Myrta Lockett Avary

“ The noble response of Magruder to the people of Texas, who contributed a handsome purse to procure him a fine plantation, was the impulse and utterance of the universal spirit of the Southern soldier: ‘No, gentlemen, when I espoused the cause of the South, I embraced poverty and willingly accepted it.’”
Near Columbia, on the ruins of his handsome home which Sherman burned, General Wade Hampton, clever at wood-work, built with his own hands and with the help of his faithful negroes, a lowly cottage to shelter himself and family. ”

“ Men in blue followed Gordon, Fitzhugh Lee and Joe Wheeler to their graves; Joe Johnston and Buckner were Grant’s pall-bearers. Our dead bind us together. The voices of Lee, our Beloved, Davis, our Martyr, Stephens, our Peacemaker, Grady, our Orator, of Hampton, Gordon and all their noble fellowship, have spoken for true Unionism; blending with theirs is the voice of Grant, in his last hours at McGregor, the voice of McKinley in Atlanta, the voice of Abraham Lincoln, as, just before his martyrdom, he stood pityingly amid the ruins of Richmond. ”

“ I have seen in a Southern street-car all blacks sitting and all whites standing; have seen a big black woman enter a car and flounce herself down almost into the lap of a white man; have seen white ladies pushed off sidewalks by black men. The new manners of the blacks were painful, revolting, absurd. The freedman’s misbehaviour was to be condoned only by pity that accepted his inferiority as excuse. Southerners had taken great pains and pride in teaching their negroes good manners; they wanted them to be courtly and polished, and it must be said for the negroes, they took polish well. ”

“ In Charleston, South Carolina, gaping with scars of shot and shell of her long, long, siege, the roses and oleanders and palmettoes strove to cover with beauty the wounds of war, and in their fragrance to breathe nature’s sympathy and faithfulness. Her own desolate people kept within doors. The streets were thronged with a cheerful, well-clad crowd; the city was overflowing with Northern men and women of distinction. ”

“ The dispatch seemed positively to gloat over that poor man’s misery.
A new fad in feminine attire came into vogue; women wore long, large, and heavy black chains as decorations.
The military murder of Mrs. Surratt stirred us profoundly. Too lowly, simple, and obscure in herself to rank with heroic figures, her execution lifts her to the plane where stand all who fell victims to the troubled times. Suspicion of complicity in Mr. Lincoln’s murder, because of her son’s intimacy with Wilkes Booth, led to her death. They had her before a military tribunal in Washington, her feet linked with chains. ”

“ I was in New York during Subway construction when a strike was threatened, and overheard two gentlemen on the elevated road discussing the situation: “The company talks of bringing the blacks up here.” “If they do, the tunnel will run blood! These whites will never suffer the blacks to take their work.” I thought, “And negroes have had a monopoly of the South’s industries and have scorned it!” I thought of jealous white toilers in the slime of the tunnel; and of Dixie’s greening and golden fields, of swinging hoes and shining scythes and the songs of her black peasantry. ”

“ He was no less true to the living Union because he was faithful to the dead Confederacy. Visitors used to love to see General Lee at the Finals of Washington College in his full suit of Confederate gray; it became him to wear it in the midst of the draped flags and stacked arms, for while he was teaching our young men to love our united country and to reverence the Stars and Stripes, he did not want them to fail in reverence to the past. None can want us so to fail. ”

“ The average negress will accept, invite, with every wile she may, the purely animal attention of a “no-count white man” in preference to marriage with a black. The average mulatto of either sex considers union with a black degradation. The rainbow of promise spanning this gloomy vista is the claim that the noble minority of black women who value virtue is on the increase as the race, in self-elevation, recognises more and more the demands of civilisation upon character, and that dignity of racehood which will not be ashamed of its own skin or covet the skin of another. ”

“ Mammy Julia was my mother’s assistant superintendent, so to speak. “I could trust almost anything to her,” her mistress bore testimony, “for she appreciated responsibility and was faithfulness itself. I don’t know a negro of the new order who can hold a candle to her.” Mammy Julia and my mother had no rest night or day. Black folks were coming with troubles, wants, quarrels, ailments, births, marriages and deaths, from morning till night and night till morning again. “I was glad and thankful—on my own account—when slavery ended and I ceased to belong, body and soul, to my negroes.” ”

“ The missionary of the sixties and seventies was not as wise as the missionary of today, who knows that he must study a people before he undertakes to teach and reform them, and that it is all in the day’s work for him not to run counter heedlessly to established social usages or to try to uproot instantly and with violence customs centuries old. A reckless reformer may tear up more good things in a few weeks than he can replant, or substitute with better, in a lifetime. ”

“ But for a rooted and grounded sympathy and affection between the races that fierce and newly awakened prejudice could not kill, the Sepoy massacres of India would have been duplicated in the South in the sixties and seventies. Under slavery, the black race held the heart of the white South in its hands. ”

“ High carnival in the Old African Church wound up the day. An educated coloured man from Boston presided, and Carpet-Bagger-Philanthropist Hayward (who, having had the cold shoulder turned on him in Massachusetts, had come to Virginia) held forth: “The papers have made conspicuous my remarks that the negro is better than the white man. Why, I had no idea anybody was so stupid as to doubt it. When I contemplate such a noble race, and look upon you as you appear to me tonight, I could wish my own face were black!” ”

“ The Union flag is my flag and I love it, and, therefore, I trust that no one may ever again pass under it weeping. Those little children were not traitors. They were simply human. If in the sixties situations had been reversed, and the people of New York, Boston and Chicago had seen the Union flag flying over guns that shelled these cities, their children would have passed under it weeping and wailing. ”

“ The way to become a hero in the eyes of the white North and to win the crown of martyrdom for oneself and new outbursts of sympathy for one’s race was to assault a white woman of the South. This crime was a development of a period when the negro was dominated by political, religious and social advisers from the North and by the attitude of the Northern press and pulpit. It was practically unknown in wartime, when negroes were left on plantations as protectors and guardians of white women and children. ”

“ Gaunt poverty closed the doors of learning against the white child of the South, while Northern munificence was flinging them wide to the black.
Soon as war ended, schools for negroes were organised in all directions with Government funds or funds supplied by Northern charity; and under Northern tutelage—a tutelage contributing to prejudice between the races. These institutions had further the effect of aggravating the labour problem—a problem so desperate for the Southern farmer that he could not turn from it to give his own child a chance for intellectual life. ”

“ Black, white, and yellow pages flew around, waiting on members; the blacker the dignitary, the whiter the page he summoned to bring pens, ink, paper, apples, ginger-cakes, goober-peas. And newspapers. No sooner did darkeys observe that whites sent out and got newspapers than they did likewise; and sat there reading them upside down.
The gallery of coloured men and women come to see the show were almost as diverting as the law-makers. Great were the flutterings over the seating of John Morrissey, the “Wild Irishman,” mistaken for his namesake, the New York pugilist. ”

“ The best men of the South have long desired to do away with the institution and were quite willing to see it abolished. But with them in relation to this subject, the question has ever been: ‘What will you do with the freed people?’ That is the serious question today. Unless some humane course based upon wisdom and Christian principles is adopted, you do them a great injustice in setting them free.” He plead for moderation towards the South as the part of wisdom as well as mercy. Oppression would keep the spirit of resistance alive. ”

“ The wife of the native Radical Governor of one Southern State said when her punishment was over: “The saddest years of my life were spent in the Executive Mansion. In a city where I had been beloved, none of my old friends, none of the best people, called on me.” In times of great poverty, temptations were great; men, after once starting in politics, were drawn further than they had dreamed possible. ”

“ Major Sutherlin had been a strong Union man. Mrs. Sutherlin has told me how her husband voted against secession in the first convention to which he was a delegate, and for it in the second, with deep regret. “I saw in that convention,” he told his wife, “strong, reserved men, men of years and dignity, sign the Secession Ordinance while tears coursed down their cheeks.”
It is just to rehearse such things of men who were called “traitors” and “rebels.” It is just to remember how Jefferson Davis tried to prevent secession. ”

“ Through kindliness of temperament on both sides and the clan feeling fostered by the old plantation life of the South, the white man and the negro made the best they could of an evil thing. But the world has now well learned that a superior race cannot afford to take an inferior into such close company as slavery implies. For the service of the bond-slave the master ever pays to the uttermost in things precious as service, imparting refinements, ideals, standards, morals, manners, graces ”

“ In the face of so much distraction, demoralisation and disorder, the example of those negroes who were not affected by it shines out with greater clearness as witness for the best that is in the race. Thousands stood steadfastly to their posts, superior to temptations which might have shaken white people, performing their duties faithfully, caring for their children, sick and aged, shirking no debt of love and gratitude to past owners. Some negroes still live in families for which their ancestors worked, the bond of centuries never having been broken. ”

“ No successor can be more comprehensive, as a glance at the table of contents will show. The tragedy, pathos, corruption, humour, and absurdities of the military dictatorship and of reconstruction, the topsy-turvy conditions generally, domestic upheaval, negroes voting, Black and Tan Conventions and Legislatures, disorder on plantations, Loyal Leagues and Freedmen’s Bureaus, Ku Klux and Red Shirts, are presented with a vividness akin to the camera’s. ”

“ From the political debauchery of the day, men of the old order shrank appalled. Even when the test-oath qualification was no longer exacted and disabilities were removed, many Southerners would not for a time touch the unclean thing; then they voted as with averted faces, not because they had faith in or respect for the process, but because younger men told them the country’s salvation demanded thus much of them. If a respectable man was sent to the Legislature or Congress, he felt called upon to explain or apologise to a stranger who might not understand the circumstances. ”

“ The South sought to honour her past in peaceful ways, and to repair by patient industry the ravages of war, wielding cheerfully weapons of progress to which her hands were as yet unaccustomed. As the soldier-citizens marched along, people old and young, by ones and twos and threes, or in organised bodies, fell into the ever-lengthening line. ”

“ As illustrations of embarrassments we had to face, I have chiefly chosen incidents showing a kindly and forbearing spirit on the part of Federal commanders, because I desire to pay tribute wherever I may to men in blue, remembering that Southern boys are now wearing the blue and that all men wearing the blue are ours. I have chiefly chosen incidents in which the Federal officers, being gentlemen and brave men—being decent and human—revolted against exercise of cruelty to a fallen foe. ”

“ Since leaving Kentucky last December, I have travelled many thousand miles in the South; I have seen spreading out [Pg 301] before me in sad panorama solitary chimneys, burned buildings, walls of once happy homes, grounds and gardens grown with weeds and briers; groups of sad human faces; gaunt women and children; old, helpless men; young men on crutches, and without arms, sick, sad, heart-broken. Words cannot describe the destitute condition of the orphaned children. ”

“ After war, the war spirit always lingers longest in non-combatants—in women and in men who stayed at home and cheered others on. “The soldiers,” said General Grant, “were in favor of a speedy reconstruction on terms least humiliating to the Southern people.” He wrote Mrs. Grant from Raleigh, North Carolina, in 1865: “The suffering that must exist in the South ... will be beyond conception; people who speak of further retaliation and punishment do not conceive of the suffering endured already, or they are heartless and unfeeling.” ”

“ Nothing could be more sharply defined in lights and shadows than the life of one beautiful and talented Southern woman who matronised the entertainments of a famous Federal general at a post in one of the Cotton States, and thereby brought upon herself such condemnation as made her wines and roses cost her dear. ”