James R. Gilmore

“ Where now, with their large plantations, not one acre in ten is tilled, a system of small farms will spring into existence, and the whole country be covered with cultivation. The six hundred thousand men who have gone there to fight our battles, will see the amazing fertility of the Southern soil—into which the seed is thrown and springs up without labor into a bountiful harvest—and many of them, if slavery is crushed out, will remain there. Thus a new element will be introduced into the South, an element that will speedily make it a loyal, prosperous, and intelligent section of the Union. ”

“ There's not a slave in all South Carolina but would shoot Garrison or Greeley on sight."
"That may be, but if so, it is because you keep them in ignorance. Build a free-school at every cross-road, and teach the poor whites, and what would become of slavery? If these people were on a par with the farmers of New England, would it last for an hour? Would they not see that it stands in the way of their advancement, and vote it out of existence as a nuisance?" ”

“ Are there not abuses in society at the North? Are not their laborers overworked? While sin here hides itself under cover of the night, does it not there stalk abroad at noon-day? If the wives and daughters of blacks are debauched here, are not the wives and daughters of whites debauched there? and will not a Yankee barter away the chastity of his own mother for a dirty dollar? Who fill our brothels? Yankee women! Who load our penitentiaries, crowd our whipping-posts, debauch our slaves, and cheat and defraud us all? ”

“ The few cannot rule when the many know their rights. If the poor whites realized that slavery kept them poor, would they not vote it down? But the South and the world are a long way off from general education. When it comes to that, we shall need no laws, and no slavery, for the millennium will have arrived."
"I'm glad you think slavery will not exist during the millennium," I replied, good-humoredly; "but how is it that you insist the negro is naturally inferior to the white, and still admit that the 'white trash,' are far below the black slaves?" ”

“ It seemed to me a pity—anti-Abolitionist and Southern-sympathizer though I was—that a man of such rare natural talent, such character and energy, should have his large nature dwarfed, be tethered for life to a cotton-stalk, and made to wear his soul out in a tread-mill, merely because his skin had a darker tinge and his shoe a longer heel than mine. ”

“ Phillips, Greeley, and Garrison create and control your public opinion. They are mighty powers, while Yancey and Wise have no influence whatever. Yancey is a mere bag-pipe; we play upon him, and like the music, but smile when he attempts to lead us. Wise is a harlequin; we let him dance because he is good at it, and it amuses us. Lincoln may be honest, but if made President he will be controlled by Seward, who hates the South. ”

“ I have seen the young and the beautiful laid away in the earth; but I never felt the solemn awfulness of death, as I did, when, in the stillness and darkness of night, I listened to the wild grief of that negro group, and saw the bodies of that slave mother and her child, lowered to their everlasting rest by the side of Sam. ”

“ Though situated on a magnificent bay, a little below the confluence of three noble rivers, which drain a country of surpassing richness, and though the centre of the finest rice-growing district in the world, the town is dead. Every thing about it wears an air of dilapidation. The few white men you meet in its streets, or see lounging lazily around its stores and warehouses, appear to lack all purpose and energy. Long contact with the negro seems to have given them his shiftless, aimless character. ”

“ Will the loyal people of the North submit to be ground to the earth with taxes to pay the expenditures of a war, brought upon them by these Southern oligarchists, while the traitors are left in undisturbed possession of every thing, and even their slaves are exempted from taxation? ”

“ The whole assemblage then knelt on the cold ground, while the old man prayed, and a more sincere, heart-touching prayer never went up from human lips to that God "who hath made of one blood all nations that dwell on the face of the earth." Though clothed in rags, and in feeble age at the mercy of a cruel taskmaster, that old slave was richer far than his master. ”

“ If a miserable peace is patched up before a death-stroke is given to slavery, it will gather new strength, and drive freedom from this country forever. In the nature of things it cannot exist in the same hemisphere with liberty. ”

“ Then he seemed a man—splendid of frame, noble of soul—suspended in the whipping-rack, his arms bound above his head, his body resting on the tips of his toes, and the merciless lash falling on his bare back, till the red stream ran from it like a river—scourged because he would not aid in creating beings as wretched as himself, and make merchandise of his own blood to gorge the pocket of an incarnate white devil. ”

“ Teaching is a very laborious employment there, far more so than with us, for the Southerners have no methods like ours, and the same teacher usually has to hear lessons in branches all the way from Greek and Latin to the simple A B C. The South has no system of public instruction; no common schools; no means of placing within the reach of the sons and daughters of the poor even the elements of knowledge. While the children of the wealthy are most carefully educated, it is the policy of the ruling class to keep the great mass of the people in ignorance ”

“ The live-oak, the sycamore, the Spanish mulberry, the holly, and the persimmon—gaily festooned with wreaths of the white and yellow jessamine, the woodbine and the cypress-moss, and bearing here and there a bouquet of the mistletoe, with its deep green and glossy leaves upturned to the sun—flung their broad arms over the road, forming an archway grander and more beautiful than any the hand of man ever wove for the greatest hero the world has worshipped. ”

“ Then let every man who loves his country determine that if this war must needs last for twenty years, it shall not end until this root of all our political evils is weeded out forever.
A short half-hour took us to the plantation, where I found the Colonel on the piazza awaiting me. After our greeting was over, noticing my soiled and rather dilapidated condition, he inquired where I had passed the night. I told him, when he burst into a hearty fit of laughter, and for several days good-naturedly bantered me about "putting up" at the most aristocratic hotel in South Carolina—the "Mills House." ”

“ Public sentiment, as well as State law, prevents the enlightened master, who would fit the slave by knowledge for greater usefulness, from letting a ray of light in upon his darkened mind. The black knows his task, his name, and his dinner-hour. ”

“ I replied, "he could not bear freedom, but that does not prove he might not have 'endured' it if he had never been a slave. His overjoy at obtaining liberty, after so long a struggle for it, led to his excesses and his ruin. According to your view, neither the black nor the poor white is competent to take care of himself. [Pg 178] The Almighty, therefore, has laid upon you a triple burden; you not only have to provide for yourself and your children, but for two races beneath you, the black and the clay-eater. The poor nigger has a hard time, but it seems to me you have a harder one." ”

“ Nothing, perhaps, if we were three or even eight millions, but we shall be neither one nor the other. Mexico and Cuba are ready, now, to fall into our hands, and before two years have passed, with or without the Border States, we shall count twenty millions. Long [Pg 38] before England is abolitionized, our population will outnumber hers, and our territory extend from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and as far south as the Isthmus. We are founding, sir, an empire that will be able to defy all Europe—one grander than the world has seen since the age of Pericles! ”

“ They prefer the white men; their husbands know it, and take it as a matter of course."
We had here reached the negro cabin. It was one of the more remote of the collection, and stood deep in the woods, an enormous pine growing up directly beside the doorway. In all respects it was like the other huts on the plantation. A bright fire lit up its interior, and through the crevices in the logs we saw, as we approached, a scene that made us pause involuntarily, when within a few rods of the house. The mulatto man, whose clothes were torn and smeared with swamp mud, stood near the fire. ”

“ Noble, generous, and a true friend, he is also a bitter, implacable enemy. When he once conceives a dislike, [Pg 204] his feelings become even vindictive. Never having had an ungratified wish, he does not know how to feel for the sorrows of those beneath him. Sam, though a proud, headstrong, unruly character, was a great favorite with him; he felt his death much; and as he attributes it to Jule, he feels terribly bitter toward her. She will have to be sold to get her out of his way, for he will never forgive her. ”

“ Let us hope the direful upheaving, which is now felt throughout the Union, is the earthquake that will bury it forever.
The sun was wheeling below the trees which skirted the western horizon, when we halted in the main road, abreast of one of those by-paths, which every traveller [Pg 27] at the South recognizes as leading to a planter's house. Turning our horse's head, we pursued this path for a short distance, when emerging from the pine-forest, over whose sandy barrens we had ridden all the day, a broad plantation lay spread out before us. ”

“ In the estimation of the whites a glorious future was about to open on the little state. Whether she stood alone, or supported [Pg 14] by the other slave states, she would assume a high rank among the nations of the earth; her cotton and rice would draw trade and wealth from every land, and when she spoke, creation would tremble. Such overweening state pride in such a people—shiftless, indolent, and enervated as they are—strikes a stranger as in the last degree ludicrous ”

“ With the exception of the negro huts, which are scattered at irregular intervals through the woods in the rear of the mansion, there is not a human habitation within an hour's ride; but such a cosy, inviting, hospitable atmosphere surrounds the whole place, that a stranger does not realize he has happened upon it in a wilderness. ”

“ The Colonel nodded assent, and we all, blacks and whites, knelt down on the floor, while the old preacher made a short, heart-touching prayer. It was a simple, humble acknowledgment of the dependence of the creature on the Creator—of His right to give and to take away, and was uttered in a free, conversational tone, as [Pg 107] if long communion with his Maker had placed the old negro on a footing of friendly familiarity with Him, and given the black slave the right to talk with the Deity as one man talks with another. ”

“ We should not fight with thirty millions. The other Cotton States are with us, and the leaders in the Border States are pledged to Secession. They will wheel into line when we give the word. But the North will not fight. The Democratic party sympathizes with us, and some of its influential leaders are pledged to our side. They will sow division there, and paralyze the Free States; besides, the trading and manufacturing classes will never consent to a war that will work their ruin. With the Yankees, sir, the dollar is almighty. ”

“ That vehicle, originally used by some New England doctor, in the early part of the past century, had but one seat, and besides, was not going the way I intended to take, so I was forced to seek a conveyance at a livery-stable. At the only livery establishment in the place, kept by a "cullud pusson," who, though a slave, owns a stud of horses that might, among a people more movingly inclined, yield a respectable income, I found what I wanted—a light Newark buggy, and a spanking gray. Provided with these, and a darky driver, who was to accompany me to my destination, and return alone, I started. ”

“ Wishing to be near her sister, our hostess had also married and settled down for life in that wild region. "I like the country very well," she added; "it's a great sight easier living here than in Vermont; but I do hate these lazy, shiftless, good-for-nothing niggers; they are so slow, and so careless, and so dirty, that I sometimes think they will worry the very life out of me. I do believe I'm the hardest mistress in all the district."
I learned from her that a majority of the teachers at the South are from the North, and principally, too, from New England. ”

“ As I mused over his "strange, eventful history," and thought of the handy way nature has of putting the right man in the wrong place, it occurred to me how "Brother Beecher" one evening, not a long time before, had charmed the last dollar from my waistcoat pocket by exhibiting, à la Barnum, a remarkably ugly "cullud pusson" on his pulpit stairs, and by picturing the awful doom which awaited her—that of being reduced from baby-tending to some less useful employment—if his audience did not at once "do the needful." ”

“ A system that reduces nearly half of a white population to the level of slaves cannot stand in this country. The late election shows that the power of your 'white trash' is broken."
"Well, it does, that's a fact. If the states should remain together, the West would in future control the Union. We see that, and are therefore determined on dissolution. It is our only way to keep our niggers." ”