_The Old Slave-holders.--The Freedmen.--Murders.--School-teachers.
--Riot at Memphis.--Mob at New Orleans.--Murder of Union Men--Riot at a
Camp-meeting._
Haughty and scornful as ever; regarding themselves as overpowered, but
not conquered; openly regretting their failure to establish a Southern
Confederacy; backed up by President Johnson in their rebellious
course,--the Southerners appear determined to reduce the blacks to a
state of serfdom if they cannot have them as slaves. The new labor-laws
of all the Southern States place the entire colored population as much
in the hands of the whites as they were in the palmiest day of chattel
slavery, if we except the buying and selling. The negro _whipping-post_,
which the laws of war swept away, has, under Andrew Johnson’s
reconstruction policy, been again re-instated throughout the South.
The Freedmen’s Bureau is as powerless to-day to protect the emancipated
blacks in their rights as was the Hon. Samuel Hoar to remain in South
Carolina against the will of the slave-holders of the days of Calhoun
and of McDuffie. Where the old masters cannot control their former
slaves, they do not hesitate to shoot them down in open day, as the
following will show:--
A Texas correspondent writes to “The New-York Evening Post” (he dare not
allow his name and residence to be printed) as follows:--
“Every day I hear of murders of freedmen. Since five o’clock this
afternoon, four new ones have been reported here. The disloyal press
suppress the mention of such occurrences.
“Should there be another outbreak in Texas, very many Union men, as well
as a large proportion of freedmen, would at once be massacred in order
to bring about such another reign of terror as would make the South a
unit....
“Three freedmen were murdered in or near the line of an adjoining county
a few days ago. The wagon which one of them was driving was robbed of
all the fine goods it contained. The other two freedmen were shot by the
same man, who is believed to be their former owner. The head of one
of them was cut off, and they were left unburied. No investigation has
been, or probably will be, made into these murders. If any Union man
were to move in the matter, it would be at the peril of his life.
“The brave and loyal man who told me of these murders was applied to by
a freed man, a kinsman of one of the murdered, for advice. The freedman
was told to go to Austin, and report the facts to the agent of the
Freedmen’s Bureau: but he appears not to have arrived. Like the freedman
despatched by the chief justice of Refugio County, with a letter setting
forth the disorders in that county, he may have been shot on the road.
“My informant, seeing that I set about writing down the facts as to
these murders just as he stated them, said to me, ‘Do not make my name
public, for it is all I can do to hold my own in----------county just
now;’ and added, ‘Ikeep no money in my house but a few dollars for
current expenses. I can take care of myself in the daytime, but I do not
feel safe at night.’”
On the 2d of April, 1866, a Mr. Quisenbery was tried at the Circuit
Court for the County of Louisa, Va., for the murder of Washington Green.
Green was the former slave of Quisenbery, had worked for said Quisenbery
from the fall of Richmond, about the 3d of April, 1865, until about the
1st of October, 1865, when Quiserinbery told him, the said Washington
Green, that he had better go and get work somewhere else; that he would
not pay him for any thing that he had done. Washington Green went to
work for a lady to get some shingles for her, and Quisenbery made a
contract with this lady, that she should pay him, for Green’s getting
the shingles, by thrashing out his, Quisenbery’s, wheat. It did not
satisfy Washington Green, that Quisenbery should not only refuse to pay
him for the work which he had already done for him, but that he should
also collect what he had earned by hard working for this lady. Green
went to Quisenbery, and asked him for the amount of getting the shingles
for this lady. Quisenbery said, “Washington, this is three times that
you have been after me for that money; I am now going to my hog-pen, and
I warn you not to follow me.” He repeated that warning three times. He
then went to the hog-pen, got over the fence, stooped down to throw out
some corn that the hogs had not eaten. He looked up, and saw Washington
Green at or near the fence, and said, “I thought I warned you not to
follow me,” and pulled out his knife, and stabbed Green in the throat,
and killed him instantly. This is the evidence and confession of
Quisenbery, who was tried, and the jury found a verdict of _not guilty_,
without scarcely leaving the jury-box; and Quisenbery was declared
guiltless of any crime amid the plaudits of the people.
At Jacksonville, Fla., on the 20th of June last, a freedman complained
before Col. Hart, that his last employer would not pay him. The black
man afterwards went to the pine-woods, chopping logs. While absent, the
man of whom he had complained got a woman to go to the freedman’s wife,
and get into a difficulty with her; whereupon the freedman’s wife was
arrested, tried, found guilty, and fined fifty dollars, being unable to
pay which, she was _put up at auction_, and sold to the person who would
take her for the shortest time, and pay fine and costs. The _shortest
time was four years!_ Under another law of the State, the children were
_bound out till they should become of age!_
A free colored man named Jordan opened, by permission of the commandant
of the post at Columbia, Tenn., a school for the blacks. The school
went on smoothly till Monday, the 11th instant, when two soldiers of the
Eighth Tennessee Cavalry went into the school, and broke it up; but the
teacher, being so advised, resumed his labor the next day. But, on the
14th, Messrs. Datty, Porter, White, and others, including soldiers of
the Eighth Tennessee, the party headed by White the city constable,
proceeded to the schoolroom, seized the teacher, and brought him under
guard to the court-house, where he received a mock trial. When being
asked for his authority for teaching a school, Mr. Jordan replied, that
Lieut.-Col. Brown and Major Sawyer were his authority, and wished they
would bring Major Sawyer in. One of the men went out, but was absent
only for a moment, when he came in, stating that Major Sawyer could
not be found; whereupon Mr. Andrews ordered that the teacher be given
twenty-five lashes. And they were administered, the man receiving the
scourge like a martyr, telling his persecutors that he was willing to
suffer for the right; and that Christ had received the same punishment
for the same purpose; and he thought, if he could teach the children to
read the Bible so that they might learn of heaven, he was doing a good
work. To this, a soldier of the Eighth Tennessee said, “If you want to
go to heaven you must pray: you can’t get there by teaching the niggers.
We can’t go to school, and I’ll be damned if niggers shall.”
Volumes might be written, recounting the shameful outrages committed at
the South since the surrender of Lee. Not satisfied with murders of an
individual character, the Southerners have, of late, gone into it more
extensively. The first of these took place at Memphis, Tenn., May 4,
1866. A correspondent of Hon. W. D. Kelley, of Philadelphia, said,--
“I have been an eye-witness to such sights as should cause the age in
which we live to blush. Negro men have been shot down in cold blood on
the streets; barbers, at their chairs and in their own shops; draymen on
their drays, while attempting to earn an honest living; hotel-waiters,
while in the discharge of their duties; hackmen, while driving female
teachers of negro children to their schools; laborers, while handling
cotton on the wharves, &c. All the negro schoolhouses, and all the negro
churches, and many of the houses of the negroes, have been burned, this
too, under the immediate auspices of the city police and the mayor:
in fact, most of these outrages were committed by the police
themselves,--_all Irish, and all rebels, and mostly drunk_. This is not
the half: I have no heart to recount the outrages I have _seen_. The
most prominent citizens stand on the streets, and see negroes hunted
down and shot, and _laugh_ at it as a good joke. Attempts have been made
to fire every Government building, and fire has been set to many of the
abodes and business-places of Union people.
“There is no doubt but that there is a _secret_ organization sworn
to purge the city of all Northern men who are not _rebels_, all negro
teachers, all Yankee enterprise, and return the city ‘to the good old
days of Southern rule and chivalry.’
“When the miscreants had fired Collins’s chapel (a large frame church,
corner of Washington and Orleans Streets, which would now cost fully ten
thousand dollars, to rebuild), they stood around the fire which lighted
the midnight sky, and made the night hideous with their hellish cheers
for ‘Andy Johnson’ and a ‘white man’s government!’ And the supporters
of the President, aside from being midnight burners of churches and
schoolhouses, robbed women and children, and men,--sparing none on
account of age, sex, physical disabilities, or innocence of crime,--even
burning women and children alive.
“The board of aldermen had their usual meetings last night. Their
proceedings show no reference to the riot. No rewards have been
offered for the apprehension of the murderous assassins, thieves, and
house-burners.”
Next came, on a still larger scale, the rebel riot at New Orleans.
The Military Commission appointed to investigate the cause of the riot
charge it upon Mayor Monroe, Lieut.-Gov. Voorhies, and the rebel press
of the city. The Commission speak of the murders as follows:--
“They can only say that the work of massacre was pursued with a cowardly
ferocity unsurpassed in the annals of crime. Escaping negroes were
mercilessly pursued, shot, stabbed, and beaten to death by the mob
and police. Wounded men on the ground begging for mercy _were savagely
despatched_ by mob, police, firemen, and, incredible as it may seem,
in two instances by women; but, in two or three most honorable and
exceptionable cases, white men and members of the Convention were
protected by members of the police, both against the mob, and against
other policemen. The chief of police, by great exertions, defended in
this manner Gov. Hahn.
“After the attack had commenced, the police appeared to be under no
control as such; but acted as and with the mob. Their cheers and waving
of hats as they threw the mangled Dostie, then supposed a _corpse, like
a dead dog into the cart, sufficiently show their unison of feeling with
their allies_.”
Nothing, we take it, is more apparent from the array of evidence
presented in this Report than that the New-Orleans riot was a
preconcerted, deliberate, cold-blooded attempt to massacre the
Unionists, white and black, of that city. The design can be traced like
the development of a tragedy. Mayor Monroe is busy for a long time
in advance in stirring up the passions of the mob by stigmatizing the
members of the Convention as outlaws and revolutionists, threatening
them with wholesale arrest, and preparing his police for action. He
might have ascertained that the members had resolved to peacefully
submit the legality of their course to the proper tribunals; but he had
bloodier ends in view. He knew that the excitement he had fanned would
surely lead to an outburst of violence, unless restrained by two forces
alone,--his police and the United-States troops. To keep the latter
away, Mayor Monroe suppresses all requisition for them until it is too
late; and then tries to cover up his conduct with downright falsehood
and perjury. His police, instead of being brought forward openly, so
that they would have to take sides for the preservation of order, are
concealed in hiding-places till the collision occurs; when they rush
forth as allies of the mob, murdering negroes in cold blood; firing
repeatedly into the Convention, even after a white flag is raised;
shooting and barbarously maltreating the wounded; and perpetrating such
feats of cowardly brutality and ferocity as were never before seen
in this country, except in the congenial affairs of Memphis and Fort
Pillow.
Nothing goes so far towards reconciling one to what is called the
“total-depravity” theory, as the contemplation of those scenes of blood.
They carry us back to the crimes and cruelty of the Massacre of
St. Bartholomew. Mayor Monroe acts the part of the Duke of Guise;
Lieut.-Gov. Voorhies, that of the Duke of Alva; while President Johnson
acts the part of Charles IX., who, on approaching the burning corpse of
Admiral Coligny, exclaimed, “The smell of a dead enemy is always good.”
During the mob, the appearance of rebel organizations on the ground with
marks and badges, and scores of similar incidents, show that the plot
was as deliberate as it was infernal.
Again: a dispassionate consideration of the facts detailed by the
Commission will lead to the conclusion that the underlying cause of the
New-Orleans massacre was the old virus of slavery, still existing in
the passions of Southern society, and likely to issue forth in violence
whenever it shall be favored by similar circumstances. The members of
the Louisiana Convention were entirely harmless, no matter how obnoxious
or how indiscreet they were. Even if they were not disposed to submit
their pretensions to a legal test,--as they were,--there would have
been no difficulty in making their peaceable arrest on the occurrence
of their first overt act; but the mob of New Orleans, who, by the
acquiescence of the better classes, or else in defiance of them
through their great numerical preponderance, elect and control the
city authorities, were determined to permit no such result of the
controversy. The Convention claimed to exercise free speech; they would
have none of that Northern innovation: it was composed of Union men; and
they should be made to feel their place in “reconstructed” New Orleans:
worse than all, they had for their allies and supporters _colored_
Unionists; and _they_ should be made such an example of as should deter
any more such movements at the South. It was a bloody crusade against
the men and the principles that had triumphed in the Government of this
country. Well do this Commission say, that, but for martial law and the
United-States troops, “fire and bloodshed would have raged throughout
the night in all negro quarters of the city, and that the lives and
property of Unionists and Northern men would have been at the mercy of
the mob.” Finally: the Report throws an impressive light upon President
Johnson’s connection with the New-Orleans massacre. He had already, in
a manner, inculpated himself in his speech at St. Louis. He there
suppresses all the facts found by the Commission, and stigmatizes the
members of the Convention as “traitors,” engaged, under the instigation
of Congress, in getting up a “rebellion,” and therefore responsible for
all the bloodshed that occurred. That is precisely the pretence of Mayor
Monroe and his mob. Well might the President, therefore, play into their
hands. Gen. Baird, from official experience, has been taught not to
interfere with Mayor Monroe. When he telegraphs to Washington for
orders, he gets no answer: the other side telegraph, and receive replies
that encourage them in their course. Gen. Sheridan, like a true soldier,
telegraphs the facts, with indignant comments; and his despatches are
garbled for public effect. Of all the murderers on that dreadful day,
not one has been called to account; nor has any one of them received
therefor the least censure of the Government at Washington.
The appointment, since the riot, of Adams, one of the most notorious of
the rioters, as sergeant in the police force, by Mayor Monroe, confirms
the fact of his guilt in the massacre. The blood of the martyrs Dostie
and Horton cries to Heaven for justice for the Union men of the South,
white and black. The mob, composed of ex-rebel soldiers and citizens,
that broke up the colored campmeeting near Baltimore, Md., a few weeks
after the New-Orleans riot, was only a part of the programme concocted
by the men engaged in carrying out the reconstruction policy of Andrew
Johnson.