Southern Feeling after the Meeting of Congress.
December broke the earliest hope of the revived Southern temper. The
preponderating Rebel element, which reorganized the State Governments
under Mr. Johnson’s proclamations, first expected to take Congress by a
_coup de main_, organize the House through a coalition with the Northern
Democracy, and, having thus attained the mastery of the situation,
repeal the war legislation and arrange matters to suit themselves.
Defeated in this by the incorruptible firmness of Mr. McPherson, the
Clerk, they next hoped by Executive pressure, combined with Southern
clamor, to force a speedy admission of all Representatives from the
rebellious States who could take the prescribed oath. These once in, the
rest was easy. They were to combine with the Northern Democracy and such
weak Republicans as Executive influence could control, repeal the test
oath, thus admit all the other Southern applicants, and turn over the
Government to a party which, at the North, had opposed the war for the
Union, and at the South had sustained the war against it.
By the 1st of January all knew that the plot had failed. A few days
later, I left the Capital again for the South.
* * * * *
Traveling wholly by land from Washington to New Orleans, taking the trip
leisurely, with frequent stoppages and constant intercourse with the
people, I had abundant opportunities for discovering at once the marked
change in the tone of public sentiment. In November I had found it
buoyant and defiant. In January it was revengeful, but cowed.
Prominent public men were much more cautious in their expressions. They
talked less of their demands; were more disposed to make elaborate
arguments on their rights. There were few boasts as to what the South
would do, or how heartily that true Southern man, the President, would
sustain them; there was more tendency to complain that they had been
whipped for trying to go out, and that now the door was shut in their
faces when they tried to come in.
A very few, whom I should judge to have been Union men through the war,
or to have been so thoroughly disgusted with the rebellion as to accept
its defeat with cheerfulness, professed their entire satisfaction with
the action of Congress. “It is none of our business to be making a fuss
or demanding anything,” said one of these. “We’ve been guilty of a great
crime; we have reason to be thankful that we are treated as leniently as
we are, and it becomes us to keep quiet, and hope for the best.”
Such were the expressions of two classes. Together, they were but a
small minority.
Everywhere, on the cars, in the hotels, on the streets, at public
meetings, in social intercourse with the people at their homes, the
great majority held very different language.
A little east of Lynchburg, an officer in the national uniform happened
to pass through the cars. “There’s one of the infernal villains,”
exclaimed an old man in homespun behind me. “Well,” said his companion,
“perhaps it isn’t right to talk so, but how can we help hating them?
They’ve burned our houses and made us paupers, and now they kick us out
of the Capitol. May be my sons may feel differently, by the time they’re
as old as I am, if they have to live with them, but I always expect to
hate the sight of a Yankee till my dying day.” These were plain old
Virginians from the mountains, apparently farmers.
At Grand Junction, Tennessee, I whiled away half a day in the bar-room
of a dilapidated little frame house called a hotel. A wood contractor
from one of the interior towns of Northern Mississippi was the leading
talker. For hisself, he’d rather be a pauper all his days than do
business with the dirty, mean, low-down Yankees. Certainly four out of
every five in the room at any period during that half day, in some form
or another re-echoed the sentiment.
On the cars of the Mississippi Central Railroad, a party of girls,
attended by one or two rustic beaux, going down to New Orleans to see
the sights and have their winter “society,” monopolized the
conversation, and did it in no whispered tones. The burden of all their
discourse, the staple subject that never failed them—when questions as
to how long Sam stayed the other night when he came to see Sally, were
fully exhausted—the _pièce de résistance_ to which they always reverted,
was the meanness, the ignorance, the hatefulness, the cowardice of the
detested Yankees. One had to leave school because the dirty Yankees were
too near. Another’s “par” had lost all his house servants because the
sneaking Yankees had enticed them away. Another knew that the Yankees
were all cowards, and would never have overpowered us if they hadn’t
called in the Dutch, Irish, niggers, and all the rest of their superiors
in creation, to help them. “Didn’t my brother Tom—you know, Lizzie, he’s
as brave and gallant a man as ever lived—didn’t he tell me hisself, with
his own lips, that he chased five of ’em, in full uniforms, with swords
in their hands, and plenty of revolvers, full gallop, out of Holly
Springs? His own self, mind you, by hisself.” The presence of an officer
in uniform in the car, part of the day, only served to increase the
volubility and virulence with which these Mississippi ladies delivered
their utterances.
By and by one of the beaux, having run out of subjects for talk with the
ladies, took a seat beside me, and produced the unfailing Mississippi
substitute for an introduction—a whisky bottle. “Try some, stranger;
don’t be afeard. Jist sample it. You’ll find it the rale stuff.” “Didn’t
that Yankee officer look sheepish just now, when the gals was givin’ it
to him so hot?” he asked, after our acquaintance had progressed smoothly
for some time. This was a little too much for Northern flesh and blood,
and I informed him that I was a Yankee myself.
“Stranger, you’re jokin’.” I insisted that it was a solemn fact.
“Whar’d you come from?”
“From Washington City.”
“Well, who’d a thought it? But, stranger”——and a prolonged stare
followed.
“I say, stranger, take another drink,” and the uncorked bottle of
villainous whisky was thrust to my lips. “I rather guess, stranger, you
must be pretty well used to hearin’ that sort o’ thing, if you’ve been
down heah long. The truth is, you don’t look like one o’ them sort, and
I don’t b’lieve y’ are one o’ the mean kind anyway; but we do all hate
the Yankees like pizen—thar’s no use tryin’ to hide it.”
I traveled one day through Northern Alabama and Western Tennessee with a
Texan, who had been North, begging merchants to give him credit again,
and help him on his legs.
“I tell you, you don’t none o’ you know anything about the meanness of
the Yankees. I’ve been among them—I understand ’em. Why, do you know, a
little thing a Texas store-keeper’d throw in ’thout thinking to tell you
of ’t, one o’ them New York fellers’ll make you out a bill for, and ten
to one he’ll reckon in the interest till paid.”
In such a strain he entertained his listeners for hours. By his account;
Northern hotels were sponging houses, as compared with similar
establishments in the South. Northern railroads were wholesale swindles,
the churches were like the circus, and a “high-toned gentleman” was
unknown. From this the talk naturally digressed to life in Texas. We had
vivid accounts of little personal differences with the Bowie-knife;
precise instructions as to the best way to stand to make your antagonist
miss you in a duel, while you got a good shot at him; and challenges to
anybody to name as charming a town to live in, under this Yankee-cursed
Government, as Galveston, Texas. Nobody named one.
At last we came to an eating-house. “We’d better hurry,” some one
suggested. “Oh, there’ll be plenty of room,” said the Texan. “There’s a
lot of cowardly Yankees in the front car. You don’t ketch them payin’ a
dollar for dinner. They stole enough at the breakfast-table to last till
to-morrow mornin’.”
All this was, of course, the merest froth, thrown not without scum to
the surface of the social agitation. A civil engineer, holding a
responsible position on a leading Southern railroad, whom I encountered
the next day, expressed very clearly the prevailing views of the better
classes.
“What do they mean at Washington? They said the war was to maintain the
Union. They succeeded in it and wouldn’t let us go out. What then? Why,
they next refuse to let us in.”
This man was a gentleman; he was intelligent, familiar with political
questions, apparently not bitter. Yet, when I tried to explain to him
the view at the North, that every one who had in any way attempted to
overturn the Union was a traitor to it, not to be again invested with
civil rights till atonement for the treason had been made, or, at least,
till security was given against its repetition, he seemed to regard it
as something monstrous, unheard of, not to be endured.
“It all resolves itself back into this: we honestly thought we had a
right to go out. You thought differently; went to war about it, and
established by numbers what you could not by argument. We submit. We
accept the situation. Then, having refused to let us out, you slam the
door in our faces and won’t let us in. During the war you maintained
that we were not out, and never could get out. The war over, you now
maintain that we are out, and must stay out till you subject us to fresh
humiliations.”
“I tell you,” he continued, with evident sincerity and deep feeling, “no
free people in the history of the world were ever treated with such
indignity. There was some feeling, not of love for the Union, but of
readiness to be at least obedient, even though we could not become
affectionate children. They are destroying all this at Washington. Our
people feel that you are cruelly and wantonly trifling with us—yes,
insulting us; that, having conquered, you have not the magnanimity of
brave conquerors, but are bent upon heaping humiliation on your
unfortunate victims.”
“Do you mean that the people feel like making armed resistance to the
action of Congress?”
“Feel like it? Yes. Likely to do it? No. You have us at your mercy. We
are powerless, impotent. You can work your will upon us; but men do not
forget things seared into their hearts. The time will come when the
Yankees will learn to regret their present course.”
Of a hundred conversations with intelligent gentlemen from different
parts of the interior (not politicians), this one gave the clearest
statement of the common feeling. I believe it to have been almost
universal in Mississippi, and to have been entertained by a majority of
the citizens in West Tennessee, and in the interior of Georgia and
Alabama.
The mistake made by Northern statesmen, through the whole winter of
1860, was in not believing the South to be in earnest. They thought the
conventions were political bluster; the secession itself a piece of
bravado. Perhaps there is danger of a similar mistake again. To us, all
this talk of defeated traitors about the humiliation of not being
immediately reinvested with political rights in the Government they
tried to destroy, seems very absurd bluster. Perhaps their politicians
see it in the same light; but their people do not. Very many in some of
the States, certainly a majority, actually smart under the exclusion of
their representatives as a studied, brutal insult to a beaten and
helpless enemy.
A change in the feeling toward the negroes was also manifest from the
first day’s entrance within the cotton region. In November nothing could
exceed the hatred which seemed everywhere felt to the freedmen. Now,
this feeling was curiously and almost ludicrously mingled with an effort
to conciliate them. Cotton was no longer king, but the cotton-maker was.
Men approached the negro with an effort at kind manners; described to
him the comforts of their plantations, and insinuatingly inquired if he
wouldn’t like to enter into contract for a year. The sable owner of
muscle, his woolly head greatly perplexed with this unwonted kindness,
held aloof, and seemed, as he respectfully listened to the glowing
inducements, to be wondering whether the fly would make anything by his
visit to the nicely-arranged parlors of the Mississippi spiders.
The anxious planters argued and pleaded, and the puzzled negroes—kept up
their thinking, I suppose. At any rate, very few contracts were yet made
in many parts of the interior, especially in Mississippi, though by this
time it was near the close of January, and the season for beginning the
year’s cotton work was rapidly passing away. They were willing to
contract on the Mississippi River, and, to some extent, along railroads;
but they were very shy about venturing into the interior at all, and,
when they did, insisted on remaining in sight of the towns. “I could
have got plenty of hands at Vicksburg,” complained a planter returning
from an unsuccessful trip for labor, “if I had only been able to pick my
plantation up and move it twelve miles across the country to Holly
Springs.” Another came nearer success: “I could have got plenty right at
home, if my quarters had been at the other side of my plantation, where
it joins the corporation-line of the village; but the black rascals
wouldn’t trust themselves the width of my plantation away from town for
fear I would eat ’em up.”
An old Mississippian was returning from New Orleans in a great rage: “Do
you believe, sah, I even demeaned myself so much as to go to a d——d
nigger, who called himself a labor agent, and offered him five dollars a
head for all the hands he could get me. He promised ’em at once, and I
was all right till I told him they was to be sent to ——, Mississippi. To
think of it, sah! The black scoundrel told me flat he wouldn’t send me a
man. ‘Why not,’ says I; ‘I’ll give you your money when they start.’ ‘I
wouldn’t send you a man ef you gave me a hundred dollars a head,’ said
the dirty, impudent black dog. And why? All because the sassy scoundrel
said he didn’t like our Mississippi laws.”
I subsequently learned that these statements were literally correct, and
that many Mississippi planters who had gone to New Orleans for laborers,
found they could engage plenty, but lost their hold on every man as soon
as they let him know that it was in Mississippi he was wanted. Through
the interior, planters were complaining of the disappearance of the
negroes. They couldn’t imagine where the worthless things had suddenly
sunk to, until it occurred to some of them to observe that this
disappearance began shortly after their reconstructed Legislature had
embodied its wisdom in laws on the negro question.