, and rendered the tenures of property unstable
and insecure. In no conjuncture in which this paroxysm of politics
placed the former masters of slaves, did they abate their care and zeal
for their betterment. Monuments of brass and sculptured stone are not
sufficiently enduring to memorialize the virtues of the negroes of the
old plantations of the South, who watched and waited for the avenging
arm of Providence to right the wrongs of old master. May God's mercy
rest and abide upon this scattered remnant, that, like autumn's leaves
in the forest, have been blown hither and thither by the wraith of the
tempest.

[Illustration]

THE BROKEN SWORD.

CHAPTER I.

LOOKING BACKWARD.

I have surrendered at discretion to vagrant thoughts. Just as the idle
school-boy will pause beside the limpid stream to watch its eddying
waters as they go on and on, "never hasting, never resting," so I sit
to-night in the haze of the years that are dead, with the mind sadly
reminiscent, and I watch the shadows as they seem to sketch upon the
memory the familiar faces of our loved and lost, and I hear their
laughter and songs--grateful echoes from the realm of the long ago. I am
gazing again upon the sepulchre of the old South, after the plowshare
of war and reconstruction had run the last furrow. In the garnering of
the red harvest did our men and women of the sixties maintain themselves
with a proper decorum? Were they less patriotic, less self-sacrificing,
less ready with heart and hand to divert the destructive revolution of
principle than their fathers of '76, who in the upbuilding of
republican institutions wavered not in their purpose; when the terror
and ignominy of the scaffold were before them; when they knew their
blood must cement the foundations of the structure they were rearing,
and they themselves become the first sacrifice in the temple of liberty,
which they were dedicating? In that epoch and since we have been making
the grand experiment of self-government; not as Rome made it, when
liberty there was only a name for licentiousness; not as Greece made it,
when a demagogue swayed the deluded masses and lacked only a throne to
make him a king; but with a constitution that should deserve the
encomium of the people, for the unutterable blessings it should bestow;
a constitution impervious to unjust exactions and unpatriotic
suggestions, we hoped for a policy dictated in a spirit of compromise;
but as I look back upon the eventful past, the first adventure of Gil
Blas occurs to me. He had been furnished by his uncle with a sorry mule
and thirty or forty pistoles, and sent forth to seek his fortune. He set
out accordingly, but had not proceeded far from home, when, sitting on
his beast counting his pistoles with much satisfaction, into his hat,
the mule suddenly raised its head and pricked up its ears. Gil Blas
looked around to see the cause of its alarm, and perceived an old hat
upon the ground in the middle of the road, with a rosary of very large
beads in it. At the same time he heard a voice addressing him in a very
pathetic tone, "Good traveler, in the name of the merciful God, and of
all the saints, do drop a few pistoles in the hat." Looking in the
direction from which these words proceeded, he saw to his dismay the
muzzle of a blunderbuss projecting through the hedge, and pointing
directly at his head. Gil Blas, not much pleased with the looks of the
pious mendicant, dropped a few pistoles in the hat and scampered away as
fast as he could. This slight narrative presents to the mind of the
writer the most perfect emblem of the pacific remedy of reconstruction
in its beginning.

To the contemplative mind there is a melancholy pleasure in looking
backward; as shadows will enter unbidden into the camera obscura,
though every portal appears securely guarded; so memories will flit
fantastically into the imagination when every approach seems closed
against intrusion. I am looking backward, as it were, through a smoked
glass, for a great sunburst is within the radius of vision, a sunburst
that cheered our tired eyes with its thousand scintillant gleams in the
hot days of August A. D. Nineteen Hundred.

Looking backward upon a picturesque civilization--upon the old
homesteads and plantations of the South, with their hallowed
associations and ideals--with their impedimenta not of human chattels,
but of compact masses of freed slaves, the underpinning of that
civilization in its concrete form.

I have asked the historian, the essayist, the chronicler, the
clairvoyant, to aid me in the retrospection, but they answer dubiously.
There is no trodden path that I may pursue. No friendly hand that I may
clasp as I stride across fens and brakes, and morasses: even the echoes
of receding footsteps, like the laughter of happy voices are hushed and
dead "lang syne." There are faded letters however that I may read;
broken swords and battered shields hanging upon decaying walls; moth
eaten uniforms in garret and closet, that will guide me backward. The
line of vision is traversed by unwieldy throngs of dilapidated men, in
tattered gray clothes, without a federal head, without intelligent
momentum, breaking up and dissolving like icebergs drifting southward;
they are coming back home where there is neither grain for the sickle,
nor hope for the husbandman: coming back to little cottages where lights
in the windows kept burning for dear papa flickered and spumed, then
died down into the rustic candlesticks, when the little watchful eyes so
tired and weary, closed upon the moonlight that shimmered within the
humble chamber.

Looking back over grave yards, where we reverently laid away our jewels
to be placed by the Great Lapidary in His Crown by and by, when we shall
all rise from our sleep and shine in His emitted glory. Looking backward
over a strange realm, without boundaries or capitals, where there are no
soldiers and no battle fields, and where every thing is so fragrant and
ethereal. Here we may fashion pictures and weave around them gossamer
draperies as insubstantial as this golden twilight.

Hard-hitting, rough-riding moss-troopers rode over the subjugated
domains of the bewildered South, with swords that flashed and turned
every way like Alaric's; rode hither to obliterate the past, its
monuments, its shrines, its traditions; to scarify the old south with
harrows and bayonets; its altars, its homes, its civilization, and to
fetter with chains a great warlike people, with a purpose as fatuous as
ever animated the swart maid of Philistia. Against this senseless
vengeance, the South rebelled again with the same old defiance, the same
old manhood. You may prod the wounded lion with pikes and sabres, but
you cannot tread upon it with iron heels without hearing its roar and
feeling its fangs. To these marauders, the old South was but a moor fowl
to be plucked and eaten. To us she was dynastic, like Hapsburg,
Plantagenet or Hohenzollern. To them the South was a huge incubator, out
of which was hatched "Stratagems and treasons:" To us she was a Queen,
still wearing the purple, still grasping the sceptre, as in past
evolutions and crises. She was Our Queen when a full century ago, and
before there was a cabin upon her plantations she pleaded for the
emancipation of slaves and was insultingly asked to withdraw her
petition by the Merchant Marine of Massachusetts. She was Our Queen
when envenomed abolitionists were gathering the aftermath of the "Higher
law proclamation;" she was Our Queen when Ossawattomie Brown unleashed
his bloodhounds upon a fresher trail at Harper's Ferry; she was Our
Queen when Sumpter ran up a flag that had never before fluttered in a
gale, never before greeted a young nation with its maiden blushes,
followed by the hopes, the prayers, the aspirations, faith and loyalty
of ten million men, women and children; Our Queen when "old Traveler"
was stripped of his dust covered housings and led ever so weary back
into Old Mars. Bob's stables; Our Queen when the last cavalier wiped the
blood from his sabre and scabbarded it forever. God grant she may always
be Our Queen that we may be her liegemen, leal and right trusty in all
catastrophes! Hence we go back to think of her, to write of her, though
a widow bereaved of her husband, and a mother who has buried her first
born. There is no sword now to gleam like a flash of light over the
plumes of charging squadrons: there is no guidon to mark the line of
direction through defile and mountain pass: no call of the bugle "to
saddle and away," no thanksgiving like that of Jackson; "God crowned our
arms with Victory at McDowell yesterday;" No smile like that of Lee as
the Army of the Potomac with trailing banners was double quicking back
to Washington. Ah! no, but the old South through her blinding tears is
smiling still; her dear old face re-lighted by a fresher inspiration.

A trifling dash of time between 1860 and 1870, but events have been
packed away within that decade, that would overlap the four corners of
any other century in the calendar. Within those years were compounded
somewhere in laboratories all the combustible elements of war and
pillage; the casting the projectiles that would destroy a hemisphere.
Broken hearts--crushed hopes--desolated homes, an enslaved country,
wrongs, indignities, outrages, oppressions, all, all wrought by the
cruel instrumentalities of great masters of tragedy. Here is an old
mansion with turrets and esplanades and terraces long neglected and
sadly out of repair. Here are great oaks of a century's growth planted
and pruned by hands that have long since forgotten their cunning. Here
are lapping waters singing in low sweet octaves as they did when poured
out of the hollow of His Hand. Here is the old rookery out of which are
ricochetting birds almost of every voice and plume. Here are cattle, red
and dappled, cropping the meadow grass. Here are vast expanses clad in
the refreshing drapery of nature, upheaving their grassy billows. Here
are the crumbling cabins of the old slaves, in silent platoons that
flank the old mansion, the earmarks of a picturesque civilization abused
and denounced. Slaves, many of whom like the paintings of Titian and
Murillo and Correggio in the great mullioned halls have come down from
former generations. In yonder clump of soughing pines stood the little
meeting house of the "cullud folks" on "Old Marsa's plantation." Here
for decades they worshipped. In the little brook that glides along so
cheerily singing as it goes, they had baptized adult "bredrin and
sisterin." Here many of them had felt the touch of the Master upon the
emancipated souls, and heard His voice in their spiritual uplifting,
tenderly calling, and there when the gnarled and knotted hands had
ceased their toil "Ole Marsa and Ole Misses" had laid them crosswise
upon rigid, lifeless bosoms, that heaved not again with the pangs of
suffering; and out yonder under the maples, hard by the little babbling
brook, reverent and tender hands white and black had lowered the rude
coffin and covered it up in "God's acre," and here around the little
altar ole Marster, and Miss Alice and Mars Harry worshipped with them.
No master, no mistress, no slave in this consecrated ground; no black,
no white, in the invisible Presence; no hard times to come again; no
tithing men, nor tax gatherers; no snarling, snapping wolf to snatch the
gnawed bone from the hungry wife and her starving child. If the larder
were empty the "great house" had an exhaustless supply. If clothes were
rent there was "allus stuff in de loom;" If the clouds gathered for snow
"ole marsa" would put on his great coat and knock at the doors and ask,
"Boys, have you got plenty of good wood for the storm'?" If Joshua had
the "rheumatics" or Melinda the "shaking ager," or little Jeff the
hives, there were ointments and liquids, pills and lotions; and what
physician was so kind; whose hands so soft and tender, whose voice so
comforting and sympathetic as "ole missis's and young missis's?" There
was the garden from which the negroes would market their vegetables;
there was the little "water million" patch where little Jeff and Susan
Ann would run out at midday, and thump and thump and thump and would as
often run back with their mouths wide-open like a rift in a black cloud,
"Mammy, oh! Mammy, dat great big water million is mo'est ripe--be ripe
by Sunday sho," and their little black feet would knock off a jig on the
bare floor; then there was the pig sty where Sukey the "sassy poker," in
its sleekness and fatness, would grunt and frisk and cavort all the day
long. Then there was "Ole Boatswain," the coon dog, lazily napping in
the door--barking at the treed coon in his sleep; then there were the
"tater ridges" and the pumpkins and the cotton patches; then there were
the cackling hens and the pullets, the ducks and geese and guinea-fowls;
the eggs that Hannah and Clarissa and Melinda had counted a score of
times, and knew to a four pence a' penny how much they would fetch in
the town; and "dere was de wagin wid ole Bob an' ole Pete wid pinted
yeares, chawin' de bit same as it were fodder, ready to dash off fore
dey wus ready;" and there were the inventoried assets in trade, "free
forfs Hanna's and two forfs Melinda's and seben forfs Clarissy's," all
tumbled in disorder, live stock and dead stock. And then "dere was
Melinda and Judy a settin' a middle ships into de wagin, all agwine to
de town." And when the heavy wheels would rattle with its human freight
over the hard ground of Ingleside, as the moon was dipping its nether
horn below the line of vision, and Clara Bell and Melinda "a singin' de
ole ship of Zion," "ole Marster an' Missis an' Miss Alice would run
outen de great house jes to see if Ned had fotched us all back safe an'
sound. An' den when Christmas would come, de ole turkey gobbler would be
turnin' an' twistin' roun' and roun' fore de fire drappin' gravy in de
dish, and de barbeku would be brownin' and de lasses a stewin out de
taters in great big ubbens, fo de flambergasted cookin' stobes cum about
to pester folkes. And den dere would be ole Cæsar a shufflin' towards
ole Marser's room, and little Jeff a sneakin' on tip-toe to ketch ole
Marser's Christmas gift fore he seed em, an' Mary an' Polly creepin'
like cats in Miss Alice's chamber, to get their stockins that Santy
Claus had stuffed from top to toe; and den de clatter in de great dinin'
room, when wid bowls of cream, and flagons of mellow ole rye, Clarissa
and Melindv would be makin' egg-nog fur de fokeses, white and cullud, on
de plantation."

Oh! this golden prime!

There were no black soldiers in greasy uniforms a hep, hep, hepping
about the plantation; no firing of guns by riotous negroes on the
roadside; no drunken, revelling wretches to slash and deface portraits,
walls and corridors; no lecherous villains to accost and abuse
defenceless and inoffensive women; no vigils to keep for fear of
murders, burglaries and conflagrations; no angry forces and energies to
quicken and compound; no wife to say to her husband, "Have you fotched
any wittles back from the conwenshun? 'Fore God de chillun haint had
narry moufful o' nuffin to eat dis blessed day, nor me nuther."

Ah, no! the blessing that was vouchsafed unto Israel, despite its
rebellion, was all bountiful in this land. "I will give thee peace in
the land, and ye shall lie down, and there shall be none to make thee
afraid."

Then war came with its unutterable horrors and tumults. The old tallow
candles were snuffed out, and there were fears and alarms in the mansion
and the cabin; the thoroughbred was brought out of the stable with
yellow housings on, like the gelding of a knight errant, and the young
soldier, dressed all in gray with buff revers, rushed out of the house
and vaulted into the saddle. There were kisses and good byes--lost
echoes now--as the cavalier, young and happy and handsome, rode away.
Yes, rode away in the descending shadows, over the hills, through the
glades, to Manassas and to death. Yes, rode away to the death
wrestle--to where the guns were spitting fire.

"Bress yo souls, fokeses," said Uncle Ned one day, as he leaned upon his
staff like a sheik of the desert, "I looks back now und den, und peers
lak I kin see ole missis way back yander in de war times, when de kannon
was a plowin' froo de trees ober at Manassy, same as a sho nuff
harrykin, und killin' a million of our federick soldiers at wun time. I
seed her und Miss Alice cum outen de grate house, a fairly toting Mars
Harry dat rainy day he rid off to de war, und Mars Harry he looked same
as a gineral in all dem stripes und fedders, und Nelly she wuz jest a
chompin' de bit und er pawin' de yurth lak she wuz moes afeerd de war
want er gwine to hole out twell she und Mars Harry got dar; und den ole
missis looked up in Mars Harry's face, und I seed her laf, do she wuz
crying tu, und den I heerd hur say, 'My brave boy, how kin I ever giv yu
up! Will yer git er furlow und cum home arter de battle? Und den Mars
Harry he larfed too, und den I heerd him say, 'Oh mother don't be
childish, I'm jest er gwine off fer my helth. I'm gwine to bring yer a
yankee sord when we whups em and drives um tuther side o' de Pokomuc
river.' Und den ole missis she put her pendence in every word Mars Harry
tole her, kase when he rid off I heerd her tell Miss Alice dat her boy
want agwine to be gone long, and dat de yankeys was agwine to give up
fore dey fit ary battle; but bimeby, when ole missus seed dat Mars Harry
mout not git a furlow, she jest gin herself up to die. All de day long
pore old missis would walk up und down de piazzy a peekin' froo de trees
und axin' me ef I spishioned he was gwine to git kilt, und den when she
heerd dat our fokeses had fit de battle of Manassy, me und ole missis
sot up all night long, jes a watchin' fer Mars Harry to ride back lak he
rid off; but no Mars Harry neber didn't come back twell one rainy,
grizzly night me und ole missis heerd a clatter down de road, und den we
heerd somebody say, 'Wo! und den a passel ov soldiers cum up to missis
easy like, and axed her if Mr. Seymo' lived dere; und when ole missis
heerd dat word und seed de kivered wagin, she jes drapped down into de
road dead. Pore ole missis! De soldiers took her up in dere arms und
toted her into de 'grate house,' und dere was her and pore Miss Alice
in hysteriks, and ole marser not a sayin' ary wurd but a chokin 'mos to
def; und den de soldiers went back to de kivered wagin', and I heered
'em a draggin' outen it a great big box, and I seed dem totin it to de
'grate house' jes as easy and slow, wid dere milinterry hats offen dere
heds in de rain, und den I node it was Mars Harry. When ole missis cum
to, she made de soldiers take de led offen de coffin, und dere was Mars
Harry a lyin' dere wid his eyes shot right tight, a smilin de
butifullest all to hissef. Ole missis sot dere all dat nite lak a grate
big statu, a runnin her fingers fru his hair an' a talkin' to him jes de
same as if Mars Harry had rid back frum de war lak he rid off. An' den
ole marsa he cum in und looked at Mars Harry a smilin' to hissef, an' I
could see ole marsa shake an' shake, but he didn't say narry a wurd, an'
he tuck Mars Harry's sord out of de coffin; den bimeby I heerd him say
he was agwine to venge his death. Ole missis soon pined erway, cause
Mars Harry was her eyeballs. I tells ye fokeses, dat was de most
solemcholly site I ever seed in my born days. Poor ole missis didn't
stay long arter Mars Harry died; she dun gon home too, an' I specks Mars
Harry dun tole ole missis all erbout de battle of Manassy, an' how he
fit an' how he got kilt; und erbout dat yankey sord he nebber didn't
fotch back."

To a paternal ancestor of Colonel John Walter Seymour has been ascribed
this prayer in battle, "Oh Lord, thou knowest how busy I must be this
day. If I forget Thee, do not Thou forget me." Then rising, he gave the
command, "Forward, march! On, my lads!"

At eight o'clock on the morning of the 23rd of October, King Charles was
riding along the ridge of Edgehill, and looking down into the valley of
the Red Horse, a beautiful meadow, broken here and there by hedges and
copses, he could see with his glasses the parliamentary army as they
marched out of the town of Kleinton and aligned their forces in battle
array.

"I never saw the rebels in a body before," said the king. "I will give
them battle here." There were hot words around the royal standard.
Rupert, a dashing young general, who had seen the swift, fiery charges
of the fierce troopers in the thirty years war, was backed up by Patrick
Lord Ruthven and Sir Walter Seymour, among the many Scots who had won
renown under the great Augustus Adolphus and opposed fiercely by Lord
Lindsey, an old comrade of the Earl of Essex, commander-in-chief of the
rebel forces, who swore by all the saints in the calendar that he would
not serve again in an army under a boy, referring to Prince Rupert, who
was assigned by the king to command the army at Edge Hill that day.

It was to this circumstance that the country was indebted for the prayer
aforesaid. The brave soldier, unyielding in his loyalty to the king,
resigned his command as a general to command his company, and in so
doing gave affront to Lord Lindsay and the king; but subsequently, at
Scone, the king said to him, "You shall accompany me to London as a
privy counsellor."

It was from this doughty ancestor of blessed memory that John Walter
Seymour lineally descended. I have seen the old corselets, shackbolts,
shields and trefoils of that chivalric era that belonged to the old
baronet. Colonel Seymour had interested himself greatly in the
literature of that institutional era that had so close a connection with
the pomp and power of the Feudal system. He spoke learnedly too of the
ideal purity of the social and moral code of the age.

The Colonel himself was no ignoble scion of so noble an ancestor. He
had won his spurs and stars at Malvern Hill, and at the disbanding of
the army he had covered the faded stars upon his collar with his pocket
handkerchief until unobserved he could pluck them one by one and trample
them underfoot. His haughty spirit could not brook the shame that
overlaid him like a shroud when his sword passed out of his hands hilt
foremost at Appomattox. He had taken the beautiful Alice Glendower from
a neighboring estate as his wife twenty-six years ago, and now in the
year 186-, though a shadow darkening and deepening lay athwart heart and
home, the old man was still muttering curses long, loud and deep. He had
fully assimilated the indignant spirit of Coriolanus. "I would they were
barbarians (as they are though in Rome littered), not Romans as they are
not though calved in the porch of the capitol." His only surviving child
Alice was now in her twenty-third year. Harry, a princely fellow, a
young lieutenant of cavalry, had fallen at the battle of Manassas and
ever since that day the mother had steadily declined until now the end
had almost come. The likeness of the dead boy was photographed vividly
upon her heart and every tender chord was ceaselessly vibrating from the
presence of a grief, that recreated fancies and memories that brought
back to her the vanished idol. God's peace had settled upon the old home
and its hearth stones, one beautiful Sabbath morning, as the Colonel,
his daughter and old Clarissa had assembled in Mrs. Seymours's bed
chamber. The light of the morning sun shimmered through open windows,
and the shadows of the tree boughs like imprisoned fairies danced in
cotilion upon the polished floor. "The birds are singing so sweetly
to-day," observed the sick lady.

"Yes indeed, they are," replied her husband.

"My dear," she said as she turned her face to him, "I have been greatly
troubled by a horrid dream."

"Land sakes alive ole missis," interrupted Clarissa, "don't yu pester
yoursef to def erbout dreams these outlandish times. Dey is bad enuff
goodness nose widout dreaming dreams. Ned he jumped clean outen de bed
tother nite hollering for his ole muskit lak he was agwine to war--his
eyes fairly a sot in his head lak a craw-fish and a tarryfying me to def
and hollering 'fire! fire!' and a foaming at the mouf lak a mad dog, und
duz yu know what I dun ole missis? when dat drotted nigger hollered
fire! fire! I jes retched ober de table an' got de pale of water an' I
put out dat fire fore Ned skovered whay hit war. Dat fool nigger walks
perpendikler, now yu heers my racket." She laughed again and again as
she continued: "And Ned he wanted to fight; he was most drounded."

There was little of sentiment and less of diplomacy in the character of
Colonel Seymour; though he was exceedingly tolerant toward Clarissa with
her little vagaries and superstitions. What the dream of the good lady
was has never been known--the narrative was rudely broken off by the
interruption of Clarissa.

Would you know sweet Alice more intimately? I cannot portray her as she
deserves; her heart was like so many little cells into which were
unceasingly dropping the honey of blue thistle blossoms of charity. In
every den of wretchedness; in every hovel where squalor and disease
disputed all other dominions, she was a beam of sunshine, giving warmth
and cheer and joy. The little star-eyed daisies in the meadow would turn
up their tiny faces to greet her with smiles as she would pass them day
after day with the little basket upon her arm; God had put her here
among these poor people--among the deluded negroes as his missionary,
and I am quite sure He was pleased with her work. I cannot describe her
beauty and grace of person better than in the natural and characteristic
language of Clarissa "Miss Alice," she would say, "Yu is the most
butifullest white gal I ever seed in de wurrel; yer cheek is jes lak
mellow wine-sop apples, und yer eyes is blu und bright lak agate
marbles, und yer teeth as white as de dribben snow, und when yer laffs,
pen pon it, even de birds in de trees stops to lisen; und yu is jes as
suple und spry as de clown in de show."

Golden tresses like a nimbus of glory adorned her queenly head. Eyes of
blue graduated to the softest tint; cheeks that transfered the deep
blush from tender spring blossoms. Something in her there was that set
you to thinking of those "strange back-grounds of Raphael--that hectic
and deep brief twilight in which Southern suns fall asleep." With Alice
in her presence, Clarissa felt no evil; when the storm came with
blinding fire, its fierce thunders, her refuge was by her side. She was
her inspiration, her providence. The gentle hand upon the hot brow and
there came relief; an old fashioned lullaby from her sweet lips and the
fevered pickaninny in the cradle would turn upon his side and fall into
a grateful slumber. A prayer spoken out of a heart touched by pity or
sorrow, and instantly another heart would be uplifted in thanksgiving.
She exercised too a power over the freed slaves that made captive to her
will almost all the stubborn and rebellious negroes. Old Ned would have
plucked out his eyes for her and cast them at her feet; so would
Clarissa, so would Clarabel; so would old Caesar and Hannah and Joshua.
Only these rebelled against her influence, to wit: Aleck, Miles and
Ephraim. Clarissa would say to her young mistress so inquisitively,
"Miss Alice, why don't yu git married? Peers like child yer is too
sweet and pretty to live allus by yer lone, lorn self. Yer aint allers
gwine to be 'ticin an butiful like yer is now. By and by de crow's foot
is agwine to cum into yer lubly face and dere is gwine to be kurlikus
and frowns in yo eyes jes lak yo mammy's; she used to be pretty und
lubly jes' lak you, and whar is she now? De boys aint gwine to brak
their necks over you when yer gets ole an' ugly, nuther. Now dey is lak
a passel ov yallow jackets a swarmin' a-roun my house, and axin me dis
ting an' tuther ting about dare sweetheart, and bress yo dear life I has
to keep a patchin' up de fence whar dey climbs ober to keep de horgs an'
cattle beastes out o de crap. Dey is afraid to cum to de 'grate house;'
skeert of yu an' ole marser. Ole Mars John aint gwine to be here allus,
nuther; see how cranksided he is gettin' an' so ill an' contrawy that
we das'nt projec' wid him no mo; an' whar wud yu be chile in dis grate,
big house und dis grate big plantashun wid de cussed niggers a marchin'
an' a beatin' drums an' a shootin' guns lak ole Sherman's army, treadin'
down de corn an' 'taters und a momickin' up de chickins und de sheepses
und de cattle beastes? 'Taint agwine to do nohow. Dat it aint. I kin
count fourteen portly yung 'uns dat wud jump clean akross de crick fer
yer any hour God sends."

Alice could only silently hearken to the force of such plain,
matter-of-fact reasoning, but poor girl, there was not a single niche in
her heart into which she could lift an idol. Within the shrine there
were nothing but soulless effigies, so faded and old and lifeless that
they recalled only battle-fields and sepulchres. "Will her prince never
come, into whose eyes she can see mirrored her own self, her soul in its
beauty, love and happiness?" Do you ask? There is a medallion that hangs
by a golden chain across her fair bosom. "How long had she worn it
there," think you? Ever since

"She was a child and he was a child,
In his kingdom by the sea;
When she loved with a love that was more than love,
Alice and Arthur McRae."

CHAPTER II.

OUR SCOTCH-IRISH.

A person on entering the library in an old-fashioned mansion, situated
in the heart of a country that was very beautiful in the landscaping of
nature, at eleven a. m. of the 12th of November, would have observed a
venerable gentleman reclining upon an antique sofa, plainly upholstered
in morocco. The gentleman was reading from a book entitled, "The Life
and Speeches of Daniel Webster." The stranger might have further
observed, that the right hand of the old gentleman would now and again
move with some energy of expression, as if he were punctuating a
particular paragraph by an emphatic dissent. If the reader had been
asked for an opinion as to the character and ability of the illustrious
commoner, whose views were so logically expressed in the memoir, he
would have said without hesitation, that "He possessed the acumen of the
wisest of statesmen, but that his opinions as a strict constructionist
were extra hazardous, indeed out of harmony with the true theory of a
republican form of government--a government of co-ordinate states that
had entered voluntarily into a compact for a more perfect union. But (he
may have continued) against the doctrine of nullification, indeed
against the ordinances of secession, the irony of fate, through this
great man, projected an argument whose logic was irrefutable in its last
analysis. Foreshadowed events put into the mouth of Mr. Webster a
menace, whose uninterpretable meaning in 1833 was clearly understood
when the baleful power of the storm swept from the high seas the last
privateer with its letter of marque, disbanded the last armed scout
south of the breakwater of the Delaware, and broke the heart of the
greatest warrior since Charlemagne; a chieftain more honored in defeat
than Hannibal, or Napoleon, or Sobieski, or the great Frederick. This
master craftsman in the construction corps of the Republic; whose
resourceful intellect engrafted a principle as fixed and inviolable into
the Constitution as fate, propelled against the equity of 'peaceful
separation' the weight of an overmastering influence. This menace to the
South marked the tumultuous heart-beats of the commercial North, when it
contemplated the separation of indestructible states. It made of the
Republic a huge camp of instruction, into which the nations of the earth
were perpetually dumping their refuse populations; it girdled the South
with a cincture of embattled mercenaries; it imparted to the
Constitution a disciplinary vigor; it gave to partisan legislation an
inspiration; it gave to centralized power an omnipotent reserve that
unnerved every arm, paralyzed every tongue, and rendered organized
effort abortive in the crucial struggle for Southern independence. But,
sir, (and the eyes of the old man would gleam as with the light of an
overpowering genius), a government created by the States, amendable by
the States, preserved by the States, may be annihilated by the States."

It was one of those leaky, bleak November days, when the weather, out of
temper with itself, is continually making wry faces at the rain and the
forest and the cattle, that a gentleman lately arrived from the auld
town of Edinboro, shook the glistening rain-drops from his shaggy talma
in the great hall of Ingleside, as he observed to the host with a smile,
"Thot it was a wee bit scrowie, but the weether wad be fayre in its ain
gude time." It was indeed one of those leaden days that occasionally
comes in the Southland with the November chills, pinching the herds that
are out upon the glades and meadows, when the winds sang in the tree
boughs with a strange and melancholy rhythm. A sailor passing up the
forward ladder from the forecastle to observe the weather would say,
with a shudder, that it was a "greasy day," and that the sky and shrouds
and storm-sails were leaky. Col. Seymour, upon ordinary occasions, was a
gentleman of discrimination, and his judgment of character was fairly
correct. Like the true Scotch Southron, as he was, he had his own
ideals, his own loves and his own idiosyncrasies. He loved Scotland and
her people, her memories, her history, her renown, her trossachs, her
lakes, her mountains; they were his people, and Scotland was the "ain
love of his fayther and mither." He had not forgotten the language of
her beautiful hills and vales, though he was a boy when, with his
parents, he bade adieu to his bonny country to find a home across the
water in the Old North State, so prodigal and impartial in the
distribution of honors and riches to all who came with clean hands and
stout hearts. So when the neat and genteel Scotchman gave his name as
Hugh McAden, the old man's heart impulsively warmed towards his guest,
for he knew of a verity that a McAden everywhere was a man of honor--the
name, an open sesame to the hearts and homes of Scotch Americans.

"I will make you very comfortable to-day, sir," he observed, as he
escorted Mr. McAden to his library. There were great hickory logs, half
consumed, resting upon the antiquated brass andirons in the fire-place,
giving warmth and cheer to the whole room. The stranger, rubbing his
hands vigorously, for they were very cold and stiff, observed
interrogatively, "You do not let the chill ond weet coom into the
hoose?"

"No indeed," replied the Colonel with a broad smile, "these inflictions
are for other folks, whose liberty is upon the highways and in the
forests in such weather."

"Ah, for ither fauk; maybe the naygurs," laughingly suggested the
Scotchman.

"Yes, you can hear the guns in the woods, where they are hunting cattle
not their own. You can see drunken squads marching upon the roads upon
such a day."

"Ah!" he exclaimed, "ond do ye call this free America? May-be ye hae no
goovernment as ye haed lang syne, ond no law ither."

The Colonel assured the gentleman that public affairs were at sixes and
sevens, and the negroes now held the mastery over their former owners,
and their discipline was not over indulgent.

"Ond do the naygurs make the laws for sic as you?" he enquired in a
startled way.

"Oh yes," replied the Colonel, quite seriously.

"Alack-a-day!" exclaimed the astonished man. "The deil take sic a
goovernment, ond the deil tak sic a coontry, ond the deil tak the
naygurs! Coom to Edinboro, mon, where there is not o'ermuch siller, but
where ivery mon is his ain laird, ond his hoose is his ain hame. Ye ken
fine that I am a stranger hereaboot. Ond will the naygurs harm a poor
mishanalled mon like me?" he enquired in alarm. The Colonel, with an
effort to conceal his mirth, reassured his friend that no harm would
come to him.

"Ond wad ye say," the Scotchman interrupted, "that amang the naygurs
ond sic a government, that a puir body wad hae the protection o' his ain
queen?" he again asked, with his fears still unsubdued. The amiable
host, shaking from an effort at self-control, again remarked that the
carpet-bag government had made no attempt at personal violence upon
strangers, and that he was as safe here as in his own city of Edinboro;
and the Scotchman laughed away his fears.

"Sic an auld fule!" he exclaimed in great glee. "I am hardly masel in
these lowlands," the Scotchman continued, as the conversation changed
into more agreeable channels. "Ye hae na moontains ond bonnie hills
hereaboot," he continued, as he looked from the window upon the
low-lying fields and meadows.

"But, my friend," replied the Colonel, "if you will abide with me for
awhile you will quite forget your mountains, for there is a charm and
freshness in the landscape here when you become familiar with it."

"I am sure of thot," quickly answered the guest; "but ye ken fine that a
puir body must abide in his ain hame. What wad a man do in th' Soothland
wi' his beezeness in Edinboro?" And the Scotchman smiled as he asked the
unanswerable question. "Ah, well," the Colonel replied with an assumed
dignity, "you would do as we do."

"Ond what is thot?" asked the Scotchman.

"Swear and vapor from early morn to dewy eve."

"Ah! thot wad na do, thot wad na do," he replied, horrified at such a
suggestion, "The meenister in holy kirk wad discipline a puir body, ond
the deil wad be to play. I guess I'll gang hame agen ond do as ilka fauk
do in th' auld toon."

The Colonel had not been so happy in many a day as with the plain,
matter-of-fact Scotchman, in a sense, a type and representative of his
own people, and a man who could speak so eloquently of the fadeless
glory of old Scotland.

"Hae ye nae gude wife ond bairns?" he enquired.

"Yes, an invalid wife and an only child, sir," said the Colonel, as
tears began to gather in his eyes. "My only son, sir, was slain in
battle some years ago."

"Ond was it for sic a goovernment as ye hae noo, that ye gaed up your
bonnie lad to dee?" he asked quite innocently.

The old man bowed his head in silent grief. He could not answer, and he
walked across the room and looked out upon the murky sky--a funereal
coverlid, it appeared, laid over the grave of poor Harry.

"Puir lad," uttered Mr. McAden, half aside, as he drew his handkerchief
across his face and gazed abstractedly into the blazing fire. It was
quite an interval before the Colonel was able to subdue this paroxysm of
grief that had quite overcome him, and, availing himself of the earliest
opportunity to excuse himself, withdrew from the room. To Mr. McAden the
moment was fraught with sincere sorrow. He had unwittingly opened the
sluice-way at the veteran's heart, and great tides, crimsoned, as it
seemed, with the blood of poor Harry, were pouring into it. He could
find no surcease only in the oft-repeated exclamation of reproach.

"Sic an auld fule! Sic an auld fule! But I thocht the mon was o'er happy
in the love of his gude wife ond the bairn. Haed I thocht thot the lad
had deed in battle, I wad na gaed him sic a sair thrust in his auld
heart."

The Colonel retired to his own chamber to repair the injury that had
been done to his feelings, and presently he returned with a smiling
face, accompanied by his daughter, and he said, introducing her.

"This sir, is my daughter, Alice."

"Ah!" exclaimed Mr. McAden, rising with extended hand, "The lassie is
like the sire, Coonel. I can see the fayther in her een."

"And the counterpart of her mither in all except the een," replied her
father.

"You ond the gude wife ond the lassie must coom to Edinboro, Coonel; ye
ken fine thot her rooyal men ond weemen are i' th' groond noo, ond there
are memorials here ond there in the auld kirk-yards where their puir
bodies are laid, but our men ond weemen still are vera fayre ond gentle,
ond we niver put our een upon a naygur. Ond, now thot I can abide nae
langer wi' ye, will ye nae tell me a wee bit o' the history o' our ain
fauk in the Soothland, for ye ken fine thot the auld anes wad be askin
aboot this ane ond thot ane, in fine all aboot the Scotch in your ain
coontry, when I gae hame to Edinboro."

The subject referred to by the Scotchman was full of a picturesque
interest, and no man in the Southland took a higher delight in imparting
such information as he could command, than Colonel Seymour. Turning his
old arm-chair so that he could observe his guest more closely, he began:

"The characteristics of these people are ineffaceably impressed upon our
civilization. Indeed they are as deeply grounded into the religious and
social soil of North Carolina, as though they had taken root like the
rhododendron under the rocks and in the fissures of our hills and
mountains. The Scotch-Irish American, with gigantic strides, has at last
sat himself down upon the loftiest pinnacle of our 19th century
civilization. He has never yielded to oppression; he has never
compounded with evil. These brave people, bringing hither the virtues of
their fathers as well as their own, have given North Carolina its most
luminous page. They made the earliest industry of the Cape Fear--the
industry of colonization. It was an industry that sought to provide
homes for the people, and to dignify labor and life in the midst of
surroundings that taxed every resource of action, and the ultimate verge
of human daring; an industry that employed the plainest instruments--the
axe to hew down the forest, and the plow to turn the furrow. Their
primitive sires in these early settlements did not control those
powerful auxiliaries that now multiply the skill of man; nor did they
enjoy the aristocracy of the recognized power of wealth. They cared
nothing for mammonism, that some philosophical crank has defined to be a
physical force that makes men invertebrates. Here was life with the
struggle of pioneers; a struggle for place rather than for position; for
homes rather than castles, that prepared the intellect for a higher
development, and man for ultimate power. The victory of the axe and plow
were the pre-ordained antecedents to the victory of the forum and
pulpit, and the triumph over the crude obstructions of nature was the
divine prophecy of undisciplined toil. Out of the ruggedness of such an
epoch came forth a condition of virtue and integrity; of honest and
honorable convictions; of sincere patriotism; of a race of men who
looked to themselves only, and originated within this scant domain the
literature of economic life. It was here that the domestic sentiment
displayed its captivating charm. Nowhere on earth was there a more
generous love for children, and whenever this attribute of the heart
appears, the prophetic benediction of Christ, as childhood lay in His
hallowed arms, is fulfilled. Here was social life, too, in its freedom,
picturesqueness and animation, without demoralizing conditions. Away
northward and southward, bays and rivers stretched their wedded waves,
hills holding in their dead grasp the secrets of centuries; the ancient
miracles of fire and water where chaos had been transfixed in its
primeval heavings; all these were here subject to the mighty mastery
that men should eventually exert, and side by side with humble homes,
arose schools and churches--emblems of the power and purity of the
people. Here the ambassadors of Christ were persuasive with tongue,
fervent in spirit; they felt that their religion was more ancient than
government, higher than any influence; more sacred than any trust; a
religion that was benevolence in its gentlest mood, courage in its
boldest daring, affection in its intensest power; philanthropy in its
widest reach; patriotism in its most impassioned vigor; reason in its
broadest display; the mighty heart that throbbed through every artery;
fed every muscle; sped the hidden springs of an electric current through
every nerve. Such were and are "oor ain fauk in th' Soothland."

"Ah, I ken fine," replied the Scotchman with enthusiasm, "that your
forebears came from the hielands, and yoor knowledge of the gude fauk in
yoor ain coontry quite surprises me. Did ye not say that yoor fayther
ond mither came from Edinboro?" he inquired with animation.

"Yes," replied the Colonel, "in the good old days; and they lie buried
side by side in the little cemetery over the hill yonder, where I shall
rest after a wee bit."

"These are bonnie lands hereaboot, but there is mony a glade in auld
Scotland where a puir body may sleep as tranquilly," said the Scotchman
with feeling, "ond when I dee my sepulchre shall be near the auld hame
where there are no naygurs ond no sic a goovernment, in th' shadow o'
th' auld kirk o' my fayther ond mither."

CHAPTER III.

THE ASSASSINS OF THE PEACE OF THE SOUTH.

To the people of the South the infliction of the carpet-bag government
was an outrage that "smelled to heaven." The changed character--the
degradation of the South was a deplorable consequence--it was the
inoculating of a virus into the circulation of the body politic that it
will take a century to cleanse.

The power of attainting and confiscating, forbidden by the law from a
full knowledge of its lamentable use by the factious parliaments of
Great Britain, was shamelessly exercised by local jurisdictions of the
South until nothing was left to the most virtuous of patriots but their
name, their character, and the fragrance of their great and illustrious
actions, to go down to posterity. A stranger coming to any legislature
would have taken it at one time for a disorderly club-room, where
ignorant and vicious partisans, white and black, were assembled to lay
plans for their own aggrandizement and the prostration of the country.
At another time he would suppose it to be a hustings for the delivery of
electioneering harangues; at another, an areopagus for the condemnation
of all virtuous men; then a theatre, for the entertainment of a most
diverted auditory; always a laboratory for the compounding of alarms,
conspiracies and panics. In the deliberations of the members there was
no check to the license of debate, or the prodigal expenditure of money;
no voice to control their judgments of outlawry and sequestration.
Radamanthus himself, in some stage of his infernal process, would at
least listen to his victim; "First he punisheth, then he listeneth, and
lastly he compelleth to confess." The inventors of mythology could not
conceive of a Tartarus so regardless of the forms of justice as not to
allow the souls of the condemned to speak for themselves; but
reconstruction, trampling upon all laws, denied to the long-suffering
people of the South the right to plead their innocence in the face of
the concentrated accumulation of frightful accusations, all founded upon
the "baseless fabric of a vision."

Centuries ago the last saurian died in the ooze of the bad lands in
Kansas, but by an unnatural law of reproduction the carpet bagger and
scalawag, with the same destructive instincts, with the same malodorous
presence, found its bed of slime in the heart of the South and disported
with a devilish energy. Monsters of malice, spawning evil gendering
fanaticism, focussed their evil eye upon the millions of freedmen, whose
destiny and happiness were closely interwoven with their old masters;
with masters who had yielded their swords but not their honor; who were
"discouraged, yet erect; perplexed, yet not unto despair; pursued, yet
not forsaken; smitten down, yet not conquered." The poor negro, under
the seductive charms of these human serpents, languished, and
languishing, did die.

The carpet-baggers preached to the negroes an anti-slavery God, from the
gospel of hate, of revenge. Slavery was the tempest of their poor souls,
and revenge must assuage the swollen floods. "The thronged cities--the
marks of Southern prosperity and the monuments of Southern
civilization," said they, "are yours, yours to enjoy, to alienate, to
transmit to posterity. Your empire is established indestructibly
throughout the new South. This land shall not be permitted to remain as
a lair for the wild beasts that have clutched at the throat of this
republic to destroy it. We have heard the cries of our Israel in
bondage, and we have come to give you the land that flows with milk and
honey." Poor black souls! What a delusion! The day will surely come when
the curtain shall be drawn and the deceivers, active and dormant, in
this dark tragedy, shall be dragged before the footlights to receive the
curse of an indignant reprobation. Poor negro! He is starving for bread
and they give him the elective franchise. He begs to be emancipated from
hunger, and they decree that he shall be a freedman.

Who will dare assert that the pride, the patriotism, the spirit of the
South was not alarmingly compromised by the issues of the Civil War?--a
war that was the exercise of both violence and discipline by sovereign
authority. We are told that wars are an evil, come when they may; they
are just or unjust, moral or immoral, civilized or savage, as the
ingredients of violated rights--demand of reparation and refusal--shall
be observed, neglected or abused. Perhaps the prostrated South should
have been advertent to this fact before she delivered the first blow.
But whether right or wrong, when the armies were disbanded, when it
yielded its organic being--its sovereignty--to overwhelming resources
and numbers, the law of nations laid upon the paramount sovereignty
obligations which have never been performed, either in letter or spirit.
The government that re-instated its authority was bound by a circle of
morals, including the obligations of justice and mercy, reciprocally
acting and reacting.

The emancipation of five million slaves was a supplemental act of war; a
renewed declaration that the tramp of embattled armies should echo and
re-echo from the Potomac to the Rio Grande, until the foot of a slave
should not press its "polluted" soil. Their enfranchisement was neither
an act of war or of exasperation, but an act of diplomacy,
extra-hazardous as results have shown, with the effect of humiliating
the conquered South. It introduced throughout the South a sacrilegious
arm against the fairest superstructure of Christian manhood the world
has ever known; stamped the history of the nation with dishonor, and
betrayed the proudest experiment in favor of the rights of man. It
taught the freedmen, through the vicious counsel of intriguing,
designing demagogues, that their liberty was still insecure; that to
accomplish it in its ultimate triumph and blessing, the savage axe must
be laid at the root of the social institutions; that they must lay
violent hands upon the men, women and children who had made their
emancipation an accomplished fact. Hence a war whose horrors should be
accentuated by the lighted torch was inaugurated, and an inglorious
campaign of reprisals by placable tools, whose zeal to preserve what
they now purposed in their blind fanaticism to destroy, was a few years
before as ardent and persevering.

Poor, pitiable, deluded human beings, who as chattels real--impedimenta
of Southern plantations--had guarded the peace of the home, and many of
whom were faithful unto death!

Reconstruction superimposed an artificial citizenship--a citizenship
essentially lacking in every resource of intellectual strength--it was
without ideals or examples for the government of the freedmen of the
proud Southern commonwealths. The allegiance of the negroes was as
friable as a rope of sand; they were without a definite conception of
the responsibilities of sovereignty--without a fixed principle to guide
them in governmental policy--with impulses of brutish suggestion, and
under masters more inexorable, more exacting than those they had
deserted upon the abandoned plantations. How painful was such a crisis
that split up the old South into disgraced and bleeding fragments!

We come to speak for a moment of the microbes that ate their way into
the hearts of the seceded commonwealths, while the ruins of southern
homes were still smoking; and before the blood of chivalrous southrons
had dried upon our battle-fields. I commend the chalice to the lips of
those who will deny the truth of what is herein written and desire that
such a man might realize a bare modicum of what was suffered and
endured. The elective franchise was the panacea for every evil; an
antispasmodic, when there were occasional exacerbations in the public
mind; our fathers valued the elective franchise because in its patriotic
expression was the covenant of freemen.

When our hopes were feeblest, and our horizon darkest, the scalawag fled
like a hound to the sheltering woods whence he sallied forth like an
outlaw. The reddened disc of the sun that went down at Appomattox gave
him an inspiration for his hellish work, and he went out in the gloom of
the starless night, declaring with a more vicious temper than did Henry
of Agincourt "the fewer the men the greater the honor" or in its
appropriate paraphrase "the deeper the pockets the greater the spoil."
His philanthropy and selfish interests never clash. He claimed always to
be rigidly righteous, and was seen in the camp-meeting and the church
sanctified and demure to a proverb. He spoke of the poor negro in
paroxysms of charity--a most rare benevolence which employed its means
in theft and crime; a charity which performs its vows and gives its alms
with money plundered from the freedmen. The scalawag like other
unclassified vermin was without respectable antecedents; with an acute
sense of smell like the "lap-heavy" scout of the Andes, he sought his
prey when there was no fear of the approach of man. As an Irish
barrister once wrote upon the door of a plebians' carriage, "Why do you
laugh?" so the humorist of the sixties could have written upon the
shirt-front of the scalawag "Why do people hold their noses?" He was
never mentioned by naturalists, unless under some other name he was
paired off with the vulture. In reconstruction days the transformation
of this abortion of nature from vulture to serpent was made without the
break of a feather or the splitting of a talon. With a seductive grimace
he whispered into the open ear of the freedmen "In the day that thou
eatest thereof thou shalt not surely die." He was as much an augury of
evil as the brood of ravens that once alighted upon Vespasian's pillar.
Had he been seen plying his vocation in the first empire Napoleon would
have said to Fouche, "Shoot the accursed beast on the spot." The carpet
bagger when not fighting the pestiferous vermin in the Chickahominy
swamps was pilfering. He went into the army conscripted like a
gentleman; he came out of the army at night when the back of the sentry
was turned and without a furlough, like a patriot. These twain were the
autocrats of the new south, which had its christening in the blood of
heroes; they were the furies that rode the red harlot around the circle,
when her flanks were still wet with human slaughter, and her speed was
increased by the jeering negroes. When Sister Charity in an occasional
fit would fall unconsciously into the receptive bosom of her black lover
in the prayer-meeting, with the wild exclamation "Bress Gord I sees de
hosses und de charyut er cumin!" they would clap their hands in joy and
shout, "Persevere in the good cause my sister." When old deacon Johnson
upon some happy suggestion from the "sliding elder" would turn up the
white of one eye, they would turn up the whites of the others; and when
deacon Thompson came around for alms for the heathen, they would slip
under the pennies a brass-button and inwardly thank God they were not
like the poor publican or the hypocritical pharisee. Their first meeting
with the freedmen was flattering and agreeable; it was an expression of
frail vows of love, sweet but not permanent, which bore but the perfume
and dalliance of a moment; it was the fusing of units of power for the
purpose of spoil, and plunder. Sambo had prayed ardently for this
revelation, and it had come. The scalawag, carpet-bagger, and freedman
were parties of the first part, second part and third part in the
tripartite agreement, until the negro became the party of no part or the
worst part, and he began to mutter to himself in vulgar doggerel:

"Ort is er ort und figger is er figger,
All fur de white man und none fur de nigger."

When Sambo stole from the store to increase the joint stock-in-trade,
the plunder was checked off in the invoice and Sambo was checked off in
the penitentiary; if the firm went into liquidation it was because its
active and suffering partner went into jail. If the poor negro died with
assets the carpet-bagger "sot upon de state" like a carrion-crow upon a
putrid body. These human harpies were natural sons of the commune.

* * * * *

The dirty co-partners opened up business in the south, as soon as
Sherman's army had crossed the border, under the attractive firm name
and style of "The Devil broke loose in Dixie." The iron-hoof of war had
so cruelly scathed the bosom of the south that it was like an over-ripe
carbuncle; it required a little scarifying and savage hands might
squeeze and sponge at will.

Credit was prostrate; society was disorganized, treasuries empty; debt
like a huge fragment of ice slipping away from the glacier upon the
mountain, was gathering volume and momentum as it rolled on and on, and
the poor old tottering, reeling country was still struggling on like a
bewildered traveller, followed by wolves, and overshadowed by vultures.
Corruption and ignorance were the only passports to power. No modern
instance of wrong and oppression can approach this Fructidor of the
sixties in the South. Human ghouls not so black as these vomited out,
the Carbonari of Italy, the Free Companions of France and the Moss
Troopers of England.

This condition of things, we dare assert, is without a parallel in the
history of any people, in any civilization. Even when Rome was swayed by
the keenest lust for conquest and dominion, their legions conquered the
barbaric states, not to degrade or destroy, but to attach them to her
invincible arms. Savage vengeance never went so far as to place the
slave above the master by way of retribution. This was the exciting
cause that brought into fullest display the natural law of reprisals and
retaliations upon the part of the Southern people.

The first prominent cause of public disturbance of which the
carpet-baggers were the authors was a most thorough and secret
organization of the negroes in all the counties into Loyal Leagues; in
many instances armed and adopting all the formula of signs, pass-words
and grips of an oath bound secret organization. When the negro is asked
why he votes the Republican ticket his simple answer always is, "Why Lor
bress your soul Marsa, we swo to do dat in de League." That simple
answer by this new suffragist, this new automaton of the ballot, is a
full explanation of the political solidity of the negro vote: With such
an element to work upon, ignorant and degraded, the carpet-baggers,
fierce and rapacious, have found themselves in Mahomet's seventh heaven
in the South.

It is a subject of interest and maybe of admonition to the people North
and South, how political institutions, in an age of the highest
civilization and under the most explicit constitutional forms, may be
changed or abolished by a process of partisan policy, when inaugurated
in a spirit of hate, revenge or avarice. Pseudo-philanthropists may talk
never so eloquently about an "equality before the law" when equality is
not found in the great natural law of race ordained by the Creator. That
cannot be changed by statute which has been irrevocably fixed by the
fiat of the Almighty. The result of this mongrel combination of
carpet-bagger, scalawag and negro; this composition of vice and
ignorance and rapacity, was plainly seen everywhere. Robbery and public
plunder were rampant in the State capital. The expenses of government
were at once increased five hundred per cent. Verily the pregnant
suggestion of the carpet-bagger that the only way to bring down the
white people of the South to the level of the negro was to tax them
down, was carried out with a sweeping vengeance. These thieves and
robbers, who had fastened themselves like vampires upon the public
treasury, and unlike the leach, did not let go their hold when full,
were still gorging themselves by new methods of plunder. No such rate of
taxation upon the same basis of property valuation has ever occurred in
the history of the world. A tithe of this rate of taxation lost to the
crown of England her thirteen American colonies. All the county
auditors, county treasurers, trial justices in the courts of record
were utterly incompetent and utterly corrupt. The juries in the courts
of records were mostly negroes, summoned by negro sheriffs, and the
pardoning power in the hands of venal and truculent governors was
shamefully prostituted. The most unblushing villainies and crimes were
either officially condoned or remitted and forgiven.

The people were taxed by millions; millions were paid out, and no
vouchers were ever taken or found.

In the face of such universal misrule, speculation and tyranny, there
could be no greater misrepresentation of the truth than is contained in
the oft-reiterated accusation, that the white people of the South are
fierce, aggressive and defiant in their conduct towards those placed in
authority over them by the Federal or State law. Aggressive and defiant!
How vain and worse than useless would such conduct be against the
overwhelming power of the tyrants who oppose them. It is against all the
instincts of life, when despair has taken the place of hope.

Defiant? Does the poor unresisting hare, when trembling with frenzied
apprehension under the feet and wide open jaws of the hound exhibit much
defiance, or much hope of victory in a death struggle with its cruel and
merciless foe? It makes no resistance--no motion or attitude of battle
for life except that involuntary and spasmodic action produced by pain
and suffering.

[Illustration: "Ef yu wus to brake loose und drap, yu'd bust up ebery
scallyhorg in de Souf."]

CHAPTER IV.

TYPES AND SHADOWS.

The development of the negro, educationally, has been embarrassed by
natural causes that he has been unable to overcome. In a great variety
of instances he has failed to be actuated by an intellectual or
benevolent reason. In the evolution of the negro from a savage to a
slave, from a slave to a freedman, and from a freedman to a citizen,
only in exceptional instances has he been able to originate a theory or
experiment that has been profitable to himself or others. No high state
of civilization has ever originated from them. History teaches us that a
nation may pass through an ascending or descending career. It may, by
long-continued discipline, exhibit a general, mental advance; or it may
go through other demoralizing processes, until it descends to the very
bottom of animal existence.

Man is distributed throughout the earth in various conditions: in
temperate zones he presents the civilization of Europe and America; in
torrid zones the ignorance and nakedness of the African. It was out of
the stew-pan of the equator that the negro was fished--with all the
features and instincts of a barbarism, from which he is slowly
emerging--by cruel and irresponsible traders. The religious ideals of
the negro are vague and indeterminate. They are intensely superstitious,
and believe, as their ancestors before them, in sorcery and witchcraft.
Although their powers of origination are inefficient, they readily
imitate the manners, customs and idiosyncracies of their masters, and
frequently exhibit a superficial polish. They are emotional rather than
practical in their religion. They are not naturally revengeful or
vindictive, and they have shown a sentiment of gratitude that greatly
endeared them to their owners. When war was flagrant, and they felt that
it was waged for their emancipation--that the institution of slavery was
menaced by Federal arms, in unnumbered instances they held in sacred
trust millions of dollars worth of property and the lives of thousands
of defenseless human beings, who held over them, without challenge, the
rod of domestic government.

Under all exasperating causes up to and during the war, hundreds of
slaves remained loyal to the interests and authority of their masters.

Conditions, however, highly inflammatory, developed passions that made
them brutish, dishonest and cruel. Their emotional religion and their
prejudices acted concurrently. The carpet-bagger found these unlighted
fagots distributed everywhere throughout the South; he had only to
entice them by delusive promises; he had only to say to them, "Will you
be slaves, or freedmen?"--to put into their hands a new commission, and
into their hearts a new faith, differentiated from the old in order to
kindle the fires of hate and revenge.

The Freedman's Bureau in the South was the nineteenth century
Apocalypse--a revelation truly to the poor negroes, who had devoutly
longed for its coming. The event, they thought, would be distinguished
by their sudden enrichment; its huge commissariat would leak from every
pore with the oil of fatness; officials, patient and sympathetic, would
stand at its portals to distribute pensions and subsistence, and the
star-spangled banner waving from the masthead would bow its welcome to
all who came. Something for nothing was their great law of reciprocity.
Four million slaves fastened themselves like barnacles upon this odious
institution, an extremely partisan agency, deadly and inimical--hostile
to the peace of the South and the interests of her people. These slaves,
maddened by their misery, looked back upon the ruined plantations, and
laughed when they felt that the whirlwind of retribution had swept over
the land.

Aleck, a former slave of Colonel Seymour, but whose rebellion to the
slightest authority had latterly been shown by expressions cruel and
insulting, and who affected a social equality with the carpet-baggers,
halloed over the picket fence in the small hours of the night, to Johua,
who was now eighty years of age:

"Hay, dar, yu franksized woter! hez yu heerd de news, ur is yu pine
plank ceasded? Hay, dar, Joshaway! De bero man is dun und riv wid de
munny, und he lows dat he is ergwine ter penshun off de ole isshu
niggers fust."

"Aye, aye!" exclaimed Joshua, almost mechanically, as he aroused himself
with an effort, and rubbed the sleep out of his dimmed eyes, "Don't you
heer dat, Hanner?" he asked his old wife. "Ergwine to penshun off de ole
isshu niggers fust! Grate Jarryko! Who dat er woicin' dat hebbenly
pocklermashun outen dar in de shank o' de night? Haint dat yu, brudder
Wiggins?"

"Yaw," Aleck replied, "dis is me, sho. De bero man hez dun und sont me
to norate dis pocklermashun to you und Ned."

"Grate Jarryko!" exclaimed Joshua, again excitedly. "Hanner," he
continued, "ef yu ever seed a cricket hop spry 'pon de hath, jess watch
dis heer ole isshu jump inter his gyarments."

As the negro was groping about in the dark for his ragged clothes he
said half parenthetically, "Dat dare voice fetches to my membrunce de
scriptur agen, whay hit says "Fling yo bred into de warter und hit is
ergwine to cum out a ho cake." Yu is er shoutin', sliding-baccurd
mefodis Hanner und don't pin yo fafe to providence but to grace, und
grace is ergwine to keep you perpendikkler in Filadelfy meeting-house,
but hit haint ergwine to fetch no horg meat nur taters nudder, dis side
of de crick. Hit wur providence dat fotched dat bero man into de
souf-land wid de munny to de ole lams of de flock. Don't yu see?"

"I sez ole lams," snapped Hannah; "ef day wuz de onliest wuns gwine to
be penshunned off, yu'd be stark nekked as er buzzard, kase yu is dun un
backslewed wusser dan a scaly horg."

"Grate Jarryko!" ejaculated Joshua, "How's a mishunnary ergwine to back
slew, tell me dat? Kase you jined Filadelfy church, you haint got all de
liggion in de world. Dare's Zion und dare's Massedony und dare's de
baptizin crick und den dares fafe und providence. Don't you see Hannah?
I'm ergwine to ax yu enudder pint rite dare," continued Joshua. "Who dat
way back yander in the dissart, dat de good Lord fed wid ravens, when de
rashuns gin out? Pend upon it, dat woice out yander imitates de woice of
the proffit Heckerlijer, dat flung his leg outen jint, er tusselling wid
de harkangel."

"Twant Heckerlijer" answered Hannah sharply, as she threw a splinter of
lightwood upon the embers. "Yu's allus a mysterfying de scriptures when
yu's er spashiatin erbout dem proffets; yu haint never heerd no such a
passage as dat from de circus rider, nur de slidin elder nudder; ef dat
cum outer de scriptur, hits by und 'twixt de misshunaries, und day is
fell frum grace same as yu."

"Now yu's acting scornful agen de misshunarys" replied Joshua
contemptuously, "Ef you ever gits to hebben, let me pete dat ergin; I
sez, ef you ever gets to hebben yu's ergwine to hole a argyment wid de
possel Joner, und den yu's ergwine to be flung outen de gate."

"Whay did yu get dat possell frum?" asked Hannah with irritation.
"Whicherway is de sebben starrs Joshua?" She asked as she changed the
subject.

"Day is skew-west over yander," said Joshua as he went to the door to
look out into the night; "Und bress de Lord" he continued, "peers lak
day is a nussing de bero man und de munny er standin' disserway
purpundikkler, fo und aft?"

"Is yu ergwine to de town und hit pitch dark?" enquired Hannah. "How in
de name of Gord is yu gwine to get to de tuther eend of de crick, und yu
bline ez a sand mole flung outer de ground?"

"Now yu's er flingin' a damper on my ambishun ergin. How's I ergwine to
fetch de munny back epseps I gits to the tuther eend?" asked Joshua
crustily. "Duz yu speck me to slew frum wun eend to the tuther lak a
skeeter hork? Tell me dat."

"Lors a massy" he cried out in pain, as he danced around the room on one
foot, "fur de hebbins sake fling dat ole free-legged cheer outer dis
house into de mash. Grate Jarryko! de debble has sho got hisself tangled
up wid de harrydatterments of dis house. Yu mouter knowed dat pizened
cussed impelment was ergwine to cum in contack wid sum of my jints."

"Yu jess nuss dat ole hoof of yourn in boff hands lak dat," said Hannah
provokingly "twell I strikes a lite und den I'm ergwine to clap fur yu
to dance er misshunery reel."

"Don't tanterlize me no mo Hanner wid dem reels und me in all dis rack
und missury! Grate Jarryko! Dis heer ole happy sack haint ergwine to
hole all dat munny," observed Joshua, after a moment and still groaning
with pain.

"Den you mout take de bofat, und de blu chiss, und den dare's de wheel
borrer und de steer kyart. Fetch all yu kin Joshaway, fur me und yu is
ergwine to need hit every bit und grane. Dat ole beaver of yourn wid de
tip eend er flipperty-flopity disserway und datterway, same ez a kyte in
de gale is jamby gin out, und den dares de lan, und de grate house, und
de hosses und de kerrige, und de peanny forty, und de kalliker kote, und
de snuff, und--und--"

"Don't fling no mo unds--unds--at me," interrupted Joshua in disgust,
"epsep yu aims fur me to drap rite back into de bed, whay I wur wen de
proklermashun isshued."

Hannah made no answer to this effusion of temper, but going slyly to an
old chest in the corner, she took from it a bottle containing a gill or
more of ardent spirits and giving it to the old negro, said, "Anint dat
ole jint wid dis good truck, Joshaway, hit will swage de missury."

Joshua looked up with a countenance beaming like the full moon coming
out of a black cloud, and playfully said to his old wife, "Honey I kin
swage de missury mo better disser way;" drank it down and then
exclaimed, "Bress God, dat sarchin pain is dun und gon."

"Dont you forget honey," said Joshua again, patronizingly as he was
about stepping out of the door with his stick and haversack, "dat nex
Saddy, arter dis Saddy cummin, dem dare high steppers dats gwine to cum
home wid me dis arternoon is ergwine to raise a harry kane 'twixt dis
house und de federick sammyterry whay old Semo und dat secesh gubberner
is ergwine to preach de funeral of ole Ginurul Bellion, lately ceasded,
und when me und yu gits into de kerrige, great Jarryko! I'm ergwine to
hole dem rones disserway, und whern day gits 'twixt de flatform und ole
glory, I'm ergwine to histe 'em up on dare hine legs, jess so, see!"

Old Hannah clapped her hands with joy and laughed again and again
"Bress Gord" she exclaimed with excitement; "yu is same ez a yurling
colt yoself Joshaway, I'm ergwine to give yu a moufful of fodder and
shet yu up wid de steer, kase de way yu's a histing up yo rare legs und
er chompin' de bit, yu's ergwine to eat up de gyarden sass same as de
steer."

Joshua looked scornfully at his wife and observed with a fierce scowl,
"Day haint no passifyin' wun of dese backslewed mefodiss epseps yu's er
totin every bit of de strane yoself, fo I gits back wid de kerrige und
de hosses," he continued quite earnestly "Yu mout move all de harry
detaments outen de house, ready fur de grate house, und yu mont rent dis
house to ole Semo pervidin' he pays de rent, und you mout turn de munny
over to de darters of de sammytary siety."

"Ugh! Ugh! I heers yu; fetch dem nales und de snuff Joshaway!" Hannah
halloed as Joshua now in a good humor limped away in the darkness
singing merily;

"When I was ergrwine down de field,
De blacksnake bit me on de heel;
Und ez I riz to fire my best
I run ergin a yaller jacket's nest.

"Yaller jackets indeed" echoed Hannah as she proudly tossed her aged
head, "when Joshua fetches dem rones und kerrige, dare haint ergwine to
be no yaller jackets on me ur him udder."

The village was thronged with the black wards of the government, when
Joshua arrived wearied and hungry. Allured by expectations that had
been most wantonly excited, the negroes flocked into the town with
trunks, valises, travelling bags, some of them of the most primitive
description, within which to put their pensions. Flattering expressions
came from truly loyal hearts, when the agent of the freedman's bureau
ascended the court house steps to address the freedmen. His very
presence was like the sunlight over the darkened land, but alas; he was
the man who was to pass out to each and all of the misguided negroes the
cup of disappointment and bitterness, and they in their nakedness and
stupidity would drink its lees with the desperate resoluteness of
fanatics.

Joshua stood with his old skinny hands clasped upon his bosom, looking
up in an attitude of reverence.

"Grate Jarryko!" he said to himself; "Ef dis bellion hadn't upriz de ole
isshu nigger mouter been way back yander a totin' de grubbin hoe fur
Jeff Davis, de secesh, und de ole bull whup er natally cryin fur de po
niggers meat. Ef Hanner seed dis site, she'd jine de mishunary's, kase
she mouter node dat providence had sont dat bero man und hit is mo
better dan grace."

The old negro saw the diamonds glittering upon the enameled shirt bosom
of the agent and he said again in rapture.

"Day is same ez de starrs in de hellyments."

He saw a huge chain dangling from his neck, and he exclaimed.

"Grate Jarryko! ef de ole ship of Zion wur to git shipracked in Galilee,
yu mout grapple her wid dat dare chain und hit mout hole twell de
harrykin swaged."

The old negro was lost in wonder, and at last overpowered by fatigue,
and the press of the throng, he dropped out of line and fell asleep upon
an empty crate. How long he slept does not enter into the chronicle.
There were mischievous boys then as there are now, and whilst he slept
they collected from old bureau drawers one hundred dollars of brand new
confederate treasury notes of the issue of 1864, and placed them loosely
in his beaver and covered it over with his red pocket handkerchief. Upon
awaking, Joshua rubbed his eyes, and then his knees and his elbows;
looked around dazedly, and exclaimed.

"Consound my buttons, ef de bero man haint dun und penshuned off de
niggers, und gon; und dis heer nigger a drapped back to sleep, lak a
idgeot, wid nary cent of de penshun. Grate Jarryko! I knows what Hanner
is ergwine to say; she's ergwine to ax me erbout de hosses, und den
she's ergwine to aggravate me wid providence dis, und grace dat, und
mishunary heer, und meferdis dare. Ef yu'd pervided yoself wid sum of
dat grace down at Filadelfy meetin' house Joshaway, she's ergwine to
say, you mouter fotched de rones und de kerrige too. Grate Jarryko! hit
peers lak provedense hez dun und flung de fat in de fire arter all."

Taking up his old hat, the confederate money went scurrying here and
there; the old negro looked around him suspiciously, and exclaimed in an
excited way.

"Grate Jarryko! whicherway did all dis munny cum from? hit wur
provedense dat time und no mistake; now yu sees Hanner which wun of dem
meeting houses is got de under holt; Yu's dun und hilt to grace, und me
runs wid fafe, und whicherwun is got de munny? Tell me dat?"

Whilst Joshua was sleeping, Hannah was busy hammering and packing the
scant furniture for its removal to the great house, and at high noon
everything was out of doors. The squealing pig was fettered like a
convict, and old Boatswain, the coon dog, was tied and howling like a
catamount. Joshua placed the money into his haversack, with the nails
and snuff, looked up at the setting sun, and said to himself.

"I mout let Hanner pick out dem hosses, und de kerrige, kase she mout
not like de rones."

The old negro struck a bee-line for home with the further observation.

"Grate Jarryko! ef hit warnt fur Ganderbilt, I specks dis ole nigger
mout be de richest man on de top side of de yurth."

He paused for a moment and said.

"I dun und forgit; I'm mo'est sho Hanner is ergwine to ax fer sperrets
fur her griping missury."

And he stepped into the nearest groggery and purchased a pint or more
with the money an old friend had given him.

"Now den ole town, I bids yu farwell twell yu sees me und Hanner in de
kerrige."

As Joshua was going on toward home his mind became speculative. Great
schemes in a crude way were thought of, and he said to himself.

"Now dat de munny is dun un riv, ef I ketches Hanner wun mo time wid a
hoe in her hands, I'm ergwine to git a vorcement. She mout take lessons
on de peanny-forty from dat white gal in de grate house und play de
hopperatticks arternoons arter me und her hez driv over de plantushun
und seed to de craps. When I gits home I'm ergwine to berry dis munny
under de tater hill und I haint ergwine to let Hanner spishun whay I
keeps hit, kase she'll buy all de hosses in de Newnited States und
finely hit will all be gone. I'm ergwine to fling de whup und pull de
ribbuns myself, und ole Semo de secesh jess got to git outen de grate
house. Lemme see how dese sperrets tastes," he said. And he reached in
his ole haversack, got the flask and put it to his mouth. "Gurgle,
gurgle, gurgle; umph," he said, smacking his lips, "dat is sho good
truck. Is yu got gumpshun nuff ter count dis munny, specks it oversizes
your judgment, ole hoss," and he began to count upon his fingers, "five
hundred, hundred fousand, hundred million. Great king! what am I gwine
ter do wid dis munny; ef ole Mars Linkun cud see Joshaway now, wid his
freedom und de grate house und de plantashun und de hosses, he wud larf
und larf frum wun eend of his mouf to the tother. You see's now Mr.
Bellyun what yu is dun und dun fur yosef crackin de whup ober de po
nigger."

A distance of two miles had been placed between the old negro and the
village and he had two more miles to go. One mile ahead ran with a swift
current the black waters of Chowattuck, but there was a substantial foot
log thrown across it, and it was ordinarily safe. Joshua had gone but a
little farther when he wanted to sample "dem dar sperrets agin," "Pen
upon it, I nattally feels dat ar truck er oozin outen my toe nails." The
"tikler" was turned up again, and gurgle, gurgle, gurgle sang the fiery
spirits. The money now had greatly multiplied; the trees upon the
roadside were somersaulting, and the road itself, like a serpent, was
twisting in and out about his tangled legs. Joshua stopped in sight of
the water with the observation.

"Hole on dar ole hoss, what is yu ergwine ter do, dis munny aint ergwine
to tote yu ober dis crick; ole glory back yander aint gwine ter heer yu
hollow, what is yer gwine to do?"

He put his hands upon his old knees, and rubbed them down, brought his
coat sleeves with a fierce swing across his cavernous mouth, fetched a
grunt or two, then planted his feet upon the foot-log.

"Studdy yosef ole hoss, studdy yosef, ef yu draps inter dis heer crick
und gits drounded, it's ergwine to bust up ebery scalyhorg in der
souf."

Three times he tried to walk the log and as often fell off before
reaching the water.

"Konsoun de crick," he muttered, "hit hadn't orter be heer no how, er
pesterrin fokses er cummin und er gwine; pears lak now de bellion is dun
und fell dere is a dratted crick at ebery crook in de rode; blame my
hide ef I aint gwine ercross ef I has ter crawl lak a santypede; I kin
straddle de dratted fing un I kin git ercross arter a fashun, but what
is I gwine ter do wid de happy-sak und de munny? I is bleeged ter use
bof hands ter hold on to de dratted log when I slips und slides, und I
kaint tote de happy-sak in my mouf, kase I haint got but one ole snag in
my hed, and hit is in de furder eend; consound it, whay it hadn't orter
be no how. I kin tie de happy-sak to de kote keerts, und den ole hoss,
yu und me kin land on de tother side of de crick lak a kildee. Ef I was
ergwine tother way dar wud be a passel ob kaarts cummin dis way; dey is
allus gwine de rong way at de rong time." So argued Joshua as he
fastened the haversack to the only button on the back of his coat.

"Now den ole buttun, ef yu was ter brake loose, un drap yu wud werk
bigger strucshun dan a yeth-shake, dat yu wud. Provedense is ergwine to
do hits part ef Hanner is dun und dun hern."

Slipping and sliding, the old negro was approaching the other end of the
foot log; his heavily weighted coat skirts thumping against his shanks,
when he was sliding along under an overhanging cypress bush about midway
of the deep channel, "kerchunk" some heavy object dropped into the
water.

"Grate Jarryko!" exclaimed the old negro alarmed, "what a tremenjous
mockisun snake dat was a drapping off dat dar bush; I'm ergwine ter git
erway frum dis crick, sho yo born."

Slipping and sliding he finally got to the end, and with the
observation "Peers lak I feels mity lightsum in de hine parts," he put
his hand behind him to feel for his haversack, and found it gone.

The loss of the treasure for the moment confused the old negro, then he
began to cry and swear, until his grief at last found expression in the
exclamation:

"Grate Jarryko! Dem passages o' scriptur erbout fafe und erbout grace
und erbout proverdense got twisted und tangled togedder into a loblolly,
und bress de Lawd, dis heer happuning is de eend of it all."

He then looked back upon the raging flood, utterly forlorn, and
plaintively addressed himself to his situation:

"Now, whot's Hanner gwine ter do erbout dem hosses und de kerrige und de
grate house, und dey kivered up in dat sloshy graveyard--drownded to def
in de turkle hole? Dat ole button dun und broke loose und drapped in de
werry wustest place on de top side o' de yeth. Now Hanner she's ergwine
ter say hit wuz de sperrets. Well, den, how did de sperrets git inter de
button? Dat's de pint. She mout say ergen dat ef dem sperrets hadn't got
mixed up wid de ankle jints dat dis nigger mouter slewed ter disser eend
und hilt on ter de munny. Well, den, how cum de drotted crick in de
middle o' de rode? Dat's er nudder pint. Dis heer missury dun und cum
erbout twixt Hanner und de debbil; dats de how. She er drapped back
yander, er singin',

'Hold de fort, fer I'm er coming'

und er spectin' de hosses und de kerrige, und bress de Lawd she dun und
flung de fat in de fiar her own sef. How's I ergwine ter hole de fort
wid de ammynishun in de dratted crick? I haint ergwine ter put de blame
on de sperrits, kase hit hadn't orter go dare. She mout er node dat ole
buttun warnt ergwine to tote dat strane, und dat hit wus ergwine ter
brake loose und drap fust er las. How wus I er gwine ter git ter dis
eend epseps I had fafe in de button? Now she mout say ergin dat I hed
orter slewed across fust und den slewed back und fotched de munny. Bress
de Lawd, how wuz I ergwine ter know de munny wuz gwine to stay at de
tuther eend und I at disser eend? Tell me dat. Twixt de scalyhorgs und
dat Mefodis meetin house, dare's ergwine ter cum a slycoon in dis lan'
yit."

As Joshua approached his cabin he looked up and saw his old wife sitting
in a dilapidated rocking chair, surrounded by the scant furniture, and
singing:

"Tis grace hez fotched me safe dis fur.
Und grace gwine take me home."

He stopped abruptly and began to groan and mutter.

"Grate Jarryko!" he exclaimed, as he vigorously rubbed one foot against
the other, "Ef yu's spectin' dem rones to tote yu in de kerrige to
Filadelfy meetin' house, hits ergwine ter be by und twixt mo better
grace dan yu's got, ur me udder."

The old negro looked up again over the broken rim of his beaver, and he
began to mutter again, "Grate Jarryko! Ef dat fool nigger haint dun und
gone und turned de house inside outtards! De debbil hez sho broke loose
in de middle ships o' dis ole plantashun, und dem evil sperrets is in
cohoot wid won ernudder."

At this point Hannah observed Joshua zigzagging across the field without
horses or carriage, and her wrath was exceeding fierce.

"Pend upon it," she exclaimed, "dat ar ole nigger fool de werry
eyeballs outen yo hed. Gwine ter fetch de rones und de kerrige! Grate
king! Ef de good Lawd spares me twell den, when de jedge cums er roun'
ter de kote, I'm ergwine ter git me er vorcement. Mont ez well go inter
cohootnership wid a billy gote, widout ary moufful o' fodder ez dat ole
black idgeot."

When Joshua came within hailing distance, Hannah halloed to him; "Whay
hez yu been all dis nite Joshaway? Here I'se sot und sot ever sense
daylite down, in de jam of de chimney und every now und den hit peeerd
lak I heerd dem rones er plumputy plump down de rode, er cummin same ez
a sho nuff harrykin, und bress Gord heer yu cums ergin wid de drunken
reels lak er ole hoss, wid de bline staggers, mommucked up wusser dan a
kadnipper; Look at dat ole bever hat, er layin' dare pine plank lak a
turkle trap sot bottom uppards."

Joshua heaved one or more sighs as he blurted out in a drowsy way; "Dem
dare hosses yu heerd down de rode, er blickerty blick, dun und got
drownded to def in de crick last nite."

"Grate king!" exclaimed Hannah wrathfully; "ef de good Lord spares me
twell den, when de jedge gits to de kote, I'm gwine to git me a
vorcement."

"Und me too;" ejaculated Joshua as he stretched himself upon a plank for
a nap.

CHAPTER V.

PATRIOTIC MEN DELIBERATING.

At the hour of 3 p. m., in the early autumn of 186--, several
representative gentlemen met by previous agreement in the library of
Colonel Seymour. This congress of Southern leaders of the old school,
after the interchange of the usual courtesies, resolved themselves into
"A Committee of the Whole upon the state of the Union," with Judge
Bonham in the chair, and was addressed at length by Governor Ainsworth.
This gentleman had honored his state as one of its Senators in the
Federal Congress; again as Secretary of the Navy, and had filled by
successive elections the office of Governor for three terms. He had
reached that mellow age when the intellect becomes largely
retrospective. The manner of this distinguished statesman was singularly
individual. In early life strongly inclined to the contemplation of
perplexing political questions, he possessed a graphic, nervous force--a
kind of untamed vigor--a raciness of flavor in speech that belonged only
to the individual who thought for himself. There were few men more
richly endowed; his intellect was of the highest order--clear, rapid and
comprehensive--combined with an extraordinary facility of expressing and
illustrating his ideas, both in conversation and debate. He possessed a
rich imagination, a rare and delicate taste, a gentle and sportive wit,
and an uninterrupted flow of humor, that made him the delight of every
circle. Nor were his moral qualities less deserving of respect and
admiration. He was generous, brave, patriotic and independent. He was
the slave of no ambitious or selfish policy; the hunter of no
factitious or delusive popularity; he spoke the language of truth,
justice and wisdom. A "throb of gratitude beat in the hearts of the
people," and the sentiment of an affectionate respect glowed in their
bosoms for the "old man eloquent." His speeches, too, were essentially
characteristic, abounding in keen satire, humor, and frequently in the
most direct and idiomatic language. Given to intense conviction rather
than to subtle discernment, and devoting his unusual ability to studied
effort, he could, whenever he felt so inclined, "strip the mask from the
hypocrite, and the cowl from the bigot."

This was the man toward whom the patriotic sentiment of the country was
directed; the man who might, by possibility, lash the raging Hellespont
into submission. "But what avail," said he as he leaned heavily upon his
staff, "are arguments and protests? Can we charm the serpent into
harmlessness by the feeble chirping of the wren? Can we tranquilize the
country by indignant declamation?" Then with an effort he assumed a
poise still more dignified and serious, as he continued:

"Gentlemen, when the seas are lashed into a rage, no matter who are the
mad spirits of the storm, they cannot say to their tumultuous waters,
'thus far shalt thou go, and no farther, and here shalt thy proud waves
be stayed.' There are other powers in motion beneath its surface, which
they wist not of, and whose might they can neither direct or control. I
have stood upon the shores of the mighty ocean, and observed the
forerunners of the coming storm. I have heard the moan of its restless
waters in the caverns of the great deep, and have seen the upheaving of
the billows, which rose, and raged and tossed as foam from their bosoms,
the wild spirits that gendered the tempest. I envy not the triumph of
those who have troubled the waters; who have laid waste the South, who
have beggared her proud people. I had rather stand with my countrymen
powerless, but brave and unyielding, than to wield the thunderbolts of
Jove, if I must employ their power and resource in wrong and oppression.
When the last spark of Roman liberty was extinguished; when no voice but
that of Augustus was heard, and no power but that of Augustus was felt,
his venal flatterers vied with each other in deifying their god, and
degrading those firm, defiant spirits who stood for their country and
its tranquility. Cæsar had subjugated the world, all but the dark
unbending soul of Cato. In a catastrophe, such as this, let that band of
patriots to which it is my pride to belong, share in the spirit of the
last of the Romans; that spirit which scorns to bow before any earthly
power, save that of their beleaguered country.

The reconstruction government has purposely demoralized the economic
conditions which contributed to the prosperity of the South. Full well
it knew that the wealth of the people depended upon their labor. There
was a time when plunder was the great resource of the nations of the
earth. The first kingdom was sustained by pillage and conquest, and
great Babylon, the glory of the Chaldean empire, was adorned by the
spoils of all Asia; the Assyrian was plundered by the Persian, the
Persian by the Macedonian, and it at last devoured by the Roman power.
The wolf which nursed its founder, gave a hunger for prey insatiable to
the whole world. There was not a temple nor a shrine between the
Euphrates and the salted sea that was not pillaged by these marauders.
The tide of ages, century after century, had rolled over the last
fragment of Roman power; the light of science had broken upon the world,
before mankind seemed to realize that our Creator, dead aeons ago had
said: 'By the sweat of his brow man should eat his bread all the days of
his life.'

Wealth is power, and the wealth of a nation is its labor, its abundant
control of all the great agencies of nature employed in production. The
products of human labor, its food and clothing, like the fruits of the
earth are annual, and God in his wisdom has adjusted human wants to
their power of production. Like the bread from heaven the dews of every
night produce the crops, and the labors of every day gather the harvest.
What, but an almost boundless power of consumption and reproduction has
given to the South its athletic vigor, and yet the enfranchisement of
the negroes has been a fatal blow to every industrial interest. It has
left our plows to rot in the furrow, and our plantations to grow up in
briers and brambles.

That liberty, which ranks in our organic law next to life, is subjected
to the caprice of those who happen in the ever varying conditions of
human affairs to be placed over us as masters. The South believed that
the theory of the government derived its chiefest captivation from its
regard to the equal rights of all its citizens and from its pledge to
maintain and preserve those rights. It assumed to proclaim the happiness
of the people to have been the object of its institution, and to
guarantee to each and to all without limitation the enjoyment of life,
liberty, and property.

It has been reserved for the power of oppression, in its active and
diffused state, to give effect to the unhallowed innovation upon the
rights of the South.

Reconstruction is the Gethsemane of southern life. God's law is higher
than man's law. Man's feeble statutes cannot annul the immutable
ordinances of the Almighty. Those whom God has put asunder, let no man
join together.

Who could have foreseen that in the first century of our existence
African freedmen would rule sovereign commonwealths, and become the
judges of the rights and property of a race who had ruled the destinies
of the world since governments--patriarchal, monarchical or
constitutional--was known to man?

The true, sincere and rational humanitarian looks with sorrow upon the
future state of the misguided negroes; for when this institutional age
shall have passed away, he sees the exodus or extirpation of this
disturbing element in the social and political conditions of the more
powerful sovereign race. The authors of the infamous policy have written
their _hic jacet_ against our civilization.

No where can there be found in the history of any country where the
civil and military policy have been so basely prostituted, or where the
safeguards of liberty, life and property were ever entrusted to freed
slaves--human chattels; slaves who never for a moment have been in a
state of pupilage. It is an epoch that marks the decadence of the
manhood and civilization of a great nation--homogeneous, prosperous,
enlightened and happy. The nearest approximation to this era of ruin--of
social degradation--was when the slaves in Rome were enfranchised by
order of the emperor, and conditions there were totally dissimilar.
Whilst they enjoyed certain rights and prerogatives of manumission, they
were still held to duties of obedience and gratitude. Whatever were the
fruits of their toil and industry, their patrons shared or inherited the
third part, or even the whole of their acquisitions. In the decline of
this great empire, the proud mistress of the world, we are told that
hereditary distinctions were gradually abolished, and the reason or
instinct of Justinian completed the simple form of an absolute monarchy.
In the eye of the law all Romans were equal and all subjects were
citizens. The inestimable character was degraded to an obsolete and
empty name. The voice of a Roman could no longer enact laws or create
the annual ministers of his power.

"It may take many generations perhaps, for moral changes are slow, to
put out all our lights of knowledge that are now beaming from every
cottage in the South; but one after another they will be extinguished,
and with them the beacon torch of liberty. When the white men of the
South shall come to see how things are, and to realize the downward
tendency, physical, intellectual manhood will make a throe to regain the
height it has lost, and if it fails, a storm will arise from the
elements they are compounding, that will break somewhere and spend
itself with desolating fury. They cannot degrade a people who have been
enlightened and free, prosperous and happy, without igniting a mass
which they can no more control, than they can the central fires of
Vesuvius.

"Up to the commencement of hostilities between the North and the South,
there were in the South millions of people employed directly or
indirectly in the honest and wholesome avocation of agriculture, and by
its great encouraging system, sustained in a condition of existence,
both moral and physical, equally as prosperous and independent as any
other agricultural people in any other region of the earth. They were
white men who piece by piece built up the whole superstructure, and
thereby reinforced the country with so much labor and skill; furnished
so much mutual employment for that skill and labor, aided as they were
by so many instrumentalities of toil and agents of production. What a
country it was--supplied by this system from the labor of our own hands
and workshops, with all the machinery, fruits of the earth, and all the
needful fabrics of human skill. This great system comprehended every
class and every source of material wealth. Under this system our people
prospered. The white population of the South came by descent from a
parent stock, that from the foundation of society had governed in wisdom
and moderation the most enlightened countries of the world; who had
written every constitution, fought every battle, endowed every charity,
established every government, introduced every reform that has given to
the world its christian development and progress.

"When these extra-hazardous reconstruction acts were submitted to the
Legislature of the South, they refused to "chop logic" with the
Reconstruction party. It would have been contrary to the experience of
mankind, and an exception to all the teachings of history, if in the
high excitement then prevailing--the exasperation of the people--the
outrages threatened and inflicted, the South had yielded one jot or
tittle or swerved from its honest, patriotic convictions. The transition
was from a state in which the integrity and intelligence of the white
race, ennobled by centuries of meritorious service, had ruled; to a
government by a black race that less than five generations before had
been hunted like wild beasts in the jungles of the dark continent; who
were handcuffed and decoyed into slave ships, and who had been slaves
until the proclamation of President Lincoln emancipated them in the
territory protected by the U. S. Army. The transition was to a condition
of things in which white men to the number of three hundred thousand
were disfranchised and deprived of the right to vote and to hold office,
and the enfranchisement of more than a corresponding number of benighted
negroes with the right to vote and hold office. The transition of the
slave, was too sudden--too alarming--too degrading. No people who were
proud of their traditions, their institutions, could have looked upon
such a change with complacency; nor seen their local government pass
into the hands of their slaves--irresponsible, illiterate, brutish,
rapacious, without being goaded into violent resistance.

"It has been remarked 'Oh Liberty, what crimes are committed in thy
name.' If the gift of the elective franchise enabled the negro to
protect himself in his rights of person and property, the denial of it
to the white man took away from him that protection and that right. They
went even to lower depths, and by the election and registration laws
basely surrendered into the hands of the carpet-baggers all power. The
judiciary, the last refuge of the unfortunate and oppressed is stricken
down and stripped of both ermine and respectability. The ballot box--the
sanctuary of freedom--the ballot box--the only secure refuge of
liberty--the ballot box, the armory where freedom's weapons are wont to
terrify tyrants, is made the charnel house in which the assassinated
liberties of a defenceless, prostrated people are buried; is made the
dice box in which are staked and played for by the freedmen of the South
the revenues of plundered commonwealths. What wonder in this lust for
power men should become strangers to the people they govern, outlaws to
honesty and patriotism.

"They know no law but that of force, and no God but Mammon. They ply
their theft upon every citizen, enthrall him with taxation, deny him the
right to be seen or heard or felt at the ballot box or before the court.
In the train of these outrages and indignities came a flood of
unwholesome oppressive laws, creating new offices, increasing the
salaries of incompetent and truculent officials, multiplying the cost
and expenditures of government, and correspondingly increasing the
burdens of taxation. Then came martial law, militia campaigns, loyal
leagues, murders, arsons, burglaries, rapes, and a reign of terror and
intimidation to make the way for the easy perpetration of the most
monstrous and unparallelled wrongs, frauds and outrages that ever cursed
the earth. The South, like a beautiful captive, was turned over to be
deflowered and defiled. She could only cry in her desperation--"I am
within your brutal power, and gagged and pinioned must submit."

"Our elective judiciary has contributed immeasurably to the vicious,
demoralizing spirit of the age." The intelligent and upright judge is
the representative of the law in its simplicity, sufficiency and
learning. He is the living exponent of its justice. Whatever the law is
will appear in him, and whatever it does will be done through him. The
different departments of industrial activity center in him. The plowman
in the field, the smith at his anvil, the miner in the earth, the
operative in the factory, the banker at his desk, are all a vital part
of his being. He is the foremost agent of providence in keeping up the
natural distinction of race and position. His creed is that men are not
to be antagonists, but friends. Differ they must in usages and
institutions, in habits and pursuits; but in his opinion they differ,
not that they may be separated, but for a truer sympathy and a compacter
union. Mountains and seas insulate, language and religion differentiate
men, but the law in its economical administration corrects these things
into the elements of a genuine brotherhood. The fortunes of the world,
so far as they are delegated to human care, are in his hands. The
peaceful progress of society is blended with his personal integrity.
Commonwealths, corporations and individuals vest their wealth, their
reputation, their security in him, and if any one man more than another
is under the most sacred of earthly obligations to be an example of the
highest integrity, the most exact justice, the noblest virtue of
thought, word and action, it is the judge of our courts of record. No
feudal baron--no courtly knight--ever had the power that may now be
exercised by him.

"Our civilization pledges us to the sway of moral principles; its rule
is imperative, because we have assumed the title of men, domesticated
our hearts, and accepted the religion of Jesus Christ. Judicial life, by
the earnestness with which it has acted in the past crisis of our state
and national history, by the patriotic devotion and interpretation of
the constitution and the laws made in pursuance thereof, by its
conservative temper in resisting fanaticism, vice, corruption and fraud
has shown itself a watchful guardian of the momentous trusts confided to
its keeping. The honest, learned judge has pledged himself for the faith
of contracts and treaties; he has jealously guarded the institutions of
the country and bravely upheld them as the embodiment of our doctrines
and our hopes. The traditions, laws and customs of the country have been
committed to him, and with the ever active jealousy of encroachment, he
has not disguised his fears of centralization or oppression. Hitherto,
irrespective of all party relations, the judicial system was slowly but
surely working out the great problems of domestic prosperity. Times have
changed, however, and we have changed with them. Our present elective
judiciary is indeed the black vomit of reconstruction.

"It may be seriously questioned whether under any circumstances the
elective system is adequate for the purpose designed. All classes, high
and low, sooner or later come before the tribunal of justice. Its
judgments and decrees affect the humblest, as well as the most powerful
individual and control the strongest combinations of men. We know that
it is utterly impossible to keep the nomination and election clear of
mere political influences and those of the worst kind. It is said that
revolutions never go backward; nevertheless in the teeth of the adage I
confess that I can see no better way of selecting judges than the mode
pointed out by the unamended constitutions and the laws and by the
general good sense of mankind. I believe that this method is wise and
conservative, in harmony with our institutions and sufficiently
democratic to satisfy the people. All the rest is faction, demagogism
and cabal. The judge should represent no interest, no party, only the
law; he is an umpire between man and man, between the individual and the
body social.

"What is required in the judge is ability, learning, integrity. In
public station it is as necessary to be thought honest as to be so, and
the moment the popular mind once takes in the true position of the
elective judge, the moment that it perceives the magistrate to be
possessed of neither true power nor real dignity, and exposed
perpetually to temptation, that moment the influence and usefulness of
the judge will be destroyed. Their judgments in such cases will be
received without respect and obeyed only so far as they can be enforced,
and if the people shall ever break down and trample under foot the
defences of unpopular power; the Judiciary will be scouted from their
seats, their filthy and tattered ermine will be torn from their backs,
and they will be driven out into hopeless ignominy as the meanest of
sycophants, and the most truculent of demagogues.... A hundred and
eighty years ago the English parliament, sick of the miseries resulting
from a corrupt judiciary, changed the tenure of the office, abolished
their dependence on the sovereign and made the tenure of their
existence dependent on their good behavior alone. From that time to this
the English judiciary has risen in character and influence. With us the
system is elective. The judicial candidate, like a fish monger, goes
with his wares into a market overt. He advertises his opinions--his
promises, he makes his pledges, he puts a premium upon the ballot, he
weighs to a nicety the purchasable value of negro electors. The rival
candidate does the same, and hence the office is purchasable at the
price of manhood, integrity, learning and capacity. Thus the whole
machinery of the courts is run with an eye single to making political
capital for the radical party and intensifying their hatred toward the
South.

"And now gentlemen," the governor said in conclusion, "our meeting here
to-day will be without its influence upon a power that can 'kill and
make alive.'"

At the conclusion of the speech of the governor, it was resolved that
messengers should be sent to the president with full power to enter into
any treaty or compact for the maintenance of peace and order, and that
Governor Ainsworth and Colonel Seymour shall be charged with the
execution of the mission.

CHAPTER VI.

THE MILLS ARE GRINDING.

It was the hour of high noon that a gentleman and lady alighted from a
carriage at the foot of the mansion of Colonel Seymour without previous
announcement. The gentleman was a person of attractive presence and
perhaps forty-five years of age. The lady was not attractive, a little
patronizing in her manners, and perhaps thirty-five years of age. Their
_patois_ was that of English people; to an artistic ear, however, this
may have appeared feigned. Their manner in the presence of the host was
unconstrained; indeed they expressed themselves with unusual freedom.
The gentleman gave his name as Mr. Jamieson, and the lady as his niece,
Miss Harcourt, both of them lately arrived from London. He had
interested himself, he said, in scientific researches for the past few
years, and was now pursuing an inquiry that he hoped would be of
practical use to the South. The "London Society," whose agent he was,
was seeking from all available sources the most exhaustive information
about the negro in his gradations from the savage to the citizen; and he
took occasion to say that his principals had been greatly astonished
because of the alarming strides the negro had made in a country that,
less than a century ago, made the British power tremble in its very
strong-holds. He would be pleased to ask if this sudden transition from
slavery to freedom had not reversed the orderly procedure of the
government in respect to its administration in the South. To this
inquiry Colonel Seymour replied, quite epigrammatically, "that the
world had no precedent for the revolutionary measures which were being
enforced in the South."

The stranger continuing, observed that he had desired this interview
before exploiting a field untried and perhaps dangerous; and he would be
greatly obliged if his host would be as frank and communicative as
possible.

In the course of this interview, the arguments employed by the stranger
disarmed the old man's suspicions, and in a confidential way the Colonel
told Mr. Jamieson that he would communicate his knowledge of the matters
as far as he could, but feared it would not be of much value, as he was
under suspicion by the Federal authorities; having fought under Lee in
the many battles of the South, he was still vehemently protesting
against the invasion of his own country by the carpet bag government.

"You were, then, a Confederate soldier?" inquired the stranger.

"Yes, and was paroled at Appomattox," sententiously rejoined the
veteran.

"Now, my dear sir, you greatly interest me; may I inquire your rank in
the Confederate army?"

"I was a Colonel of cavalry, sir."

"Were you at Gettysburg, sir?"

"Yes, and was wounded as we were falling back to the Potomac."

"Gettysburg! Ah, yes!" the stranger observed reflectively; "this battle
was quite disastrous to the South, I believe, and was claimed by the
North as a great victory."

"And what upon the face of the earth have they not claimed?" excitedly
replied the veteran.

"Ah yes, they are a boastful people," said Mr. Jamieson. "I doubt not
they claimed victories they never won. You of course are still of the
opinion that the South was right?"

"No opinion about it. I know she was right. We never resorted to
hostilities until our institutions were assailed."

"I am sure your statement is correct, sir," said the Englishman. "While
our government, then in the control of a radical ministry, was
officiously unfriendly to the South, your government had a great army of
sympathizers in England who deplored its downfall; indeed, the president
of our society was an active sympathizer with your country, and the bank
in which he was a director, upon his private account emitted bills of
credit that were used by the agents of the Confederate government in the
purchase of materials of war. I presume, sir," continued the Englishman,
"you would have no hesitation in going to war again if the same
casus-belli existed?"

"No indeed, sir."

"And you are of opinion that it would not be treasonable to oppose the
policy of the government in respect to its acts of reconstruction?"

"If armed with adequate power, I should not hesitate in respect to my
duty in the premises," replied the veteran with a show of temper.

"I am very glad, sir, that you have been entirely frank with me," said
the stranger, "and I fully appreciate your feelings. I suspect that you
do not think that a strongly centralized government in any contingency
is the least oppressive form of government?"

"Assuredly not, sir. Nature has established a diversity of climates,
interests and habits in the extensive territories embraced by the
Federal government. We cannot assimilate these differences by
legislation. We cannot conquer nature. Other differences have been
introduced by human laws and adventitious circumstances, very
difficult, if not impossible to be adjusted by Federal legislation,
hence the necessity of local legislatures with adequate powers, and a
general government with its appropriate powers."

"I presume, sir," said the stranger, "that you cannot conscientiously
support the reconstruction measures of Congress and the president?"

"I cannot and will not, sir," responded Colonel Seymour with emphasis;
"and if you were advertant to that point of time in the history of our
late war when, from sheer exhaustion, the South laid down its arms, you
would not ask the question. There were hundreds of thousands of
patriotic men in the North, who, upon the question of the emancipation
of the negro, concurred in its propriety, yea, its necessity, but who
denounced those reactionary measures that were crystalized and enforced
with cruelty against the South. In our judgment these measures were not
only extra-hazardous, but inherently oppressive. It would have been a
pernicious power in the hands of an intelligent, conservative,
law-abiding people, but most deadly in the hands of ignorant,
unscrupulous and truculent officials. You must remember that the South,
in a metaphorical sense, was an immense area sown in grain ready to be
harvested, with its hedges trampled under foot and destroyed, and
inviting cattle and swine to enter and devour. The herds came greedily
through every gap, and like the wild beasts upon our western prairies,
depastured and consumed almost the whole."

"How wonderfully recuperative have been the energies of your people
sir," interrupted the stranger.

"Yes, but will you allow me to proceed?" replied the Colonel; "We
believed that when the war ended, the people of the South relying upon
the pledges made by the union generals in the field before the armies
were disbanded; on the negotiations preceding the surrender; on the
proclamation of President Lincoln; and the publications of the press; as
well as upon the terms actually agreed on between Grant and Lee, and
Johnson and Sherman, at the time of the capitulation of the Confederate
armies; that when resistence to federal authority ceased, and the
supremacy of the constitution of the United States was acknowledged; and
especially after the ordinances of secession were repealed, and an
amendment to the constitution, abolishing slavery wherever it existed,
was ratified by the legislatures of the insurrectionary states; that a
full and complete restoration of the southern states to their former
position of equal states would at once take place; and after the
exhaustion of such a war they hailed the return of peace with
satisfaction; they acknowledged defeat; accepted the situation, and went
to work to rebuild their waste places and to cultivate their crops. The
men who composed the union armies, found on their return home, a
healthy, prosperous, peaceable and well organized society; while the
government with a prodigal hand freely distributed pay, pensions, and
bounties. It was not so in the south; society here was disorganized; the
strain upon the people to supply the armies in the fields had exhausted
their resources; labor was absolutely demoralized; the negroes being
freed, in their ignorance and delusion were not slow to understand their
changed condition, and became aggressive, riotous and lawless. Under
such circumstances it was impossible to restore harmony in the civil
government without the utmost confusion; yet so earnestly did our people
struggle to return to their allegiance and thus entitle them to the
protection which had been promised, that from the day of the surrender
of the Confederate army, not a gun has been fired; no hostile hand has
been uplifted against the authority of the United States, but before
breathing time even was allowed, a set of harpies, many of whom had
shirked the dangers of the battle field, pounced down upon our people to
ravage, plunder, and destroy. All remonstrances, entreaties, resistances
were stifled by the cry of treason and disloyalty and by the hollow
pretence that the plunderers were persecuted because of their loyalty to
the Union. A system has grown up in the South with obstinacy, whereby
great protected monopolies are fostered at the expense of its
agricultural labor; then follow the series of offensive measures known
as the reconstruction acts; but one further observation sir, and I have
done. The English people had no just conception of the oppressions want
only inflicted upon the South; of the insolence and rapacity of the
carpet-baggers and freedmen who were made our masters."

There was quite an interval before the stranger replied.

"Your address sir has been a revelation indeed; it is a lesson of great
educational value and I sincerely hope I may hear you again. Would you
care to present your views in writing?"

The Colonel without any suggestion of evil said to the stranger. That
possibly at some future day he might find the leisure to do so.

"And now you must allow me to thank you, before leaving, for the
courtesy you have shown. I shall take pleasure in reporting this
interview."

Colonel Seymour upon entering his wife's chamber remarked to her "I have
found a friend in need; an Englishman who was delightfully entertaining
and who represents certain humanitarian interests. I expect to hear
something very flattering to the South when he submits a report to his
principal."

Mrs. Seymour who had passed that period in life, when she could look
hopefully upon anything, observed quite sadly. "I hope it is so, my dear
husband; I hope the future has very much happiness in store for you; but
I am suspicious of strangers who seem to have no other business with
you, than to obtain your views upon the unhappy events that are girdling
our home as it were with a zone of fire." "Ah," exclaimed the husband,
"you do not understand, perhaps your opinion will change in a few days."

"I hope so" the sick lady replied feebly.

We pretermit events more or less irritating to follow the urbane
Englishman. The reader has perhaps surmised that he was an agent of the
secret service bureau. This was true, as Colonel Seymour learned to his
sorrow, within forty eight hours after the man and the lady dropped out
of the wide open arms of the old mansion. But how could a southern
gentleman withhold knowledge when sought under such a disguise. He spoke
as he felt; and if the weapons that he used to punctuate his expressions
were boomerangs that impaled him on its points, he could not help it.
Anywhere, everywhere, he would have spoken his convictions without
concealment, without equivocation. Laflin came to Ingleside; came to
foreclose a poor man's liberty, without a day of redemption. The old man
saw the offensive carpet-bagger approaching the mansion and met him
sternly with the interrogatory. "What is your business?"

"Ah!" sneeringly answered the carpet-bagger, "that is a fine question to
ask a gentleman. Do you recognize that seal sir" he continued, handing
the old man an official requisition bearing the broad seal of the
department of justice upon it "you will perhaps conclude, sir, that it
will be compatible with your safety to return with me; I promise you a
safe conduct to Washington."

"I will go with you" replied the old man with all the suavity possible,
"but you will allow me to prepare for the journey."

"Certainly sir," said Laflin, "but I must see that you do not provide
yourself with arms."

"I do not want my house polluted by your presence," cried the old man in
the vehemence of his feelings.

"Then you shall go as you are," gruffly replied the carpet-bagger.

Alice had but little to say to the man, knowing that entreaty or
expostulation would be unavailing, and Clarissa slunk away from him as
if he were the forerunner of the plague. When the Colonel arrived in the
village he saw the white-haired governor with his overcoat upon his
arms, and his valise and umbrella upon a chair beside him. He knew
intuitively that their missions were the same, that their destination
was Washington.

"What are you doing here governor?" asked Colonel Seymour.

The dejected man replied deliberately, "I am going to Washington sir.
May I ask your destination as I observe you are traveling too?"

"You see my guide, do you not," answered the Colonel with a frigid
smile.

"Yes and I am informed he is mine also; so we shall not get lost on the
route shall we?" answered the governor lugubriously. "I presume we shall
have a suite of rooms at the old capital," asked the Colonel
provokingly.

"Perhaps so, if the President doesn't invite us to the executive
mansion. I hope he will do this as I have no bank account North, and but
little currency in my pocket," replied the Governor in irony. "By the
way Colonel," continued the Governor, "did you have an elegant gentleman
and his niece to call upon you a few days ago? Quite an interesting man
was he not? I hope we shall have a good report from him when he returns
home."

"And were you confidential toward this man?" asked Colonel Seymour.

"Why yes, quite so," replied the Governor innocently. "I found him so
agreeable and so intelligent withal, that I told him all that I knew and
I am expecting great things when I hear from him."

"Do you think, Governor," asked the Colonel quizzically, "that the
Englishman has given us free transportation to Washington to be examined
and punished as suspects?"

"Why my dear sir" replied the old Governor, "you alarm me. Is it
possible we are the dupes of a government spy so clever and
intelligent?"

"That is my opinion, sir," replied the Colonel.

"Is it possible? My, my, my!" he ejaculated, and sank back in the
upholstered seat, and after awhile fell asleep.

These were men who had made the wager of battle for eleven proud
commonwealths and lost; men coming now with their patriotism repudiated,
to be told that their traditions were treasonable, their principles
insurrectionary; to be badgered into compliance; to be scourged into
submission; men who believed with a living faith that they had given
American reasons for convictions that ought not to be challenged, coming
now heroically to receive their doom.

The Governor, on entering the great judgment hall with Colonel Seymour,
was surprised to see in the person of the chairman a highly honored
colleague upon the committee of ways and means in the congress of 1858.
The recognition was mutual, and the distinguished chairman descending
from the dais, demonstratively grasped the old Governor's hand,
exclaiming, "My dear sir, what has brought you here?" The excess of joy
experienced by the Governor quite overcame him, and for a moment he did
not answer, but he replied after awhile as coherently as he could, that
he had never been informed of the charge against him.

"Ah!" replied the chairman sympathetically, "That is indeed regretable,
but the discipline of this court does not contain within itself the germ
of an arbitrary prerogative. No man, however bitter may be his opinions
shall be condemned unheard." The Englishman, under the alias of Mr.
Jamieson appeared as a witness in the person of Jonathan Hawkins.

It is unnecessary to go through the trial that followed. "You are at
liberty," said the chairman, at its conclusion, "to go wheresoever you
will. You shall be safeguarded while you remain in the city, and we
shall exert our utmost to protect you and your interests at home. Mr.
Laflin," he continued, "you will procure passports for these gentlemen
whom you have brought here without a pretext of reason."

Our old friends, taking up their hats and canes, returned their grateful
thanks to the honorable commission, whose judicial fairness was so
praise-worthy; and turned their faces homeward; the Governor exclaiming
through his clenched teeth, "The infamous, villainous Englishman!"

"Why, bless my soul, Governor," exclaimed the Colonel in a startled
tone, "What an opportune moment to have carried out the wishes of our
meeting!"

"What meeting do you refer to sir?" asked the Governor in surprise.

"Why, my dear sir, had you forgotten that we were deputized to visit the
authorities in Washington at the meeting presided over by Judge Bonham?"

"Well, well, well!" ejaculated the Governor, "I verily believe, sir, if
peace is not speedily restored to the country that I will become a
driveling idiot."

The Colonel adroitly changed the subject by observing, "It has occurred
to me that if the practical operation of the reconstruction acts was
directly in the control of the authorities in Washington, we should see
that they are our friends; I am sure that the sentiment of the Northern
people is in favor of the restoration of the South, and would counteract
the vicious primary mischief resulting from a criminal abuse of power--I
mean that power that is centralized in the Southern States."

"I am looking for conservative measures myself from the wise men who are
in charge of the government," replied the Governor. "The infernal spoils
system in the South, if not checkmated, will destroy the country. This
same spoils principle has been the cause of more wretchedness and guilt,
individual and national, than any other in the history of human
suffering. It is the incentive alike to the burglar who breaks and
enters your house at night and the highwayman who waylays your path and
takes your life; that, rising from individuals to multitudes, it is the
impelling motive to all the plunderings and desolations of military
conquests; it forces the gates of cities; plunders temples of religion;
the great despoiler of private rights and national independence. It was
the spoils system that united the barbarians of the North and finally
overthrew the vast fabric of Roman policy law and civilization; and it
is this principle, worse than war, that has shaken to their foundation
our free and happy institutions.

Perhaps we shall meet at the cemetery to-morrow, if there are no English
spies around," suggested the Governor.

"Yes, yes; and adieu until then," replied the Colonel, as they alighted
from the cars.

[Illustration: "Dare goes joshaway, now, wid Ole Glory strowed er roun'
him, steppin lak a rare-hoss over de tater ridges."]

CHAPTER VII.

A POLITICIAN OF THE NEW SCHOOL.

Uncle Joshua was the color guard in a volunteer company of negroes,
whose muster roll, like a thermometer, ran up into the nineties. As he
shook out the folds of the scarlet-veined banner of the free one morning
in his cabin, he observed to his old wife, "Hit peers lak dat dare wus
ernudder wun o' dem possels, ef my membrunce sarves me rite, dat toted
de flag fur Ginrul Farryo when he wus er heppin disserway und datterway
froo de dessart; but I moest furgit dat gemman's name. Twant Absurdam,
I'm moest sho, und hit twant Jack-in-de-bed, nudder. Duz yu reckermember
dat possel, Hanner? Yu und de locus preacher is erquainted wid all dem
aintshunts."

"Umph!" grunted Hanna, "yu's gwine fur back fur sumbody to tote de flag.
Ef yu hez gin out why don't you fling hit over to Efrum? Ur is yu aiming
ter immertate dat aintshunt?"

"Grate Jarryko!" exclaimed Joshua, irritated by such a question. "Duz yu
see dat fodder foot, und duz yu see dat shuck foot? Well, den, when de
leftenant sez 'hep, hep, hep, hep, hep--fodder foot, shuck foot!' I'm
ergwine ter fling dem footsies out disserway--see? Und I'm ergwine ter
tote ole glory fo und aft, jess so, twell I gits ter be de ginrul, und
den I'm ergwine ter fling dem identikle footses in de saddle, disserway,
und uprare de rone on his hine shanks, jess lak dat."

"Umph!" grunted ole Hannah, "To be sho yu's jess rivved out o' de
babboon show! Yu's er sho nuff limber Jack--jest ez suple ez a yurling
gote, ebery bit und grane!"

"Now, den," continued Joshua, without heeding the ridiculous
interruption, "I wuz studdin up dat possel, when you flung yo mouf inter
de argyment."

"Wuz dat gemman a Mefodis ur Mishunary?" inquired Hannah, provokingly.

"Grate Jarryko! How's I ergwine to know dis fur back? Kin I skiver er
humans clean clar ercross de dissart, und retch back ter de eend o' de
yeth, wid dese wun-eyed specks? Ef he hilt on to grace, he wur a shoutin
Mefodis; und ef he run wid Proverdense, he wur a Mishunary; und ef he
hilt on ter sumfin wusser, he wur a harrytick. Dat's ez fur ez I'm
gwine, doubt I node fur sartin. I'm moest sho, do, he wur a Mishunary,
kase he didn't drap back when he cum in contack wid de water."

"Grate king!" snapped Hannah, as she kindled into a passion. "Wuz yu
dare? Yu talks lak dare warnt no Mefodis mixed up wid dem harryticks;
gwine on wid yer warter in de bilin dissart! Better git de Zion bushup
to larn yu de scriptur."

"Oh, my sole!" groaned Joshua. "Ef hit warnt fer de Mishunarys in dis
Soufland, dare mout be a wusser war dan ole Jeff Davis de secesh's. I'm
ergwine ter ax yer wun pint mo, und den me und Ole Glory is ergwine ter
hit de grit fur de conwenshun. Which wun o' dem slidin elders o' yourn
hilt a confurence in dat dissart whey dare warnt no warter, und no
chickens nudder, und whay de po parished up Mishunary hed to furrige er
roun fer dare dinner? Now den!"

There were shops and bazaars scattered here and there about the public
streets of the shire town within the recesses of which sat colored women
selling their merchandise; now and then accentuating some passing
pageant by the clapping of hands and other noisy demonstrations. There
were disorderly, ruffianly negroes, in greasy uniforms, neither
brigaded or disciplined, patrolling the country, discharging their
muskets at random; and about the premises of Colonel Seymour there was a
squad, more or less menacing, marching and counter-marching in the
carriage way near the mansion, and the old man in his desperation cried
out "Oh that I could gird the sword upon my thigh, like the man Barak,
and could smite these devils to the earth."

"Mars Jon," interrupted Clarissa, "yer mout as well let dese devilis
niggers lone; de Lord is agwine to slam dem to de yearth fore dey knows
it; he is agwine to vour dem up lak hoppergrasses; day a ransakin all
ober creashun fur franksized niggers to wote de yaller ticket in de
convenshun; mout as well hab so many billy goats a wotin fur ole Abrum
Laffin, de meanest, low downest scalyhorg in de wurrel. Yander goes ole
Joshaway now, wid ole glory strode er roun him, steppin lak a rare-hoss
ober de tater ridges agwine to de town." And she pointed to a group of
four crossing the field from Joshua's cabin, marching under the stars
and stripes, that swung lifelessly over old Joshua's right shoulder. We
had just as well go with Joshua and witness the proceedings. The first
observation the old negro made as he came up was this, "How much is de
boss agwine to gib fur wotin fur him to go to de legislatur?"

"Agwine to giv yer, yer axes," replied a partisan of Laflin. "Yer dun
und got freedom, haint yer? yer dun und jined de milintary cumpny, haint
yer? Yer is de most selfishes nigger dat I ebber seed. Is yer aimin to
git de whole kommisary flung in? What mo dos yer speck?" continued the
black partisan. Freedom haint nebber made de pot bile at my house nary
time, und it haint nebber fotched no sweetenin dar, und it haint put no
sperrets in de jimmyjon, und it haint nebber sot out no taters nudder,
und wid all dis lustration in de land, it haint agwine too, nudder. Jess
as well be a naked snow-bird wid nary whing as wun ob dese franksized
niggers. Too much freedom in de lan now, und not nuff horgs and
catfishes. I'se been a wotin und a wotin eber since de belyun fell--a
trapsing to de town bakkards und furruds, und I haint nebber got nuffin
but freedom yit--not eben de rappins ob my little finger; und I has been
hep, hep, hep, hep, heppin in de miluntary cumpny ober tater ridges und
fru de brier patches und de skeeters, und de cap'in haint nebber said
nary time, Joshaway, I'm agwine to put yaller upperlips on yer jacket,
und I'm agwine ter gib yer a sord wid a wheel. Nary time hab de boss
axed me how much meal I had in de gum, ur how much taters I hab in de
hill; und I haint nebber had but wun little speck ob munny sense freedom
cum in de lan, und den it wus Federick munny. Ef I dont git nuffin
bettern dat I has got, und dat mity quick, dis po nigger is agwine to
drap outer de ranks into de sametary. Dis here war has turned loose a
passel ob niggers all ober de kentry wid dere freedum und muskets, und
bress Gord dere aint nary turkle in de swamp, nur catfish nudder, yu
mout say; und eben de sparrers when dey sees a nigger a cummin shakes
his tail, und sais 'ugh, ugh; I'm agwine erway frum here.' Ole mars Jon
had rudder de hoppergrasses wud kivver de hole lan, und de tarypin bugs
too. Eber time de boss gits lected he ups and sezs, sez he, 'Josh, de
nex time I runs I'm agwine to make yer er magistreet, so yer kin sot on
white fokses, und bress de Lord, dat time haint nebber cum yit.'"

"Shut dat big mouf ob yourn," sharply commanded Laflin's constituent.

"I haint agwine to do dat, nudder," saucily replied the old negro. "Ef
de boss don't gib me er dram, ur sumfing when I gits to town, I'm
agwine to wote fur tuther man. De ole ooman tole me to ax de boss fur a
kaliker kote; sed how dat she wus jam nigh as ragged as a skeer-crow.
Hanner is a gitten monstrus tired ob freedom, und dese franksized
niggers--yer heers my racket. Aye! aye," he exclaimed patriotically,
"dars ole glory now a shinin froo de trees," and with that the bandy
shanked negro cut a pigeon wing in the middle of the road; and sure
enough, the banner of the free, displaying its broad stripes and bright
stars was nodding its welcome to its African heroes, who had worked out
their emancipation with ploughshares and scythe blades.

"I knows," the negro continued in rapture, "when I sees dat butifullest
flag er wavin und see-sawin dat dere is bound to be a stummic full ob
good whittles sumwheres, but I's monstrous skeert hits agwine to gib out
fore hit gits to me." And just now the faintest tintinnabulation of an
asthmatic brass band broke upon old Joshua's ear like the sound of a
dinner horn, on a long, dry summer day. Joshua braced up for the home
stretch and began to take long slouchy strides, as if he were on the old
parade ground again. Calling out to his comrades "Forrud, march to de
town; hep, hep, hep, hep, hep, eyes to de front, charge, bagonets!" As
he approached the rallying ground of the Laflin hosts, a recruiting
agent from Laflin's opponent, took him by the arm and said
patronizingly, "Let me put a bug in your ear, ole man."

Joshua jerked away with the startled cry "No sar, no sar, don't do dat
white man, kase I kaint heer good no how, und ef yer puts dat ar bug in
my yeer, how in de name ob Gord is I ebber agwine to git him outen dere
eny more, and hit mout be a horned bug ur a stingin bug. I'll fite eny
man dat puts a bug in my yeer, dat I will; stan back, white man; dont
cum nigh me wid nun ob dem creeturs."

"You don't understand me, my friend" replied the scalawag, "our side are
home folks, bred and born right here, and we know what we can do for our
colored friends when we get to the legislature, and we are going to buy
plantations for our men, and we are going to make our old friends like
you sheriffs."

"Dats a mity heep ob promisin, white man," replied the negro
suspiciously, "How menny shurrufs is yer agwine to hab in dis county?"

"Forty seven," replied the Scalawag.

"How menny jail houses is yer agwine to hab," asked the negro.

"We are going to do away with the jails," said he.

"Is?" exclaimed Joshua in surprise. "Ugh, Ugh! forty-leven shurrufs in
dis county und all clecting taxes at wun time, Grate Jarryko, dar wont
be nary tater, nur nary horg, nur nary ole settin hin--nur nary nigger
in sebenteen fousan miles ob dis place. Saks a live, white man, dos yer
aim to massercree fokes fo und aft? Whar wus yer when dey fit de war
enny how?"

"Oh, I was at home raising breadstuffs for the poor," he answered.

"Raisin which fur de po, boss?" enquired Joshua.

"Breadstuffs," he replied.

"Und did de po git dey share?" asked Joshua.

"Yes, indeed," the scalawag answered.

"Und wus yer in de pennytenshun when yer raised dat truck?" further
enquired Joshua.

"No, indeed," he said.

Joshua gazed comically into the face of the politician as he said;
"Lemme look at yu rite good wid boff eyes, wid dese ole specks on,
disserway; dare. Haint I seed yu afore?"

"Perhaps so; I cant say" replied the scalawag furtively.

"Ugh! Ugh!" exclaimed Joshua.

"Haint I seed yu at Zion's meeting house wun time, at de stracted
meetin? Dat time sister Cloe drapped back into er concushun und yu wuz
de yarb doctor dat fotched her too, und yu tuck yo pay outen de munny
dat wuz gwine to de orfins?"

"No, no, you are thinking of some one else I am sure."

"Und hit warnt yu nudder dat drunk up de sakryment de dekons stode away
under de mussy seat?"

"No, indeed! why do you ask such a question?"

"Kase," replied Joshua quite saucily, "dem dare too eyes of yourn puts
me in membrance of dat scalyhorg in de scriptur whay wuz drug outer de
kote house ded, him und Sofy Mariah, too, kase day made er mis hit
erbout dat lan."

"Oh Jerusalem!" retorted the scalawag "Lets get back to the subject."

"Jess so! Jess so!" exclaimed Joshua, laughing, "yu sees yu's dun und
kotched, und yu aims to drap back in de convenshun agen."

"We pay one dollar in gold and a jug of whisky to every Laflin man that
votes with us. Do you hear?" observed the scalawag.

"Now yer is er a gettin down to de pint," exclaimed the negro smiling.
"Is yer man agwine to git lected?"

"Certainly, certainly, sir."

"Dats all right, den, when dos I git de munny und de sperrits, fore I
wotes ur arterwurds?" asked Joshua dubiously.

"We don't pay in advance," replied the scalawag.

"Don't, hey?" exclaimed Joshua.

"Well Laflin, he do, und I mout wote fore I git de pay, und yer man
mout not git lected, den my wote wud be flung away, und de munny und de
sperrits too, dats de pint. Yer see, boss," Joshua continued
argumentatively, "us franksized woters is bleeged to make er leetle
kalkerlashun und den ef we gits disappinted its kase de white fokses
obersizes de niggers. Don't yer see how de cat is agwine to jump, boss?"
he whispered confidentially, "yer mout put de spirits in de jimmyjon
now, und I mout take a drap ur too fore I wotes und yer mout hold back
de munny twelt yer man is lected; how dos dat do?"

"All right," announced the scalawag. "You come with me." And old Joshua
in his "hop, step and go fetchit" way followed the politician until he
brought up squarely against one of Laflin's lieutenants, who took him
savagely by the limp paper collar.

"Wher's yer agwine lak a struttin turkey gobbler, wid dat white man, yer
fool nigger? Don't yer know dat ar white trash will put yer back in
slabery?"

The rival candidates were running for the legislature. On one side of
the court house square were aligned the adherents of Laflin, the
carpet-bagger; on the other side the adherents of Hale the scalawag. Each
was haranguing the black sovereigns of the South--men who in other
fields had toiled ever so hard for their country, but whose hands were
unskilled, and whose minds were untutored in this the grandest of human
endeavors--the building up of an immense superstructure that shall stand
"four square to all the winds that blow."

Each candidate had his claquers, slipping into rough, horny hands the
paper representative of manhood, intellectual, patriotic
manhood--manhood compromised by no overt act of treason.

Every star and every stripe upon that magnificent banner just overhead
accentuated the fact that in devious wanderings over blood stained
battle fields, fire scathed villages, homes and plantations it had
followed manhood suffrage as faithfully as it did the tithing agent
throughout the South. Suspended above the heads of the free men, across
the street, was this blood-red warning "No man shall vote here who
followed Lee and Jackson." Vain delusion; as if there could be treason
under that flag; or traitors lurking in its shadows like mad Malays!
Stranger still, that the dust of Jackson should re-animate hearts that
had been broken in a catastrophe, too terrible to be uttered by
patriots. Strangest of all, that living heroes should gather at a
banquet where toasts were spoken in frantic curses of the brave by
fanatics! To the right were barrels of whiskey on tap; to the left were
huge piles of yellow tickets with appropriate devices upon them; and to
the front waved over a bloodless conquest the "Star Spangled banner,"
just as triumphantly as it did at the head of the charging battalions of
Lee and Jackson in Mexico, just as proudly as when the Southern cross
yielded its sovereignty upon the ill-starred field of Appomattox.
Crimsoned to a deeper blush to-day methinks because it is made to
dishonor Lee and Jackson, who shall live forever in the pantheon of
history--as men worthy of emulation, as heroes whose fame is already
written upon amaranthine tablets.

"Who sees them act but envies every deed--
Who hears them groan and does not wish to bleed;
Great men struggling with the storms of state,
And greatly fallen with a falling state."

"Welcome, my son, here lay him down, my friends,
Full in my sight, that I may view at leisure
The bloody corse and count those glorious wounds.
How beautiful is death when earned by virtue."

About high noon Joshua, with his old beaver caved in on both sides and
one skirt of his blue coat torn away, was seen to oscillate, as it were,
betwixt the whiskey barrel on the Laflin side and the rum barrel on
Hales' side, and doubtless, so far as his vote was concerned, preserving
a strict neutrality, that is to say, in the plantation language of the
old negro, "Bress de Lawd, I was so flushtrated wid dat meextry o' rum
und sperrits dat I flung in six wotes fur de cyarpet-sacker und er eben
haf dozen fur de scalyhorg." The result officially declared, made the
agreement between Joshua and Hales' manager about the payment of money
"arter yo man is dun und lected" a nude pact.

Laflin was nominated, and in his address to his constituents flattered
himself that the nomination came unsought and with practical unanimity.

"Our enemies," said he, "shall feel our power, and you will be asked to
co-operate in such manner as will place you above them in this
government. Can I depend on you?"

"Dat yer kin!" came from a hundred throats. "Hurrah for de boss! He is
de ginrul fur dis kentry, und he will lick out de white trash! Yes
siree!"

Such were the exclamations that deafened the ear and horrified the
sense. Joshua was too drunk to be offensively partisan. He lay in the
street waving his old beaver hat and hurrahing the best he could for
Laflin, as he held on to "de jimmyjon," and singing in a drunken,
maudlin way--

"Dis jug lak a ribber is er flowin,
Und I don't keer how fast it flows on boys, on;
While de korn in de low groun is er growin,
Und dis mouf ketch de stuff as it runs."

When Joshua got home next morning the sun was blazing like a great ball
of fire from the mid-heavens. Both skirts of his old blue coat were
gone. His old beaver was flopping and hung limp and crownless over his
right eye, and his old wife paused in her work in her garden to observe
the dilapidated negro as he approached his cabin. She could hear him
muttering to himself, "Talk erbout de niggers ergwine ter de conwenshun,
und er runnin dis here kentry, und er gittin de eddykashun und er bossin
de white fokeses, ef ennybody is er mint ter gin me wun dollar fer my
pribileges, I'm ergwine ter sell out, und I mout tak pay in Federic
munny."

"Ergwine ter sell out, is yer!" exclaimed Hannah with a grunt.

Joshua looked up startled, and pushing the broken brim of his old hat
from his eyes, he saw it was Hannah who had interrupted his soliloquy,
and she continued in ridicule, "Yu is too brash, Joshaway; yer mout git
ter be presydent, den yer cud git er cote wid two skurts to hit. Yu keep
er wotin und er wotin, und bimeby yu is ergwine ter be wun ob dem
Mishunary possels wid whings, same ez er blue herron."

Joshua saw that his wife was making him ridiculous, and he slunk away
into the old cabin and fell asleep upon the rickety bed.

CHAPTER VIII.

MEMORIAL DAY.

The patriotic men of the South who had so valorously insisted upon their
rights throughout the deadly passage at arms, felt that now the war was
over, that the country should settle down on the great common principle
of the constitution--the principle that had triumphed in 1780. They had
an intuitive abhorrence to confiding extravagant power in the hands of
the corrupt and ignorant. They could not understand how the Union could
be preserved by the annexation of eleven conquered provinces, and asked
themselves the question, "Will not the light of these eleven pale stars
be totally obscured by a central sun blighting and destroying every germ
of constitutional liberty?" The Union, said they, was safe in the hands
of President Lincoln. Rome was safe when Cincinnatus was called from the
plow, but she was torn asunder by the wars of Scylla and Marius, and
history is more or less a repetition of itself.

Despite the catastrophe that overlaid the South because of the unhappy
issue of the war; the gravity of which enemies, both domestic and
foreign, have scandalized by calling it "rebellion," despite the fact
that disbanded forces were still prosecuting their conquests, not
against disciplined armies in the field, but against men, women and
children, in the lawful pursuit of peace and happiness, with a vengeance
hourly reinforced by new resources and fresh horrors, and with a terror
that mastered our fettered souls; our people felt that there was at
least one refuge from the blast of the tornado--still a sheltering rock
to which they could flee from the cruel cloud-burst.

In passing the eye rapidly over the outline of the circumstances in
which persecution originated; in reviewing the cause that unsettled the
deep foundations of social life, the southern people felt that there
were hallowed spots of ground so strongly buttressed in the hearts of
the people that the violence of the storm could not rustle a leaf or
shake a twig; that these consecrated precincts they could lawfully
appropriate, and as to this claim, the carpet-baggers with all their
hosts of misrule had the honor, magnanimity and mercy to forget, forgive
and forbear. Here at least there could be no intrusion, because the
baser passions were fenced upon the outside; and amid this sad
continuity of graves the heart would be uplifted in gratitude to God,
who in his great mercy had given to the nineteenth century and to the
South, such undying examples of patriotism and valor. Here lie the bones
of men who dared to say, when the political system of the South was
strangely inverted, that it was such a menace to southern institutions
that it could not go unchallenged; a palpaple violation of the public
faith. To what other convulsions and changes are we predestined? they
asked. Shall we leave our character, our civilization, our very being to
the unresisted assault and prepare such an epitaph for our tombs? Shall
we declare ourselves outlawed from the community of nations? "Nay, war
rather to the cost of the last dollar, and slaughter of the last man."
Such was the sentiment of the men who sleep so peacefully in these
graves. Such was the sentiment of the men, women and children, who
to-day stand over these graves to honor the brave, and to reproduce a
fresh page in history, and lay it reverently by in our southern
Valhalla.

Col. Seymour was the orator of the day. "Stonewall Jackson," his old
commander, the subject, and his friends, Judge Bonham and the
ex-governor honored auditors. The old governor, whitelocked and
furrowed, in introducing the orator observed with a proper decorum. "For
what Stonewall Jackson and his brave men did, we have no apologies to
make here or elsewhere. I had rather wear here," said he, striking his
aged breast, "a scar from the victorious field of Manassas, than the
jewelled star of St George, or the Victorian Cross."

I can reproduce in a fragmentary way parts of the patriotic address
which I herein give to the reader, to show that there was "life in the
old land yet."

"MY COMRADES, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN:

"One year ago to-day, with the reverence of a pilgrim, I stood by the
grave of Stonewall Jackson; and I remembered that every battle order he
ever wrote, every victory he ever won, was a thank offering to the
christian's God.

"I thought, too, of the thousand highways that rayed out from citadels
of oppression, barricaded with human bones. I thought of the seas of
human slaughter, whose redundant tides flowed on and on as libations
upon the altars of ambition.

"I saw as it were the faded crowns and the crumbling thrones of dead
despots, who once girdled the earth with a cincture of fire, and marked
its boundaries with the sword, writing again their achievements where
mankind might read and wonder.

"I saw again the accusing throngs of pensioned widows from the Moselle,
the Rhine, the Danube, the Nile, and wherever else the scarlet standards
of fanaticism flaunted their challenge, hastening to record their
anguish, where the tyrants had memorialized their deeds.

"I saw everywhere the badges of speculative knavery, of incorrigible
wrong; Cossacks all, who knew no law but force, and no patriotism but
greed.

"I thought of the Spaniard, riding to the stirrup-leather in the blood
of babes in the Netherlands; of the Hun and his proclamation 'beauty and
booty,' and I thought of the angel of God's mercy proclaiming an
armistice; giving a refreshing peace to the saturated earth after these
monsters were dead, and I bowed with a profounder reverence at this
hallowed grave in the valley of Virginia.

"I thought then of Alcibiades at Abydos; of Alexander at Issus; of
Scipio at Zama; of Hannibal at Cannae; of Pompey at Pharsalia; of Cæsar
at the Rubicon; of Napoleon at Marengo; and I thought, as Vattel
thought, that warriors such as these failed to prosecute the rights of
their countrymen by force.

"I thought of the keen blade of the assassin that cut in twain the heart
of Alcibiades; of the dagger of Brutus; of the murder of Clitus; of the
hemlock; of the suicide's sword at Thrapsus; of the assassination at
Miletus; of the fifth paragraph in the will of Napoleon; and then I
thought of the bleeding earth these warriors had scarified and scourged,
until they were drunken with excess of human slaughter; and then I
looked back over the tide of centuries for a single example of
disinterested patriotism, and I bowed my head once more to hear a
protest from principalities in their orphanage, and commonwealths in
their sorrow.

"I thought again of Jackson, as he knelt in prayer, when the great guns
were signaling the issue of battle, as with hands uplifted to heaven he
was supplicating his Father to guide and guard his poor country in her
sore hour of travail, and I thought if there were a Pericles somewhere,
who from the foot of our American Acropolis would sound his fame, the
'bloody chasm' would be bridged by a single span.

"A little more than three years ago, by the violation of a plain order,
the tears of a nation, magnanimous and patriotic, rained down upon and
extinguished almost the last camp fire of Gen. Robert E. Lee. Within
that short period events, like chasing shadows, both clouded and
glorified the perspective of history. Within a like period of time this
great country, by a vigorous discipline, has completely obliterated
lines and boundaries that once circumscribed the ambition of men. A
trifling order methinks of Jackson, but it cancelled our charter of
freedom, it rendered a nude pact our declaration of independence. It was
only the nod of the head of an unlettered peasant at Hougomont, but it
sent somersaulting into the sunken road of Ohain the steel clad
cuirassiers of Napoleon the great; dipped the imperial purple starred
with bees, into the silt of the English channel, and paragraphed the
capitulation of Paris with the civil death of the great emperor. Such
are some of the pivots upon which great crises rotate.

Forty eight years after the Scotch-Greys pierced the uplifted visors of
the old guard, there glided down the echoing corridors of time this
sententious order; "Shoot down without halting the man who dares to
cross the lines to-night."

The catastrophe that rode as a courier upon the flank of this order,
hacked the sword, unnerved the arm that was carving out of a heart of
fire a civilization whose altars and whose shrines were relumed by the
torch of liberty; but the God of battles, amid the carnage, called a
halt. It was a night of exasperation, of despair. Ten million people
watched, as watchers never watched before, the last flickering of a
life that laid down its all, at the altar of love and duty. Those ten
million people kept their vigil like vestal virgins, and saw, alas, the
frenzied spirit of hate and wrath snuff out the candle and heard the
groans of the victim of his own blunder, as he cried out in his
delirium, "Let us cross over the river and rest under the shade of the
trees."

There has been now and again an illustrious personage, who appears to us
to have been mirrored upon the foreground of events like some titanic
silhouette. The irony of fate has dealt with such a man, as the creature
of an hour, holding him in thrall in time of peace, to become the storm
spirit in some great crisis. When he dies the face of history is
saddened and obscured, and a twilight like that observed under Southern
skies, falls upon the world. Such a person may be fitly called the
courier of fate; or better still, the tragedian of revolution. He cannot
be weighed or measured by the definitive judgment of contemporaries.
When he dies the stride of conquest is checked; sword blades dripping
with human blood are thrust back into scabbards. In war, he is its
inspiration; its providence.

I make no allusion just now to that splendid effigy that is yet
discerned in the haze that lowers over Vienna, Berlin and Moscow; that
incomprehensible tutor of strategic science, who with sword and cannon
cut a red swath through the capital cities of Europe; and partitioned
the world into two dominions, as if he were only dividing in twain an
apple. I speak not of him, whom this man that "embarrassed God," found a
waif, and made a giant, whose death hastened to its decline that
splendid imperialism that the great Napoleon erected on the ruins of the
commune.

The fall of Stonewall Jackson at Chancellorsville thrust betwixt the
Confederacy and independence a pall so dense, that it could not be cut
asunder with the sword.

I can compare Stonewall Jackson with no hero, living or dead. He stood
in the foreground an unique personality--a phenomenon. With the genius
of war he appeared almost supernaturally mated. Whether his unparalleled
victories were the result of combinations essentially tactical, of
methods logically conceived, or of an intuition that almost without
arrangement forced its power upon vast evolutions, will perhaps never be
known.

The plain profile of this man reminds one of the hard-hitting,
rough-riding Roundhead. His dispatches smacked of the Calvinism of
Ireton and Cromwell. "God blessed our arms at McDowell yesterday."
Wherever there was a downpour of leaden rain Jackson and the "Ironsides"
would have been in accord. His was the spirit that resolved combinations
in his favor. His masterly apprehension of issues diminished the carnage
by plucking the fruit before it was fully ripe. In war as elsewhere he
was absorbed by a fatalism, such as Mohammedans sum up when they say
"What is to be, will be." Napoleon, like an astrologer, believed in a
star; Jackson, unlike an astrologer, believed in Him who made the star
and lighted it in the candelabra of night.

A few years ago an American asked a halting, mutilated soldier of the
Old Guard to tell him how Napoleon died? "The great Emperor dead! He
will not die," was the sententious answer from the man who had fought
under the shadow of his eagles at Wagram and Marengo. It was with
something of this vague, indefinable superstition, of this heroic belief
in "Old Stonewall" as their providence that one of the "Old Brigade"
would hearken dubiously to such a challenge, "Tell us how Stonewall
Jackson died?"

Critics who have judged with more or less asperity have said that his
capacity as a commander was limited to the manoeuvres of a corps.
Strange fatuity! A score of battle fields prove the opinion false. If
such had been the case, the history of Port Republic, Harper's Ferry,
Groveton and Winchester would have been written the other way.

I saw this imperturbable man at Cold Harbor. Again he reminded one of
the "predestined" leader of the Ironsides. "If the enemy stand at
sunset, press them with the bayonet." All commands issuing from him
found their climax in this supreme order. The hero of Toulon never
caressed the fire throated 12 pounder more ardently than did Jackson. He
would have swept every obstruction from the field with a single battery,
or failing in this would have "pressed" them with the bayonet. His camp
fires are now extinguished. The old army of the Shenandoah is an
aggregation of phantoms. Winchester, Port Royal, Fredericksburg and
Chancellorsville appear as mirage reminiscences rather, that steal
unbidden upon the soul when its depths are full of darkness and shadows.

"We walk to-day listlessly over the great, rough, heroic life of
Stonewall Jackson, but on either side of us are monuments and memorials
to his renown ever brightening to a higher luster.

It is a stern business, this going to war. Reconciliation is
problematical, more frequently impossible. The public pulse in 1861 was
intensely excited. One boastingly said upon one side that all the blood
that would be spilt, could be wiped up with a silk handkerchief. Another
on the other side with equal bravado answered that he would live to call
the roll of his slaves from the foot of Bunker Hill, and thus there was
boast and badinage until the "Anaconda" turned his many-hued scales to
the sun on the 21st of July, 1861.

The scene from the northern point of view was exceedingly dramatic--a
magnificent host all in tinsel--a composite picture of carnival and war.
A flash, as of gunpowder; a blazing up as of dry heath; a shout ever so
frightful, and half infernal, and the whole universe seemed wrapt in
flame and wild tumult. But the fire has died out; tumultuous passion is
allayed; the old South with its mountains and glades, rivers and
valleys, the stars above its sodden ground beneath, is still there.

"Jackson believed in the southern cause, as if it had been a revelation
from God. Cromwell said, 'Let us obey God's will' while he whetted his
sword blade to drink the slaughter of women, and nursing babes at
Drogheda. Jackson said, 'Let us obey God's will,' whilst bringing to the
altar the offering of universal emancipation.

"Jackson believed that the war of invasion was a heartless crusade
against mankind and womankind, and the civilization of the South, and
the higher law proclamation was the aftermath of the pernicious
broadcasting of seed sown by Horace Greely, Gerritt Smith, and Joshua R.
Giddings. The old stubble required to be ploughed under, said they;
unhappily in seeding the ground they scattered here and there dragons'
teeth and forthwith there sprang up armed men.

"Jackson believed that the 'Grand army' in holiday attire, with
flaunting banners and careering squadrons, were an aggregation of
iconoclasts, fierce destroyers of images, creeds, institutions,
traditions, homes, country. So believed he when the 'Anaconda' with
panting sides drew back to strike.

"Man to man, bayonet to bayonet, cannon to cannon, bosom to bosom, here
was challenged the asserted right of coercion, of frenzy against frenzy,
patriotism, anger, vanity, hope, dispair; each facing and meeting the
other like dark clashing whirlwinds."

Hither sped Jackson with the swoop of the eagle, down the valley from
Gordonsville to fresher carnage, to a bloodier banquet. Hither he came
with as high a resolve as ever animated Peter the Hermit, to plant upon
the sand dunes of Palestine the fiery cross; whether right or wrong,
cannot now be known. The formula by which he may be judged is yet
undiscovered.

Eleven o'clock, twelve o'clock, and Jackson with folded arms, occupies
the plateau near the "Henry House." Just beyond is a dark confused death
wrestle. Forty thousand athletes against eighty thousand athletes; two
hundred odd iron throats perpetually vomiting an emetic of death.

Hope within him burns like a freshly lighted fagot. There is a quiver in
the hardened nerves; the old sun-scorched cap is in his hand; the lips
are slightly parted; the order given, and the 'old Stonewall Brigade' is
hurled like an immense projectile upon ranks of human flesh. There is a
halt, a recoil; cannon spit out their fire, their hail, their death upon
bosoms bared to the shock. 'There stands Jackson like a Stonewall.'
Under that name he was baptized with blood at Manassas. Everywhere that
faded coat and tarnished stars were the oriflame of battle and the old
brigade followed them as if they had been the white plume of Navarre.

This incomparable leader never failed in a single battle from the day
when with 2800 men at Kernstown he held in check 20,000 men and covered
the retreat of the army from Centreville to Manassas, where he cut their
communications and decoyed their columns into the iron jaws of
Longstreets reserves. Such achievements were not accidental. No
manoeuvre could mislead the clear judgment that presided serenely in
that soul of fire. It is not too much to say that the conqueror of Port
Republic was an overmatch in strategy and technique of war for his
opponents.

He's in the saddle, now fall in--
Steady! the whole brigade!
Hill's at the ford cut off; he'll win
His way out with ball and blade.

What matter if our shoes are worn--
What matter if our feet are torn--
The foe had better ne'er been born
That gets in Stonewall's way.

There were other attractions there, too; flower girls had brought
hither, not the funereal cypress and willow, but bright and beautiful
carnations and violets, and streaming about the heads of the throngs
were battle flags, torn and tattered--almost shredded by shot and
shell--cross-barred with blue, with pale white stars like enameled
lilies peeping out of the azure ground. Lifeless eyes and voiceless lips
now, had cheered these flags with the same joy that once greeted the
eagles of Napoleon. Withered skeleton hands now, had borne them at the
head of charging squadrons and battalions, the guidons of victorious
armies--the guerdon of a nation's trust and faith. If out of the cold,
dead white stars could come again the old gleam of light as it lighted
up the line of direction over the mountain passes of Virginia and the
valley of the Shenandoah, what a halo of glory would encircle Winchester
and Gordonsville and Chantilly! how dramatic the narrative; how truthful
the history; how inspiring the reminiscence; how fully and completely
vindicated the Old South--the lost cause! But there is no light in the
stars, and the broad bands of blue upon the blood-red field are
disfiguring scars upon the face of an incident long since closed, and
closed forever, full of tragedy and patriotism.

The old Governor was exceedingly complimentary towards his old friend,
Colonel Seymour, "for his patriotic address," and very cordially invited
him to visit him at his home.

Alice had formed new acquaintances, and Clarissa too had honored this
most interesting occasion with her presence. She had carried a basketful
of flowers that had been carefully plucked and assorted by her young
mistress, and with very tender hands Alice had placed them in a stone
urn at the foot of a grave that seemed to have been more profusely
decorated than the others. Indeed, it was the grave of the soldier boy
who had been the first to fall in the terrible holocaust of war.

"Miss Alice," Clarissa asked quite feelingly, "Haint yu dun und fotched
back to yo membrunce dis here po sojer boy dat fout in de battle of
Manassy, und was brung back home to pine away und die? Me und yu seed
him arter he got home, und hit made my flesh creep und crawl lak
katterpillers when I seed how de yankeys had mommucked up dat po chile.
Dare wus wun arm all twisted kattykornered twell you couldn't tell
pine-plank whedder it growed wid de fingers pinted disserway or
datterway, und den dare wus er hole in de buzzum dat yu cud farely see
de daylight on de tother side. Grate king! De yankeys mouter shot dat po
chile wid a steer kyart; he wus de wustest lookin' humans I eber seed in
my born days, und he wus de onliest chile of his po mammy. Dare's her
grabe too. Dare day lay side by side, und de Lord in hebben only knows
what day's dun und sed erbout dis here war up yander. I'm ergwine ter
strow dese lillies o' de walley on boff on em. Po fings, I hopes und
prays day has dun und gon froo de purly gates whey dare aint no war, nur
tribulation of sperrets nudder." And the old negro knelt reverently at
the graves and placed the white flowers upon them. As she rose from the
solemn service she said feelingly to her young mistress, "Pend upon it,
missis, sumbody's bleeged to suffer fer all dis gwines on epseps dare
aint no troof in proverdense nur grace nudder. Miss Alice, bress yer
life, Gord aint ergwine ter suffer his people ter be mommucked up in no
sich er fashion. Now dar is dat po 'oman lying out dare; ef de yankeys
hadn't kilt her onliest son, she would be right here ergwine erbout
spreddin flowers on de grabes o' dese po sojers, und she'd er heerd ole
marser a speechifying to all dese fokeses."

Alice was not in the humor to indulge Clarissa in further observations.
She was thinking of a grave over yonder in old Virginia, and wondering
if some fair hand was not arranging the flowers and tenderly placing
them upon the grave of her boy lover.

The setting sun was shooting little slivers of gold from its beautiful
disc all around the cemetery, and the shadows from magnolias and weeping
willows were deepening and darkening all the while, when the Colonel,
his daughter and Clarissa drove home in the old barouche, tired out with
the fatigue incident to the day and its burdens.

CHAPTER IX.

THE BROKEN CRUSE.

The lights were burning with a soft glow one night in the mansion when
the announcement was made by Clarissa that a gentleman stood without,
desiring an audience with the old master. The gentleman introduced
himself as Mr. Summers (half apologetically), a reconstructed rebel.
There was a moment's pause in which, by the shimmer of the lighted
lamps, Colonel Seymour saw that the visitor was quite an elderly man,
without beard and with soft white hair. His address was easy and
insinuating. He was neatly clad in black cloth, and impressed Colonel
Seymour as being a man of affairs. Together they entered the library,
the Colonel observing that he conducted all business transactions in
that particular room just now. Considering the unusual hour at which the
visitor had arrived, in connection with the unpleasant incidents of a
quite eventful day, there was nothing reassuring in the visit: the times
were critical, to say the least, and his own situation so entirely
defenceless, that he felt as if "vigilance was truly the price of
liberty." So he addressed the stranger in a manner quite emphatic--

"May I enquire, sir, to what circumstance I am indebted for the honor of
this visit?"

"Why, certainly, sir," replied the bland stranger. "But will you permit
me first to ask after your health and that of your family? How are you,
sir?"

"My family--that is my wife--is quite unwell, sir. She has been an
invalid for many weeks, and I fear there is no possible hope of her
recovery," said the Colonel.

"Ah, that distresses me greatly; perhaps her condition is not so bad as
you fear. May I ask after your health, sir?"

The Colonel hesitated for a moment, and then observed, deliberately,
"Physically, I am quite well, sir."

"Did I not see you, sir, when we were re-crossing the Potomac on our mad
flight from Gettysburg at the lower ford?" enquired the stranger.

"Mad flight!" echoed the veteran with ill-concealed wrath. "Have you
such a conception of the orderly retreat of our great army without the
loss of a gun and without the capture of a man, as to characterize it as
a mad flight? Were you a Confederate soldier, sir, and do you insult my
intelligence, my loyalty, yea, my bravery, sir, by this challenged
inquiry?"

"My dear sir, if the statement pains you I will recall it instantly.
Pray excuse me. I was Major of the 7th Virginia Cavalry, and as the army
halted at the ford I saw an officer, a Colonel, who was badly wounded
and who with great difficulty sat his horse on that occasion. I now see
that the officer whom I then saw is the gentleman I now address, and I
heartily crave your pardon for the rash expression."

"Very well, then," replied the Colonel. "We are Confederate soldiers
again, and will make our future assaults upon the enemy, if you please,
and not upon Lee's army, that whipped the enemy at Gettysburg; yes, sir,
whipped them and fell back, sir, because our base of supplies was
menaced by the flooding of the Potomac, sir," fairly hissed the old man
in great excitement.

"My dear sir, why this excessive warmth?" cried the stranger; "I am sure
we understand each other; but, my dear sir, the war is over--why make
imaginary assaults upon an imaginary enemy? We are entirely in accord.
We entered the army because we then believed we were right, and--"

"Knew it, sir, knew it, and know it now, sir, know it now, sir,"
fiercely interrupted the Colonel.

"Will you allow me to ask, my dear sir, do you recall those events with
any degree of pleasure?" asked the stranger.

"Yes, and no. When I realize that then and now, the enemy with unbounded
resources was eternally casting into the vat of pernicious fermentation
every act, thought and suggestion that was doubtful in interpretation,
and brewing a concoction as nauseous as the black vomit of the red
harlot herself, and eructating it upon us--the recollection is painful;
but when I remember that every sword thrust into their vitals was the
act of a patriot, I delight to recall events that crowned the old South
with undying glory."

"Allow me one other observation, if you please," asked the stranger in a
tentative way. "Admittedly the South was right, but, my dear sir, do you
think it possible that men like yourself who gallantly fought for a
cause they sincerely believed to be just may not impress their
individuality upon an era that promises so much for the betterment of
our condition as a people?"

"Barely possible, I imagine," replied the Colonel.

"Are you inclined to favor a proposition that has in contemplation the
election of negroes to office."

"No sir; such a proposition, in my opinion, would be so abhorrent to our
ideals of sovereignty that I should consider myself a traitor to the
South and her people. Should I endorse such a proposition, it would be
an act of self degradation."

"But, my dear sir," argued the stranger, "you will pardon me if I should
say that every man must look out for his own safety. Patriotism to a
great extent, is a matter of sentiment, and a great man once said 'It is
the last refuge of a scoundrel.' You of course will not yield to such an
interpretation, nor would I ask you to do so, but, sir, we must let the
dead past bury its dead. We must live in the present, and we must as
skilled architects build for future generations a superstructure that
shall challenge the admiration of men yet unborn."

"That is to say, if I understand you," interrupted the Colonel, "you
propose to inoculate the South with the poison of your infamous
reconstruction policy, to engraft upon our institutions a new and
dangerous character, and besides other atrocious enormities to establish
the spoils principle--its temptation to licentiousness--the watchword to
animate your corrupt followers to a savage and unscrupulous warfare,
sparing neither sex nor age, practicing every species of fraud and
hypocrisy, confounding right and wrong, and robbing the innocent and
virtuous of their only treasure, their manhood and womanhood. What is
your proposition, sir," he exclaimed vehemently, "but a proclamation to
the venal and depraved to rally to the standard of a chief, who, like
the leader of an army of bandits, points to our God-forsaken country,
and says to your plunderers, 'This shall be the reward of victory.' This
is no exageration, sir; disguise it as you may, your proposition leads
to brigandage and ruin."

"But, my dear sir," replied the stranger, "you have so disarmed me by
your arguments that I fear my mission to you will be without avail--will
you allow me to proceed, sir? We deplore the fact, sir, that our most
virtuous men are still braving the dangers they might, with a little
circumspection avoid; still plunging headlong, as it were into great
heated furnaces whose doors are open to receive them."

"How would you advise, sir, that we can protect ourselves, so we will
not be utterly consumed, but only roasted here and there" asked the
Colonel epigrammatically.

"Ah, you trifle with serious matters" replied the white haired stranger.
"There is one way, sir, and one way only--adopt this, sir, and the
country will honor you with its blandishments. Take the tide at its
flood, and co-operate patriotically with those who are enforcing manhood
suffrage without respect to educational or property qualifications, and
the suffrages of the adult freemen, white and black, will be cast for
you for congress."

"Ah, a tempting bait," exclaimed the Colonel, "but it has a rancid
negroish scent, and the hook is too sharp--too sharp sir. Do you intend
to do this thing?" continued the Colonel interrogatively.

"Assuredly, sir," the stranger replied, with might and main.

"Then sir," shouted the indignant man, "this interview ends now."

"One more word," pleaded the stranger, "and I have done--please bear
with me a moment. The Central Executive Committee, of which I am a
member, feeling their great need of your invaluable services have
commissioned me to make known to you their earnest desire, that you will
accept a nomination, from the party, for Congress upon the reform
platform."

"You mean your ultra radical platform," suggested the Colonel.

"No, not exactly that," replied the stranger, "they desire further, if
however you will not accept, that you will submit your views upon the
perplexing subject of negro or manhood suffrage."

"And you are sure your committee will act upon suggestions from me?" he
asked.

"I am quite sure they will," answered Mr. Summers.

"Then, sir, please ask your committee, as a special request from John W.
Seymour, to put the negroes to work upon the farms; and the
carpet-baggers out of the state, and hang the scalawags by the neck
until they are dead, dead, dead, sir."

"Tut, tut, tut," exclaimed the old man excitedly, "you are beside
yourself. Remember, my dear sir, that you are sowing the wind, and by
and by strangers will reap the whirlwind. Good night, Colonel Seymour,
I hope you will think better of the matter.

As the white haired stranger passed out of the door, Clarissa, who was
closing it after him, enquired of her old master, "Mars Jon, what nice
farderly ole man was dat ole gemmen? he peared lak he wus mity
sorrowful. Iseed him put his handkercher to his face lak he mout be
weepin; what did yer say to him, ole marser, dat upsot him so bad?"

"Without deigning a reply Col. Seymour enquired of Clarissa what the
shouting and halloing at her house last night meant?"

"Did yer heer dat racket Mars Jon? I spected yer wus asleep. Twant
nuffin epceps Ned und Joshaway er cuttin up der shines. Dem niggers been
to town und cum bak drunk as horgs in de mash tub und sed how dat dey
had jined de milintery cumpny, und was agwine to clur up de po white
trash in de kentry, fo und aft; when yer hurd dem dey wus er hollern to
Ellik how dat de boss sed dat dey mout go to de town und draw de lan
und de mule und de penshun, dat dey wus agwine to git dern nex Saddy.
Lans sake, ole Marser, I specks we's agwine to have orful times in dis
kentry--de niggers turned loose lak blaten sheepses er shullikin und a
pilfern erbout ebery which a way. Ole fokses used to say dat when de tip
eend ob de moon wus rite red lak, dat yer mout look out fur wars und
yurthshaks too, und I seed dat ur site las nite 'twixt midnite und day
und it fotched what de ole fokses sed rite back to my member'nce. I'd
hate powerful to see any udder bellion in dis lan, dat I would. Not ef
day is ergwine to shoot steerkyarts und wheel-barrers clean froo our
federick sojers, lak dey dun de last time. Grate king, Mars Jon, what
sorter ammynishun did dem dare yankeys shoot outen dare kannons ennyhow?
Frum de way our po sojers wuz tore to pieces, dey put me in membrunce of
ambylances, und powerful big wuns at dat; Grate king! I natally heers
dare po flesh er sizzing dis minnit. Is you sho ole marser dat de good
Lord is ergwine to fetch all dem arms und legs und heds togedder, eend
fur eend at de resurreckshun, so our sojers is ergwine to know pine
plank which is dere'n, und dey drifted disserway und datterway in de
cornfields of Manassy und Chuckkermorger und de Bulls Run? Grate king!"

Contemporaneously with the coming of the troubles that were well nigh
overwhelming the old veteran and his beautiful daughter, the death of
the wife and mother came as it were the knell of doom--the giving away
of the last arch in the compact fabric of human life, the snapping of
the last filament in the web of destiny--the leaking of the last drop of
oil from the broken cruse. With her, the heart could be nerved to
extraordinary endeavor; with her, ever so many bright colors could be
painted upon the angry horizon; with her, the sunset heavens would
diffuse a glamour, all radiant and glorious, as if the angels were
kissing its banners into crimson and with deft fingers were garnishing
the leaky clouds with prismatic hues; with her, the little birds upon
sportive pinions would syllable their songs into the dialect of love.
But she was passing away--passing away like the shadowy vapor that
clings for a moment to the mountain's crest, like the resplendent star
that shimmers more beautifully as it is dipping its disc below the
western verge, and bids us good night--like the breath of the crushed
flower that exhales its aroma for a moment, and is gone. Passing away
from a home that is darkened by shadows, passing away from the hearts
that are consumed into dead white ashes.

What black stygian waters were rushing vehemently against the fretted
casements of these poor souls. Ties that are sundering here are binding
into a glorious sheaf loves and affections up yonder, as imperishable as
God's great throne. Passing away from the frigid griefs that are soon to
environ old Ingleside, when the blood in its channels is to pause in its
circulation, when a negro, vile and savage lacerates the dear, dear face
of her beautiful daughter, and her precious blood follows the thorns.
Passing away before the proud head of her noble husband is bowed in
ignominy, when the shackles of a felon encircle arms--enslave hands that
never struck a blow, except for his bleeding country. Passing away to
plead in her own glorified person to a merciful Father to speedily unite
the three in the realm of joy, where there are no shadows and no griefs.

Poor Alice knew as by revelation that the lifeless form before which she
was kneeling and weeping was not her mother. Oh, what a royal welcome,
what a banqueting upon love there will be by and by, when the terrors
of the horrid reconstruction shall so chill her young blood that it will
cease to flow, by and by, beyond the sighing and the weeping.

Tenderly, yea reverently, the body was placed into the casket and
removed to the parlor, just under the portrait of her dear soldier boy
who went to heaven from the gory field of Manassas. Friends had gathered
into the room and the man of God read from the blessed Book, "I am the
resurrection and the life." The solemn discourse was almost concluded
when ruffianly booted feet were heard in the verandah, and a loud knock
was heard at the door. Armed, uniformed negroes had come--come like an
Arctic gale, chilling and freezing heart and soul--with a mandate to
snatch the living from the dead.

Laflin himself would not have pursued the poor wretch within the barred
precincts of the sepulchre. The infidel powers of the East would have
paused when they saw this "truce of God." But there was no order of
adjournment in the message which they brought. "Forthwith" was the
unequivocal command and "forthwith" was now. They had come to take the
broken-hearted man, though he clung to the casket; come to prod him with
bayonets if the rigid limbs did not respond quickly to the command,
"Quick time--March!"

Once or twice, through sheer faint, the poor old man fell out of line
and against a black guard who violently pushed him into line with the
imprecation--

"D--n yu, git back inter yer place, er I'll stick my bagonet clar froo
yer."

He was arraigned before three white men and four negroes, and in the
presence of whom stood the white-haired stranger, Mr. Summers.

The Colonel did not clearly comprehend the character of the accusation
against him. He had been informed by no one except in a general way.
Perhaps he would learn as he followed Mr. Summers in his address to this
tribunal.

"Gentlemen," said Mr. Summers, continuing his speech, "whilst it was my
plain duty to report upon the case of Colonel Seymour, I do so with the
hope that he may be given a day to answer; indeed, gentlemen, I pray
that you may not deal harshly with this old man, who is now in the sere
and yellow leaf. You say that you will require him to turn his back upon
the traditions of the past--upon the ancient landmarks; that he shall
fraternize with our party, in fact become one of us, or his condition
shall be made intolerable and his life burdensome. Spare the rod,
gentlemen, for his sake and for the sake of his only child."

"What have you to say for yourself, sir," asked the chairman frigidly,
addressing himself to Colonel Seymour.

"Sir, I am an old man. One more turn of your wheel--the tightening of
the cord ever so slight--and a life worthless and burdensome will drop
at your feet. The standard of truth, virtue and patriotism has bowed its
once lofty crest, and is now prostrate in the dust. All that was
beautiful and lovely in this land of our fathers is sinking, rotting,
dying beneath the blight and mildew of your accursed lust of power. Why
should I survive? My life, sir, is behind me. You ask me to be your
slave. Sir, your bondage is inexorable--it is the life of an outlaw, a
traitor, a felon. You ask me to be your friend, and I should consort
with thieves; I should crucify every principle of a man. You ask me to
be your candidate--my consent would be an act of stultification. Sir,
against your savage principles I swear an eternal hatred and wage an
interminable war."

The feeble old man sank back exhausted into his seat.

"We intend," exclaimed the chairman with great deliberation, "to scarify
the old wounds of the rebels until they bleed afresh. Sixty days, sir,
within which to prove your loyalty. You can retire sir."

Thus ran the order, marked with three blood-red stars. * * *

[Illustration: "Kase de high shurruff he dun und seed what wuz ergwine
ter cum arter de bellion fell, und he flopped ober ter de
publikins"----"Ole Mars Jon haint ergwine ter flop nowheys," replied
Clarissa.]

CHAPTER X.

FREEDOM IN FLOWER.

Ned, who was now in his seventy-third year, was drinking to intoxication
from the cup the carpet-baggers had lifted to his lips.

He sat in the shade of a mulberry tree near his cabin furbishing his
musket for the next company inspection, and stopping now and then to
observe the sportive pranks of a domesticated raccoon.

He heard the irritable voice of his old master calling him from the
verandah of the mansion, and observed with gravity to his wife--

"Jes lissen at dat! Golly! to be sho ole Semo dun und furgit dat dis
Soufland is konkered und de niggers sot free. Haint dat a purefied
scandle? De werry fust munny I gits outen de bero, arter I pays fur de
clay-banks und de lan und de grate-house, I'm ergwine to uprare er silum
fer dat po stractified creetur way out in de big woods, twixt dis
plantashun und de crick, whay he kin call 'Ned, Ned!' und nobody's
ergwine ter ansur but de blue herrons. Don't yu heer his gwines on,
Clarsy? Jeemes' ribber! don't yu heer dat ofe he's dun und swore! Sposin
de surcus rider had er heerd dat cuss wurd he flung at me und yu? Golly!
he'd histe him upon de horns o' de haltar twell he riggled same ez er
fettered wezul. Dat makes me sez whot I duz erbout dese ole isshu white
fokeses. When dare aint no grass in de crap und de smoke house am full
o' meat, hits brudder dis und sister dat; but bimeby, when de ole isshu
draps inter de trap sot by de scalyhorgs, Jeemes' ribber! 'ligion hez
dun und tuck er backsot. Don't yu see? Yu mout sot down whey dat ole
man is wid yo teef clinched same ez er hasp in de lock, und he mout be
gwine on wid his stractified nonsense, und ef yu didn't spishun nuffin,
de fust fing you node hit mout be ole marser dis und ole marser dat, und
bimeby yu'd clean clare furgit yosef, dat yu wud, und be totin de
grubbin ho und er swettin ober de wire grass fur de secesh. Don't yu
see? Me und yu's jes bleeged ter walk perpendikler ur we's gwine ter be
kotched agen lak minks."

"Dat's de troof, hit sho is," interrupted Clarissa with emphasis.

"Und den," Ned continued, "me und yu mout be wusser niggers dan in
slabery time."

"Pend upon it dat po ole white man has dun und gon plum strakted. I
nebber seed sich shines as he is a cuttin up, by his lone lorn sef, in
all my born days, nur yu nudder. Dar he now trapesing furwards and
baccards wid boff hans ahin his back und histin up his cote skeerts, und
a callin, Ned, Ned! jes lac slabery times. Ef de good Lord puts off his
wisitation much furder, und don't take him outen his misry, hes gwine to
sassinate hissef fore de time kums. 'Ned, Ned; I ses Ned Ned,'" grunted
the old freedman mockingly. "Jes as well be callin wun of Joshaway's
catfishes outen de crick, ebery bit an grane. Clarsy, don't it mak you
sorter solumkolly to see how idjeotick ole mister Semo is a gittin, sens
de culled fokes is franksized?"

"It sho do," replied Clarissa with some force of expression.

"Pend erpon it woman, ef we culled genmen don't take holt of dis here
plantashun, und de house, und de craps, us is all agwine to suck sorrer,
shows you born."

"Dats de Lords truff" exclaimed Clarissa.

"Mr. Semo, he don't look arter nuffin, dat he don't," Ned continued,

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