IN the death of Mr. Lincoln, a group of radical politicians, hitherto
suppressed, saw their supreme opportunity to obtain control of the
nation in the crisis of an approaching Presidential campaign.
Now they could fasten their schemes of proscription, confiscation, and
revenge upon the South.
Mr. Lincoln had held these wolves at bay during his life by the power
of his great personality. But the Lion was dead, and the Wolf, who had
snarled and snapped at him in life, put on his skin and claimed the
heritage of his power. The Wolf whispered his message of hate, and in
the hour of partisan passion became the master of the nation.
Busy feet had been hurrying back and forth from the Southern states to
Washington whispering in the Wolf’s ear the stories of sure success,
if only the plan of proscription, disfranchisement of whites, and
enfranchisement of blacks were carried out.
This movement was inaugurated two years after the war, with every
Southern state in profound peace, and in a life and death struggle
with nature to prevent famine. The new revolution destroyed the Union a
second time, paralysed every industry in the South, and transformed ten
peaceful states into roaring hells of anarchy. We have easily outlived
the sorrows of the war. That was a surgery which healed the body. But
the child has not yet been born whose children’s children will live
to see the healing of the wounds from those four years of chaos, when
fanatics blinded by passion, armed millions of ignorant negroes and
thrust them into mortal combat with the proud, bleeding, halfstarving
Anglo-Saxon race of the South. Such a deed once done, can never be
undone. It fixes the status of these races for a thousand years, if not
for eternity.
The South was now rapidly gathering into two hostile armies under these
influences, with race marks as uniforms--the Black against the White.
The Negro army was under the command of a triumvirate, the Carpet-bagger
from the North, the native Scalawag and the Negro Demagogue.
Entirely distinct from either of these was the genuine Yankee soldier
settler in the South after the war, who came because he loved its genial
skies and kindly people.
Ultimately some of these Northern settlers were forced into politics
by conditions around them, and they constituted the only conscience
and brains visible in public life during the reign of terror which the
“Reconstruction” régime inaugurated.
In the winter of 1866 the Union League at Hambright held a meeting of
special importance. The attendance was large and enthusiastic.
Amos Hogg, the defeated candidate for Governor in the last election, now
the President of the Federation of “Loyal Leagues,” had sent a special
ambassador to this meeting to receive reports and give instructions.
This ambassador was none other than the famous Simon Legree of Red
River, who had migrated to North Carolina attracted by the first
proclamation of the President, announcing his plan for readmitting the
state to the Union. The rumours of his death proved a mistake. He had
quit drink, and set his mind on greater vices.
In his face were the features of the distinguished ruffian whose cruelty
to his slaves had made him unique in infamy in the annals of the South.
He was now preeminently the type of the “truly loyal”. At the first
rumour of war he had sold his negroes and migrated nearer the border
land, that he might the better avoid service in either army. He
succeeded in doing this. The last two years of the war, however, the
enlisting officers pressed him hard, until finally he hit on a brilliant
scheme.
He shaved clean, and dressed as a German emigrant woman. He wore dresses
for two years, did house work, milked the cows and cut wood for a good
natured old German. He paid for his board, and passed for a sister, just
from the old country.
When the war closed, he resumed male attire, became a violent Union man,
and swore that he had been hounded and persecuted without mercy by the
Secessionist rebels.
He was looking more at ease now than ever in his life. He wore a silk
hat and a new suit of clothes made by a fashionable tailor in Raleigh.
He was a little older looking than when he killed Uncle Tom on his farm
some ten years before, but otherwise unchanged. He had the same short
muscular body, round bullet head, light grey eyes and shaggy eyebrows,
but his deep chestnut bristly hair had been trimmed by a barber. His
coarse thick lips drooped at the corners of his mouth and emphasised
the crook in his nose. His eyes, well set apart, as of old were bold,
commanding, and flashed with the cold light of glittering steel. His
teeth that once were pointed like the fangs of a wolf had been filed by
a dentist. But it required more than the file of a dentist to smooth out
of that face the ferocity and cruelty that years of dissolute habits had
fixed.
He was only forty-two years old, but the flabby flesh under his eyes and
his enormous square-cut jaw made him look fully fifty.
It was a spectacle for gods and men, to see him harangue that Union
League in the platitudes of loyalty to the Union, and to watch the crowd
of negroes hang breathless on his every word as the inspired Gospel of
God. The only notable change in him from the old days was in his speech.
He had hired a man to teach him grammar and pronunciation. He had high
ambitions for the future.
“Be of good cheer, beloved!” he said to the negroes. “A great day is
coming for you. You are to rule this land. Your old masters are to dig
in the fields and you are to sit under the shade and be gentlemen. Old
Andy Johnson will be kicked out of the White House or hung, and the
farms you’ve worked on so long will be divided among you. You can rent
them to your old masters and live in ease the balance of your life.”
“Glory to God!” shouted an old negro.
“I have just been to Washington for our great leader, Amos Hogg. I’ve
seen Mr. Sumner, Mr. Stevens and Mr. Butler. I have shown them that we
can carry any state in the South, if they will only give you the ballot
and take it away from enough rebels. We have promised them the votes in
the Presidential election, and they are going to give us what we want.”
“Hallelujah! Amen! Yas Lawd!” The fervent exclamations came from every
part of the room.
After the meeting the negroes pressed around Legree and shook his hand
with eagerness--the same hand that was red with the blood of their race.
When the crowd had dispersed a meeting of the leaders was held.
Dave Haley, the ex-slave trader from Kentucky who had dodged back and
forth from the mountains of his native state to the mountains of Western
North Carolina and kept out of the armies, was there. He had settled
in Hambright and hoped at least to get the postoffice under the new
dispensation.
In the group was the full blooded negro, Tim Shelby. He had belonged to
the Shelbys of Kentucky, but had escaped through Ohio into Canada before
the war. He had returned home with great expectations of revolutions to
follow in the wake of the victorious armies of the North. He had been
disappointed in the programme of kindliness and mercy that immediately
followed the fall of the Confederacy; but he had been busy day and night
since the war in organising the negroes, in secretly furnishing them
arms and wherever possible he had them grouped in military posts and
regularly drilled. He was elated at the brilliant prospects which
Legree’s report from Washington opened.
“Glorious news you bring us, brother!” he exclaimed as he slapped Legree
on the back.
“Yes, and it’s straight.”
“Did Mr. Stevens tell you so?”
“He’s the man that told me.”
“Well, you can tie to him. He’s the master now that rules the country,”
said Tim with enthusiasm.
“You bet he’s runnin’ it. He showed me his bill to confiscate the
property of the rebels and give it to the truly loyal and the niggers.
It’s a hummer. You ought to have seen the old man’s eyes flash fire when
he pulled that bill out of his desk and read it to me.”
“When will he pass it?”
“Two years, yet. He told me the fools up North were not quite ready
for it; and that he had two other bills first, that would run the South
crazy and so fire the North that he could pass anything he wanted and
hang old Andy Johnson besides.”
“Praise God,” shouted Tim, as he threw his arms around Legree and hugged
him.
Tim kept his kinky hair cut close, and when excited he had a way of
wrinkling his scalp so as to lift his ears up and down like a mule.
His lips were big and thick, and he combed assiduously a tiny moustache
which he tried in vain to pull out in straight Napoleonic style.
He worked his scalp and ears vigourously as he exclaimed, “Tell us the
whole plan, brother!”
“The plan’s simple,” said Legree. “Mr. Stevens is going to give the
nigger the ballot, and take it from enough white men to give the niggers
a majority. Then he will kick old Andy Johnson out of the White House,
put the gag on the Supreme Court so the South can’t appeal, pass his
bill to confiscate the property of the rebels and give it to loyal men
and the niggers, and run the rebels out.”
“And the beauty of the plan is,” said Tim with unction, “that they are
going to allow the Negro to vote to give himself the ballot and not
allow the white man to vote against it. That’s what I call a dead sure
thing.” Tim drew himself up, a sardonic grin revealing his white teeth
from ear to ear, and burst into an impassioned harangue to the excited
group. He was endowed with native eloquence, and had graduated from a
college in Canada under the private tutorship of its professors. He was
well versed in English History. He could hold an audience of negroes
spell bound, and his audacity commanded the attention of the boldest
white man who heard him.
Legree, Perkins and Haley cheered his wild utterances and urged him to
greater flights.
He paused as though about to stop when Legree, evidently surprised and
delighted at his powers said, “Go on! Go on!”
“Yes, go on,” shouted Perkins. “We are done with race and colour lines.”
A dreamy look came to Tim’s eyes as he continued, “Our proud white
aristocrats of the South are in a panic it seems. They fear the coming
power of the Negro. They fear their Desdemonas may be fascinated again
by an Othello! Well, Othello’s day has come at last. If he has dreamed
dreams in the past his tongue dared not speak, the day is fast coming
when he will put these dreams into deeds, not words.
“The South has not paid the penalties of her crimes. The work of the
conqueror has not yet been done in this land. Our work now is to
bring the proud low and exalt the lowly. This is the first duty of the
conqueror.
“The French Revolutionists established a tannery where they tanned the
hides of dead aristocrats into leather with which they shod the common
people. This was France in the eighteenth century with a thousand years
of Christian culture.
“When the English army conquered Scotland they hunted and killed every
fugitive to a man, tore from the homes of their fallen foes their wives,
stripped them naked, and made them follow the army begging bread, the
laughing stock and sport of every soldier and camp follower! This was
England in the meridian of Anglo-Saxon intellectual glory, the England
of Shakespeare who was writing Othello to please the warlike populace.
“I say to my people now in the language of the inspired Word, ‘All
things are yours!’ I have been drilling and teaching them through the
Union League, the young and the old. I have told the old men that they
will be just as useful as the young. If they can’t carry a musket they
can apply the torch when the time comes. And they are ready now to
answer the call of the Lord!”
They crowded around Tim and wrung his hand.
* * * * *
Early in 1867, two years after the war, Thaddeus Stevens passed through
Congress his famous bill destroying the governments of the Southern
states, and dividing them into military districts, enfranchising the
whole negro race, and disfranchising one-fourth of the whites. The army
was sent back to the South to enforce these decrees at the point of
the bayonet. The authority of the Supreme Court was destroyed by a
supplementary act and the South denied the right of appeal. Mr. Stevens
then introduced his bill to confiscate the property of the white people
of the South. The negroes laid down their hoes and plows and began to
gather in excited meetings. Crimes of violence increased daily. Not
a night passed but that a burning barn or home wrote its message of
anarchy on the black sky.
The negroes refused to sign any contracts to work, to pay rents, or
vacate their houses on notice even from the Freedman’s Bureau.
The negroes on General Worth’s plantation, not only refused to work, or
move, but organised to prevent any white man from putting his foot on
the land.
General Worth procured a special order from the headquarters of the
Freedman’s Bureau for the district located at Independence. When the
officer appeared and attempted to serve this notice, the negroes mobbed
him.
A company of troops were ordered to Hambright, and the notice served
again by the Bureau official accompanied by the Captain of this company.
The negroes asked for time to hold a meeting and discuss the question.
They held their meeting and gathered fully five hundred men from the
neighbourhood, all armed with revolvers or muskets. They asked Legree
and Tim Shelby to tell them what they should do. There was no uncertain
sound in what Legree said. He looked over the crowd of eager faces with
pride and conscious power.
“Gentlemen, your duty is plain. Hold your land. It’s yours. You’ve
worked it for a lifetime. These officers here tell you that old Andy
Johnson has pardoned General Worth and that you have no rights on the
land without his contract. I tell you old Andy Johnson has no right to
pardon a rebel, and that he will be hung before another year. Thaddeus
Stevens, Charles Sumner and B. F. Butler are running this country. Mr.
Stevens has never failed yet on anything he has set his hand. He has
promised to give you the land. Stick to it. Shake your fist in old Andy
Johnson’s face and the face of this Bureau and tell them so.”
“Dat we will!” shouted a negro woman, as Tim Shelby rose to speak.
“You have suffered,” said Tim. “Now let the white man suffer. Times
have changed. In the old days the white man said, ‘John, come black my
boots’! And the poor negro had to black his boots. I expect to see the
day when I will say to a white man, ‘Black my boots!’ And the white man
will tip his hat and hurry to do what I tell him.”
“Yes, Lawd! Glory to God! Hear dat now!”
“We will drive the white men out of this country. That is the purpose of
our friends at Washington. If white men want to live in the South they
can become our servants. If they don’t like their job they can move to
a more congenial climate. You have Congress on your side, backed by a
million bayonets. There is no President. The Supreme Court is chained.
In San Domingo no white man is allowed to vote, hold office, or hold
a foot of land. We will make this mighty South a more glorious San
Domingo.”
A frenzied shout rent the air. Tim and Legree were carried on the
shoulders of stalwart men in triumphant procession with five hundred
crazy negroes yelling and screaming at their heels.
The officers made their escape in the confusion and beat a hasty retreat
to town. They reported the situation to headquarters, and asked for
instructions.