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