Can the Ethiopian
change his skin or the leopard his spots?
THE LEOPARD’S SPOTS A ROMANCE OF THE WHITE MAN’S BURDEN -- 1865-1900 BY
THOMAS DIXON, JR. Illustrated by C. D. Williams New York DOUBLEDAY, PAGE &
CO. 1902 Copyright, 1902, by DOUBLEDAY, PAGE & CO. All rights reserved.
Published, March 1, 1902. TO
HARRIET SWEET-VOICED DAUGHTER OF THE OLD FASHIONED SOUTH
In answer to hundreds
of letters, I wish to say that all the incidents need in Book I., which is
properly the of my story, were selected from authentic records, or came within
my personal knowledge.
The only serious
liberty I have taken with history is to tone down the facts to make them
credible in fiction. The village of "Hambright" is my birthplace, and
is located near the center of "Military District No. 2," comprising
the Carolinas, which were destroyed at States by an Act of Congress in 1867. It
will be a century yet before people outside the South can be made to believe a
literal statement of the history of those times.
I tried to write this
book with the utmost restraint.
"TWO THOUSAND MEN
WENT MAD" . . . Frontispiece
"YOU THIEF!"
. . . 76
THE HON. TIM SHELBY
Portrait from life. . . . 88
"COME ON
BOYS!" . . . 124
"I’LL KILL THE
FIRST NIGGER THAT CROSSES THAT LINE" . . . 132
"A DAZZLING VISION
OF BEAUTY" . . . 250
"THIS IS MY
THRONE" . . . 270
TOM CAMP. Portrait from
Life. . . . 378
I HAVE RESIGNED MY
CHURCH--TO KILL YOU" . . . 450
Scene: The Foothills of
North Carolina--Boston--New York Time: From 1865 to 1900
CHARLES GASTON . . .
Who dreams of a Governor’s Mansion
SALLIE WORTH . . . A
daughter of the old fashioned South
GEN. DANIEL WORTH . . .
Her father
MRS. WORTH . . . Sallie’s
mother
THE REV. JOHN DURHAM .
. . A preacher who threw his life away
MRS. DURHAM . . . Of
the Southern Army that never surrendered
TOM CAMP . . . A
one-legged Confederate soldier
FLORA . . . Tom’s
little daughter
SIMON LEGREE . . .
Ex-slave driver and Reconstruction leader
ALLAN MCLEOD . . . A
scalawag
HON. EVERETT LOWELL . .
. Member of Congress from Boston
HELEN LOWELL . . . His
daughter
MISS SUSAN WALKER . . .
A maiden of Boston
MAJOR STUART DAMERON .
. . Chief of the Ku Klux Klan
HOSS NORMAN . . . A
dare-devil poor white man
NELSE . . . A black
hero of the old regime
AUNT EVE . . . His
wife--"a respectable woman"
HON. TIM SHELBY . . .
Political boss of the new era
HON. PETE SAWYER . . .
Sold seven times, got the money once
GEORGE HARRIS, JR. . .
. An educated Negro, son of Eliza
DICK . . . An unsolved
riddle
I. A Hero Returns . . .
3
II. A Light Shining in
Darkness . . . 19
III. Deepening Shadows
. . . 30
IV. Mr. Lincoln’s Dream
. . . 34
V. The Old and the New
Church . . . 38
VI. The Preacher and
the Woman of Boston . . . 44
VII. The Heart of a
Child . . . 52
VIII. An Experiment in
Matrimony . . . 58
IX. A Master of Men . .
. 63
X. The Man or Brute in
Embryo . . . 72
XI. Simon Legree . . .
83
XII. Red Snow Drops . .
. 93
XIII. Dick . . . 98
XIV. The Negro Uprising
. . . 100
XV. The New Citizen
King . . . 104
XVI. Legree Speaker of
the House . . . 109
XVII. The Second Reign
of Terror . . . 118
XVIII. The Red Flag of
the Auctioneer . . . 130
XIX. The Rally of the
Clansmen . . . 143
XX. How Civilization
was Saved . . . 153
XXI. The Old and the
New Negro . . . 163
XXII. The Danger of
Playing with Fire . . . 165
XXIII. The Birth of a
Scalawag . . . 171
XXIV. A Modern Miracle
. . . 176
I. Blue Eyes and Black
Hair . . . 187
II. The Voice of the
Tempter . . . 193
III. Flora . . . 200
IV. The One Woman . . .
206
V. The Morning of Love
. . . 213
VI. Beside Beautiful
Waters . . . 221
VII. Dreams and Fears .
. . 234
VIII. The Unsolved
Riddle . . . 240
IX. The Rhythm of the
Dance . . . 244
X. The Heart of a
Villain . . . 256
XI. The Old, Old Story
. . . 265
XII. The Music of the
Mills . . . 277
XIII. The First Kiss .
. . 282
XIV. A Mysterious
Letter . . . 286
XV. A Blow in the Dark
. . . 290
XVI. The Mystery of
Pain . . . 301
XVII. Is God
Omnipotent? . . . 306
XVIII. The Ways of
Boston . . . 310
XIX. The Shadow of a
Doubt . . . 317
XX. A New Lesson in
Love . . . 320
XXI. Why the Preacher
Threw His Life Away . . . 328
XXII. The Flesh and the
Spirit . . . 337
I. A Growl Beneath the
Earth . . . 349
II. Face to Face with
Fate . . . 351
III. A White Lie . . .
361
IV. The Unspoken Terror
. . . 364
V. A Thousand-Legged
Beast . . . 372
VI. The Black Peril . .
. 381
VII. Equality with a
Reservation . . . 385
VIII. The New Simon
Legree . . . 395
IX. The New America . .
. 404
X. Another Declaration
of Independence . . . 409
XI. The Heart of a
Woman . . . 417
XII. The Splendor of
Shameless Love . . . 423
XIII. A Speech That
Made History . . . 431
XIV. The Red Shirts . .
. 445
XV. The Higher Law . .
. 447
XVI. The End of a
Modern Villain . . . 455
XVII. Wedding Bells in
the Governor’s Mansion . . . 457
In the rear of Mrs.
Gaston’s place, there stood in the midst of an orchard a log house of two
rooms, with hallway between them. There was a mud-thatched wooden chimney at
each end, and from the back of the hallway a kitchen extension of the same
material with another mud chimney. The house stood in the middle of a ten acre
lot, and a woman was busy in the garden with a little girl, planting seed.
"Hurry up Annie,
less finish this in time to fix up a fine dinner er greens and turnips an ’taters
an a chicken. Yer Pappy ’ll get home to-day sure. Colonel Gaston’s Nelse come
last night. Yer Pappy was in the Colonel’s regiment an’ Nelse said he passed
him on the road comin’ with two one-legged soldiers. He ain’t got but one leg,
he says. But, Lord, if there’s a piece of him left we’ll praise God an’ be
thankful for what we’ve got."
"Maw, how did he
look? I mos’ forgot--’s been so long sence I seed him?" asked the child.
"Look! Honey! He
was the handsomest man in Campbell county! He had a tall fine figure, brown
curly beard, and the sweetest mouth that was always smilin’ at me, an’ his eyes
twinklin’ over somethin’ funny he’d seed or thought about. When he was young ev’ry
gal around here was crazy about him. I got him all right, an’ he got me too. Oh
me! I can’t help but cry, to think he’s been gone so long. But he’s comin’
to-day! I jes feel it in my bones."
"Look a yonder,
Maw, what a skeer-crow ridin’ er ole hoss!" cried the girl, looking
suddenly toward the road.
"Glory to God! It’s
Tom!" she shouted, snatching her old faded sun-bonnet off her head and
fairly flying across the field to the gate, her cheeks aflame, her blond hair
tumbling over her shoulders, her eyes wet with tears.
Tom was entering the
gate of his modest home in as fine style as possible, seated proudly on a stack
of bones that had once been a horse, an old piece of wool on his head that once
had been a hat, and a wooden peg fitted into a stump where once was a leg. His
face was pale and stained with the red dust of the hill roads, and his beard,
now iron grey, and his ragged buttonless uniform were covered with dirt. He was
truly a sight to scare crows, if not of interest to buzzards. But to the woman
whose swift feet were hurrying to his side, and whose lips were muttering half
articulate cries of love, he was the knightliest figure that ever rode in the
lists before the assembled beauty of the world.
"Oh! Tom, Tom,
Tom, my ole man! You’ve come at last!" she sobbed as she threw her arms
around his neck, drew him from the horse and fairly smothered him with kisses.
"Look out, ole
woman, you’ll break my new leg! cried Tom when he could get breath.
"I don’t care,--I’ll
get you another one," she laughed through her tears.
"Look out there
again you’re smashing my game shoulder. Got er Minie hall in that one."
"Well your mouth’s
all right I see," cried the delighted woman, as she kissed and kissed him.
"Say, Annie, don’t
be so greedy, give me a chance at my young one." Tom’s eyes were devouring
the excited girl who had drawn nearer.
"Come and kiss
your Pappy and tell him how glad you are to see him!" said Tom, gathering
her in his arms and attempting to carry her to the house.
He stumbled and fell.
In a moment the strong arms of his wife were about him and she was helping him
into the house.
She laid him tenderly
on the bed, petted him and cried over him. "My poor old man, he’s all shot
and cut to pieces. You’re so weak, Tom--I can’t believe it. You were so strong.
But we’ll take care of you. Don’t you worry. You just sleep a week and then
rest all summer and watch us work the garden for you!"
He lay still for a few
moments with a smile playing around his lips.
"Lord, ole woman,
you don’t know how nice it is to be petted like that, to hear a woman’s voice,
feel her breath on your face and the touch of her hand, warm and soft, after
four years sleeping on dirt and living with men and mules, and fightin’ and
runnin’ and diggin’ trenches like rats and moles, killin’ men, buryin’ the dead
like carrion, holdin’ men while doctors sawed their legs off, till your turn
came to be held and sawed! You can’t believe it, but this is the first feather
bed I’ve touched in four years.
"Well,
well!--Bless God it’s over now," she cried. "S’long as I’ve got two
strong arms to slave for you--as long as there’s a piece of you left big enough
to hold on to--I’ll work for you," and again she bent low over his pale
face, and crooned over him as she had so often done over his baby in those four
lonely years of war and poverty.
Suddenly Tom pushed her
aside and sprang up in bed.
"Geemimy, Annie, I
forgot my pardners--there’s two more peg-legs out at the gate by this time
waiting for us to get through huggin’ and carryin’ on before they come in. Run,
fetch ’em in quick!"
Tom struggled to his
feet and met them at the door.
"Come right into
my palace, boys, I’ve seen some fine places in my time, but this is the
handsomest one I ever set eyes on. Now, Annie, put the big pot in the little
one and don’t stand back for expenses. Let’s have a dinner these fellers ’ll
never forget."
It was a feast they
never forgot. Tom’s wife had raised a brood of early chickens, and managed to
keep them from being stolen. She killed four of them and cooked them as only a
Southern woman knows how. She had sweet potatoes carefully saved in the mound
against the kitchen chimney. There were turnips and greens and radishes, young
onions and lettuce and hot corn dodgers fit for a king; and in the centre of
the table she deftly fixed a pot of wild flowers little Annie had gathered. She
did not tell them that it was the last peck of potatoes and the last pound of
meal. This belonged to the morrow. To-day they would live.
They laughed and joked
over this splendid banquet, and told stories of days and nights of hunger and
exhaustion, when they had filled their empty stomachs with dreams of home.
"Miss Camp, you’ve
got the best husband in seven states, did you know that? "asked one of the
soldiers, a mere boy.
"Of course she’ll
agree to that, sonny," laughed Tom.
"Well it’s so. If
it hadn’t been for him, M’am, we’d a been peggin’ along somewhere way up in
Virginny ’stead o’ bein’ so close to home. You see he let us ride his hoss a
mile and then he’d ride a mile. We took it turn about, and here we are."
"Tom, how in this
world did you get that horse?" asked his wife.
"Honey, I got him
on my good looks," said he with a wink. "You see I was a settin’ out
there in the sun the day o’ the surrender. I was sorter cryin’ and wonderin’
how I’d get home with that stump of wood instead of a foot, when along come a
chunky heavy set Yankee General, looking as glum as though his folks had
surrendered instead of Marse Robert. He saw me, stopped, looked at me a minute
right hard and says, "Where do you live?"
"Way down in ole
No’th Caliny," I says, "at Hambright, not far from King’s
Mountain."
"How are you going
to get home?" says he.
"God knows, I don’t,
General. I got a wife and baby down there I ain’t seed fer nigh four years, and
I want to see ’em so bad I can taste ’em. I was lookin’ the other way when I
said that, fer I was purty well played out, and feelin’ weak and watery about
the eyes, an’ I didn’t want no Yankee General to see water in my eyes."
"He called a
feller to him and sorter snapped out to him, "Go bring the best horse you
can spare for this man and give it to him."
"Then he turns to
me and seed I was all choked up and couldn’t say nothin’ and says:
"I’m General
Grant. Give my love to your folks when you get home. I’ve known what it was to
be a poor white man down South myself once for awhile."
"God bless you,
General. I thanks you from the bottom of my heart," I says as quick as I
could find my tongue, "if it had to be surrender I’m glad it was to such a
man as you.
"He never said
another word, but just walked slow along smoking a big cigar. So ole woman, you
know the reason I named that hoss, ’General Grant.’ It may be I have seen finer
hosses than that one, but I couldn’t recollect anything about ’em on the road
home."
Dinner over, Tom’s
comrades rose and looked wistfully down the dusty road leading southward.
"Well, Tom, ole
man, we gotter be er movin’," said the older of the two soldiers. "We’re
powerful obleeged to you fur helpin’ us along this fur."
"All right, boys,
you’ll find yer train standin’ on the side o’ the track eatin’ grass. Jes climb
up, pull the lever and let her go."
The men’s faces
brightened, their lips twitched. They looked at Tom, and then at the old horse.
They looked down the long dusty road stretching over hill and valley, hundreds
of miles south, and then at Tom’s wife and child, whispered to one another a
moment, and the elder said:
"No, pardner, you’ve
been awful good to us, but we’ll get along somehow--we can’t take yer hoss. It’s
all yer got now ter make a livin’ on yer place."
"All I got?"
shouted Tom, "man alive, ain’t you seed my ole woman, as fat and jolly and
han’some as when I married her ’leven years ago? Didn’t you hear her cryin’ an’
shoutin’ like she’s crazy when I got home? Didn’t you see my little gal with
eyes jes like her daddy’s? Don’t you see my cabin standin’ as purty as a ripe
peach in the middle of the orchard when hundreds of fine houses are lyin’ in
ashes? Ain’t I got ten acres of land? Ain’t I got God Almighty above me and all
around me, the same God that watched over me on the battlefields? All I got?
That old stack o’ bones that looks like er hoss? Well I reckon not!"
"Pardner, it ain’t
right," grumbled the soldier, with more of cheerful thanks than protest in
his voice.
"Oh! Get off you
fools," said Tom good-naturedly, "ain’t it my hoss? Can’t I do what I
please with him?"
So with hearty
hand-shakes they parted, the two astride the old horse’s back. One had lost his
right leg, the other, his left, and this gave them a good leg on each side to
hold the cargo straight.
"Take keer
yerself, Tom!" they both cried in the same breath as they moved away.
"Take keer
yerselves, boys. I’m all right!" answered Tom, as he stumped his way back
to the home. "It’s all right, it’s all right," he muttered to
himself. "He’d a come in handy, but I’d a never slept thinkin’ o’ them
peggin’ along them rough roads."
Before reaching the
house he sat down on a wooden bench beneath a tree to rest. It was the first
week in May and the leaves were not yet grown. The sun was pouring his hot rays
down into the moist earth, and the heat began to feel like summer. As he drank
in the beauty and glory of the spring his soul was melted with joy. The fruit
trees were laden with the promise of the treasures of the summer and autumn, a
cat-bird was singing softly to his mate in the tree over his head, and a
mockingbird seated in the topmost branch of an elm near his cabin home was
leading the oratorio of feathered songsters. The wild plum and blackberry
briars were in full bloom in the fence corners, and the sweet odour filled the
air. He heard his wife singing in the house.
"It’s a fine old
world after all!" he exclaimed leaning back and half closing his eyes,
while a sense of ineffable peace filled his soul. "Peace at last! Thank
God! May I never see a gun or a sword, or hear a drum or a fife’s scream on
this earth again!"
A hound came close
wagging his tail and whining for a word of love and recognition.
"Well, Bob, old
boy, you’re the only one left. You’ll have to chase cotton-tails by yourself
now."
Bob’s eyes watered and
he licked his master’s hand apparently understanding every word he said.
Breaking from his
master’s hands the dog ran toward the gate barking, and Tom rose in haste as he
recognised the sturdy tread of the Preacher, Rev. John Durham, walking rapidly
toward the house.
Grasping him heartily
by the hand the Preacher said,
"Tom, you don’t
know how it warms my soul to look into your face again. When you left, I felt
like a man who had lost one hand. I’ve found it to-day. You’re the same
stalwart Christian full of joy and love. Some men’s religion didn’t stand the
wear and tear of war. You’ve come out with your soul like gold tried in the
fire. Colonel Gaston wrote me you were the finest soldier in the regiment, and
that you were the only Chaplain he had seen that he could consult for his own
soul’s cheer. That’s the kind of a deacon to send to the front! I’m proud of
you, and you’re still at your old tricks. I met two one-legged soldiers down
the road riding your horse away as though you had a stable full at your
command. You needn’t apologise or explain, they told me all about it."
"Preacher, it’s
good to have the Lord’s messenger speak words like them. I can’t tell you how
glad I am to be home again and shake your hand. I tell you it was a comfort to
me when I lay awake at night an them battlefields, a wonderin’ what had become
of my ole woman and the baby, to recollect that you were here, and how often I’d
heard you tell us how the Lord tempered the wind to the shorn lamb. Annie’s
been telling me who watched out for her them dark days when there was nothin’
to eat. I reckon you and your wife knows the way to this house about as well as
you do to the church."
Tom had pulled the
Preacher down on the seat beside him while he said this.
"The dark days
have only begun, Tom. I’ve come to see you to have you cheer me up. Somehow you
always seemed to me to be closer to God than any man in the church. You will
need all your faith now. It seems to me that every second woman I know is a
widow. Hundreds of families have no seed even to plant, no horse to work crops,
no men who will work if they had horses. What are we to do? I see hungry
children in every house."
"Preacher, the
Lord is looking down here to-day and sees all this as plain as you and me. As
long as He is in the sky everything will come all right on the earth."
"How’s your
pantry?" asked the Preacher.
"Don’t know. ’Man
shall not live by bread alone,’ you know. When I hear these birds in the trees
an’ see this old dog waggin’ his tail at me, and smell the breath of them
flowers, and it all comes over me that I’m done killin’ men, and I’m at home,
with a bed to sleep on, a roof over my head, a woman to pet me and tell me I’m
great and handsome, I don’t feel like I’ll ever need anything more to eat! I
believe I could live a whole mouth here without eatin’ a bite."
"Good. You come to
the prayer meeting to-night and say a few things like that, and the folks will
believe they have been eating three square meals every day."
"I’ll be there. I
ain’t asked Annie what she’s got, but I know she’s got greens and turnips,
onions and collards, and strawberries in the garden. Irish taters ’ll be big
enough to eat in three weeks, and sweets comin’ right on. We’ve got a few
chickens. The blackberries and plums and peaches and apples are all on the
road. Ah! Preacher, it’s my soul that’s been starved away from my wife and
child!"
"You don’t know
how much I need help sometimes Tom. I am always giving, giving myself in
sympathy and help to others, I’m famished now and then. I feel faint and worn
out. You seem to fill me again with life."
"I’m glad to hear
you say that, Preacher. I get down-hearted sometimes, when I recollect I’m
nothin’ but a poor white man. I’ll remember your words. I’m goin’ to do my part
in the church work. You know where to find me."
"Well, that’s
partly what brought me here this morning. I want you to help me look after Mrs.
Gaston and her little boy. She is prostrated over the death of the Colonel and
is hanging between life and death. She is in a delirious condition all the time
and must be watched day and night. I want you to watch the first half of the
night with Nelse, and Eve and Mary will watch the last half."
"Of course, I’ll
do anything in the world I can for my Colonel’s widder. He was the bravest man
that ever led a regiment, and he was a father to us boys. I’ll be there. But I
won’t set up with that nigger. He can go to bed."
"Tom, it’s a funny
thing to me that as good a Christian as you are should hate a nigger so. He’s a
human being. It’s not right."
"He may be human,
Preacher, I don’t know. To tell you the truth, I have my doubts. Anyhow, I can’t
help it. God knows I hate the sight of ’em like I do a rattlesnake. That nigger
Nelse, they say is a good one. He was faithful to the Colonel, I know, but I
couldn’t bear him no more than any of the rest of ’em. I always hated a nigger
since I was knee high. My daddy and my mammy hated ’em before me. Somehow, we
always felt like they was crowdin’ us to death on them big plantations, and the
little ones too. And then I had to leave my wife and baby and fight four years,
all on account of their stinkin’ hides, that never done nothin’ for me except
make it harder to live. Every time I’d go into battle and hear them Minie balls
begin to sing over us, it seemed to me I could see their black ape faces
grinnin’ and makin’ fun of poor whites. At night when they’d detail me to help
the ambulance corps carry off the dead and the wounded, there was a strange
smell on the field ’ that came from the blood and night damp and burnt powder.
It always smelled like a nigger to me! It made me sick. Yes, Preacher, God
forgive me, I hate ’em! I can’t help it any more than I can the color of my
skin or my hair."
"I’ll fix it with
Nelse, then. You take the first part of the night ’till twelve clock. I’ll go
down with you from the church to-night," said the Preacber, as he shook
Tom’s hand and took his leave.
The next day the
Preacher had a call from Miss Susan Walker of Boston, whose liberality had
built the new Negro school house and whose life and fortune was devoted to the
education and elevation of the Negro race. She had been in the village often
within the year, running up from Independence where she was building and
endowing a magnificent classical college for negroes. He had often heard of
her, but as she stopped with negroes when on her visits he had never met her.
He was especially interested in her after hearing incidentally that she was a
member of a Baptist church in Boston.
On entering the parlour
the Preacher greeted his visitor with the deference the typical Southern man
instinctively pays to woman.
"I am pleased to
meet you, Madam," he said with a graceful bow and kindly smile, as he led
her to the most comfortable seat he could find.
She looked him squarely
in the face for a moment as though surprised and smilingly replied,
"I believe you
Southern men are all alike, woman flatterers. You have a way of making every
woman believe you think her a queen. It pleases me, I can’t help confessing it,
though I sometimes despise myself for it. But I am not going to give you an
opportunity to feed my vanity this morning. I’ve come for a plain face to face
talk with you on the one subject that fills my heart, my work among the
Freedmen. You are a Baptist minister. I have a right to your friendship and
co-operation."
A cloud overshadowed
the Preacher’s face as he seated himself. He said nothing for a moment, looking
curiously and thoughtfully at his visitor.
He seemed to be
studying her character and to be puzzled by the problem. She was a woman of
prepossessing appearance, well past thirty-five, with streaks of grey appearing
in her smoothly brushed black hair. She was dressed plainly in rich brown
material cut in tailor fashion, and her heavy hair was drawn straight up
pompadour style from her forehead with apparent carelessness and yet in a way
that heightened the impression of strength and beauty in her face. Her nose was
the one feature that gave warning of trouble in an encounter. She was plump in
figure, almost stout, and her nose seemed too small for the breadth of her
face. It was broad enough, but too short, and was pug tipped slightly at the
end. She fell just a little short of being handsome and this nose was
responsible for the failure. It gave to her face when agitated, in spite of
evident culture and refinement, the expression of a feminine bull dog.
Her eyes were flashing
now, and her nostrils opened a little wider and began to push the tip of her
nose upward. At last she snapped out suddenly,
"Well which is it,
friend or foe? What do you honestly think of my work?"
"Pardon me, Miss
Walker, I am not accustomed to speak rudely to a lady. If I am honest, I don’t
know where to begin."
"Bah! Lay aside
your Don Quixote Southern chivalry this morning and talk to me in plain
English. It doesn’t matter whether I am a woman or a man. I am an idea, a
divine mission this morning. I mean to establish a high school in this village
for the negroes, and to build a Baptist church for them. I learn from them that
they have great faith in you. Many of them desire your approval and
co-operation. Will you help me?"
"To be perfectly
frank, I will not. You ask me for plain English. I will give it to you. Your
presence in this village as a missionary to the heathen is an insult to our
intelligence and Christian manhood. You come at this late day a missionary
among the heathen, the heathen whose heart and brain created this Republic with
civil and religious liberty for its foundations, a missionary among the heathen
who gave the world Washington, whose giant personality three times saved the
cause of American Liberty from ruin when his army had melted away. You are a
missionary among the children of Washington, Jefferson, Monroe, Madison,
Jackson, Clay and Calhoun! Madam, I have baptised into the fellowship of the
church of Christ in this county more negroes than you ever saw in all your life
before you left Boston.
"At the close of
the war there were thousands of negro members of white Baptist churches in the
state. Your mission is not to proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ. Your mission
is to teach crack-brained theories of social and political equality to four
millions of ignorant negroes, some of whom are but fifty years removed from the
savagery of African jungles. Your work is to separate and alienate the negroes
from their former masters who can be their only real friends and guardians.
Your work is to sow the dragon’s teeth of an impossible social order that will
bring forth its harvest of blood for our children."
He paused a moment,
and, suddenly facing her continued, "I should like to help the cause you
have at heart and the most effective service I could render it now would be to
box you up in a glass cage, such as are used for rattlesnakes, and ship you
back to Boston."
"Indeed! I suppose
then it is still a crime in the South to teach the Negro?" she asked this
in little gasps of fury, her eyes flashing defiance and her two rows of white
teeth uncovering by the rising of her pugnacious nose.
"For you, yes. It
is always a crime to teach a lie."
"Thank you. Your
frankness is all one could wish!"
"Pardon my
apparent rudeness. You not only invited, you demanded it. While about it, let
me make a clean breast of it. I do you personally the honour to acknowledge
that you are honest and in dead earnest, and that you mean well. You are simply
a fanatic."
"Allow me again to
thank you for your candour!"
"Don’t mention it,
Madam. You will be canonised in due time. In the meantime let us understand one
another. Our lives are now very far apart, though we read the same Bible,
worship the same God and hold the same great faith. In the settlement of this
Negro question you as an insolent interloper. You’re worse, you are a wilful
spoiled child of rich and powerful parents playing with matches in a powder
mill. I not only will not help you, I would, If I had the power seize you, and
return you to a place of safety. But I cannot oppose you. You are protected in
your play by a million bayonets and back of these bayonets are banked the fires
of passion in the North ready to burst into flame in a moment. The only thing I
can do is to ignore your existence. You understand my position."
"Certainly,
Doctor," she replied good naturedly.
She had recovered from
the rush of her anger now and was herself again. A curious smile played round
her lips as she quietly added:
"I must really
thank you for your candour. You have helped me immensely. I understand the
situation now perfectly. I shall go forward cheerfully in my work and never
bother my brain again about you, or your people, or your point of view. You
have aroused all the fighting blood in me. I feel toned up and ready for a life
struggle. I assure you I shall cherish no ill feeling toward you. I am only
sorry to see a man of your powers so blinded by prejudice. I will simply ignore
you."
"Then, Madam, it
is quite clear we agree upon establishing and maintaining a great mutual
ignorance. Let us hope, paradoxical as it may seem, that it may be for the
enlightenment of future generations!"
She arose to go,
smiling at his last speech.
"Before we part,
perhaps never to meet again, let me ask you one question," said the
Preacher still looking thoughtfully at her.
"Certainly, as
many as you like."
"Why is it that
you good people of the North are spending your millions here now to help only
the negroes who feel least of all the sufferings of this war? The poor white
people of the South are your own flesh and blood. These Scotch Covenanters, are
of the same Puritan stock, these German, Huguenot and English people are all
your kinsmen, who stood at the stake with your fathers in the old world. They
are, many of them, homeless, without clothes, sick and hungry and broken
hearted. But one in ten of them ever owned a slave. They had to fight this war
because your armies invaded their soil. But for their sorrows, sufferings and
burdens you have no ear to hear and no heart to pity. This is a strange thing
to me."
"The white people
of the South can take care of themselves. If they suffer, it is God’s just
punishment for their sins in owning slaves and fighting against the flag. Do I
make myself clear?" she snapped.
"Perfectly, I
haven’t another word to say."
"My heart yearns
for the poor dear black people who have suffered so many years in slavery and
have been denied the rights of human beings. I am not only going to establish
schools and colleges for them here, but I am conducting an experiment of
thrilling interest to me which will prove that their intellectual, moral, and
social capacity is equal to any white man’s."
"Is it so?
"asked the Preacher.
"Yes, I am
collecting from every section of the South the most promising specimens of
negro boys and sending them to our great Northern Universities where they will
be educated among men who treat them as equals, and I expect from the boys
reared in this atmosphere, men of transcendent genius, whose brilliant
achievements in science, art and letters will forever silence the tongues of
slander against their race. The most interesting of these students I have at
Harvard now is young George Harris. His mother is Eliza Harris, the history of
whose escape over the ice of the Ohio River fleeing from slavery thrilled the
world. This boy is a genius, and if he lives he will shake this nation."
"It may be, Miss
Walker. There are more ways than one to shake a nation. And while I ignore your
work, as a citizen and public man,--privately and personally, I shall watch
this experiment with profound interest."
"I know it will
succeed. I believe God made us of one blood," she said with enthusiasm.
"Is it true,
Madam, that you once endowed a home for homeless cats before you became
interested in the black people?" With a twinkle in his eye the Preacher
softly asked this apparently irrelevant question.
"Yes, sir, I
did,--I am proud of it. I love cats. There an over a thousand in the home now,
and they are well cared for. Whose business is it?"
"I meant no
offense by the question. I love cats too. But I wondered if you were collecting
negroes only now, or, whether you were adding other specimens to your menagerie
for experimental purposes."
She bit her lips, and
in spite of her efforts to restrain her anger, tears sprang to her eyes as she
turned toward the Preacher whose face now looked calmly down upon her with
ill-concealed pride.
"Oh! the insolence
of you Southern people toward those who dare to differ with you about the
Negro!" she cried with rage.
"I confess it
humbly as a Christian, it is true. My scorn for these maudlin ideas is so deep
that words have no power to convey it. But come," said the Preacher in the
kindliest tone. "Enough of this. I am pained to see tears in your eyes.
Pardon my thoughtlessness. Let us forget now for a little while that you are an
idea, and remember only that you are a charming Boston woman of the household
of our own faith. Let me call Mrs. Durham, and have you know her and discuss
with her the thousand and one things dear to all women’s hearts."
"No, I thank you!
I feel a little sore and bruised, and social amenities can have no meaning for
those whose souls are on fire with such antagonistic ideas as yours and mine.
If Mrs. Durham can give me any sympathy in my work Ill be delighted to see her,
otherwise I must go."
The Preacher laughed
aloud.
"Then let me beg
of you, never meet Mrs. Durham. If you do, the war will break out again. I don’t
wish to figure in a case of assault and battery. Mrs. Durham was the owner of
fifty slaves. She represents the bluest of the blue blood of the slave-holding
aristocracy of the South. She has never surrendered and she never will. Wars,
surrenders, constitutional amendments and such little things make no impression
on her mind whatever. If you think I am difficult, you had better not puzzle your
brain over her. I am a mildly constructive man of progress. She is a
Conservative."
"Then we will say
good-bye," said Miss Walker, extending her small plump hand in friendly
parting. "I accept your challenge which this interview implies. I will
succeed if God lives," and she set her lips with a snap that spoke
volumes.
"And I will watch
you from afar with sorrow and fear and trembling," responded the Preacher.
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, half-starving 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 pre-eminently 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 bad 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 post-office 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 mustache 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, pan 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.
When Charlie Gaston
reached his home after a never-to-be-forgotten day in the woods with the
Preacher, he found a ragged little dirt-smeared negro boy peeping through the
fence into the woodyard.
"What you
want?" cried Charlie.
"Nuttin!"
"What’s your
name?"
"Dick."
"Who’s your
father?"
"Haint got none.
My mudder say she was tricked, en I’se de trick!" he chuckled and walled
his eyes.
Charlie came close and
looked him over. Dick giggled and showed the whites of his eyes.
"What made that
streak on your neck?"
"Nigger done it
wid er axe."
"What
nigger?"
"Low life nigger
name er Amos what stays roun’ our house Sundays."
"What made him do
it?"
"He low he wuz me
daddy, en I sez he wuz er liar, en den he grab de axe en try ter chop me head
off."
"Gracious, he ’most
killed you!"
"Yassir, but de
doctor sewed me head back, en hit grow’d."
"Goodness
me!"
"Say!"
grinned Dick.
"What?"
"I likes
you."
"Do you?"
"Yassir, en I aint
gwine home no mo’. I done run away, en I wants ter live wid you."
"Will you help me
and Nelse work?"
"Dat I will. I can
do mos’ anything. You ax yer Ma fur me, en doan let dat nigger Nelse git holt
er me."
Charlie’s heart went
out to the ragged little waif. He took him by the hand, led him into the yard,
found his mother, and begged her to give him a place to sleep and keep him.
His mother tried to
persuade him to make Dick go back to his own home. Nelse was loud in his
objections to the new comer, and Aunt Eve looked at him as though she would
throw him over the fence.
But Dick stuck doggedly
to Charlie’s heels.
"Mama dear, see,
they tried to cut his head off with an axe," cried the boy, and he wheeled
Dick around and showed the terrible scar across the back of his neck.
"I spec hits er
pity day didn’t cut hit clean off," muttered Nelse.
"Mama, you can’t
send him back to be killed!"
"Well darling, I’ll
see about it to-morrow."
"Come on Dick, I’ll
show you where to sleep!"
The next day Dick’s
mother was glad to get rid of him by binding him legally to Mrs. Gaston, and a
lonely boy found a playmate and partner in work, he was never to forget.
The new government was
now in full swing and a saturnalia began. Amos Hogg was Governor, Simon Legree
Speaker of the House, and the Hon. Tim Shelby leader of the majority on the
floor of the House.
Raleigh, the quaint
little City of Oaks, never saw such an assemblage of law-makers gather in the
grey stone Capitol.
Ezra Perkins, who was a
member of the Senate, was frugal in his habits and found lodgings at an
unpretentious boarding house near the Capitol square.
The room was furnished
with six iron cots on which were placed straw mattresses and six honourable
members of the new Legislature occupied these. They were close enough together
to allow a bottle of whiskey to be freely passed from member to member at any
hour of the night. They thought the beds were arranged with this in view and
were much pleased.
Ezra was the only man
of the crowd who arrived in Raleigh with a valise or trunk. He had a carpet
bag. The others simply had one shirt and a few odds and ends tied in red
bandana handkerchiefs.
Three of them had
walked all the way to Raleigh and kept in the woods from habit as deserters.
The other two rode on the train and handed their tickets to the first stranger
they saw on the platform of the car they boarded.
"What’s this
for?" said the stranger.
"Them’s our
tickets. Ain’t you the door keeper?"
"No, but there
ought to be one to every circus. You’ll have me when you get to Raleigh."
The landlady, Mrs.
Duke, apologised for the poor beds, when she showed them to their room. "I’m
sorry, gentlemen, I can’t give you softer beds."
"That’s all right
M’am! them’s fine. Us fellows been sleeping in the woods and in straw stacks so
long dodgin’ ole Vance’s officers, them white sheets is the finest thing we’ve
seed in four years, er more."
They were humble and
made no complaints. But at the end of the week they gathered around the Rev.
Ezra Perkins for a grave consultation.
"When are we goin’
ter draw?" said one.
"Air we ever goin’
ter draw?" asked another with sorrow and doubt.
"What are we here
fer ef we cain’t draw?" pleaded another looking sadly at Ezra.
"Gentlemen,"answered
Ezra, "it will be all right in a little while. The Treasurer is just
cranky. We can draw our mileage Monday anyhow."
At daylight they took
their places on the bank’s steps, and at ten o’clock when the bank opened, the
doors were besieged by a mob of members painfully anxious to draw before it
might be too late.
Next morning there was
a disturbance at the breakfast table. The morning paper had in blazing head
lines an amount of one James "Mileage" who was a member of the
Legislature front an adjoining county thirty-seven miles distant. He had sworn
to a mileage record of one hundred and seven dollars.
"That’s an
unfortunate mistake, sir," said Perkins.
"Ten’ ter yer own
business?" answered James "Mileage."
"I call it er
purty sharp trick," grinned his partner.
"I call it stealin’,"
sneered an honourable member, evidently envious.
And James
"Mileage"was his name for all time, but "Mileage" shot a
malicious look at the member who had called him a thief.
The next morning the
paper of the Opposition had another biographical sketch on the front page.
"I see your name
in the paper this morning, Mr. Scoggins?" remarked Mrs. Duke, looking
pleasantly at the member who had spoken so rudely to James "Mileage"
the day before.
"Well I reckon I’ll
make my mark down here before it’s over," chuckled Scoggins with pride.
"What do they say about me, M’am?"
"They say you
stole a lot of hogs!" tittered the landlady.
Mr. Scoggins turned
red.
"Oho, is there
another thief in this hon’able body?" sneered James "Mileage."
"That’s all a lie,
M’am, ’bout them hogs. I didn’ steal ’em. I just pressed ’em from a
Secessiner."
"Jes so,"
said James "Mileage," "but they say you were a deserter at the
time, and not exactly in the service of your country."
"Ye can’t pay no ’tention
ter rebel lies ergin Union men!" explained Scoggins, eating faster.
"Yes, that’s
so," said James "Mileage," "but there’s another funny thing
in the paper about you."
"What’s
that?" cried Scoggins with new alarm.
"That Mr. Scoggins
met Sherman’s army with loud talk about lovin’ the Union, but that a mean
Yankee officer gave him a cussin’ fur not fightin’ on one side or the other,
took all that bacon he had stolen, hung him up by the heels, gave him thirty
lashes and left him hanging in the air."
"It’s a lie! It’s
a lie!" bellowed Scoggins.
"Gentlemen!
Gentlemen! we must not have such behaviour at my table!" exclaimed Mrs.
Duke.
And "Hog"
Scoggins was his name from that day.
By the end of the week
another painful story was printed about one of this group of statesmen. The
newspaper brutally declared that he had been convicted of stealing a rawhide
from a neighbour’s tanyard. It could not be denied. And then a sad thing
happened. The moral sentiment of the little community could not endure the
strain. It suddenly collapsed. They laughed at these incidents of the sad past
and agreed that they were jokes. They began to call each other James
"Mileage," "Hog" Scoggins, and "Rawhide "in the
friendliest way, and dared a scornful world to make them feel ashamed of
anything!
But the Rev. Ezra
Perkins was pained by this breakdown. He felt that being safely removed two
thousand miles from his own past, he might hope for a future.
"Mrs. Duke,"
he complained to his landlady, "I will have to ask you to give me a room
to myself. I’ll pay double. I want quiet where I can read my Bible and meditate
occasionally."
"Certainly Mr.
Perkins, if you are wining to pay for it."
It was so arranged. But
this assumption of moral superiority by Perkins grieved "Mileage,"
"Hog" and "Rawhide," and a coolness sprang up between them,
until they found Ezra one night in his place of meditation dead drunk and his
room on fire. He had gone to sleep in his chair with his empty bottle by his
side, and knocked the candle over on the bed. Then they agreed that forever
after they would all stand together, shoulder to shoulder, until they brought
the haughty low and exalted the lowly and the "loyal."
Tim Shelby early
distinguished himself in this August assemblage. His wit and eloquence from the
first commanded the admiration of his party.
When he had fairly
established himself as leader, he rose in his seat one day with unusual
gravity. His scalp was working his ears with great rapidity showing his
excitement.
He had in his hands a
bill on which he had spent months in secret study. He had not even hinted its
contents to any of his associates. Under the call for bills his voice rang with
deep emphasis,
"Mr.
Speaker!"
Legree gave him instant
recognition.
"I desire to
introduce the following: "A Bill to be Entitled An Act to Relieve Married
Women from the Bonds of Matrimony when United to Felons, and to Define
Felony."
A page hurried to the
Reading Clerk with his bill.
The hum of voices
ceased. The five or six representatives of the white race left their desks and
walked quickly toward the Speaker. The Clerk read in a loud clear voice.
"The General
Assembly of North Carolina do enact:
I "That all
citizens of the State who took part in the Rebellion and fought against the
Union, or held office in the so called Confederate States of America, shall be
held guilty of felony, and shall be forever debarred from voting or holding
office."
II "That the
married relations of all such felons are hereby dissolved and their wives
absolutely divorced, and said felons shall be forever barred from contracting
marriage or living under the same roof with their former wives."
Instantly four
Carpet-bagger members of some education rushed for Tim’s seat. "Withdraw
that bill, man, quick! My God, are you mad!" they all cried in a breath.
Tim was dazed by this
unexpected turn, and grinned in an obstinate way.
"I can’t see it
gentlemen. That bill will kill out the breed of rebels and fix the status of
every Southern state for five hundred years. It’s just what we need to make
this state loyal."
"You pass that
bill and hell will break loose!"
"How so, brother?
Ain’t we on top and the rebels on the bottom? Ain’t the army here to protect
us?" persisted Tim.
There was a brief
consultation among the little group in opposition and the leader said,
"Mr. Speaker, I
move that the bill be at once printed and laid on the desk of the members for
consideration."
Tim was astonished at
this move of his enemy. Legree looked at him and waited his pleasure.
"Mr. Speaker, I
withdraw that bill for the present," he said at length.
That night the wires
were hot between Washington and Raleigh, and the entire power of Congress was
hurled upon the unhappy Tim. His bill was not only suppressed but the news
agencies were threatened and subsidised to prevent accounts of its introduction
being circulated throughout the country.
Tim decided to lay this
measure over until Congress was off his hands, and the state’s autonomy fully
recognised. Then he would dare interference. In the meantime he turned his
great mind to financial matters. His success here was overwhelming.
His first measure was
to increase the per diem of the members from three to seven dollars a day. It
passed with a whoop.
Uncle Pete Sawyer a
coal-black fatherly looking old darkey from an Eastern county made himself
immortal in that debate.
"Mistah
Speakah!" he bawled drawing himself up with great dignity, and holding a
pen in his left hand as though he had been writing. "What do dese white
gem’men mean by exposen dis bill? Ef we doan pay de members enuf, day des be
erbleeged ter steal. Hit aint right, sah, ter fo’ce de members er dis hon’able
body ter prowl atter dark when day otter be here ’tendin’ ter de business o’ de
country. En I moves you, sah, Mistah Speakah, dat dese rema’ks er mine be filed
in de arkibes er grabity!"
They were filed and
embalmed in the archives of gravity where they will remain a monument to their
author and his times.
As Tim’s great
financial measures made progress, the members began to wear better clothes,
assumed white linen shirts, had their shoes blacked, and put on the airs of
overworked statesmen.
When they had used up
all the funds of the state in mileage and per diem, they sold and divided the
school fund, railroad bonds worth a half million, for a hundred thousand ready
cash. It was soon found that Simon Legree, the Speaker of the House, was the
master of financial measures and Tim Shelby was his mouthpiece.
Legree organised three
groups of thieves composed of the officials needed to perfect the thefts in
every branch of the government while he retained the leadership of the
federated groups. The Treasurer, who was an honest man, was stripped of power
by a special act.
The Capitol Ring merely
picked up the odds and ends about the Capitol building. They refurnished the
Legislative Halls. They spent over two hundred thousand dollars for furniture,
and when it was appraised, its value was found to be seventeen thousand dollars
at the prices they actually paid for it. The Ring stole one hundred and seventy
thousand dollars on this item alone.
An appropriation of
three hundred thousand dollars was made for "supplies, sundries and
incidentals." With this they built a booth around the statue of Washington
at the end of the Capitol and established a bar with fine liquors and cigars
for the free use of the members and their friends. They kept it open every day
and night during their reign, and in a suite of rooms in the Capitol they
established a brothel. From the galleries a swarm of courtesans daily smiled on
their favourites on the floor.
The printing had never
cost the state more than eight thousand dollars in any one year. This year it
cost four hundred and eighty thousand. Legree drew thousands of warrants on the
state for imaginary persons. There were eight pages in the House. He drew pay
for one hundred and fifty-six pages. In this way he raised an enormous
corruption fund for immediate use in bribing the lawmakers to carry through his
schemes.
The Railroad Ring was
his most effective group of brigands.
They passed bills
authorising the issue of twenty-five millions of dollars in bonds, and actually
issued and stole fourteen millions, and never built one foot of railroad.
When Legree’s movement
was at its high tide, Ezra Perkins sought Uncle Pete Sawyer one night in behalf
of a pet measure of his pending in the House.
Peter was seated by his
table counting by the light of a candle three big piles of gold.
His face was wreathed
in smiles.
"Peter, you seem
well pleased with the world tonight?" said Ezra gleefully.
"Well, brudder,
you see dem piles er yaller money?"
"Yes, it is a fine
sight."
Uncle Pete smacked his
lips and grinned from ear to ear.
"Well, brudder, I
tells you. I ben sol’ seben times in my life, but ’fore Gawd dat’s de fust time
I ebber got de money!"
Uncle Pete dreamed that
night that Congress passed a law extending the blessings of a "republican
form of government" to North Carolina for forty years and that the
Legislature never adjourned.
But the Legislature
finally closed, and in a drunken revel which lasted all night. They had
bankrupted the state, destroyed its school funds, and increased its debt from
sixteen to forty-two millions of dollars, without adding one cent to its wealth
or power.
Legree then organized a
Municipal and County Ring to exploit the towns, cities, and counties, having
passed a bill vacating all county and city offices.
This Ring secured the
control of Hambright and levied a tax of twenty-five per cent for municipal
purposes! Tom Camp’s little home was assessed for eighty-five dollars in taxes.
Mrs. Gaston’s home was assessed for one hundred and sixty dollars. They could
have raised a million as easily as the sum of these assessments.
It cost the United
States government two hundred millions of dollars that year to pay the army
required to guard the Legrees and their "loyal" men while they were
thus establishing and maintaining "a republican form of government"
in the South.
It was the bluest
Monday the Rev. John Durham ever remembered in his ministry. A long drought had
parched the corn into twisted and stunted little stalks that looked as though
they had been burnt in a prairie fire. The fly had destroyed the wheat crop and
the cotton was dying in the blistering sun of August, and a blight worse than
drought, or flood, or pestilence, brooded over the stricken land, flinging the
shadow of its Black Death over every home. The tax gatherer of the new
"republican form of government," recently established in North
Carolina now demanded his pound of flesh.
The Sunday before had
been a peculiarly hard one for the Preacher. He had tried by the sheer power of
personal sympathy to lift the despairing people out of their gloom and make
strong their faith in God. In his morning sermon he had torn his heart open and
given them its red blood to drink. At the night service he could not rally from
the nerve tension of the morning. He felt that lie had pitiably failed. The
whole day seemed failure black and hopeless.
All day long the
sorrowful stories of ruin and loss of homes were poured into his ear.
The Sheriff had
advertised for sale for taxes two thousand three hundred and twenty homes in
Campbell county. The land under such conditions had no value. It was only a
formality for the auctioneer to cry it and knock it down for the amount of the
tax bill.
As he arose from bed
with the burden of all this hopeless misery crushing his soul, a sense of utter
exhaustion and loneliness came over him.
"My love, I must
go back to bed and try to sleep. I lay awake last night until two o’clock. I
can’t eat anything," he said to his wife as she announced breakfast.
"John, dear, don’t
give up like that."
"Can’t help
it."
"But you must.
Come, here is something that will tone you up. I found this note under the
front door this morning."
"What is it?"
"A notice from
some of your admirers that you must leave this county in forty-eight hours or
take the consequences."
He looked at this
anonymous letter and smiled.
"Not such a
failure after all, am I?" he mused.
"I thought that
would help, you," she laughed.
"Yes, I can eat
breakfast on the strength of that."
He spread this letter
out beside his plate, and read and reread it as he ate while his eyes flashed
with a strange half humourous light.
"Really, that’s
fine, isn’t it?" "You sower of sedition and rebellion, hypocrite and
false prophet. The day has come to clean this county of treason and traitors.
If you dare to urge the people to further resistance to authority, there will
be one traitor less in this county."
"That sounds like
the voice of a Daniel come to judgment, don’t it?"
"I think Ezra
Perkins might know something about it."
"I am sure of
it."
"Well, I’m duly
grateful, it’s done for you what your wife couldn’t do, cheered you up this
morning!"
"That is so, isn’t
it? It takes a violent poison sometimes to stimulate the heart’s action."
"Now if you will
work the garden for me, where I’ve been watering it the past month, you will be
yourself by dinner time."
"I will. That’s
about all we’ve got to eat. I’ve had so salary in two months, and I’ve no
prospects for the next two months."
He was at work in the
garden when Charlie Gaston suddenly ran through the gate toward him. His face
was red, his eyes streaming with tears, and his breath coming in gasps.
"Doctor, they’ve
killed Nelse! Mama says please come down to our house as quick as you
can."
"Is he dead,
Charlie?"
"He’s most dead. I
found him down in the woods lying in a gully, one leg is broken, there’s a big
gash over his eye, his back is beat to a jelly, and one of his arms is broken.
We put him in the wagon, and hauled him to the house. I’m afraid he’s dead now.
Oh me!" The boy broke down and choked with sobs.
"Run, Charlie, for
the doctor, and I’ll be there in a minute."
The boy flew through
the gate to the doctor’s house.
When the Preacher
reached Mrs. Gaston’s, Aunt Eve was wiping the blood from Nelse’s mouth.
"De Lawd hab
mussy! My po’ ole man’s done kilt."
"Who could have
done this, Eve?"
"Dem Union
Leaguers. Day say day wuz gwine ter kill him fur not jinin’ ’em, en fur tryin’
ter vote ergin ’em."
"I’ve been afraid
of it," sighed the Preacher as he felt Nelse’s pulse.
"Yassir, en now
day’s done hit. My po’ ole man. I wish I’d a been better ter ’im. Lawd Jesus, help
me now!"
Eve knelt by the bed
and laid her face against Nelse’s while the tears rained down her black face.
"Aunt Eve, it may
not be so bad," said the Preacher hopefully. "His pulse is getting
stronger. He has an iron constitution. I believe he will pull through, if there
are no internal injuries."
"Praise God! ef he
do git well, I tell yer now, Marse John, I fling er spell on dem niggers bout
dis!"
"I am afraid you
can do nothing with them. The courts are all in the hands of these scoundrels, and
the Governor of the state is at the head of the Leagues."
"I doan want no
cotes, Marse John, I’se cote ennuf. I kin cunjure dem niggers widout any
cote."
The doctor pronounced
his injuries dangerous but not necessarily fatal. Charlie and Dick watched with
Eve that night until nearly midnight. Nelse opened his eyes, and saw the eager
face of the boy, his eyes yet red from crying.
"I aint dead,
honey!" he moaned.
"Oh! Nelse, I’m so
glad!"
"Doan you believe
I gwine die! I gwine ter git eben wid dem niggers ’fore I leab dis worl’."
Nelse spoke feebly, but
there was a way about his saying it that boded no good to his enemies, and Eve
was silent. As Nelse improved, Eve’s wrath steadily rose.
The next day she met in
the street one of the negroes who had threatened Nelse.
"How’s Mistah
Gaston dis mawnin ’M’am?" he asked.
Without a word of
warning she sprang on him like a tigress, bore him to the ground, grasped him
by the throat and pounded his head against a stone. She would have choked him
to death, had not a man who was passing come to the rescue.
"Lemme lone, man,
I’se doin’ de wuk er God!"
"You’re committing
murder, woman."
When the negro got up
he jumped the fence and tore down through a corn field, as though pursued by a
hundred devils, now and then glancing over his shoulder to see if Eve were
after him.
The Preacher tried in
vain to bring the perpetrators of this outrage on Nelse to justice. He
identified six of them positively. They were arrested, and when put on trial
immediately discharged by the judge who was himself a member of the League that
had ordered Nelse whipped.
* * * * * *
Tom Camp’s daughter was
now in her sixteenth year and as plump and winsome a lassie, her Scotch mother
declared, as the Lord ever made. She was engaged to be married to Hose Norman,
a gallant poor white from the high hill country at the foot of the mountains.
Hose came to see her every Sunday riding a black mule, gaily trapped out in
martingales with red rings, double girths to his saddle and a flaming red
tassel tied on each side of the bridle. Tom was not altogether pleased with his
future so-in-law. He was too wild, went to too many frolics, danced too much,
drank too much whiskey and was too handy with a revolver.
"Annie, child, you’d
better think twice before you step off with that young buck," Tom gravely
warned his daughter as he stroked her fair hair one Sunday morning while she
waited for Hose to escort her to church.
"I have thought a
hundred times, Paw, but what’s the use. I love him. He can just twist me ’round
his little finger. I’ve got to have him."
"Tom Camp, you don’t
want to forget you were not a saint when I stood up with you one day,"
cried his wife with a twinkle in her eye.
"That’s a fact,
ole woman," grinned Tom.
"You never give me
a day’s trouble after I got hold of you. Sometimes the wildest colts make the
safest horses"
"Yes, that’s so.
It’s owing to who has the breaking of ’em," thoughtfully answered Tom.
"I like Hose. He’s
full of fun, but he’ll settle down and make her a good husband."
The girl slipped close
to her mother and squeezed her hand.
"Do you love him
much, child?" asked her father.
"Well enough to
live and scrub and work for him and to die for him, I reckon."
"All right, that
settles it, you’re too many for me, you and Hose and your Maw. Get ready for it
quick. We’ll have the weddin’ Wednesday night. This home is goin’ to be sold
Thursday for taxes and it will be our last night under our own roof. We’ll make
the best of it."
It was so fixed. On
Wednesday night Hose came down from the foothills with three kindred spirits,
and an old fiddler to make the music. He wanted to have a dance and plenty of
liquor fresh from the mountain-dew district. But Tom put his foot down on it.
"No dancin’ in my
house, Hose, and no licker," said Tom with emphasis. "I’m a deacon in
the Baptist church. I used to be young and as good lookin’ as you, my boy, but
I’ve done with them things. You’re goin’ to take my little gal now. I want you
to quit your foolishness be a man."
"I will, Tom, I
will. She is the prettiest sweetest little thing in this world, and to tell you
the truth I’m goin’ to settle right down now to the hardest work I ever did in
my life."
"That’s the way to
talk, my boy,"said Tom putting his hand an Hose’s shoulder. "You’ll
have enough to do these hard times to make a livin’."
They made a handsome
picture, in that humble home, as they stood there before the Preacher. The
young bride was trembling from head to foot with fright. Hose was trying to
look grave and dignified and grinning in spite of himself whenever he looked
into the face of his blushing mate. The mother was standing near, her face full
of pride in her daughter’s beauty and happiness, her heart all a quiver with
the memories of her own wedding day seventeen years before. Tom was thinking of
the morrow when he would be turned out of his home and his eyes filled with
tears.
The Rev. John Durham
had pronounced them man and wife and hurried away to see some people who were
sick. The old fiddler was doing his best. Hose and his bride were shaking hands
with their friends, and the boys were trying to tease the bridegroom with hoary
old jokes.
Suddenly a black shadow
fell across the doorway. The fiddle ceased, and every eye was turned to the
door. The burly figure of a big negro trooper from a company stationed in the
town stood before them. His face was in a broad grin, and his eyes bloodshot
with whiskey. He brought his musket down on the floor with a bang.
"My frien’s, I’se
sorry ter disturb yer but I has orders ter search dis house."
"Show your
orders," said Tom hobbling before him.
"Well, deres one
un ’em !" he said still grinning as be cocked his gun and presented it
toward Tom. "En ef dat aint ennuf day’s fifteen mo’ stanin’ ’roun’ dis
house. It’s no use ter make er fuss. Come on, boys!"
Before Tom could utter
another word of protest six more negro troopers laughing and nudging one
another crowded into the room. Suddenly one of them threw a bucket of water in
the fire place where a pine knot blazed and two others knocked out the candles.
There was a scuffle,
the quick thud of heavy blows, and Hose Norman fell to the floor senseless. A
piercing scream rang from his bride as she was seized in the arms of the negro
who first appeared. He rapidly bore her toward the door surrounded by the six
scoundrels who had accompanied him.
"My God, save her!
They are draggin’ Annie out of the house," shrieked her mother.
"Help! Help! Lord
have mercy!" screamed the girl as they bore her away toward the woods,
still laughing and yelling.
Tom overtook one of
them, snatched his wooden leg off, and knocked him down. Hose’s mountain boys
were crowding round Tom with their pistols in their hands.
"What shall we do,
Tom? If we shoot we may kill Annie."
"Shoot, man! My
God, shoot! There are things worse than death!"
They needed no urging.
Like young tigers they sprang across the orchard toward the woods whence came
the sound of the laughter of the negroes.
"Stop de screechin’!"
cried the leader.
"She nebber get
dat gag out now."
"Too smart fur de
po’ white trash dis time sho’!" laughed one.
Three pistol shots rang
out like a single report! Three more! and three more! There was a wild
scramble. Taken completely by surprise, the negroes fled in confusion. Four lay
on the ground. Two were dead, one mortally wounded and three more had crawled
away with bullets in their bodies. There in the midst of the heap lay the
unconscious girl gagged.
"Is she
hurt?" cried a mountain boy.
"Can’t tell, take
her to the house quick."
They laid her across
the bed in the room that had been made sweet and tidy for the bride and groom.
The mother bent over her quickly with a light. Just where the blue veins
crossed in her delicate temple there was a round hole from which a scarlet
stream was running down her white throat.
Without a word the
mother brought Tom, showed it to him, and then fell into his arms and burst
into a flood of tears.
"Don’t, don’t cry
so Annie! It might have been worse. Let us thank God she was saved from them
brutes."
Hose’s friends crowded
round Tom now with tear-stained faces.
"Tom, you don’t
know how broke up we all are over this. Poor child, we did the best we
could."
"It’s all right,
boys. You’ve been my friends to-night. You’ve saved my little gal. I want to
shake hands with you and thank you. If you hadn’t been here--My God, I can’t
think of what would ’a happened! Now it’s all right. She’s safe in God’s
hands."
The next morning when
Tom Camp called at the parsonage to see the Preacher and arrange for the
funeral of his daughter he found him in bed.
"Dr. Durham is
quite sick, Mr. Camp, but he’ll see you,"said Mrs. Durham.
"Thank you, M’am."
She took the old
soldier by his hand and her voice choked as she said,
"You have my heart’s
deepest sympathy in your awful sorrow."
"It’ll be all be
the for best, M’am. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. I will still
say, Blessed is the name of the Lord!"
"I wish I had such
faith." She led Tom into the room where the Preacher lay.
"Why, what’s this,
Preacher? A bandage over your eye, looks like somebody knocked you in the
head?"
"Yes, Tom, but it’s
nothing. I’ll be all right by to-morrow. You needn’t tell me anything that
happened at your house. I’ve heard the black hell-lit news. It will be all over
this county by night and the town will be full of grim-visaged men before many
hours. Your child has not died in vain. A few things like this will be the
trumpet of the God of our fathers that will call the sleeping manhood of the
Anglo-Saxon race to life again. I must be up and about this afternoon to keep down
the storm. It is not time for it to break."
"But, Preacher,
what happened to you?"
"Oh! nothing much,
Tom."
"I’ll tell you
what happened," cried Mrs. Durham standing erect with her great dark eyes
flashing with anger.
"As he came home
last night from a visit to the sick, he was ambushed by a gang of negroes led
by a white scoundrel, knocked down, bound and gagged and placed on a pile of
dry fence rails. They set fire to the pile and left him to burn to death. It
attracted the attention of Doctor Graham who was passing. He got to him in time
to save him."
"You don’t say
so!"
"I’m sorry, Tom, I’m
so weak this morning I couldn’t come to see you. I know your poor wife is
heartbroken."
"Yes, sir, she is,
and it cuts me to the quick when I think that I gave the orders to the boys to
shoot. But, Preacher, I’d a killed her with own hand if I couldn’t a saved her
no other way. I’d do it over again a thousand times if I had to."
"I don’t blame
you, I’d have done the same thing. I can’t come to see you to-day, Tom, I’ll be
down to your house to-morrow a few minutes before we start for the cemetery. I
must get up for dinner and prevent the men from attacking these troops. They’ll
not dare to try to sell your place to-day. The public square is full of men
now, and it’s only nine o’clock. You go home and cheer up your wife. How is
Hose?"
"He’s still in
bed. The Doctor says his skull is broken in one place, but he’ll be over it in
a few weeks."
Tom hobbled back to his
house, shaking hands with scores of silent men on the way.
The Preacher crawled to
his desk and wrote this note to the young officer in command of the post,
MY DEAR CAPTAIN, In the
interest of peace and order I would advise you to telegraph to Independence for
two companies of white regulars to come immediately on a special, and that you
start your negro troops on double quick marching order to meet them. There will
be a thousand armed men in Hambright by sundown, and no power on earth can
prevent the extermination of that negro company if they attack them. I will do
my best to prevent further bloodshed but I can do nothing if these troops
remain here to-day. Respectfully, JOHN DURHAM.
The Commandant acted an
the advice immediately.
* * * * * *
It was the week
following before the sales began. There was no help for it. The town and the
county were doomed to a ruin more complete and terrible than the four years of
war had brought. Independence had been saved by a skillful movement of General
Worth, who sought an interview with Legree when his council first issued their
levy of thirty per cent for municipal purposes.
"Mr. Legree, let’s
understand one another," said the General.
"All right, I’m a
man of reason."
"A bird in hand is
worth two in the bush!"
"Every time,
General."
"Well, call off
your dogs, and rescind your order for a thirty per cent tax levy, and I’ll
raise $30,000 in cash and pay it to you in two days."
"Make it $50,000
and it’s a bargain."
"Agreed."
The General raised
twenty thousand in the city, went North and borrowed the remaining thirty
thousand.
Legree and his brigands
received this ransom and moved on to the next town.
Poor Hambright was but
a scrawny little village on a red hill with no big values to be saved, and no
mills to interest the commercial world, and the auctioneer lifted his hammer.
When the Preacher took
the train in Boston for the South, his friendly merchant, a deacon, was by his
side.
"Now, you put my
name and address down in your note book, William Crane. And don’t forget about
us."
"I’ll never forget
you, deacon."
"Say, I just as
well tell you," whispered the deacon bending close, "we are not going
to allow you to stay down South. We’ll be down after you before long--just as
well be packing up."
The Preacher smiled,
looked out of the car window, and made no reply.
"Well, good-bye,
Doctor, good-bye. God bless you and your work and your people! You’ve brought
me a message warm from God’s heart. I’ll never forget it."
"Good-bye
deacon."
As the train whirled
southward through the rich populous towns and cities of the North, again the
sharp contrast with the desolation of his own land cut him like a knife. He
thought of Legree and Haley, Perkins and Tim Shelby robbing widows and orphans
and sweeping the poverty-stricken Southland with riot, pillage, murder and
brigandage, and posing as the representatives of the conscience of the North.
And his heart was heavy with sorrow.
On reaching Hambright
he was thunderstruck at the news of the sale of Mrs. Gaston’s place and her
tragic death.
"Why, my dear, I
sent the money to her on the first Monday I spent in Boston!" he declared
to his wife.
"It never reached
her."
"Then Dave Haley,
the dirty slave driver, has held that letter. I’ll see to this." He
hurried to the post-office.
"Mr. Haley,"
he exclaimed, "I sent a money order letter to Mrs. Gaston from Boston on
Monday a week ago."
"Yes, sir,"
answered Haley in his blandest manner, "it got here the day after the
sale."
"You’re an
infamous liar!" shouted the Preacher.
"Of course! Of
course! All Union men are liars to bear rebel traitors talk."
"I’ll report you
to Washington for this rascality."
"So do, so do. Mor’n
likely the President and the Post-Office Department ’ll be glad to have this
information from so great a man."
As the Preacher was
leaving the post-office be encountered the Hon. Tim Shelby dressed in the
height of fashion, his silk hat shining in the sun, and his eyes rolling with
the joy of living. The Preacher stepped squarely in front of Tim.
"Tim Shelby, I
hear you have moved into Mrs. Gaston’s home and are using her furniture. By whose
authority do you dare such insolence?"
"By authority of
the law, sir. Mrs. Gaston died intestate. Her effects are in the hands of our
County Administrator, Mr. Ezra Perkins. I’ll be pleased to receive you, sir,
any time you would like to call I!" said Tim with a bow.
"I’ll call in due
time," replied the Preacher, looking Tim straight in the eye.
Haley had been peeping
through the window, watching and listening to this encounter.
"’These charmin’
preachers think they own this county, brother Shelby," laughed Haley as he
grasped Tim’s outstretched hand.
"Yes, they are the
curse of the state. I wish to God they had succeeded in burning him alive that
night the boys tried it. They’ll get him later on. Brother Haley, he’s a
dangerous man. He must be put out of the way, or we’ll never have smooth
sailing in this county."
"I believe you’re
right, he’s just been in here cussin’ me about that letter of the widder’s that
didn’t get to her in time. He thinks he can run the post-office."
"Well, we’ll show
him this county’s in the hands of the loyal!" added Tim.
"Heard the news
from Charleston?"
"Heard it? I guess
I have. I talked with the commanding General in Charleston two weeks ago. He
told me then he was going to set aside that decision of the Supreme Court in a
ringing order permitting the marriage of negroes to white women, and commanding
its enforcement on every military post. I see he’s done it in no uncertain
words."
"It’s a great day,
brother, for the world. There’ll be no more colour line."
"Yes, times have
changed," said Tim with a triumphant smile. "I guess our white
hot-bloods will sweat and bluster and swear a little when they read that order.
But we’ve got the bayonets to enforce it. They’d just as well cool down."
"That’s the
stuff," said Haley, taking a fresh chew of tobacco.
"Let ’em squirm.
They’re flat on their backs. We are on top, and we are going to stay on top. I
expect to lead a fair white bride into my house before another year and have
poor white aristocrats to tend my lawn." Tim worked his ears and looked up
at the ceiling in a dreamy sort of way.
"That’ll be a
sight won’t it!" exclaimed Haley with delight. "Where’s that
scoundrel Nelse that lived with Mrs. Gaston ?"
"Oh, we fixed
him," said Tim. "The black rascal wouldn’t join the League, and
wouldn’t vote with his people, and still showed fight after we beat him half to
death, so we put a levy of fifty dollars on his cabin, sold him out, and every
piece of furniture, and every rag of clothes we could get hold of. He’ll leave
the country now, or we’ll kill him next time."
"You ought to a
killed him the first time, and then the job would ha’ been over."
"Oh, we’ll have
the country in good shape in a little while, and don’t you forget it."
The news of the order
of the military commandant at "District No. 2," comprising the
Carolinas, abrogating the decisions of the North Carolina Supreme Court,
forbidding the intermarriage of negroes and whites, fell like a bombshell on
Campbell county. The people had not believed that the military authorities
would dare go to the length of attempting to force social equality.
This order from
Charleston was not only explicit, its language was peculiarly emphatic. It
apparently commanded intermarriage, and ordered the military to enforce the
command at the point of the bayonet.
The feelings of the
people were wrought to the pitch of fury. It needed but a word from a daring
leader, and a massacre of every negro, scalawag and carpet-bagger in the county
might have followed. The Rev. John Durham was busy day and night seeking to
allay excitement and prevent an uprising of the white population.
Along with the
announcement of this military order, came the startling news that Simon Legree,
whose infamy was known from end to end of the state, was to be the next
Governor, and that the Hon. Tim Shelby was a candidate for Chief justice of the
Supreme Court.
Legree was in
Washington at the time an a mission to secure a stand of twenty thousand rifles
from the Secretary of War, with which to arm the negro troop he was drilling
for the approaching election. The grant was made and Legree came back in
triumph with his rifles.
Relief for the ruined
people was now a hopeless dream. Black despair was clutching at every white man’s
heart. The taxpayers had held a convention and sent their representatives to
Washington exposing the monstrous thefts that were being committed under the
authority of the government by the organised band of thieves who were looting
the state. But the thieves were the pets of politicians high in power. The
committee of taxpayers were insulted and sent home to pay their taxes.
And then a thing
happened in Hambright that brought matters to a sudden crisis.
The Hon. Tim Shelby as
school commissioner, had printed the notices for an examination of school
teachers for Campbell county. An enormous tax had been levied and collected by
the county for this purpose, but no school had been opened. Tim announced,
however, that the school would be surely opened the first Monday in October.
Miss Mollie Graham, the
pretty niece of the old doctor, was struggling to support a blind mother and
four younger children. Her father and brother had been killed in the war. Their
house had been sold for taxes, and they were required now to pay Tim Shelby ten
dollars a month for rent. When she saw that school notice her heart gave a
leap. If she could only get the place, it would save them from beggary.
She fairly ran to the
Preacher to get his advice.
"Certainly, child,
try for it. It’s humiliating to ask such a favour of that black ape, but if you
can save your loved ones, do it."
So with trembling hand
she knocked at Tim’s door. He required all applicants to apply personally at
his house. Tim met her with the bows and smirks of a dancing master.
"Delighted to see
your pretty face this morning, Miss Graham," he cried enthusiastically.
The girl blushed and
hesitated at the door.
"Just walk right
in the parlour, I’ll join you in a moment."
She bravely set her
lips and entered.
"And now what can
I do for you, Miss Graham?"
"I’ve come to
apply for a teacher’s place in the school."
"Ah indeed, I’m
glad to know that. There is only one difficulty. You must be loyal. Your people
were rebels, and the new government has determined to have only loyal
teachers."
"I think I’m loyal
enough to the old flag now that our people have surrendered," said the girl.
"Yes, yes, I dare
say, but do you think you can accept the new régime of government and society
which we are now establishing in the South? We have abolished the colour line.
Would you have a mixed school if assigned one?"
"I think Id prefer
to teach a negro school outright to a mixed one," she said after a moment’s
hesitation.
Tim continued,
"You know we are living in a new world. The supreme law of the land has
broken down every barrier of race and we are henceforth to be one people. The
struggle for existence knows no race or colour. It’s a struggle now for bread.
I’m in a position to be of great help to you and your family if you will only
let me."
The girl suddenly rose
impelled by some resistless instinct.
"May I have the
place then?" she asked approaching the door.
"Well, now you
know it depends really altogether on my fancy. I’ll tell you what I’ll do. You’re
still full of silly prejudices. I can see that. But if you will overcome them
enough to do one thing for me as a test, that will cost you nothing and of
which the world will never be the wiser, I’ll give you the place and more, I’ll
remit the ten dollars a month rent you’re now paying. Will you do it?"
"What is it?"
the girl asked with pale quivering lips.
"Let me kiss
you--once!" he whispered.
With a scream, she
sprang past him out of the door, ran like a deer across the lawn, and fell
sobbing in her mother’s arms when she reached her home.
The next day the town
was unusually quiet. Tim had business with the Commandant of the company of
regulars still quartered at Hambright. He spent most of the day with him, and
walked about the streets ostentatiously showing his familiarity with the
corporal who accompanied him. A guard of three soldiers was stationed around
Tim’s house for two nights and then withdrawn.
The next night at
twelve o’clock two hundred white-robed horses assembled around the old home of
Mrs. Gaston where Tim was sleeping. The moon was full and flooded the lawn with
silver glory. On those horses sat two hundred white-robed silent men whose
close-fitting hood disguises looked like the mail helmets of ancient knights.
It was the work of a
moment to seize Tim, and bind him across a horse’s back. Slowly the grim
procession moved to the court house square.
When the sun rose next
morning the lifeless body of Tim Shelby was dangling from a rope tied to the
iron rail of the balcony of the court house. His neck was broken and his body
was hanging low--scarcely three feet from the ground. His thick lips had been
split with a sharp knife and from his teeth hung this placard:
"The answer of the
Anglo-Saxon race to Negro lips that dare pollute with words the womanhood of
the South. K. K. K."
And the Ku Klux Klan
was master of Campbell county.
The origin of this Law
and Order League which sprang up like magic in a night and nullified the
programme of Congress though backed by an army of a million veteran soldiers,
is yet a mystery.
The simple truth is, it
was a spontaneous and resistless racial uprising of clansmen of highland origin
living along the Appalachian mountains and foothills of the South, and it
appeared almost simultaneously in every Southern state produced by the same
terrible conditions.
It was the answer to
their foes of a proud and indomitable race of men driven to the wall. In the
hour of their defeat they laid down their arms and accepted in good faith the
results of the war. And then, when unarmed and defenceless, a group of
pot-house politicians for political ends, renewed the war, and attempted to
wipe out the civilisation of the South.
This Invisible Empire
of White Robed Anglo-Saxon Knights was simply the old answer of organised
manhood to organised crime. Its purpose was to bring order out of chaos,
protect the weak and defenseless, the widows and orphans of brave men who had
died for their country, to drive from power the thieves who were robbing the
people, redeem the commonwealth from infamy, and reestablish civilisation.
Within one week from
its appearance, life and property were as safe as in any Northern community.
When the negroes came
home from their League meeting one night they ran terror stricken past long
rows of white horsemen. Not a word was spoken, but that was the last meeting
the "Union League of America" ever held in Hambright.
Every negro found
guilty of a misdemeanor was promptly thrashed and warned against its
recurrence. The sudden appearance of this host of white cavalry grasping at
their throats with the grip of cold steel struck the heart of Legree and his
followers with the chill of a deadly fear.
It meant inevitable
ruin, overthrow, and a prison cell for the "loyal" statesmen who were
with him in his efforts to maintain the new "republican form of
government" in North Carolina.
At the approaching
election, this white terror could intimidate every negro in the state unless he
could arm them all, suspend the writ of Habeas Corpus, and place every county
under the strictest martial law.
Washington was besieged
by a terrified army of the "loyal" who saw their occupation
threatened. They begged for more troops, more guns for negro militia, and for
the reestablishment of universal martial law until the votes were properly
counted.
But the great statesmen
laughed them to scorn as a set of weak cowards and fools frightened by negro
stories of ghosts. It was incredible to them that the crushed, poverty stricken
and unarmed South could dare challenge the power of the National Government.
They were sent back with scant comfort.
The night that Ezra
Perkins and Haley got back from Washington, where they had gone summoned by
Legree and Hogg, to testify to the death of Tim Shelby, they saw a sight that
made their souls quake.
At ten o’clock, the Ku
Klux Klan held a formal parade through the streets of Hambright. How the news
was circulated nobody knew, but it seemed everybody in the county knew of it.
The streets were lined with thousands of people who had poured in town that
afternoon.
At exactly ten o’clock,
a bugle call was heard on the hill to the west of the town, and the muffled
tread of soft shod horses came faintly on their ears. Women stood on the
sidewalks, holding their babies and smiling, and children were laughing and
playing in the streets.
They rode four abreast
in perfect order slowly through the town. It was utterly impossible to
recognise a man or a horse, so complete was the simple disguise of the white
sheet which blanketed the horse fitting closely over his head and ears and
falling gracefully over his form toward the ground.
No citizen of Hambright
was in the procession. They were all in the streets watching it pass. There
were fifteen hundred men in line. But the reports next day all agreed in fixing
the number at over five thousand.
Perkins and Haley had
watched it from a darkened room.
"Brother Haley,
that’s the end! Lord I wish I was back in Michigan, jail er no jail," said
Perkins mopping the perspiration from his brow.
"We’ll have ter
dig out purty quick, I reckon," answered Haley.
"And to think them
fools at Washington laughed at us!" cried Perkins clinching his fists.
And that night, mothers
and fathers gathered their children to bed with a sense of grateful security
not felt through years of war and turmoil.
The success of the Ku
Klux Klan was so complete, its organisers were dazed. Its appeal to the
ignorance and superstition of the Negro at once reduced the race to obedience
and order. Its threat against the scalawag and carpet-bagger struck terror to
their craven souls, and the "Union League," "Red Strings,"
and "Heroes of America" went to pieces with incredible rapidity.
Major Stuart Dameron,
the chief of the Klan in Campbell county, was holding a conference with the
Rev. John Durham in his study.
"Doctor, our work
has succeeded beyond our wildest dream."
"Yes, and I thank
God we can breathe freely if only for a moment, Major. The danger now lies in
our success. We are necessarily playing with fire."
"I know it, and it
requires my time day and night to prevent reckless men from disgracing
us."
"It will not be
necessary to enforce the death penalty against any other man in this county,
Major. The execution of Tim Shelby was absolutely necessary at the time and it
has been sufficient."
"I agree with you.
I’ve impressed this on the matter of every lodge, but some of them are growing
reckless."
"Who are
they?"
"Young Allan
McLeod for one. He is a dare devil and only eighteen years old."
"He’s a
troublesome boy. I don’t seem to have any influence with him. But I think Mrs.
Durham can manage him. He seems to think a great deal of her, and in spite of
his wild habits, he comes regularly to her Sunday School class."
"I hope she can
bring him to his senses."
"Leave him to me
then a while. We will see what can be done."
* * * * * *
Hogg’s Legislature
promptly declared the Scotch-Irish hill counties in a state of insurrection,
passed a militia bill, and the Governor issued a proclamation suspending the
writ of Habeas Corpus in these counties.
Fearing the effects of
negro militia in the hill districts, he surprised Hambright by suddenly
marching into the court house square a regiment of white mountain guerillas
recruited from the outlaws of East Tennessee and commanded by a noted desperado,
Colonel Henry Berry. The regiment had two pieces of field artillery.
It was impossible for
them to secure evidence against any member of the Klan unless by the
intimidation of some coward who could be made to confess. Not a disguise had
even been penetrated. It was the rule of the order for its decrees to be
executed in the district issuing the decree by the lodge furthest removed in
the county from the scene. In this way not a man or a horse was ever
identified.
The Colonel made an
easy solution of this difficulty, however. Acting under instructions from
Governor Hogg, he secured from Haley and Perkins a list of every influential
man in every precinct in the county, and a list of possible turncoats and
cowards. He detailed five hundred of his men to make arrests, distributed them
throughout the county and arrested without warrants over two hundred citizens
in one day.
The next day Berry
hand-cuffed together the Rev. John Durham and Major Dameron, and led than escorted
by a company of cavalry on a grand circuit of the county, that the people might
be terrified by the sight of their chains. An ominous silence greeted them on
every hand. Additional arrests were made by this troop and twenty-five more
prisoners led into Hambright the next day."
The jail was crowded,
and the court house was used as a jail. Over a hundred and fifty men were
confined in the court room. Rev. John Durham was everywhere among the crowd,
laughing, joking and cheering the men.
"Major Dameron, a
jail never held so many honest men before," he said with a smile, as he
looked over the crowd of his church members gathered from every quarter of the
county.
"Well, Doctor, you’ve
got a quorum here of your church and you can call them to order for
business."
"That’s a fact,
isn’t it?"
"There’s old
Deacon Kline over there who looks like he wished he hadn’t come! The Preacher
walked over to the deacon.
"What’s the
matter, brother Kline, you look pensive."
The deacon laughed.
"Yes, I don’t like my bed. I’m used to feathers."
"Well, they say
they are going to give you feathers mixed with tar so you won’t lose them so
easily."
"I’ll have
company, I reckon," said the deacon with a wink.
"The funny thing,
deacon, is that Major Dameron tells me there isn’t a man in all the crowd of
two hundred fifty arrested who ever went on a raid. It’s too bad you old
fellows have to pay for the follies of youth."
"It is tough. But
we can stand it, Preacher." They clasped hands.
"Haven’t smelled a
coward anywhere have you, deacon?"
"I’ve seen one or
two a little fidgety, I thought. Cheer ’em up with a word, Preacher."
Springing on the
platform of the judge’s desk he looked ever the crowd for a moment, and a cheer
shook the building.
"Boys, I don’t believe
there’s a single coward in our ranks." Another cheer.
"Just keep cool
now and let our enemies do the talking. In ten days every man of you will be
back at home at his work."
"How will we get
out with the writ suspended?" asked a man standing near.
"That’s the
richest thing of all. A United States judge has just decided that the Governor
of the state cannot suspend the rights of a citizen of the United States under
the new Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution so recently rammed down our
throats. Hogg is hoisted on his own petard. Our lawyers are now serving out
writs of Habeas Corpus before this Federal judge under the Fourteenth
Amendment, and you will be discharged in less than ten days unless there’s a
skunk among you. And I don’t smell one anywhere." Again a cheer shook the
building.
An orderly walked up to
the Preacher and handed him a note.
"Read it!"
the men crowded around.
"Read it, Major
Dameron, I’m dumb," said the Preacher.
"A military order
from the dirty rascal, Berry, commanding the mountain bummers, forbidding the
Rev. John Durham, to speak during his imprisonment!"
A roar of laughter
followed this announcement.
"That’s cruel! It’ll
kill him!" cried Deacon Kline as he jabbed the Preacher in the ribs.
In a few minutes, the
Preacher was back in his place with five of the best singers from his church by
his side. He began to sing the old hymns of Zion and every man in the room
joined until the building quivered with melody.
"Now a good old
Yankee hymn, that suits this hour, written by an old Baptist preacher I met in
Boston the other day!" cried the Preacher.
"My country ’tis
of thee,
Sweet land of liberty,
of thee I sing!"
Heavens, how they sang
it, while the Preacher lined it off, stood above them beating time, and led in
a clear mighty Voice! Again the orderly appeared with a note.
"What is it
now?" they cried on every side.
Again Major Dameron
announced "Military order No. 2, forbidding the Rev. John Durham to sing
or induce anybody to sing while is prison."
Another roar of
laughter that broke into a cheer which made the glass rattle. When the soldier
had disappeared, the Rev. John Durham ascended the platform, looked about him
with a humourous twinkle in his eye, straightened himself to his full height
and crowded like a rooster! A cheer shook the building to its foundations. Roar
after roar of its defiant cadence swept across the square and made Haley and
Perkins tremble as they looked at each other over their conference table with
Berry.
"What the devil’s
the matter now?" cried Haley.
"Do you suppose it’s
a rescue?" whispered Perkins.
"No, it’s some new
trick of that damned Preacher. I’ll chain him in a room to himself,"
growled Berry.
"Better not,
Colonel. He’s the pet of these white devils. Ye’d better let him alone."
Berry accepted the advice.
Five days later the
prisoners were arraigned before the United States judge, Preston Rivers, at
Independence. Not a scrap of evidence could be produced against them. Governor
Hogg was present, with a flaming military escort. He held a stormy interview
with Judge Rivers.
"If you discharge
these prisoners, you destroy the government of this state, sir!" thundered
Hogg.
"Are they not
citizens of the United States? Does not the Fourteenth Amendment apply to a
white man as well as a negro?" quietly asked the judge.
"Yes, but they are
conspirators against the Union. They are murderers and felons."
"Then prove it in
my court and I’ll hand them back to you. They are entitled to a trial, under
our Constitution."
"I’ll demand your
removal by the President," shouted Hogg.
"Get out of this
room, or I’ll remove you with the point of my boot!" thundered the judge
with rising wrath. "You have suspended the writ of Habeas Corpus to win a
political campaign. The Ku Klux Klan has broken up your Leagues. You are
fighting for your life. But I’ll tell you now, you can’t suspend the
Constitution of the United States while I’m a Federal judge in this state. I am
not a henchman of yours to do your dirty campaign work. The election is but ten
days off. Your scheme is plain enough. But if you want to keep these men in
prison it will be done on sworn evidence of guilt and a warrant, not on your
personal whim."
The Governor cursed,
raved and threatened in vain. Judge Rivers discharged every prisoner and warned
Colonel Berry against the repetition of such arrests within his jurisdiction.
When these prisoners
were discharged, a great mass-meeting was called to give them a reception in
the public square of Independence. A platform was hastily built in the square
and that night five thousand excited people crowded past the stand, shook hands
with the men and cheered till they were hoarse. The Governor watched the demonstration
in helpless fury from his room in the hotel.
The speaking began at
nine o’clock. Every discordant element of the old South’s furious political
passions was now melted into harmonious unity. Whig and Democrat who had fought
one another with relentless hatred sat side by side on that platform.
Secessionist and Unionist now clasped hands. It was a White Man’s Party, and
against it stood in solid array the Black Man’s Party, led by Simon Legree.
Henceforth there could
be but one issue, are you a White Man or a Negro?
They declared there was
but one question to be settled:--
"Shall the future
American be an Anglo-Saxon or a Mulatto?
These determined
impassioned men believed that this question was more important than any theory
of tariff or finance and that it was larger than the South, or even the nation,
and held in its solution the brightest hopes of the progress of the human race.
And they believed that they were ordained of God in this crisis to give this
question its first authoritative answer.
The state burst into a
flame of excitement that fused in its white heat the whole Anglo-Saxon race.
In vain Hogg marched
and counter-marched his twenty thousand state troops. They only added fuel to
the fire. If they arrested a man, he became forthwith a hero and was given an
ovation. They sent bands of music and played at the jail doors, and the ladies
filled the jail with every delicacy that could tempt the appetite or appeal to
the senses.
Hogg and Legree were in
panic of fear with the certainty of defeat, exposure and a felon’s cell before
them.
Two days before the
election, the prayer meeting was held at eight o’clock in the Baptist church at
Hambright. It was the usual mid-week service, but the attendance was unusually
large.
After the meeting, the
Preacher, Major Dameron, and eleven men quietly walked back to the church and
assembled in the pastor’s study. The door opened at the rear of the church and
could be approached by a side street.
"Gentlemen,"
said Major Dameron, "I’ve asked you here to-night to deliver to you the
most important order I have ever given, and to have Dr. Durham as our chaplain
to aid me in impressing on you its great urgency."
"We’re ready for
orders, Chief," said young Ambrose Kline, the deacon’s son.
"You are to call
out every troop of the Klan in full force the night before the election. You
are to visit every negro in the county, and warn every one as he values his
life not to approach the polls at this election. Those who come, will be allowed
to vote without molestation. All cowards will stay at home. Any man, black or
white, who can be scared out of his ballot is not fit to have one. Back of
every ballot is the red blood of the man that votes. The ballot is force. This
is simply a test of manhood. It will be enough to show who is fit to rule the
state. As the masters of the eleven township lodges of the Klan, you are the
sole guardians of society to-day. When a civilised government has been
restored, your work will be done."
"We will do it, sir,"
cried Kline.
"Let me say,
men," said the Preacher, "that I heartily endorse the plan of your
chief. See that the work is done thoroughly and it will be done for all time.
In a sense this is fraud. But it is the fraud of war. The spy is a fraud, but we
must use him when we fight. Is war justifiable?
"It is too late
now for us to discuss that question. We an in a war, the most ghastly and
hellish ever waged, a war on women and children, the starving and the wounded,
and that with sharpened swords. The Turk and Saracen once waged such a war. We
must face it and fight it out. Shall we flinch?"
"No! no!"
came the passionate answer from every man.
"You are asked to
violate for the moment a statutory law. There is a higher law. You are the
sworn officers of that higher law."
The group of leaders
left the church with enthusiasm and on the following night they carried out
their instructions to the letter.
The election was
remarkably quiet. Thousands of soldiers were used at the polls by Hogg’s
orders. But they seemed to make no impression on the determined men who marched
up between their files and put the ballots in the box.
Legree’s ticket was
buried beneath an avalanche. The new "Conservative" party carried
every county in the state save twelve and elected one hundred and six members
of the new legislature out of a total of one hundred and twenty.
The next day hundreds
of carpet-bagger thieves fled to tie North, and Legree led the procession.
Legree had on deposit
in New York two millions of dollars, and the total amount of his part of the
thefts he had engineered reached five millions. He opened an office on Wall
Street, bought a seat in the Stock Exchange, and became one of the most daring
and successful of a group of robbers who preyed on the industries of the
nation.
The new Legislature
appointed a Fraud Commission which uncovered the infamies of the Legree régime,
but every thief had escaped. They promptly impeached the Governor and removed
him from office, and the old commonwealth once more lifted up her head and took
her place in the ranks of civilised communities.
Nelse was elated over
the defeat and dissolution of the Leagues that had persecuted him with such
malignant hatred. When the news of the election came he was still in bed
suffering from his wounds. He had received an internal injury that threatened
to prove fatal.
"Dar now!" he
cried, sitting up in bed, "Ain’t I done tole you no kinky-headed niggers
gwine ter run dis gov’ment!"
"Keep still dar,
ole man, you’ll be faintin’ ergin," worried Aunt Eve.
"Na honey, I’se
feelin’ better. Gwine ter git up and meander down town en ax dem niggers how’s
de Ku Kluxes comin’ on dese days."
In spite of all Eye
could say he crawled out of bed, fumbled into his clothes and started down
town, leaning heavily on his cane. He had gone about a block, when he suddenly
reeled and fell. Eve was watching him from the door, and was quickly by his
side. He died that afternoon at three o’clock. He regained consciousness before
the end and asked Eve for his banjo.
He put it lovingly into
the hands of Charlie Gaston who stood by the bed crying.
"You keep ’er,
honey. You lub ’er talk better’n any body in de worl’, en ’member Nelse when
you hear ’er moan en sigh. En when she talk short en sassy en make ’em all gin
ter shuffle, dat’s we too. Dat’s me got back in ’er."
Charlie Gaston rode
with Aunt Eve to the cemetery. He walked back home through the fields with
Dick.
"I wouldn’ cry ’bout
er ole nigger!" said Dick looking into his reddened eyes.
"Can’t help it. He
was my best friend."
"Haint I wid
you?"
"Yes, but you ain’t
Nelse."
"Well, I stan’ by
you des de same."
Mrs. Durham, the Doctor
wants you," said Charlie when McLeod’s footfall had died away.
"Charlie, dear,
why don’t you call we ’Mama’--surely you love me a little wee bit, don’t
you?" she asked, taking the boy’s hand tenderly in hers.
"Yes’m," he
replied hanging his head.
"Then do say Mama.
You don’t know how good it would be in my ears."
"I try to but it
chokes me," he half whispered, glancing timidly up at her. "Let me
call you Aunt Margaret, I always wanted an aunt and I think your name Margaret’s
so sweet," he shyly added.
She kissed him and
said, "All right, if that’s all you will give me." She passed on into
the library where the Preacher waited her.
"My dear, I’ve
just given young McLeod a piece of my mind. I wanted to say to you that you are
entirely mistaken in his character. He’s a bad egg. I know all the facts about
his treachery. He’s as smooth a liar as I’ve met in years."
"With all his
brute nature, there’s some good in him," she persisted.
"Well, it will
stay in him. He will never let it get out."
"All right, have
your way about it for the time. We’ll see who is right in the long run. Now I’ve
a move pressing and tougher problem for your solution."
"What is it?"
"Dick."
"What’s he done
this time?"
"He steals
everything he can get his hands on."
"He is a
puzzle."
"He’s the greatest
liar I ever saw," she continued. "He simply will not tell the truth
if he can think up a lie in time. I’d say run him off the place, but for
Charlie. He seems to love the little scoundrel. I’m afraid his influence over
Charlie will be vicious, but it would break the child’s heart to drive him
away. What shall we do with him?"
The Preacher laughed.
"I give it up, my dear, you’ve got beyond my depth now. I don’t know
whether he’s got a soul. Certainly the very rudimentary foundations of morals
seem lacking. I believe you could take a young ape and teach him quicker. I
leave him with you. At present it’s a domestic problem."
"Thanks, that’s so
encouraging."
Dick was a puzzle and
no mistake about it. But to Charlie his rolling mischievous eyes, his cunning
fingers and his wayward imagination were unfailing mountains of life. He found
every bird’s nest within two miles of town. He could track a rabbit almost as
swiftly and surely as a hound. He could work like fury when he had a mind to,
and loaf a half day over one row of the garden when he didn’t want to work,
which was his chronic condition.
When the revival season
set in for the negroes in the summer, the days of sorrow began for householders.
Every negro in the county became absolutely worthless and remained so until the
emotional insanity attending their meetings wore off.
Aunt Mary, Mrs. Durham’s
cook, got salvation over again every summer with increasing power and
increasing degeneration in her work. Some nights she got home at two o’clock
and breakfast was not ready until nine. Some nights she didn’t get home at all,
and Mrs. Durham had to get breakfast herself.
It was a hard time for
Dick who had not yet experienced religion, and on whom fell the brunt of the
extra work and Mrs. Durham’s fretfulness besides.
"I tell you what
less do, Charlie!" he cried one day. "Less go down ter dat nigger chu’ch,
en bus’ up de meetin’! I’se gettin’ tired er dis."
"How’ll you do
it?"
"I show you
somefin’?" He reached under his shirt next to his skin, and pulled out Dr.
Graham’s sun glass.
"Where’d you get
that, Dick?"
"Foun’ it whar er
man lef’ it." He walled his eyes solemnly.
"Des watch here
when I turns ’im in de sun. I kin set dat pile er straw er fire wid it!"
"You mustn’t set
the church afire!" warned Charlie.
"Now, chile, but I
git up in de gallery, en when ole Uncle Josh gins ter holler en bawl en r’ar en
charge, I fling dat blaze er light right on his bal’ haid, en I set him afire
sho’s you bawn!"
"Dick, I wouldn’t
do, it," said Charlie, laughing in spite of himself.
Charlie refused to
accompany him. But Dick’s mind was set on the necessity of this work of reform.
So in the afternoon he slipped off without leave and quietly made his way into
the gallery of the Negro Baptist church.
The excitement was
running high. Uncle Josh had preached one sermon an hour in length, and had
called up the mourners. At least fifty had come forward. The benches had been
cleared for five rows back from the pulpit to give plenty of room for the
mourners to crawl over the floor, walk back and forth and shout when they
"came through," and for their friends to fan them.
This open place was
covered with wheat straw to keep the mourners off the bare floor, and afford
some sort of comfort for those far advanced in mourning, who went into trances
and sometimes lay motionless for hours on their backs or flat on their faces.
The mourners had kicked
and shuffled this straw out to the edges and the floor was bare. Uncle Josh had
sent two deacons out for more straw.
In the meantime he was
working himself up to another mighty climax of exhortation to move sinners to
come forward.
"Come on ter glory
you po, po sinners, en flee ter de Lamb er God befo de flames er hell swaller
you whole! At de last great day de Sperit ’ll flash de light er his shinin’
face on dis ole parch up sinful worl’, en hit ’ll ketch er fire in er minute,
an de yearth ’ll melt wid furvient heat! Whar ’ll you be when den po tremblin’
sinner? Whar ’ll you be when de flame er de Sperit de smites de moon and de
stars wid fire, en dey gin ter drap outten de sky en knock big holes in de
burnin’ yearth? Whar ’ll you be when de rocks melt wit dat heat, en de sun hide
his face in de black smoke dat rise fum de pit?"
Moans and groans and
shrieks, louder and louder filled the air. Uncle Josh paused a moment and
looked for his deacons with the straw. They were just coming up the steps with
a great armful over their heads.
"What’s de mattter
wid you breddern! Fetch on dat wheat straw! Here’s dese tremblin’ souls gwine
down inter de dames er hell des fur de lak er wheat straw!"
The brethren hurried
forward with the wheat straw, and just as they reached Uncle Josh standing
perspiring in the midst of his groaning mourners, Dick flashed from the gallery
a stream of dazzling light on the old man’s face and held it steadily on his
bald head. Josh was too astonished to move at first. He was simply paralysed
with fear. It was all right to talk about the flame of the Spirit, but he wasn’t
exactly ready to run into it. Suddenly he clapped his hands on the top of his
head and sprang straight up in the air yelling in a plain everyday profane
voice,
"God-der-mighty!
What’s dat?"
The brethren holding
the straw saw it and stood dumb with terror. The light disappeared from Uncle
Josh’s head and lit the straw in splendour on one of the deacon’s shoulders.
Aunt Mary’s voice was heard above the mourners’ din, clear, shrill and soul
piercing.
"G-l-o-r-y!
G-1-o-r-y ter God! De flame er de Sperit! De judgment day! Yas Lawd, I’se here!
Glory! Halleluyah!"
Suddenly the straw an
the deacon’s back burst into flames! And pandemonium broke loose. A weak-minded
sinner screamed,
"De flames er
Hell!"
The mourners smelled
the smoke and sprang from the door with white staring eyes. When they saw the
fire and got their bearings they made for the open,--they jumped on each others’
back and made for the door like madmen. Those nearest the windows sprang
through, and when the lower part of the window was jammed, big buck negroes
jumped on the backs of the lower crowd and plunged through the two upper sashes
with a crash that added new terror to the panic.
In two minutes the
church was empty, and the yard full of crazy, shouting negroes.
Dick stepped from the
gallery into the crowd as the last ones emerged, ran up to the pulpit and
stamped out the fire in the straw with his bare feet. He looked around to see
if they had left anything valuable behind in the stampede, and sauntered
leisurely out of the church.
"Now dog-gone ’em
let ’em yell!" he muttered to himself.
When Uncle Josh
sufficiently recovered his senses to think, and saw the church still standing,
with not even a whiff of smoke to be seen, instead of the roaring furnace he
had expected, he was amazed. He called his scattered deacons together and they
went cautiously back to investigate.
"Hit’s no use in
talkin’ Bre’r Josh, dey sho wuz er fire!" cried one of the deacons.
"Sho’s de Lawd’s
in heaben. I feel it gittin’ on my fingers fo’ I drap dat straw!" said
another.
"Hit smite me fust
right top er my haid!" whispered Uncle Josh in awe.
They cautiously
approached the pulpit and there in front of it lay the charred fragments of the
burned straw pile.
They gathered around it
in awe-struck wonder. One of them touched it with his foot.
"Doan do
dat!" cried Uncle Josh, lifting his hand with authority.
They drew back, Uncle
Josh saw the immense power in that heap of charred straw. Some of it was a
little damp and it had been only partly burned.
"Dar’s de mericle
er de Sperit!" he solemnly declared.
"Yas Lawd!"
echoed a deacon.
"Fetch de hammer,
en de saw, a de nails; an de boards en build right dar en altar ter de
Sperit!" were his prophetic commands.
And they did. They got
an old show case of glass, put the charred straw in it, and built an open box
work around it just where it fell in front of the pulpit.
Then a revival broke
out that completely paralysed the industries of Campbell county. Every negro
stopped work and went to that church. Uncle Josh didn’t have to preach or to
plead. They come in troops towards the magic altar, whose fame and mystery had
thrilled every superstitious soul with its power. The benches were all moved
out and the whole church floor given up to mourners. Uncle Josh had an easy
time walking around just adding a few terrifying hints to trembling sinners, or
helping to hold some strong sister when she had "come through," with
so much glory in her bones that there was danger she would hurt somebody.
After a week the matter
became so serious the white people set in motion an investigation of the
affair. Dick had thrown out a mysterious hint that he knew some things that
were very funny.
"Doan you tell
nobody!" he would solemnly say to Charlie.
And then he would lie
down on the grass and roll and laugh. At length by dint of perseverance, and a
bribe of a quarter, the Preacher induced Dick to explain the mystery. He did,
and it broke up the meeting.
Uncle Josh’s fury knew
no bounds. He was heart-broken at the sudden collapse of his revival, chagrined
at the recollection of his own terror at the fire, and fearful of an avalanche
of backsliders from the meeting among those who had professed even with the
greatest glory.
He demanded that the
Preacher should turn Dick over to him for correction. The Preacher took a few
hours to consider whether he should whip him himself or turn him over to Uncle
Josh. Dick heard Uncle Josh’s demand. Out behind the stable he and Charlie held
a council of war.
"You go see Miss
Mar’get fur me, en git up close to her, en tell her taint right ter ’low no low
down black nigger ter whip me!"
"All right Dick, I
will," agreed Charlie.
"Case ef ole Josh
beats me I gwine ter run away. I nebber git ober dat."
Dick had threatened to
run away often before when he wanted to force Charlie to do something for him.
Once he had gone a mile out of town with his clothes tied in a bundle, and
Charlie trudging after him begging him not to leave.
The boy did his best to
save Dick the humiliation of a whipping at the hands of Uncle Josh, but in
vain.
When Uncle Josh led him
out to the stable lot, his face was not pleasant to look upon. There was a
dangerous gleam in Dick’s eye that boded no good to his enemy.
"You imp er de
debbil!" exclaimed Uncle Josh shaking his switch with unction.
"I fool you good
enough, you ole bal’ headed ape!" answered Dick gritting his teeth
defiantly.
"I make you sing
enudder chune fo I’se done wid you."
"En if you does,
nigger, you know what I gwine do fur you?" cried Dick rolling his eyes up
at his enemy.
"What kin you do,
honey?" asked Uncle Josh, humouring his victim with the evident relish of
a cat before his meal on a mouse.
"Ef you hits me
hard, I gwine ter burn you house down on you haid some night, en run erway des
es sho es I kin stick er match to it," said Dick.
"You is, is
you?" thundered Josh with wrath.
"Dat I is. En I
burn yo ole chu’ch de same night."
Uncle Josh was silent a
moment. Dick’s words had chilled his heart. He was afraid of him, but he was
afraid to back down from what was now evidently his duty. So without further
words he whipped him. Yet to save his life he could not hit him as hard as he
thought he deserved.
That night Dick
disappeared from Hambright, and for weeks every evening at dusk the wistful
face of Charlie Gaston could be seen on the big hill to the south of town
vainly watching for somebody. He would always take something to eat in his
pockets, and when he gave up his vigil he would place the food under a big
shelving rock where they had often played together. But the birds and ground
squirrels ate it. He would slip back the next day hoping to see Dick jump out
of the cave and surprise him.
And then at last he
gave it up, sat down under the rock and cried. He knew Dick would grow to be a
man somewhere out in the big world and never come back.
Hambright had changed
but little in the eighteen years of peace that had followed the terrors of
Legree’s régime. The population had doubled, though but few houses had been
built. The town had not grown from the development of industry, but for a very
simple reason--the country people had moved into the town, seeking refuge from
a new terror that was growing of late more and more a menace to a country home,
the roving criminal negro.
The birth of a girl
baby was sure to make a father restless, and when the baby looked up into his
face one day with the soft light of a maiden, he gave up his farm and moved to
town.
The most important
development of these eighteen years was the complete alienation of the white
and black races as compared with the old familiar trust of domestic life.
When Legree finished
his work as the master artificer of the Reconstruction Policy, he had dug a
gulf between the races as deep as hell. It had never been bridged. The deed was
done and it had crystallised into the solid rock that lies at the basis of
society. It was done at a formative period, and it could no more be undone now
than you could roll the universe back in its course.
The younger generation
of white men only knew the Negro as an enemy of his people in politics and
society. He never came in contact with him except in menial service, in which
the service rendered was becoming more and more trifling, and his habits more
insolent. He had his separate schools, churches, preachers and teachers and his
political leaders were the beneficiaries of Legree’s legacies.
With the Anglo-Saxon
race guarding the door of marriage with fire and sword, the effort was being
made to build a nation inside a nation of two antagonistic rices. No such thing
had ever been done in the history of the human race, even under the development
of the monarchial and aristocratic forms of society. How could it be done under
the formulas of Democracy with Equality as the fundamental basis of law? And
yet this was the programme of the age.
Gaston was feeling blue
from the reaction which followed his temptation by McLeod. His duty was clear
the night before as he walked firmly homeward, recalling the tragedy of the
past. Now in the cold light of day, the past seemed for away and unreal. The
present was near, pressing, vital. He laid down a book he was trying to read,
locked his office and strolled down town to see Tom Camp.
The old soldier had
come to be a sort oracle to him. His affection for the son of his Colonel was
deep and abiding, and his extravagant flattery of his talents and future were
so evidently sincere they always acted as a tonic. And he needed a tonic
to-day.
Tom was seated in a
chair in his yard under a big cedar, working on a basket, and a little
golden-haired girl was playing at his feet. It was his old home he had lost in
Legree’s day, but had got back through the help of General Worth, who came up
one day and paid back Tom’s gift of lightwood in gleaming yellow metal. His
long hair and full beard were white now, and his eyes had a soft deep look that
told of sorrows borne in patience and faith beyond the ken of the younger man.
It was this look on Tom’s face that held Gaston like a magnet when he was in
trouble.
"Tom, I’m blue and
heartsick. I’ve come down to have you cheer me up a little."
"You’ve got the
blues? Well that is a joke!" cried Tom. "You, young and handsome, the
best educated man in the county, the finest orator in the state, life all
before you, and God fillin’ the world to-day with sunshine and spring flowers,
and all for you! You blue! That is a joke." And Tom’s voice rang in hearty
laughter.
"Come here, Flora,
and kiss me, you won’t laugh at me, will you?"
The child climbed up
into his lap, slipped her little arms around his neck and hugged and him.
"Now, once more,
dearie, long and close and hard--oh! That’s worth a pound of candy!" Again
she squeezed his neck and kissed him, looking into his face with a smile.
"I love you,
Charlie," she said with quiet seriousness.
"Do you, dear? Well,
that makes me glad. If I can win the love of as pretty a little girl as you I’m
not a failure, am I?" And he smoothed her curls.
"Ain’t she
sweet?" cried Tom with pride as he laid aside his basket and looked at her
with moistened eyes.
"Tom, she’s the
sweetest child I ever saw."
"Yes, she’s God’s
last and best gift to me, to show me He still loved me. Talk about trouble.
Man, you’re a baby. You ain’t cut your teeth yet. Wait till you’ve seen some
things I’ve am. Wait till you’ve seen the light of the world go out, and
staggerin’ in the dark met the devil face to face, and looked him in the eye,
and smelled the pit. And then feel him knock you down in it, and the red waves
roll over you and smother you. I’ve been there."
Tom paused and looked
at Gaston. "You weren’t here when I come to the end of the world, the time
when that baby was born, and Annie died with the little red bundle sleepin’ on
her breast. The oldest girl was murdered by Legree’s nigger soldiers. Then
Annie give me that little gal. Lord, I was the happiest old fool that ever
lived that day! And then when I looked into Annie’s dead face, I went down,
down, down! But I looked up from the bottom of the pit and I saw the light of
them blue eyes and I heard her callin’ me to take her. How I watched her and
nursed her, a mother and a father to her, day and night, through the long
years, and how them little fingers of hers got hold of my heart! Now, I bless
the Lord for all His goodness and mercy to me. She will make it all right. She’s
going to be a lady and such a beauty! She’s goin’ to school now, and me and the
General’s goin’ to take her ter college bye and bye, and she’s goin’ to marry
some big handsome fellow like you, and her crippled grey haired daddy’ll live
in her house in his old age. The Lord is my shepherd I shall not want."
"Tom, you make me
ashamed."
"You ought to be,
man, a youngster like you to talk about gettin’ the blues. What’s all your
education for?"
"Sometimes I think
that only men like you have ever been educated."
"G’long with your
foolishness, boy. I ain’t never had a show in this world. The nigger’s been on
my back since I first toddled into the world, and I reckon he’ll ride me into
the grave. They are my only rivals now making them baskets and they always
undersell me."
Gaston started as Tom
uttered the last sentence.
"With you, boy, it’s
all plain sailin’. You’re the best looking chap in the county. I was a dandy
when I was young. It does me good to look at you if you don’t care nothin’
about fine clothes. Then you’re as sharp as a razor. There ain’t a man in No’th
Caliny that can stand up agin you on the stump. I’ve heard ’em all. You’ll be
the Governor of this state.
That was always the
climax of Tom’s prophetic flattery. He could think of no grander end of a human
life than to crown it in the Governor’s Palace of North Carolina. He belonged
to the old days when it was a bigger thing to be the Governor of a great state
than to hold any office short of the Presidency,--when men resigned seats in
the United States Senate to run for Governor, and when the national government
was so puny a thing that the bankers of Europe refused to loan money on United
States bonds unless countersigned by the State of Virginia. And that was not so
long ago. The bankers sent that answer to Buchanan’s Secretary of the Treasury.
"Tom, you’ve
lifted me out of the dumps. I owe you a doctor’s fee," cried Gaston with
enthusiasm as he placed Flora back on the grass and started to his office.
"All I charge you
is to come again. The old man’s proud of his young friend. You make me feel
like I’m somebody in the old world after all. And some day when you’re great
and rich and famous and the world’s full of your name, I’ll tell folks I know
you like my own boy, and I’ll brag about how many times you used to come to see
me."
"Hush, Tom, you
make me feel silly," said Gaston as he warmly pressed the old fellow’s
hand. He went back toward his office with lighter step and more buoyant heart.
His mind was as clear as the noonday sun that was now flooding the green fresh
world with its splendour. He would stand by his own people. He would sink or
swim with them. If poverty and failure were the result, let it be so. If
success came, all the better. There were things more to be desired than gold.
McLeod had developed
into a man of undoubted power. He was but thirty-two years old, dictator of his
party in the state.
He had the fighting
temperament which Southern people demand in their leaders. With this
temperament he combined the skill of subtle diplomatic tact. He had no moral
scruples of any kind. The problem of expediency alone interested him in ethics.
McLeod’s pet aversion
was a preacher, especially a Baptist or a Methodist. His choicest oaths he
reserved for them. He made a study of their weaknesses, and could tell dozens
of stories to their discredit, many of them true. He had an instinct for
finding their weak spots and holding them up to ridicule. He bought every book
of militant infidelity he could find and memorised the bitterest of it. He took
special pride in scoffing at religion before the young converts of Durham’s
church.
He was endowed with a
personal magnetism that fascinated the young as the hiss of a snake holds a
bird. His serious work was politics and sensualism. In politics he was at his
best. Here he was cunning, plausible, careful, brilliant and daring. He never
lost his head in defeat or victory. He never forgot a friend, or forgave an
enemy. Of his foe he asked no quarter and gave none.
His ambitions were
purely selfish. He meant to climb to the top. As to the means, the end would
justify them. He preferred to associate with white people. But when it was
necessary to win a negro, he never hesitated to go any length. The centre of
the universe to his mind was A. McLeod.
He was fond of saying
to a crowd of youngsters whom he taught to play poker and drink whiskey,
"Boys, I know the
world. The great man is the man who gets there."
He was generous with
his money, and the boys called him a jolly good fellow. He used to say in
explanation of this careless habit,
"It won’t do for
an ordinary man to throw away money as I do. I play for big stakes. I’m not a
spendthrift. I’m simply sowing seed. I can wait for the harvest."
And when they would
admire this overmuch he would warn them,
"As a rule my
advice is, Get money. Get it fairly and squarely if you can, but whatever you
do,-- get it. When you come right down to it, money’s your first, last, best
and only friend. Others promise well but when the scratch comes, they fail.
Money never fails."
A boy of fifteen asked
him one day when he was mellow with liquor,
"McLeod, which
would you rather be, President of the United States or a big millionaire?"
"Boys," he
replied, smacking his lips, and running his tongue around his cheeks inside and
softly caressing them with one hand, while he half closed his eyes,
"They say old
Simon Legree is worth fifty millions of dollars, and that his actual income is
twenty per cent on that. They say he stole most of it, and that every dollar
represents a broken life, and every cent of it could be painted red with the
blood of his victims. Even so, I would rather be in Legree’s shoes and have
those millions a year than to be Almighty God with hosts of angels singing
psalms to me through all eternity."
And the shallow-pated
satellites cheered this blasphemy with open-eyed wonder.
The weakest side of his
nature was that turned toward women. He was vain as a peacock, and the darling
wish of his soul was to be a successful libertine. This was the secret of the
cruelty back of his desire of boundless wealth.
He had the intellectual
forehead of his Scotch father, large, handsomely modelled features, nostrils
that dilated and contracted widely, and the thick sensuous lips of his mother.
His eyebrows were straight, thick and suggested undoubted force of intellect.
His hair was a deep red, thick and coarse, but his moustache was finer and it
was his special pride to point its delicately curved tips.
His vanity was being
stimulated just now by two opposite forces. He was in love, as deeply as such a
nature could love, with Sallie Worth. Her continued rejection of his suit had
wounded his vanity, but had roused all pugnacity of his nature to strengthen
this apparent weakness.
He had discovered
recently that he exercised a potent influence over Mrs. Durham. The moment he
was repulsed, his vanity turned for renewed strength toward her. He saw
instantly the immense power even the slightest indiscretion on her part would
give him over the Preacher’s life. He knew that while he was not a
demonstrative man, he loved his wife with intense devotion. He knew, too, that
here was the Preacher’s weakest spot. In his tireless devotion to his work, he
had starved his wife’s heart. He had noticed that she always called him
"Dr. Durham" now, and that he had gradually fallen into the habit of
calling her "Mrs. Durham."
This had been fixed in
their habits, perhaps by the change from housekeeping to living at the hotel.
Since old Aunt Mary’s death, Mrs. Durham had given up her struggle with the
modern negro servants, closed her house, and they had boarded for several
years.
He saw that if he could
entangle her name with his in the dirty gossip of village society, he could
strike his enemy a mortal blow. He knew that she had grown more and more
jealous of the crowds of silly women that always dog the heels of a powerful
minister with flattery and open admiration. He determined to make the
experiment.
Mrs. Durham, while nine
years his senior, did not look a day over thirty. Her face was as smooth and
soft and round as a girl’s, her figure as straight and full, and her every
movement instinct with stored vital powers that had never been drawn upon.
She was in a dangerous
period of her mental development. She had been bitterly disappointed in life.
Her loss of slaves and the ancestral prestige of great wealth had sent the
steel shaft of a poisoned dagger into her soul. She was unreconciled to it.
While she was passing through the anarchy of Legree’s régime which followed the
war, her unsatisfied maternal instincts absorbed her in the work of relieving
the poor and the broken. But when the white race rose in its might and shook
off this nightmare and order and a measure of prosperity had come, she had
fallen back into brooding pessimism.
She had reached the
hour of that soul crisis when she felt life would almost in a moment slip from
her grasp, and she asked herself the question, "Have I lived?" And
she could not answer.
She found herself
asking the reason for things long accepted as fixed and eternal. What was good
right and eternal? What was good, right, truth? And what made it good, right,
or true?
And she beat the wings
of her proud woman’s head against the bars that held her, until tired, and
bleeding she was exhausted but unconquered.
She was furious with
McLeod for his open association with negro politicians.
"Allan, in my
soul, I am ashamed for you when I see you thus degrade your manhood."
"Nonsense, Mrs.
Durham," he replied, "the most beautiful flower grows in dirt, but
the flower is not dirt."
"Well, I knew you
were vain, but that caps the climax!"
"Isn’t my figure
true, whether you say I’m dog-fennel or a pink?"
"No, you are not a
flower. Will is the soul of man. The flower is ruled by laws outside itself. A
man’s will is creative. You can make law. You can walk with your head among the
stars, and you choose to crawl in a ditch. I am out of patience with you."
"But only for a
purpose. You must judge by the end in view."
"There’s no need
to stoop so low."
"I assure you it
is absolutely necessary to my aims in life. And they are high enough. I
appreciate your interest in me, more than I dare to tell you. You have always
been kind to me since I was a wild red-headed brute of a boy. And you have always
been my supreme inspiration in work. While others have cursed and scoffed you
smiled at me and your smile has warmed my heart in its blackest nights."
She looked at him with
a mother-like tenderness.
"What ends could
be high enough to justify such methods ?"
"I hate poverty
and squalour. It’s been my fate. I’ve sworn to climb out of it, if I have to
fight or buy my way through hell to do it. I dream of a palatial home, of soft
white beds, grand banquet halls, and music and wine, and the faces of those I
love near me. Besides, the work I am doing is the best for the state and the
nation."
"But how can you
walk arm in arm with a big black negro, as they say you do, to get his
vote?"
"Simply because
they represent 120,000 votes I need. You can’t tell their colour when they get
in the box. I use these fools as so many worms. My political creed is for
public consumption only. I never allow anybody to impose on me. I don’t allow
even Allan McLeod to deceive me with a proper platform, or a lot of articulated
wind. I’m not a preacher."
She winced at that
shot, blushed and looked at him curiously for a moment.
"No, you are not a
preacher. I wish you were a better man."
"So do I, when I
am with you," he answered in a low serious voice.
"But I can’t get
over the sense of personal degradation involved in your association with
negroes as your equal," she persisted.
"The trouble is
you’re an unreconstructed rebel. Women never really forgive a social
wrong."
"I am
unreconstructed," she snapped with pride.
"And you thank God
daily for it, don’t you?"
"Yes, I do. Human
nature can’t be reconstructed by the fiat of fools who tinker with laws,"
she cried.
These thousands of
black votes are here. They’ve got to be controlled. I’m doing the job."
"You don’t try to
get rid of them."
"Get rid of them?
Ye gods, that would be a task! The Negro is the sentimental pet of the nation.
Put him on a continent alone, and he will sink like an iron wedge to the
bottomless pit of barbarism. But he is the ward of the Republic--our only
orphan, chronic, incapable. That wardship is a grip of steel on the throat of
the South. Back of it is an ocean of maudlin sentimental fools. I am simply
making the most of the situation. I didn’t make it to order. I’m just doing the
best I can with the material in hand."
"Why don’t you
come out like a man and defy this horde of fools?"
"Martyrdom has
become too cheap. The preachers have a hundred thousand missionaries now we are
trying to support."
"Allan, I thought
you held below the rough surface of your nature high ideals,--you don’t mean
this."
"What could one
man do against these millions?"
"Do!" she
cried, her face ablaze. The history of the world is made up of the
individuality of a few men. A little Yankee woman wrote a crude book. The
single act of that woman’s will caused the war, killed a million men, desolated
and ruined the South, and changed the history of the world. The single
dauntless personality of George Washington three times saved the colonies from
surrender and created the Republic. I am surprised to hear a man of your brain
and reading talk like that!"
"When I am with
you and hear your voice I have heroic impulses. You are the only human being
with whom I would take the time to discuss this question. But the current is
too strong. The other way is easier, and it serves my ends better. Besides, I
am not sure it isn’t better from every point of view. We’ve got the Negro here,
and must educate him."
"Hush! Tell that
to somebody that hates you, not to me," she cried.
"Don’t you think
we must educate them?"
"No, I think it is
a crime."
"Would you leave
them in ignorance, a threat to society ?"
"Yes, until they
can be moved. When I see these young negro men and women coming out of their
schools and colleges well dressed, with their shallow veneer of an imitation
culture, I feel like crying over the farce."
"Surely, Mrs.
Durham, you believe they are better fitted for life?
"They are not.
They are lifted out of their only possible sphere of menial service, and denied
any career. It is simply inhuman. They are led to certain slaughter of soul and
body at last. It is a horrible tragedy!"
Allan looked at her,
smiled, and replied, "I knew you were a bitter and brilliant woman but I
didn’t think you would go to such lengths even with your pet aversions."
"It’s not an
aversion, or a prejudice, sir. It’s a simple fact of history. Education
increases the power of the brain to think and the heart to suffer. Sooner or
later these educated negroes feel the clutch of the iron hand of the white man’s
unwritten laws on their throat. They have their choice between a suicide’s
grave or a prison cell. And the numbers who dare the grave and the prison cell
daily increase. The South is kinder to the Negro when he is kept in his
place."
"You are a quarter
of a century behind the times."
"Am I so
old?" she laughed.
"The sentiment,
not the woman. You are the most beautiful woman I ever saw."
"I like all my
boys to feel that way about me."
"You don’t class
me quite with the rest, do you?"
She blushed the
slightest bit. "’No, I’ve always taken a peculiar interest in you. I have
quarrelled with everybody who has hated and spoken evil of you. I have always
believed you were capable of a high and noble life of great achievement."
"And your faith in
me has been my highest incentive to give the lie to my enemies and succeed. And
I will. I will be the master of this state within two years. And I want you to
remember that I lay it all at your feet. The world need not know it,--you know
it." He spoke with intense earnestness.
"But I don’t want
you to make such a success at the price of Negro equality. I feel a sense of
unspeakable degradation for you when I hear your name hissed. At least I was
your teacher once. Come Allan, give up Negro politics and devote yourself to an
honourable career in law!"
He shook his head with
calm persistence.
"No, this is my
calling."
"Then take a
nobler one."
"To succeed
grandly is the only title to nobility here."
"Is the Doctor on
speaking terms with you now?"
"Oh! yes, I joke
him about his hide-bound Bourbonism, and he tells me I am all sorts of a
villain. But we have made an agreement to hate one another in a polite sort of
way as becomes a teacher in Israel and a statesman with responsibilities. By
the way, I saw him driving to the Springs with a bevy of pretty girls a few
hours ago."
"Indeed, I didn’t
know it!"
"Yes, he seemed to
be having a royal time and to have renewed his youth."
An angry flush came to
her face and she made no reply. McLeod glanced at her furtively and smiled at
this evidence that his shot had gone home.
"Would you drive
with me to the Springs? We will get there before this party starts back."
She hesitated, and answered, "yes."
When Helen Lowell
reached Boston from her visit with Sallie Worth, she found her father in the
midst of his political campaign. The Hon. Everett Lowell was the representative
of Congress from the Boston Highlands district. His home was an old fashioned
white Colonial house built during the American Revolution.
He was not a man of
great wealth, but well-to-do, a successful politician, enthusiastic student, a
graduate of Harvard, and he had always made a specialty of championing the
cause of the "freedmen." He was a chronic proposer of a military
force bill for the South.
His family was one of
the proudest in America. He had a family tree five hundred years old--an
unbroken line of unconquerable men who held liberty dearer than life. He
believed in the heritage of good honest blood as he believed in blooded horses.
His home was furnished in perfect taste, with beautiful old rosewood and
mahogany stuff that had both character and history. On the walls hung the
stately portraits of his ancestors representative of three hundred years of
American life. He never confused his political theories about the abstract
rights of the African with his personal choice of associates or his pride in
his Anglo-Saxon blood. With him politics was one thing, society another.
His pet hobby, which
combined in one his philanthropic ideals and his practical politics, was of
late a patronage he had extended to young George Harris, the bright mulatto son
of Eliza and George Harris whose dramatic slave history had made their son
famous at Harvard.
This young negro was a
speaker of fair ability and was accompanying Lowell on his campaign tours of
the district, making speeches for his patron, who had obtained for him a clerk’s
position in the United States Custom House. Harris was quite a drawing card at
these meetings. He had a natural aptitude for politics; modest, affable
handsome, and almost white, he was a fine argument in himself to support Lowell’s
political theories, who used him for all he was worth as he had at the previous
election.
Harris had become a
familiar figure at Lowell’s home in the spacious library, where he had the free
use of the books, and frequently he dined with the family, when there at dinner
time hard at work on some political speech or some study for a piece of music.
Lowell had met his
daughter at the depot behind his pair of Kentucky thoroughbreds. This daughter,
his only child, was his pride and joy. She was a blonde beauty, and her
resemblance to her father was remarkable. He was a widower, and this lovely
girl, at once the incarnation of his lost love and so fair a reflection of his
being, had ruled him with absolute sway during the past few years.
He was laughing like a
boy at her coming.
"Oh! My beauty,
the sight of your face gives me new life!" he cried smiling with love and
admiration.
"You mustn’t try
to spoil me!" she laughed.
"Did you really
have a good time in Dixie?" he whispered.
"Oh! Papa, such a
time!" she exclaimed shutting her eyes as though she were trying to live
it over again.
"Really?"
"Beaux, morning,
noon and night,--dancing, moonlight rides, boats gliding along the beautiful
river and mocking birds singing softly their love-song under the window all
night!"
"Well you did have
romance," he declared.
"Yes," she
went on "and such people, such hospitality--oh! I feel as though I never
had lived before."
"My dear, you
mustn’t desert us all like that," he protested.
"I can’t help it,
I’m a rebel now."
"Then keep still
till the campaign’s over!" he warned in mock fear.
"And the boys down
there," she continued, "they are such boys! Time doesn’t seem to be
an object with them at all. Evidently they have never heard of our uplifting
Yankee motto ’Time is money.’ And such knightly deference! such charming old
fashioned chivalrous ways!"
"But, dear, isn’t
that a little out of date?"
"How staid and
proper and busy Boston seems! I know I am going to be depressed by it."
"I know what’s the
matter with you!" he whistled.
"What?" she
slyly asked.
"One of those
boys."
"I confess, Papa,
he’s as handsome as a prince."
"What does he look
like?"
"He is tall, dark,
with black hair, black eyes, slender, graceful, all fire and energy."
"What’s his
name?"
"St. Clare--Robert
St. Clare. His father was away from home. He’s a politician, I think."
"’You don’t say!
St. Clare. Well of all the jokes! His father is my Democratic chum in the
House--an old fire-eating Bourbon, but a capital fellow."
"Did you ever see
him?"
"No, but I’ve had
good times with his father. He used to own a hundred slaves. He’s a royal
fellow, and pretty well fixed in life for a Southern politician. I don’t think
though I ever saw his boy. Anything really serious?"
"He hasn’t said a
word--but he’s coming to see me next week."
"Well things are
moving, I must say!"
"Yes, I pretended
I must consult you, before telling him he could come. I didn’t want to seem too
anxious. I’m half afraid to let him wander about Boston much, there are too
many girls here."
Her father laughed
proudly and looked at her. "I hope you will find him all your heart most
desires, and my congratulations on your first love!"
"It will be my
last, too," she answered seriously.
"Ah! you’re too
young and petty to say that!"
"I mean it,"
she said earnestly with a smile trembling on her lips.
Her father was silent
and pressed her hand for an answer. As they entered the gate of the house, they
met young Harris coming out with some books under his arm. He bowed gracefully
to them and passed on.
"Oh! Papa, I had
forgotten all about your fad for that young negro!"
"Well, what of it,
dear"
"You love me my
very much, don’t you?" she asked tenderly. "I’m going to ask you to
be inconsistent, for my sake."
"That’s easy. I’m
often that for nobody’s sake. Consistency is only the terror of weak
minds."
"I’m going to ask
you to keep that young negro out of the house when my Southern friends are
here. After my sweetheart comes I expect Sallie and her mother. I wouldn’t have
either of them to meet him here in our library and especially in our
dining-room for anything on earth!"
"Well, you have
joined the rebels, haven’t you?"
"You know I never
did like negroes any way," she continued. "They always gave me the
horrors. Young Harris is a scholarly gentleman, I know. He is good-looking,
talented, and I’ve played his music for him sometimes to please you, but I can’t
get over that little kink in his hair, his big nostrils and full lips, and when
he looks at me, it makes my flesh creep."
"Certainly, my
darling, you don’t need to coax me. The Lowells, I suspect, know by this time
what is due to a guest. When your guests come, our home and our time are
theirs. If eating meat offends, we will live on herbs. I’ll send Harris down to
the other side of the district and keep him at work there until the end of the
campaign. My slightest wish is law for him."
"You see,
Papa," she went on, "they never could understand that negro’s easy
ways around our house, and I know if he were to sit down at our table with them
they would walk out of the dining-room with an excuse of illness and go home on
the first train."
"And yet,"
returned her father lifting her from the carriage, "their homes were full
of negroes were they not?"
"Yes, but they
know their place. I’ve seen those beautiful Southern children kiss their old
black ’Mammy.’ It made me shudder, until I discovered they did it just as I kiss
Fido."
"And this a
daughter of Boston, the home of Garrison and Sumner!" he exclaimed.
"I’ve heard that
Boston mobbed Garrison once," she observed.
"Yes, and I doubt
if we have canonised Sumner yet. All right. If you say so, I’ll order a steam
calliope stationed at the gate and hire a man to play Dixie for you!"
She laughed, and ran up
the steps.
* * * * * *
Sallie determined to
keep the secret of her sorrow in her own heart. On the ocean voyage she had
cried the whole first day, and then kissed her lover’s picture, put it down in
the bottom of her trunk, brushed the tears away and determined the world should
not look an her suffering.
She had written Helen
of her lover’s declaration, and of her happiness. She would find a good excuse
for her sorrowful face in their separation. She knew he would write to her, for
he had said so, and she had slipped the address into his hand as he left the
car that night.
At first she was
puzzled to think what she could do about answering these letters so Helen would
not suspect her trouble. Then she hit on the plan of writing to him every day,
posting the letters herself and placing them in her own trunk instead of the
post-box.
"He will read them
some day. They will relieve my heart," she sadly told herself.
Helen met her on the
pier with a cry of girlish joy, and the first word she uttered was,
"Oh! Sallie, Bob
loves me! He’s been here two weeks, and he’s just gone home. I have been in
heaven. We are engaged!"
"Then I’ll kiss
you again, Helen!"--She gave her another kiss.
"And I’ve a big
letter at home for you already! It’s post-marked ’Hambright.’ It came this
morning. I know you will feast on it. If Bob don’t write me faithfully I’ll
make him come here and live in Boston."
When Sallie got this letter,
she sat down in her room, and read and re-read its passionate words. There was
a tone of bitterness and wounded pride in it. She struggled bravely to keep the
tears back. Then the tone of the letter changed to tenderness and faith and
infinite love that struggled in vain for utter ance.
She kissed the name and
sighed. "Now I must go down and chat and smile with Helen. She’s so silly
about her own love, if I talk about Bob she will forget I live."
When Gaston reached
Hambright the following day, and whispered to his mother the good news, he
hastened to tell his friend Tom Camp. The young man’s heart warmed toward the
white-haired old soldier in this hour of his victory. With sparkling eyes, he
told Tom of his stormy scene with the General, of its curious ending, and the
hours he spent in heaven beneath the limbs of an old magnolia.
Tom listened with
rapture. "Ah, didn’t I tell you, if you hung on you’d get her by-and-by?
So you bearded the General in his den did you? I’ll bet his eyes blazed when he
seed you! He’s got an awful temper when you rile him. You ought to seed him one
day when our brigade was ordered into a charge where three concealed batteries
was cross firin’ and men was fallin’ like wheat under the knife. Geeminy but
didn’t he cuss! He wouldn’t take the order fust from the orderly, and sent to
know if the Major-General meant it. I tell you us fellers that was layin’ there
in the grass listenin’ to them bullets singin’ thought he was the finest cusser
that ever ripped an oath.
"He reared and he
charged, and he cussed, and he damned that man for tryin’ to butcher his men,
and he never moved till the third order came. That was the night ten thousand
wounded men lay on the field, and me in the middle of ’em with a Minie ball in
my shoulder. The Yankees and our men was all mixed up together, and just after
dark the full moon came up through the trees and you could see as plain as day.
I begun to sing the old hymn, "There is a land of pure delight," and
you ought to have heard them ten thousand wounded men sing!
"While we was
singing the General came through lookin’ up his men. He seed me and said,
’Is that you, Tom Camp?’
"I looked up at
him, and he was crying like a child, and he went on from man to man cryin’ and
cussin’ the fool that sent us into that hell-hole. The General’s a rough man,
if you rub his fur the wrong way, but his heart’s all right. He’s all gold I
tell you!"
"Well, I’m in for
a tussle with him, Tom."
"Shucks, man, you
can beat him with one hand tied behind you if you’ve got his gal’s heart. She’s
got his fire, and a gal as purty as she is can just about do what she pleases
in this world."
"I hope she can
bring him around. I like the General. I’d much rather not fight him."
"Where’s
Flora?" cried Tom looking around in alarm.
"I saw her going
toward the spring in the edge of the woods there a minute ago," replied
Gaston.
Tom sprang up and began
to hop and jump down the path toward the spring with incredible rapidity.
Flora was playing in
the branch below the spring and Tom saw the form of a negro man passing over
the opposite hill going along the spring path that led in that direction.
"Was you talkin’
with that nigger, Flora?" asked Tom holding his hand on his side and
trying to recover his breath.
"Yes, I said
howdy, when he stopped to get a drink of water, and he give me a whistle,"
she replied with a pout of her pretty lips and a frown.
Tom seized her by the
arm and shook her. "Didn’t I tell you to run every time you seed a nigger
unless I was with you!"
"Yes, but he wasn’t
hurtin’ me and you are!" she cried bursting into tears.
"I’ve a notion to
whip you good for this!" Tom stormed.
"Don’t Tom, she
won’t do it any more, will, you Flora?" pleaded Gaston taking her in his
arms and starting to the house with her. When they reached the house, Tom was
still pale and trembling with excitement.
"Lord, there’s so
many triflin’ niggers loafin’ round the county now stealing and doin’ all sorts
of devilment, I’m scared to death about that child. She don’t seem any more
afraid of ’em than she is of a cat."
’I don’t believe
anybody would hurt Flora, Tom,--she’s such a little angel," said Gaston
kissing the tears from the child’s face.
"She is cute--ain’t
she?" said Tom with pride. I’ve wished many a time lately I’d gone out
West with them Yankee fellers that took such a likin’ to me in the war. They
told me that a poor white man had a chance out there, and that there wern’t a
nigger in twenty miles of their home. But then I lost my leg, how could I go?
He sat dreaming with
open eyes for a moment and continued, looking tenderly a Flora, "But,
baby, don’t you dare go nigh er nigger, or let one get nigh you no more ’n you
would a rattlesnake!"
"I won’t Pappy!
she cried with an incredulous smile at his warning of danger that made Tom’s
heart sick. She was all joy and laughter, full of health and bubbling life. She
believed with a child’s simple faith that all nature was as innocent as her own
heart.
Tom smoothed her curls
and kissed her at least, and she slipped her arm around his neck and squeezed
it tight.
"Ain’t she purty
and sweet now?" he exclaimed.
"Tom, you’ll spoil
her yet," warned Gaston as he smiled and took his leave, throwing a kiss
to Flora as he passed through the little yard gate. Tom had built a fence close
around his house when Flora was a baby to shut her in while he was at work.
Two days later about
five o’clock in the afternoon as Gaston sat in his office writing a letter to
his sweetheart, his face aglow with love and the certainty that she was his, as
he read and re-read her last glowing words he was startled by the sudden clang
of the court house bell. At first he did not move, only looking up from his
paper. Sometimes mischievous boys rang the bell and ran down the steps before
any one could catch them. But the bell continued its swift stroke seeming to
grow louder and wilder every moment. He saw a man rush across the square, and
then the bell of the Methodist, and then of the Baptist churches joined their
clamour to the alarm.
He snapped the lid of
his desk, snatched his hat and ran down the steps.
As he reached the
street, he heard the long piercing cry of a woman’s voice, high, strenuous,
quivering!
"A lost child! A
lost child!"
What a cry! He was
never so thrilled and awed by a human voice. In it was trembling all the
anguish of every mother’s broken heart transmitted through the centuries!
At the court house door
an excited group had gathered. A man was standing on the steps gesticulating
wildly and telling the crowd all he knew about it. Over the din he caught the
name,
"Tom Camp’s
Flora!"
He breathed hard, bit
his lips and prayed instinctively.
"Lord have mercy
on the poor old man! It will kill him!" A great fear brooded over the
hearts of the crowd, and soon the tumult was hushed into an awed silence.
In Gaston’s heart that
fear became a horrible certainty from the first. Within a half hour a thousand
white people were in the crowd. Gaston stood among them, cool and masterful,
organising them in searching parties, and giving to each group the signals to
be used.
In a moment the white
race had fused into a homogeneous mass of love, sympathy, hate, and revenge.
The rich and the poor, the learned and the ignorant, the banker and the
blacksmith, the great and the small, they were all one now. The sorrow of that
old one-legged soldier was the sorrow of all, every heart beat with his, and
his life was their life, and his child their child.
But at the end of an
hour there was not a negro among them! By some subtle instinct they had
recognised the secret feelings and fears of the crowd and had disappeared. Had
they been beasts of the field the gulf between them would not have been deeper.
When Gaston reached Tom’s
house the crowd was divided into the groups agreed upon and a signal gun given
to each. If the child was not dead when found two should be fired--if dead, but
one.
He sought Tom to be
sure there was no mistake and that the child had not fallen asleep about the
house. He found the old man shut up in his room kneeling in the middle of the
floor praying.
When Gaston laid his
hand gently on his shoulder his lips ceased to move, and he looked at him in a
dazed sort of way at first without speaking.
"Oh!--it’s you,
Charlie!" he sighed.
"Yes, Tom, tell me
quick. Are you sure she is nowhere in the house?"
"Sure!--Sure?"
he cried in a helpless stare. "Yes, yes, I found her bonnet at the spring.
I looked everywhere for an hour before I called the neighbours!"
"Then I’m off with
the searchers. The signal is two guns if they find her alive. One gun if she is
dead. You will understand."
"Yes,
Charlie," answered the old soldier in a faraway tone of voice, "and
don’t forget to help me pray while you look for her."
"I’ve tried
already, Tom," he answered as he pressed his hand and left the house. All
night long the search continued, and no signal gun was heard. Torches and
lanterns gleamed from every field and wood, byway and hedge for miles in every
direction.
Through every hour of
this awful night Tom Camp was in his room praying--his face now streaming with
tears, now dry and white with the unspoken terror that could stop the beat of
his heart. His white hair and snow-white beard were dishevelled, as he
unconsciously tore them with his trembling hands. Now he was crying in an agony
of intensity,
"As thy servant of
old wrestled with the angel of the Lord through the night, so, oh God, will I
lie at Thy feet and wrestle and pray! I will not let Thee go until Thou bless
me! Though I perish, let her live! I have lost all and praised Thee still.
Lord, Thou canst not leave me desolate!"
From the pain of his
wound and the exhaustion of soul and body he fainted once with his lips still
moving in prayer. For more than an hour he lay as one dead. When he revived, he
looked at his clock and it was but an hour till dawn.
Again he fell on his
knees, and again the broken accents of his husky voice could be heard wrestling
with God. Now he would beg and plead like a child, and then he would rise in
the unconscious dignity of an immortal soul in combat with the powers of the
infinite and his language was in the sublime speech of the old Hebrew seers!
Just before the sun
rose the signal gun pealed its message of life, ONE! TWO! in rapid succession.
Tom sprang to his feet
with blazing eyes. One! Two! echoed the guns from another hill, and fainter
grew its repeated call from group to group of the searchers.
"There! Glory to
God!" He screamed at the top of his voice, the last note of his triumphant
shout breaking into sobs. "God be praised! I knew they would find her--she’s
not dead, she’s alive! alive! oh! my soul, lift up thy head!"
The tramp of swift feet
as heard at the door and Gaston told him with husky stammering voice,
"She’s alive Tom,
but unconscious. I’ll have her brought to the house. She was found just where
your spring branch runs into the Flat Rock, not five hundred yards from here in
those woods. Say where you are. We will bring her in a minute."
Gaston bounded back to
the scene.
Tom paid no attention
to his orders to stay at home, but sprang after him jumping and falling and
scrambling up again as he followed. Before they knew it he was upon the excited
tearful group that stood in a circle around the child’s body.
Gaston, who was
standing on the opposite side from Tom’s approach, saw him and shouted,
"My God, men, stop
him! Don’t let him see her yet!"
But Tom was too quick
for them. He brushed aside the boy who caught at him, as though a feather,
crying,
"Stand back!"
The circle of men fell
away from the body and in a moment Tom stood over it transfixed with horror.
Flora lay on the ground
with her clothes torn to shreds and stained with blood. Her beautiful yellow
curls were matted across her forehead in a dark red lump beside a wound where
her skull had been crushed. The stone lay at her side, the crimson mark of her
life showing on its jagged edges.
With that stone the
brute had tried to strike the death blow. She was lying on the edge of the hill
with her head up the incline. It was too plain, the terrible crime that had
been committed.
The poor father sank
beside her body with an inarticulate groan as though some one had crushed his
head with an axe. He seemed dazed for a moment, and looking around he shouted
hoarsely,
"The doctor boys!
The doctor quick! For God’s sake, quick! She’s not dead yet--we may save
her--help--help!" he sank again to the ground limp and faint from pain and
was soon insensible.
Gaston gathered the
child tenderly in his arms and carried her to the house. The men hastily made a
stretcher and carried Tom behind him.
While Gaston and the
men were carrying Flora and Tom to the house, another searching party was
formed. There were no women and children among than, only grim-visaged silent
men, and a pair of little mild-eyed sharp-nosed blood-hounds. All the morning
men were coming in from the country and joining this silent army of searchers.
Doctor Graham came,
looked long and gravely at Flora and turned a sad face toward Tom.
"Now, doctor
wait--don’t say a word yet. I don’t want to know the truth, if it’s the worst.
Don’t kill me in a minute. Let me live as long as there’s breath in her
body--after that! well, that’s the end--there’s nothin after that!"
The doctor started to
speak.
"Wait,"
pleaded Tom, "let me tell you something. I’ve been praying all night. I’ve
seen God face to face. She can’t die. He told me so--"
He paused and his grip
on the doctor’s arm relaxed as though he were about to faint, but he rallied.
The kindly old doctor
said gently, "Sit down Tom."
He tried to lead Tom
away from the bed, but he held on like a bull dog.
The child breathed
heavily and moaned.
Tom’s face brightened.
"She’s comin’ to, doctor,--thank God!"
The doctor paid no more
attention to him and went on with his work as best he could.
Tom laid his
tear-stained face close to hers, and murmured soothingly to her as he used to
when she was a wee baby in his arms,
"There, there,
honey, it will be all right now! The doctor’s here, and he’ll do all he can!
And what can’t do, God will. The doctor’ll save you. God will save you! He loves
you. He loves me. I prayed all night. He heard me. I saw the shinin’ glory of
His face! He’s only tryin’ His poor old servant.
The broken artery was
found and tied and the bleeding stopped. When the wound on her head was dressed
the doctor turned to Tom,
"That wound is
bad, but not necessarily fatal."
"Praise God!"
"Keep the house
quiet and don’t let her see a strange face once she regains
consciousness," was his parting injunction.
The next morning her
breathing was regular, and pulse stronger, but feverish; and about seven o’clock
she came out of her comatose state and regained consciousness. She spoke but
once, and apparently at the sound of her own voice immediately went into a convulsion,
clinching her little fists, screaming and calling to her father for help!
When Tom first heard
that awful cry and saw her terrified eyes and drawn face, he tried to cover his
own eyes and stop his ears. Then he gathered the little convulsed body into his
arms and crooned into her ears,
"There, Pappy’s
baby, don’t cry! Pappy’s got you now. Nothin’ can hurt you. There, there,
nothin’ shall come nigh you!"
He covered her face
with tears and kisses while he whispered and soothed her to sleep. When the
noon train came up from Independence, General Worth arrived. Tom had asked
Gaston to telegraph for him in his name.
Tom eagerly grasped his
hand. "General I knowed you’d come--you’re a man to tie to. I never knowed
you to fail me in your life. You’re one of the smartest men in the world too.
You never got us boys in a hole so deep you didn’t pull us out"--
"What can I do for
you?" interrupted the General.
"Ah, now’s the
worst of all, General. I’m in water too deep for me. My baby, the last one left
on earth, the apple of my eye, all that holds my old achin’ body to this
world--she’s--about--to--die! I can’t let her. General, you must save her for
me. I want more doctors. They say there’s a great doctor at Independence. I
want ’em all. Tell ’em it’s a poor old one-legged soldier who’s shot all to
pieces and lost his wife and all his children--all but this one baby. And I can’t
lose her! They’ll come if you ask ’em--" His voice broke.
"I’ll do it, Tom.
I’ll have them here on a special in three hours or maybe sooner," returned
the General pressing his hand and hurrying to the telegraph office.
The doctors arrived at
three o’clock and held a consultation with Doctor Graham. They decided that the
loss of blood had been so great that the only chance to save her was in the
transfusion of blood.
"I’ll give her the
blood, Tom," said Gaston quietly removing his cost and baring his arm.
The old soldier looked
up through grateful tears.
"Next to the
General, you’re the best friend God ever give me, boy!"
The General turned his
face away and looked out of the window. The doctors immediately performed the
operation, transfusing blood from Gaston into the child. The results did not
seem to promise what they had hoped. Her fever rose steadily. She became
conscious again and immediately went into the most fearful convulsions,
breaking the torn artery a second time.
Just as the sun sank
behind the blue mountains’ peaks in the west her heart fluttered and she was
dead.
Tom sat by the bed for
two hours, looking, looking, looking with wide staring eyes at her white dead
face. There was not the trace of a tear. His mouth was set in a hard cold way
and he never moved or spoke.
The Preacher tried to
comfort Tom, who stared at him as though he did not recognise him at first, and
then slowly began,
"Go away,
Preacher, I don’t want to see or talk to you now. It’s all a swindle and a lie.
There is no God!"
"Tom, Tom!"
groaned the Preacher.
"I tell you I mean
it," he continued. "I don’t want any more of God or His heaven. I don’t
want to see God. For if I should see Him, I’d shake my fist in His face and ask
Him where His almighty power was when my poor little baby was screamin’ for
help while that damned black beast was tearin’ her to pieces! Many and many a
time I’ve praised God when I read the Bible there where it said, not a sparrow
falleth to the ground without His knowledge, and the very hairs of our head are
numbered. Well, where was He when my little bird was flutterin’ her broken
bleedin’ wings in the claws of that stinkin’ baboon,--damn him to everlastin’
hell!--It’s all a swindle I tell you!"
The Preacher was
watching him now with silent pity and tenderness.
"What a lie it all
is!" Tom repeated. "Scratch my name off the church roll. I ain’t got many
more days here, but I won’t lie. I’m not a hypocrite. I’m going to meet God
cursin’ Him to His face!"
The Preacher slipped
his arm around the old soldier’s neck, and smoothed the tangled hair back from
his forehead as he said brokenly,
"Tom, I love you!
My whole soul is melted in sympathy and pity for you!"
The stricken man looked
up into the face of his friend, saw his tears and felt the warmth of his love
flood his heart, and at last he burst into tears.
"Oh! Preacher,
Preacher! you’re a good friend I know, but I’m done, I can’t live any more!
Every minute, day and night, I’ll hear them awful screams--her a callin’ me for
help! I can see her lyin’ out there in the woods all night alone moanin’ and
bleedin’!"
His breast heaved and
he paused as if in reverie. And then he sprang up, his face livid and convulsed
with volcanic passions, that half strangled him while he shrieked,
"Oh! if I only had
him here before me now, and God Almighty would give me strength with these
hands to tear his breast open and rip his heart
out!--I--could--eat--it--like--a--wolf!"
* * * * * *
When they reached the
cemetery the next day and the body was about to be lowered into the grave, Tom
suddenly spied old Uncle Reuben Worth leaning on his spade by the edge of the
crowd. Uncle Reuben was the grave digger of the town and the only negro
present.
"Wait!" said
Tom raising his hand. "Don’t put her in that grave! A nigger dug it. I can’t
stand it:" He turned to a group of old soldier comrades standing by and
said,
"Boys, humour an
old broken man once more. You’ll dig another grave for me, won’t you? It won’t
take long. The folks can go home that don’t want to stay. I ain’t got no home
to go to now but this graveyard."
His comrades filled up
the grave that Uncle Reuben had dug, and opened a new one on the other side of
the graves where slept his other loved ones.
Gaston took Tom to his
home and stayed with him several hours trying to help him. He seemed to have
settled into a stupor from which nothing could rouse him When at length the old
man fell asleep, Gaston softly closed the door and returned to his office with
a heavy heart.
As he neared the centre
of the town, he heard a murmur like the distant moaning of the wind in the hush
that comes before a storm. It grew louder and louder and became articulate with
occasional words that seemed far away and unreal. What could it be? He had
never heard such a sound before. Now it became clearer and the murmur was the
tread of a thousand feet and the clatter of horses’ hoofs. Not a cry, or a
shout, or a word. Silence and hurrying feet!
Ah! he knew now. It was
a searchers returning, a grim swaying voiceless mob with one black figure amid
them. They were swarming into the court house square under the big oak where an
informal trial was to be held.
He rushed forward to
protest against a lynching. He could just catch a glimpse of the negro’s head
swaying back and forth, protesting innocence in a singing monotone as though he
were already half dead.
He pushed his way roughly
through the excited crowd, to the centre where Hose Norman, the leader, stood
with one end of a rope in his hand and the other around the negro’s neck.
The negro turned his
head quickly toward the movement made by the crowd as Gaston pressed forward.
It was Dick!
Dick recognised him at
the same moment, leaped toward and fell at his feet crying and pleading as he
held his feet and legs.
"Save me, Charlie!
I nebber done it! I nebber done it! For God’s sake help me! Keep ’em off! Dey
gwine burn me erlive!"
Gaston turned to the
crowd. "Men, there’s not one among you that loved that old soldier and his
girl as I did. But you must not do this crime. If this negro is guilty, we can
prove it in that court house there, and he will pay the penalty with his life.
Give him a fair trial"--
"That’s a lawyer
talkin’ now!" said a man in the crowd. "We know that tune. The
lawyers has things their own way in a court house." A murmur of assent
mingled with oaths ran through the crowd.
"Fair trial
!" sneered Hose Norman snatching Dick from the ground by the rope.
"Look at the black devil’s clothes splotched all over with her blood. We
found him under a shelvin’ rock where he’d got by wadin’ up the branch a
quarter of a mile to fool the dogs. We found his track in the sand some places
where he missed the water and tracked him clear from where we found Flora to
the cave he was lying in. Fair trial--hell! We’re just waitin’ for er can o’
oil. You go back and read your law books--we’ll tend ter this devil."
The messenger came with
the oil and the crowd moved forward. Hose shouted, "Down by Tom Camp’s by
his spring, down the spring branch to the Flat Rock where he killed her!"
On the crowd moved,
swaying back and forth with Gaston in their midst by Dick’s side begging for a
fair trial for him. A crowd that hurries and does not shout is a fearful thing.
There is something inhuman in its uncanny silence.
Gaston’s voice sounded
strained and discordant. They paid no more attention to his protest than to the
chirp of a cricket.
They reached the spot
where the child’s body had been found. They tied the screaming, praying negro
to a live pine and piled around his body a great heap of dead wood and
saturated it with oil. And then they poured oil on his clothes.
Gaston looked around
him begging first one man then another to help him fight the crowd and rescue
him. Not a hand was lifted, or a voice raised in protest. There was not a negro
among them. Not only was no negro in that crowd, but there was not a cabin in
all that county that would not have given shelter to that brute, though they
knew him guilty of the crime charged against him. This was the one terrible
fact that paralysed Gaston’s efforts.
Hose Norman stepped
forward to apply a match and Gaston grasped his arm.
"For God’s sake,
Hose, wait a minute!" he begged. "Don’t disgrace our town, our
county, our state, and our claims to humanity by this insane brutality. A beast
wouldn’t do this. You wouldn’t kill a mad dog or a rattlesnake in such a way.
If you will kill him, shoot him or knock him in the head with a rock,--don’t
burn him alive!"
Hose glared at him and
quietly remarked,
"Are you done now?
If you are, stand out of the way!"
He struck the match and
Dick uttered a scream. As Hose leaned forward with his match Gaston knocked him
down, and a dozen stalwart men were upon him in a moment.
"Knock the fool in
the head!" one shouted.
"Pin his arms
behind him!" said another.
Some one quickly
pinioned his arms with a cord. He stood in helpless rage and pity, and as he
saw the match applied, bowed his head and burst into tears.
He looked up at the
silent crowd standing there like voiceless ghosts with renewed wonder.
Under the glare of the
light and the tears the crowd seemed to melt into a great crawling swaying
creature, half reptile half beast, half dragon half man, with a thousand legs
and a thousand eyes, and ten thousand gleaming teeth, and with no ear to hear and
no heart to pity!
All they would grant
him was the privilege of gathering Dick’s ashes and charred bones for burial.
* * * * * *
The morning following
the lynching, the Preacher hurried to Tom Camp’s to see how he was bearing the
strain.
His door was wide open,
the bureau drawers pulled out, ransacked, and some of their contents were lying
on the floor.
"Poor old fellow,
I’m afraid he’s gone crazy!" exclaimed the Preacher. He hurried to the
cemetery. There he found Tom at the newly made grave. He had worked through the
night and dug the grave open with his bare hands and pulled the coffin up out
of the ground. He had broken his finger nails all off trying to open it and his
fingers were bleeding. At last he had given up the effort to open the coffin,
sat down beside it, and was arranging her toys he had made for her beside the
box. He had brought a lot of her clothes, a pair of little shoes and stockings,
and a bonnet, and he had placed these out carefully on top of the lid. He was
talking to her.
The Preacher lifted him
gently and led him away, a hopeless madman.
The longer Gaston
pondered over the tragic events of that lynching the more sinister and terrible
became its meaning, and the deeper he was plunged in melancholy.
Beyond all doubt,
within his own memory, since the negroes under Legree’s lead had drawn the
colour line in politics, the races had been drifting steadily apart. The gulf
was now impassable.
Such crimes as Dick had
committed, and for which he had paid such an awful penalty, were unknown
absolutely under slavery, and were unknown for two years after the war. Their
first appearance was under Legree’s régime. Now, scarcely a day passed in the
South without the record of such an atrocity, swiftly followed by a lynching,
and lynching thus had become a habit for all grave crimes.
Since McLeod’s triumph
in the state such crimes had increased with alarming rapidity. The
encroachments of negroes upon public offices had been slow but resistless. Now
there were nine hundred and fifty negro magistrates in the state elected for no
reason except the colour of their skin. Feeling themselves intrenched behind
state and Federal power, the insolence of a class of young negro men was
becoming more and more intolerable. What would happen to these fools when once
they roused that thousand-legged, thousand-eyed beast with its ten thousand
teeth and nails! He had looked into its face, and he shuddered to recall the
hour.
He knew that this power
of racial fury of the Anglo-Saxon when aroused was resistless, and that it
would sweep its victims before its wrath like chaff before a whirlwind.
And then he thought of
the day fast coming when culture and wealth would give the African the courage
of conscious strength and he would answer that soul piercing shriek of his
kindred for help, and that other thousand-legged beast, now crouching in the
shadows, would meet thousand legged beast around that beacon fire of a Godless
revenge!
More and more the
impossible position of the Negro in America came home to his mind. He was fast
being overwhelmed with the conviction that sooner or later we must squarely
face the fact that two such races, counting millions in numbers, can not live
together under a Democracy.
He recalled the fact
that there were more negroes in the United States than inhabitants in Mexico,
the third republic of the world.
Amalgamation simply
meant Africanisation. The big nostrils, flat nose, massive jaw, protruding lip
and kinky hair will register their animal marks over the proudest intellect and
the rarest beauty of any other race. The rule that had no exception was that
one drop of Negro blood makes a negro.
What could be the
outcome of it? What was his duty as a citizen and a member of civilised society?
Since the scenes through which he had passed with Tom Camp and that mob the
question was insistent and personal. It clouded his soul and weighed on him
like the horrors of a nightmare.
Again and again the
fateful words the Preacher had dinned into his ears since childhood pressed
upon him,
"You can not build
in a Democracy a nation inside a nation of two antagonistic races. The future
American must be an Anglo-Saxon or a Mulatto."
His depression and
brooding over the fearful events in which he had so recently taken part had
tinged his life and all its hopes with sadness. He had reflected this in his
letters to Sallie Worth without even mentioning the events. His heart was full
of sickening foreboding. How could one love and be happy in a world haunted by
such horrors! He had begged her to hasten her hour of final decision. He told
her of his sense of loneliness and isolation, and of his inexpressible need of
her love and presence in his daily life.
Her answer had only
intensified his moody feelings. She had written that her love grew stronger
every day and his love more and more became necessary to her life, and yet she
could not cloud its future with the anger of her father and the broken heart of
her mother by an elopement. She feared such a shock would be fatal and all her
life would be embittered by it. They must wait. She was using all her skill to
win her father, but as yet without success. But she determined to win him, and
it would be so.
All this seemed so far
away and shadowy to Gaston’s eager restless soul.
The letter had closed
by saying she was preparing for another trip to Boston to visit Helen Lowell
and that she should be absent at least a month. She asked that his next letter
be addressed to Boston.
Somehow Boston seemed
just then out of the world on another planet, it was so far away and its people
and their life so unreal to his imagination.
But he sighed and
turned resolutely to his work of preparation for an event in his life which he
meant to make great in the history of the state. It was the meeting of the
Democratic convention, as yet nearly two years in the future. He held a
subordinate position in his party’s councils, but defeat and ruin had taken the
conceit out of the old line leaders and he knew that his day was drawing near.
"I’ll take my
place among the leaders and masters of men," he told himself with quiet
determination, "I will compel the General’s respect; and if I can not win
his consent, I will take her without it."
The lynching at
Hambright had stirred the whole nation into unusual indignant interest. It
happened to be the climax of a series of such crimes committed in the South in
rapid succession, and the death of this negro was reported with more than usual
vividness by a young newspaper man of genius.
A grand mass meeting
was called in Cooper Union, New York, at which were gathered delegates from
different cities and states to give emphasis and unity to the movement and
issue an appeal to the national government.
When Sallie Worth
reached Boston, she found Helen Lowell at home alone. The Hon. Everett Lowell
had made one of the speeches of his career at the mass meeting held in Faneuil
Hall, and he was in New York where he had gone to make the principal address in
the Cooper Union Convention of Negro sympathisers.
George Harris had
accompanied him, supremely fascinated by the eloquent and masterful appeal for
human brotherhood he had heard him make in Boston. There was something pathetic
in the dog-like worship this young negro gave to his brilliant patron. In his
life in New England he had been shocked more than once by the brutal prejudices
of the people against his race. His soul had been tried to the last of its
powers of endurance at times. He found to his amazement that, when put to the
test, the masses of the North had even deeper repugnance to the person of a
Negro than the Southerners who grew up with him from the cradle. He had found
himself cut off from every honourable way of earning his bread, gentleman and
scholar though he was, and had looked into the river as he walked over the
bridge to Cambridge one night with a well-nigh resistless impulse to end it
all.
But Lowell had cheered
him, laughed his gloomy ideas to scorn, and more practical still, he had
secured him a clerkship in the Custom House which settled the problem of bread.
Others had failed him, but this man of trained powers had never failed him. He
had taught him to lift up his head and look the world squarely in the face.
Lowell was, to his vivid African imagination, the ideal man made in the image
of God, calm in judgment, free from all superstitions and prejudices, a citizen
of the world of human thought, a prince of that vast ethical aristocracy of
free thinkers of all ages who knew no racial or conventional barriers between
man and man.
Harris had published a
volume of poems which he had dedicated to Lowell, and his most inspiring verse
was simply the outpouring of his soul in worship of this ideal man.
He was his devoted
worshipper for another and more powerful reason. In his daily intercourse with
him in his library during his campaigns he had frequently met his beautiful
daughter, and had fallen deeply and madly in love with her. This secret passion
he had kept hidden in his sensitive soul. He had worshipped her from afar as
though she had been a white-robed angel. To see her and be in the same house
with her was all he asked. Now and then he had stood beside the piano and
turned the music while she played and sang one of his new pieces, and he would
live on that for month, eating his heart out with voiceless yearnings he dared
not expose.
In his music he made
his greatest success. There was a fiery sweep to his passion, and a deep
oriental rhythm in his cadence that held the imagination of his hearers in a
spell. It is needless to say it was in this music he breathed his secret love.
At first he had not
dared to hope for the day when he could declare this secret or take his place
in the list of her admirers and fight for his chance. But of late, a great hope
had filled his soul and illumined the world. As he had listened to Lowell’s
impassioned appeals for human brotherhood, his scathing ridicule of pride and
prejudice, and the poetic beauty of the language in which he proclaimed his own
emancipation from all the laws of caste, the fiery eloquence with which he
trampled upon all the barriers man had erected against his fellow man, his soul
was thrilled into ecstasy with the conviction that this scholar and scientific
thinker, at least, was a free man. He was sure that he had risen above the
limitations of provincialisms, racial or national prejudices.
He had begun to dream
of the day he would ask this Godlike man for the privilege of addressing his
daughter.
The great meeting at
Cooper Union had brought this dream to a sudden resolution. Lowell had outdone
himself that night. With merciless invective he had denounced the inhuman
barbarism of the South in these lynchings. The sea of eager faces had answered
his appeals as water the breath of a storm. He felt its mighty reflex influence
sweep back on his soul and lift him to greater heights. He demanded equality of
man on every inch of this earth’s soil.
"I demand this
perfect equality," he cried, "absolutely without reservation or
subterfuge, both in form and essential reality. It is the life-blood of
Democracy. It is the reason of our existence. Without this we are a living lie,
a stench in the nostrils of God and humanity!"
A cheer from a thousand
negro throats rent the air as he thus closed. The crowd surged over the
platform and for ten minutes it was impossible to restore order or continue the
programme. Young Harris pressed his patron’s hand and kissed it while tears of
pride and gratitude rained down his face.
This speech made a
national sensation. It was printed in full in all the partisan papers where it
was hoped capital might be made of it for the next political campaign, and the
National Campaign Committee of which be was a member ordered a million copies
of it printed for distribution among the negroes.
When Lowell and Harris
reached Boston, as they parted at the depot Harris said,
"Will you be at
home to-morrow, Mr. Lowell?"
"Yes, why?"
"I would like a
talk with you in the morning on a matter of grave importance. May I call at
nine o’clock?"
"Certainly. Come
right into the library. You’ll find me there, George."
That night as Lowell
walked through his brilliantly lighted home, he felt a sense of glowing pride
and strength. With his hands behind him he paced back and forth in his great
library and out through the spacious hall with firm tread and flushed face. He
felt he could look these great ancestors in the face to-night as they gazed
down on him hm their heavy gold frames. They had called him to high ambitions
and a strenuous life when his indolence had pleaded for ease and the
dilettanteism of a fruitless dreaming. His father had cultivated his artistic
tastes, dreamed and done nothing. But these grim-visaged, eagle-eyed ancestors
had called him to a life of realities, and he had heard their voices.
Yes, to-night his name
was on a million lips. The door of the United States Senate was opening at his
touch and mightier possibilities loomed in the future.
He felt a sense of
gratitude for the heritage of that stately old home and its inspiring memories.
Its roots struck down into the soil of a thousand years, and spread beneath the
ocean to that greater old world life. He felt his heart beat with pride that he
was adding new honours to that family history, and adding to the soul-treasures
his daughter’s children would inherit.
Seated in the library
next morning Harris was nervous and embarrassed. He made two or three attempts
to begin the subject but turned aside with some unimportant remark.
"Well, George,
what is the problem that makes you so grave this morning?" asked Lowell
with kindly patronage.
Harris felt that his
hour had come, and he must face it. He leaned forward in his chair and looked
steadily down at the rug, while he clasped both his hands firmly across his lap
and spoke with great rapidity.
"Mr. Lowell, I
wish to say to you that you have taught me the greatest faith of life, faith in
my fellow man without which there can be no faith in God. What I have suffered
as a man as I have come in contact with the brutality with which my race is
almost universally treated, God only can ever know.
"The culture I
have received has simply multiplied a thousandfold my capacity to suffer. But
for the inspiration of your manhood I would have ended my life in the river. In
you, I saw a great light. I saw a man really made in the image of God with mind
and soul trained, with head erect, scorning the weak prejudices of caste, which
dare to call the image of God clean or unclean in passion or pride.
"I lifted up my
head and said, one such man redeems a world from infamy. It’s worth while to
live in a world honoured by one such man, for he is the prophecy of more to
come."
He paused a moment,
fidgeted with a piece of paper he had picked up from the table and seemed at a
loss for a word.
It never dawned on
Lowell what he was driving at. He supposed, as a matter of course, he was
referring to his great speeches and was going to ask for some promotion in a
governmental department at Washington.
"I’m proud to have
been such on inspiration to you, George. You know how much I think of you. What
is on your mind?" he asked at length.
"I have hidden it
from every human eye, sir, I am afraid to breath it aloud alone. I have only
tried to sing it in song in an impersonal way. Your wonderful words of late
have emboldened me to speak. It is this--I am madly, desperately in love with
your daughter."
Lowell sprang to his
feet as though a bolt of lightning had suddenly shot down his backbone. He
glared at the negro with wide dilated eyes and heaving breath as though he had
been transformed into a leopard or tiger and was about to spring at his throat.
Before answering, and
with a gesture commanding silence, he walked rapidly to the library door and
closed it.
"And I have come
to ask you," continued Harris ignoring his gesture, "if I may pay my
addresses to her with your consent."
"Harris, this is
crazy nonsense. Such an idea is preposterous. I am amazed that it should ever
have entered your head. Let this be the end of it here and now, if you have any
desire to retain my friendship."
Lowell said this with a
scowl, and an emphasis of indignant rising inflection. The negro seemed stunned
by this swift blow in his very teeth, that seemed to place him outside the pale
of a human being.
"Why is such a
hope unreasonable, sir, to a man of your scientific mind?"
"It is a question
of taste," snapped Lowell.
"Am I not a
graduate of the same university with you? Did I not stand as high, and age for
age, am I not your equal in culture?"
"Granted.
Nevertheless you are a negro, and I do not desire the infusion of your blood in
my family."
"But I have more
of white than Negro blood, sir."
"So much the
worse. It is the mark of shame."
"But it is the one
drop of Negro blood at which your taste revolts, is it not?"
"To be frank, it
is."
"Why is it an
unpardonable sin in me that my ancestors were born under tropic skies where
skin and hair were tanned and curled to suit the sun’s fierce rays?"
"All tropic races
are not negroes, and your race has characteristics apart from accidents of
climate that make it unique in the annals of man," rejoined Lowell.
"And yet you
demand perfect equality of man with man, absolutely in form and substance
without reservation or subterfuge!"
"Yes, political
equality."
"Politics is but a
secondary phenomenon of society. You said absolute equality," protested Harris.
"The question you
broach is a question of taste, and the deeper social instincts of racial purity
and self preservation. I care not what your culture, or your genius, or your
position, I do not desire, and will not permit, a mixture of Negro blood in my
family. The idea is nauseating, and to my daughter it would be repulsive beyond
the power of words to express it!"
"And yet,"
pleaded Harris, "you invited me to your home, introduced me to your
daughter, seated me at your table, and used me in your appeal to your
constituents, and now when I dare ask the privilege of seeking her hand in
honourable marriage, you, the scholar, patriot, statesman and philosopher of
Equality and Democracy, slam the door in my face and tell me that I am a negro!
Is this fair or manly?"
"I fail to see its
unfairness."
"It is amazing.
You are a master of history and sociology. You know as clearly as I do that
social intercourse is the only possible pathway to love. And you opened it to
me with your own hand. Could I control the beat of my heart? There are some
powers within us that are involuntary. You could have prevented my meeting your
daughter as an equal. But all the will power of earth could not prevent my
loving her, when once I had seen her, and spoken to her. The sound of the human
voice, the touch of the human hand in social equality are the divine sacraments
that open the mystery of love."
"Social rights are
one thing, political rights another," interrupted Lowell.
"I deny it. If you
are honest with yourself, you know it is not true. Politics is but a
manifestation of society. Society rests on the family. The family is the unit
of civilisation. The right to love and wed where one loves is the badge of
fellowship in the order of humanity. The man who is denied this right in any
society is not a member of it. He is outside any manifestation of its essential
life. You had as well talk about the importance of clothes for a dead man, as
political rights for such a pariah. You have classed him with the beasts of the
field. As a human unit he does not exist for you."
"Harris, it is
utterly useless to argue a point like this," Lowell interrupted coldly.
"This must be the end of our acquaintance. You must not enter my house again."
"My God, sir, you
can’t kick me out of your house like this when you brought me to it, and made
it an issue of life or death!"
"I tell you again
you are crazy. I have brought you here against her wishes. She left the house
with her friend this morning to avoid seeing you. Your presence has always been
repulsive to her, and with me it has been a political study, not a social
pleasure."
"I beg for only a
desperate chance to overcome this feeling. Surely a man of your profound
learning and genius can not sympathize with such prejudices? Let me try--let
her decide the issue."
"I decline to
discuss the question any further."
"I can’t give up
without a struggle!" the negro cried with desperation.
Lowell rose with
impatience.
"Now you are getting
to be simply a nuisance. To be perfectly plain with you, I haven’t the
slightest desire that my family with its proud record of a thousand years of
history and achievement shall end in this stately old house in a brood of
mulatto brats!"
Harris winced and
sprang to his feet trembling with passion. "I see," he sneered,
"the soul of Simon Legree has at least become the soul of the nation. The
South expresses the same luminous truth with a little more clumsy brutality.
But their way is after all more merciful. The human body becomes unconscious at
the touch of an oil-fed flame in sixty seconds. Your methods are more refined
and more hellish in cruelty. You have trained my ears to hear eyes to see,
hands to touch and heart to feel, that you might torture with the denial of
every cry of body and soul and roast me in the flames of impossible desires for
time and eternity!"
"That will do now.
There’s the door!" thundered Lowell with a gesture of stern emphasis.
"I happen to know the important fact that a man or woman of negro
ancestry, though a century removed will suddenly breed back to a pure negro
child, thick lipped, kinky headed, flat nosed, black skinned. One drop of your
blood in my family could push it backward three thousand years in history. If
you were able to win her consent, a thing unthinkable, I would do what old
Virginius did in the Roman Forum, kill her with my own hand, rather than see
her sink in your arms into the black waters of a Negroid life! Now go!"
Another year of
struggle and suffering, hope and fear, Gaston had passed, and still he was no
nearer the dream of realised love. If anything had changed, the General’s pride
had added new force to his determination that his daughter should not marry the
man who had defied him.
His chief reliance for
Gaston’s defeat was on time, and the broadening of Sallie’s mind by extended
travel. He had sent her abroad twice, and this year he sent her to spend
another three months in Europe.
These absences seemed
only to intensify her longing for her lover. On her return the General would
burst into a storm of rage at her persistence. She had ceased to give him any
bitter answers, only smiling quietly and maintaining an ominous silence.
He had a new cause now
of dislike for the man of her choice. Gaston had become a man of acknowledged
power in politics and was the leader of a group of radical young men who
demanded the complete reorganisation of the Democratic party, the shelving of
the old timers, among whom he was numbered, and the announcement of a radical
programme upon the Negro issue.
Radicalism of any sort
he had always hated. Now, as advanced by this young upstart, it was doubly
odious. The General had never given much time to his political duties, but his
name was a power and he gave regularly to the campaign committee the largest
cash contribution they received.
He tried in a clumsy
way to put Gaston off the State Executive Committee, but failed. He saw Gaston
quietly laughing at him. Then he opened his pocket book and worked up a
machine. It was a formidable power, and Gaston feared its influence in the
coming convention.
While this fight was in
progress, and Sallie was in Europe, the destruction of the Maine in Havana
harbour stilled the world into silence with the echo of its sullen roar. There
was a moment’s pause, and the nation lifted its great silk battle flags from
the Capitol at Washington, and called for volunteers to wipe the empire of
Spain from the map of the Western world.
The war lasted but a hundred
days, but in those hundred days was packed the harvest of centuries.
War is always the
crisis that flashes the search light into the souls of men and nations,
revealing their unknown strength and weakness, and the changes that have been
silently wrought in the years of peace.
In these hundred days,
statesmen who were giants suddenly shrivelled into pigmies and disappeared from
the nation’s life. Young men whose names were unknown became leaders of the
republic and won immortal fame.
We were afraid that our
nation still lacked unity. The world said we were a mob of money-grubbers, and
had lost our grasp of principle. The president called for 125,000 men to die
for their flag, and next morning 800,000 were struggling for place in the line.
We feared that religion
might threaten the future with its bitter feud between the Roman Catholic and
Protestant in a great crisis. We saw our Catholic regiments march forth to that
war with screaming fife and throbbing drum and the flag of our country above them,
going forth to fight an army that had been blessed by the Pope of Rome. The
flag had become the common symbol of eternal justice, and the nation the organ
through which all creeds and cults sought for righteousness.
We feared the gulf
between the rich and the poor had become impassable, and we saw the millionaire’s
son take his place in the ranks with the workingman. The first soldier wearing
our uniform who fell before Santiago with a Spanish bullet in his breast, was
an only son from a palatial home in New York, and by his side lay a cowboy from
the West and a ploughboy from the South. Once more we showed the world that
classes and clothes are but thin disguises that hide the eternal childhood of
the soul.
Sectionalism and
disunity had been the most terrible realities in our national history. Our
fathers had a poet leader whose soul dreamed a beautiful dream called E
Pluribus Unum. But it had remained a dream. New England had threatened
secession years before South Carolina in blind rage led the way. The Union was
saved by a sacrifice of blood that appalled the world. And still millions
feared the South might be false to her plighted honour at Appomattox. The ghost
of Secession made and unmade the men and measures of a generation.
Then came the trumpet
call that put the South to the test of fire and blood. The world waked next
morning to find for the first time in our history the dream of union a living
fact. There was no North, no South,--but from the James to the Rio Grande the
children of the Confederacy rushed with eager flushed faces to defend the flag
their fathers had once fought.
And God reserved in
this hour for the South, land of ashes and tombs and tears, the pain and glory
of the first offering of life on the altar of the new nation. Our first and
only officer who fell dead on the deck of a warship, with the flag above him, was
Worth Bagley, of North Carolina, the son of a Confederate soldier. The gallant
youngster who stood on the bridge of the Merrimac, and between two towering
mountains of flaming cannon, in the darkness of night blew up his ship and set
a new standard of Anglo-Saxon daring, was the son of a Confederate soldier of
North Carolina.
The town of Hambright
furnished a whole company of eighty-six men, a Captain, three Lieutenants, and
a Major, who saw service in the war.
When they were drawn up
in the court house square under the old oak, the Preacher stood before them and
called the roll from four browned parchments. They were Campbell county
Confederate rosters. Every one of the eighty-six men was a child of the
Confederacy. And the immortal company F, that was wiped out of existence at the
battle of Gettysburg furnished more than half these children.
"Ah, boys, blood
will tell!" cried the Preacher, shaking hands with each man as they left.
A single round from the
guns, and it was over. The yellow flag of Spain, lit with the sunset splendour
of a world empire, faded from the sky of the West.
A new naval power had
arisen to disturb the dreams of statesmen. The Oregon, that fierce leviathan of
hammered steel had made her mark upon the globe. In a long black trail of smoke
and ribbon of foam, she had circled the earth without a pause for breath. The
thunder of her lips of steel over the shattered hulks of a European navy
proclaimed the advent of a giant democracy that struck terror to the hearts of
titled snobs.
He who dreamed this
monster of steel, felt her heart beat, saw her rush through foaming seas to
victory, before the pick of a miner had struck the ore for her ribs from a
mountain side, was a child of the Confederacy--that Confederacy whose desperate
genius had sent the Alabama spinning round the globe in a whirlwind of fire.
America united at last
and invincible, waked to the consciousness of her resistless power.
And, most marvellous of
all, this hundred days of war had re-united the Anglo-Saxon race. This sudden
union of the English speaking people in friendly alliance disturbed the
equilibrium of the world, and confirmed the Anglo-Saxon in his title to the
primacy of racial sway.
When General Worth received
Gaston’s brief and startling letter, the wires were hot between New York and
Asheville for hours. His last message was a peremptory command to his daughter
to join him immediately at Independence.
When Sallie arrived at
Oakwood the General was already there, and the storm broke in all its fury. At
every bitter word she only quietly smiled, until the General was on the verge
of collapse. Day after day he begged, pleaded, raged and finally took to hard
swearing as he looked into her calm happy face.
In the meantime McLeod
and his henchman on the judge’s bench had seen a new light. The excitement over
the arrest of Gaston seemed to have fanned the flames of the Red Shirt movement
into a conflagration. He was alarmed at its meaning. The judge heard a rumour
that five thousand Red Shirts were mobilising at the foot of the Blue Ridge
near Hambright, and that they were going to march across the mountains, into
Asheville, demolish the jail, liberate Gaston, and hang the judge who had
committed him without bail.
The rumour was a fake,
but he was not taking any chances. He issued an order releasing Gaston on his
own recognisance, and left for a vacation.
Gaston returned to
Hambright showered with congratulatory telegrams from every quarter of the
state.
He received a brief
note from Sallie saying the war was on but had not reached its final climax, as
the General was now devoting his best energies to the Democratic convention
which was to meet in ten days, when he expected to crush any "fool movement
of young upstarts!"
Gaston knew of his
organisation but he was sure the number of delegates pledged to the General’s
machine was not enough to dominate the body, even if he could hold them in
line.
When this convention
met at Raleigh, no body of representative men were ever more completely at sea
as to the platform or policy upon which they would appeal to the people for the
overthrow of an enemy. The coalition that conquered the state and held it with
the grip of steel for four years was stronger than ever and was absolutely
certain of victory. The enormous patronage of the Federal Government had been
in their hands for four years, and with the state, county and municipal
officers, a host of powerful leaders had been gathered around McLeod’s daring
personality. Apparently he was about to fasten the rule of the Negro and his
allies on the state for a generation.
When Gaston entered the
convention hall he received an ovation, heartfelt and generous, but it did not
reach the point of a disturbing element in the calculations of the three or
four prominent candidates for Governor. General Worth had drilled his cohorts
so thoroughly in opposition to him, that any sort of stampeding was out of the
question.
The platform committee
was composed of seven leaders, among whom was Gaston. There was a long wrangle
over the document, and at length when they reported, a sensation was created.
For the first time since their triumph over Simon Legree the committee was
divided, and, refusing to agree, submitted majority and minority reports. The
committee stood five for the majority and two for the minority.
Gaston and a daring
young politician from the heart of the Black Belt signed the minority report.
The majority report as submitted, was merely a rehash of the old platform on
which they had been defeated by McLeod twice, with slight additional
impeachment of the incapacity and corruption of the State Administration. The
delegates from the Black Belt and the counties where the Red Shirts had been
holding their noonday parades received it with silence. General Worth’s machine
cheered it vigourously, and gave a rousing reception to their chosen champion
who made the presentation speech.
When Gaston rose to
offer and defend his minority report, a sudden hush fell on the sea of eager
faces. A few men in the convention had heard him speak. All had heard he was an
orator of power, and were anxious to see him. His leadership in the Revolution
of Independence and his subsequent arrest and imprisonment had made him a
famous man.
"Mr. Chairman and
Gentlemen of the Convention:" he began with deliberate clear voice which
spoke of greater reserve power than the words he uttered conveyed--"I move
to substitute for this document of meaningless platitudes the following resolution
on which to make this campaign."
You could have heard a
pin fall, as in ringing tones like the call of bugle to battle he read,
"Whereas, it is
impossible to build a state inside a state of two antagonistic races,
And whereas, the future
of North Carolina must therefore be an Anglo-Saxon or a Mulatto,
Resolved, that the hour
has now come in our history to eliminate the Negro from our life and
reestablish for all time the government of our fathers."
The delegates from New
Hanover, Craven, and Halifax counties, the great centres of the Black Belt,
sprang on their seats with a roar of applause that shook the building, and
pandemonium broke loose. When one great wave subsided another followed. It was
ten minutes before order was restored while Gaston stood calmly surveying the
storm.
Just before him sat
General Worth, pale and trembling with excitement. The audacity of those
resolutions had swept him for a moment off his feet and back into the years of his
own daring young manhood. He could not help admiring this challenge of the
modern world to stand at the bar of elemental manhood and make good its right
to existence. He was about to summon his messengers and rally his lieutenants
when Gaston began to speak, and his first words chained his attention.
While the tumult raised
by his resolutions was in progress he lifted his eye toward the gallery and
there just above him where it curved toward the platform sat his beautiful
secret bride. His heart leaped. Her face was aflame with emotion, her eyes
flashing with love and pride. She slyly touched with her lips the tip of her
finger and blew a kiss across the intervening space. He smiled into her soul a
look of gratitude, and with every nerve strung to its highest tension resumed
his place by the speaker’s stand. When the tumult died away he began a speech
that fixed the history of a state for a thousand years.
His resolutions had
wrought the crowd to the highest pitch of excitement, and his words, clear, penetrating,
and deliberate thrilled his hearers with electrical power.
"Gentlemen:"
he said, and the slightest whisper was hushed. "The history of man is a
series of great pulse bears, whose flood overwhelms his future and fixes its
life. Like the dammed torrent on a mountain side, it breaks the conservatism
that holds it stagnant for generations and floods the world with its sweep.
Theories, creeds, and institutions hallowed by age, are cast as rubbish on the
scarred hills that mark its course. The old world is buried and a new one
appears.
"The Anglo-Saxon
is entering the new century with the imperial crown of the ages on his brow and
the sceptre of the infinite in his hands.
"The Old South
fought against the stars in their courses--the resistless tide of the rising
consciousness of Nationality and World-Mission. The young South greets the new
era and glories in its manhood. He joins his voice in the cheers of triumph
which are ushering in this all-conquering Saxon. Our old men dreamed of local
supremacy. We dream of the conquest of the globe. Threads of steel have knit
state to state. Steam and electricity have silently transformed the face of the
earth, annihilated time and space, and swept the ocean barriers from the path
of man. The black steam shuttles of commerce have woven continent to continent.
"We believe that
God has raised up our race, as he ordained Israel of old, in this world-crisis
to establish and maintain for weaker races, as a trust for civilisation, the
principles of civil and religious Liberty and the forms of Constitutional
Government.
"In this hour of
crisis, our flag has been raised over ten millions of semi-barbaric black men
in the foulest slave pen of the Orient. Shall we repeat the farce of ’67,
reverse the order of nature, and make these black people our rulers? If not,
why should the African here, who is not their equal, be allowed to imperil our
life?"
A whirlwind of applause
shook the building.
"A crisis
approaches in the history of the human race. The world is stirred by its
consciousness today. The nation must gird up her loins and show her right to
live,--to master the future or be mastered in the struggle. New questions press
upon us for solution.
"Shall this grand
old commonwealth lag behind and sink into the filth and degradation of a
Negroid corruption in this solemn hour of the world?"
"No! No!"
screamed a thousand voices.
"What is our
condition to-day in the dawn of the twentieth century? If we attempt to move
forward we are literally chained to the body of a festering Black Death!
"Fifty of our
great counties are again under the heel of the Negro, and the state is in his
clutches. Our city governments are debauched by his vote. His insolence
threatens our womanhood, and our children are beaten by negro toughs on the way
to school while we pay his taxes. Shall we longer tolerate negro inspectors of
white schools, and negroes in charge of white institutions? Shall we longer
tolerate the arrest of white women by negro officers and their trial before negro
magistrates?
"Let the manhood
of the Aryan race with its four thousand years of authentic history answer that
question!"
With blazing eyes, and
voice that rang with the deep peal of defiant power, Gaston hurled that
sentence like a thunder bolt into the souls of his two thousand hearers. The
surging host sprang to their feet and shouted back an answer that made the
earth tremble!
Lifting his hand for
silence he continued,
"It is no longer a
question of bad government. It is a question of impossible government. We lag
behind the age dragging the decaying corpse to which we are chained.
"Who shall deliver
us from the body of this death?
"Hear me, men of
my race, Norman and Celt, Angle and Saxon, Dane and Frank, Huguenot and German
martyr blood!
"The hour has
struck when we must rise in our might, break the chains that bind us to this
corruption, strike down the Negro as a ruling power, and restore to our
children their birthright, which we received, a priceless legacy, from our
fathers.
"I believe in God’s
call to our race to do His work in history. What other races failed to do, you
wrought in this continental wilderness, fighting pestilence, hunger, cold, wild
beasts, and savage hordes, until out of it all has grown the mightiest nation
of the earth.
"Is the Negro
worthy to rule over you?
"Ask history. The
African has held one fourth of this globe for 3000 years. He has never taken
one step in progress or rescued one jungle from the ape and the adder, except
as the slave of a superior race.
"In Hayti and San
Domingo he rose in servile insurrection and butchered fifty thousand white men,
women and children a hundred years ago. He has ruled these beautiful islands
since. Did he make progress with the example of Aryan civilisation before him?
No. But yesterday we received reports of the discovery of cannibalism in Hayti.
"He has had one
hundred years of trial in the Northern states of this Union with every facility
of culture and progress, and he has not produced one man who has added a feather’s
weight to the progress of humanity. In an hour of madness the dominion of the
ten great states of the South was given him without a struggle. A saturnalia of
infamy followed.
"Shall we return
to this? You must answer. The corruption of his presence in our body politic is
beyond the power of reckoning. We drove the Carpet-bagger from our midst, but
the Scalawag, our native product, is always with us to fatten on this
corruption and breed death to society. The Carpet-bagger was a wolf, the
Scalawag is a hyena. The one was a highwayman, the other a sneak.
"So long as the
Negro is a factor in our political life, will violence and corruption stain our
history. We can not afford longer to play with violence. We must remove the
cause.
"Suffrage in
America has touched the lowest tide-mud of degradation. If our cities and our
Southern civilisation are to be preserved, there must be a return to the sanity
of the founders of this Republic.
"A government of
the wealth, virtue and intelligence of the community, by the debased and the
criminal, is a relapse to elemental barbarism to which no race of freemen can
submit.
"Shall the future
North Carolinian be an Anglo-Saxon or a Mulatto? That is the question before
you.
"Nations are made
by men, not by paper constitutions and paper ballots. We are not free because
we have a Constitution. We have a Constitution because our pioneer fathers who
cleared the wilderness and dared the might of kings, were freemen. It was in
their blood, the tutelage of generation on generation beyond the seas, the
evolution of centuries of struggle and sacrifice.
"If you can make
men out of paper, then it is possible with a scratch of a pen in the hand of a
madman to transform by its magic a million slaves into a million kings.
"We grant the
Negro the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness if he can be
happy without exercising kingship over the Anglo-Saxon race, or dragging us
down to his level. But if he can not find happiness except in lording it over a
superior race, let him look for another world in which to rule. There is not
room for both of us on this continent!"
Again and again Gaston
raised his hand to still the mad tumult of applause his words evoked.
"And we will fight
it out on this line, if it takes a hundred years, two hundred, five hundred, or
a thousand. It took Spain eight hundred years to expel the Moors. When the time
comes the Anglo-Saxon can do in one century what the Spaniard did in eight.
"We have been
congratulated on our self-restraint under the awful provocation of the past
four years. There is a limit beyond which we dare not go, for at this point,
self-restraint becomes pusillanimous and means the loss of manhood."
He then reviewed with
thrilling power the history of the state and the proud part played in the
development of the Republic. He showed how this border wilderness of North
Carolina became the cradle of American Democracy and the typical commonwealth
of freemen.
He played with the
heart-strings of his hearers in this close personal history as a great master
touches the strings of a harp. His voice was now low and quivering with the
music of passion, and then soft and caressing. He would swing them from
laughter to tears in a single sentence, and in the next, the lightning flash of
a fierce invective drove into their hearts its keen blade so suddenly the vast
crowd started as one man and winced at its power.
Through it all he was
conscious of two blue eyes swimming in tears looking down on him from the
gallery.
The crowd now had grown
so entranced, and the torrent of his speech so rapid, they forgot to cheer and
feared to cheer lest they should lose a word of the next sentence. They hung
breathless on every flash of feeling from his face or eloquent gesture.
"I am not talking
of a vague theory of constructive dominion," he continued, "when I
refer to the Negro supremacy under which our civilisation is being degraded. I
use words in their plain meaning. Negro supremacy means the rule of a party in
which negroes predominate and that means a Negro oligarchy.
"I call your
attention to one typical county of over forty thus degraded, the county of
Craven, whose quaint old city was once the Capital of this commonwealth. What
are the facts? The negro office-holders of Craven county include a Congressman,
a member of the Legislature, a Register of Deeds, the City Attorney, the
Coroner, two Deputy Sheriffs, two County Commissioners, a Member of the School
Board, three Road Overseers, four Constables, twenty-seven Magistrates, three
City Aldermen and four Policemen. There are sixty-two negro officials in this
county of 12,000 inhabitants, and their member of the Legislature is a
convicted felon. The white people represent ninety-five per cent of the wealth
and intelligence of the community, and pay ninety-five per cent of its taxes
and are voiceless in its government.
"Would a county in
Massachusetts submit to such infamy? No, ten thousand times, no! There is not a
county in the North from Maine to California that would submit to it
twenty-four hours. Will the children of Lexington, Concord and Bunker Hill
demand such submission now from the children of Washington and Jefferson? No.
The passions that obscured reason have subsided. The Anglo-Saxon race is united
and has entered upon its world mission.
"We will take from
an unprofitable servant the ballot he has abused. To him that hath shall be
given, and from him that hath not shall be taken may even that which he hath.
It is the law of nature. It is the law of God.
"Yes, I confess
it," he continued, "I am in a sense narrow and provincial. I love
mine own people. Their past is mine, their present mine, their future is a
divine trust. I hate the dish water of modern world-citizenship. A shallow
cosmopolitanism is the mask of death for the individual. It is the froth of
civilisation, as crime is its dregs. Race, and race pride, are the ordinances
of life. The true citizen of the world loves his country. His country is a part
of God’s world.
"So I confess I
love my people. I love the South,--the stolid silent South, that for a
generation has sneered at paper-made policies, and scorned public opinion. The
South, old-fashioned, mediaeval, provincial, worshipping the dead, and raising
men rather than making money, family loving, home building, tradition ridden.
The South, cruel and cunning when fighting a treacherous foe, with brief
volcanic bursts of wrath and vengeance. The South, eloquent, bombastic,
romantic, chivalrous, lustful, proud, kind and hospitable. The South with her
beautiful women and brave men. The South, generous and reckless, never knowing
her own interest, but living her own life in her own way!--Yes, I love her! In
my soul are all her sins and virtues. And with it all she is worthy to live.
"The historian
tells us that all things pass in time. Wolves whelp and stable in the palaces
of dead kings and forgotten civilisations. Memphis, Thebes and Babylon are but
names to-day. So New Orleans and New York may perish. African antiquarians may
explore their ruins and speculate upon their life; but we may safely fix upon a
thousand centuries of intervening time. On your shoulders now rests the burden
of civilisation. We must face its responsibilities. For my part, I believe in
your future.
"The courage of
the Celt, the nobility of the Norman, the vigour of the Viking, the energy of
the Angle, the tenacity of the Saxon, the daring of the Dane, the gallantry of
the Gaul, the freedom of the Frank, the earth-hunger of the Roman and the
stoicism of the Spartan are all yours by the lineal heritage of blood, from
sire and dame through hundreds of generations and through centuries of culture.
"Will you halt now
and surrender to a mob of ragged negroes led by white cowards who at the first
clash of conflict will hide in sewers?
"I ask you, my
people, freemen, North Carolinians, to rise to-day and make good your right to
live! The time for platitudes is past. Let us as men face the world and say
what we mean.
"This is a white
man’s government, conceived by white men, and maintained by white men through
every year of its history,--and by the God of our Fathers it shall be ruled by
white men until the Arch-angel shall call the end of time!
"If this be
treason, let them that hear it make the most of it.
"From the eighth
day of November we will not submit to Negro dominion another day, another hour,
another moment! Back of every ballot is a bayonet, and the red blood of the man
who holds it. Let cowards hear, and remember this! Man has never yet voted away
his right to a revolution.
"Citizen kings, I
call you to the consciousness of your kingship!"
Gaston closed and
turned toward his seat, while the crowd hung breathless waiting for his next
word. When they realised that he had finished, a rumble like the crash in midheaven
of two storms rolled over the surging sea of men, broke against the girders of
the roof like the thunder of the Hatteras surf lashed by a hurricane. Two
thousand men went mad. With one common impulse they sprang to their feet
screaming, shouting, cheering, shaking each other’s hands, crying and laughing.
With the sullen roar of crashing thunder another whirlwind of cheers swept the
crowd, shook the earth, and pierced the sky with its challenge. Wave after wave
of applause swept the building and flung their people, slow to anger, now
terrible in wrath, were trembling with the pent-up passion and fury of years.
What power could resist
their wrath!
Through it all Gaston
sat silent behind the group of the majority of the platform committee, with
eyes devouring a beautiful face bending toward him from the gallery. She was
softly weeping with love and pride too deep for words.
While the tumult was
still raging, before he was conscious of his presence, General Worth’s stalwart
figure was bending over him, and grasping his hand.
"My boy, I give it
up. You have beaten me. I’m proud of you. I forgive everything for that speech.
You can have my girl. The date you’ve fixed for the marriage suits me. Let us
forget the past."
Gaston pressed his hand
muttering brokenly his thanks, and his soul sank within him at the thought of
this proud old iron-willed warrior’s anger if he discovered their secret
marriage.
The General turned
toward the side of the platform; for he had seen the flash of Sallie’s dress on
the stairs of the balcony leading to the stage. He knew her keen eye had seen
his surrender and his heart was hungry for the kiss of reconciliation that would
restore their old perfect love.
He met her at the foot
of the stairs and she threw her arms impulsively around his neck.
"Oh! Papa, dear! I
am the happiest girl in the world. The two men of all men--the only two I
love--are mine forever!"
While the applause was
still echoing and reechoing over the sea of surging men, and thousands of
excited people were crowding the windows from the outside and blocking the
streets in every direction clamouring for admittance, a tall man with grey
beard and stentorian voice, sprang on the platform. It was General Worth’s
candidate for Governor. He had not consulted the General but he had an
important motion to make. The crowd was stilled at last and his deep voice rang
through the building,
"Gentlemen, I move
that the minority report offered by Charles Gaston"--again a thunder peal
of applause--"be adopted as the platform by acclamation!"
A storm of
"ayes" burst from the throats of the delegates in a single breath
like the crash of an explosion of dynamite.
"And now that our
eyes have seen the glory of the Lord, as we heard His messenger anointed to
lead His people, I move that this convention nominate by acclamation for
Governor--Charles Gaston!"
Again two thousand men
were on their feet shouting, cheering, shaking hands, hugging one another and
weeping and yelling like maniacs.
A speech had been made
that changed the current of history, and fixed the status of life for millions
of people.