Whitelaw Reid

“ It is my firm conviction, that suffrage is not only the best security for freedom, but the most potent agent of amelioration and civilization. He who has that right will usually respect himself more, be more respected, perform more, and more productive work, and do more to increase the wealth and welfare of the community, than he who has it not. Suffrage makes nations great. Hence I am in favor of suffrage for all ”

“ Judge, we always knows who’s our friends and who isn’t. We knows the difference between the Union ticket and the Rebel ticket. We may not know all about all the men that’s on it; but we knows the difference between the Union and the Rebel parties. Yes, sir; we knows that much better than you do! Because, sir, some of our people stand behind these men at the table, and hear ’em talk; we see ’em in the house and by the wayside; and we know ’em from skin to core, better than you do or can do, till you live among ’em as long, and see as much of ’em as we have. ”

“ Here the dashing young cavaliers, the haughty Southrons who scorned the Yankee scum and were determined to have a country and a history for themselves, rushed madly into the war as into a picnic. Here the boats from Charleston landed every day cases of champagne, pâtés innumerable, casks of claret, thousands of Havana cigars, for the use of the luxurious young Captains and Lieutenants, and their friends among the privates. ”

“ Crossing other ditches, we came to the waving expanse of sugar, now nearly three feet high, and growing luxuriantly. A few negroes had come out with their plows, since the rain, and were throwing up the rich, fresh earth against the roots. No time was to be lost, for other things grew as rapidly, in the steaming moisture and under the genial heat, as the cane or cotton, and woe to the planter if, by a day or two of delay, he should be “caught in the grass.” The negroes drove their mules along rapidly, but, save when speaking to the animals, in perfect silence. ”

“ We drove through miles of cotton and corn, rank with the luxuriant growth of a soil marvelous for its fertility. Then came a bad road along a broken levee, through a cypress swamp, where amid the gloom of trailing moss, hanging down almost to the edge of the stagnant, scum-covered water, one could dimly make out the great cypress-knees, and fancy them fit resting-places for the snakes and alligators which are said to constitute the only inhabitants. ”

“ Ask them what should be done with the negroes, now that they’re free, and the bolder ones answer, “Put them under the care of the State Legislature;” while all seem to insist upon some sort of apprenticeship, or other legal restriction that will practically keep them as much slaves as ever. I have found no Georgian who, now that his slaves can no longer be made to work for him, expects to work for himself. In fact, working for themselves does not seem to be, in any event, of success or of failure, of loyalty or of rebellion, a part of their philosophy of life. ”

“ One, embracing, I think, a majority of the people, is thoroughly cowed by the crushing defeat, has the profoundest respect for the power that has whipped them so badly, and, under the belief of its necessity, will submit to anything the Government may require—negro suffrage, territorial pupilage—anything. A smaller class are Union men, if they can have the Union their way—if the negroes can be kept under, and themselves put foremost. And another class are violent and malignant Rebels, enraged at their defeat, and hardly yet willing to submit to the inevitable. ”

“ There are crowds of armed men in the streets, but they move under the strictest discipline and their color is black. No battle blood mantles the faces of the haggard and listless Charlestonians one meets—it is rather blood born of low diet and water gruel. For the flush of victory we have utter despondency. The restaurants are closed and the shutters are up; the occupants of the club rooms are dead, or in prison, or in exile; there is still carousing in taverns, but it is only by the flushed and spendthrift Yankee officers who are willing to pay seventy-five cents for a cobbler. ”

“ Great live-oaks again reared their stately pillars of gray, and spread their glorious canopy of green, beside and above the platform; negroes, old and young, again spread out in a sea of black humanity before us; but for the rows of carts, and the old meeting-house, and the moss-grown gravestones that shut in the view on St. Helena, we had here the serried ranks of two full regiments of negroes. Black urchins clambered up into the live-oak boughs, above our heads; black girls adjusted their scarfs, and fidgeted about the front of the platform ”

“ An idea that the place was unhealthy possessed the owners, and, with a curious taste, what was too dangerous for men to live in was straightway selected for dead men to be buried in. We would hardly choose a malarious bottom, or a Northern tamarack swamp for a burying ground, beautiful as either might be, but what matters it? After life’s fitful fever, the few interred here sleep, doubtless, as sweetly beneath the gigantic oaks in the solemn avenues, as if on breeziest upland of mountain heather. ”

“ Bankrupt in all but honor, the paroled soldiers of the Confederacy can only tender to the ladies of New Orleans their undying gratitude for the cordial welcome which has greeted their advent in the city, and pray that God will bless the “ministering angels,” who have lifted from their hearts the dark cloud of gloom and despondency, and turned its “silver lining” outward, brightened with their smiles. ”

“ Fifty women and children, with only a few weakly men among them, were scattered along the old cotton rows, chopping up weeds, gathering together the trash that covered the land, firing little heaps of it, singing an occasional snatch of some camp-meeting hymn, and keeping up an incessant chatter. ”

“ Negroes and Rebel soldiers worked harmoniously side by side. “I tell you, sir,” said a Yankee to a Virginian who didn’t approve of this social equality, “a white man has got just the same right a nigger has—to starve if he won’t work!”
Perched among its hills, and defended by nature’s fortifications, Lynchburg had seen little of the immediate horrors of war. Her sons had gone down to death, but her fields had not been ravaged, her barns had not been burned, her children had not been often startled by the cry of the Yankees at the gates. ”

“ General Hawley, General Abbott and their wives, the Collector, the Treasury Agent, a party of staff officers and others, pursued us with kindness till our vessel had absolutely pushed off from the almost deserted wharf, which, four years ago, was crowded with the keels of a thriving commerce, and even a year ago bustled with scores of adventurous blockade runners. Trade, indeed, follows the flag; but for trade you must have money; and of this there is far too little in the exhausted country to bring back business into its old channels, as speedily as Northern speculators are imagining. ”

“ To see a fort is naturally supposed to be not the most formidable of undertakings; but to see Fort Fisher means a ride of miles over the bleakest of sand bars; means the climbing of great heaps of sand, under the hottest of suns; means a scrambling over irregular chasms and precipices of sand, where the explosions have destroyed at once every semblance of fortification and every foot of solid earth—means all this, prolonged for hours, under the penalty of the consciousness that otherwise you would be pretending to see Fort Fisher, when you were doing nothing of the sort. ”

“ Means of communication through the interior of the South are so thoroughly destroyed, and Southern society is so completely disorganized, that it is only in the cities one can hope for any satisfactory view of the people. Even there the overshadowing military authority, and the absence of all accustomed or recognized modes of expressing public sentiment, as through the press, the bar, public meetings, the pulpit, or unrestrained social intercourse, combine to render the task of observation infinitely more difficult than at any previous period. ”

“ Struggling through the waste of sand which constitutes the streets, could be seen other and more striking illustrations of the workings of the war: a crazy cart, with wheels on the eve of a general secession, drawn generally by a single horse, to which a good meal of oats must have been unknown for months, loaded with tables, chairs, a bedstead, a stove and some frying-pans, and driven by a sallow, lank, long-haired, wiry-bearded representative of the poor white trash, who had probably perched a sun-bonneted, toothless wife, and a brace of tow-head children among the furniture ”

“ Where the men were Rebels, after the Mississippi pattern of earnestness, some new word must be discovered to define the extent of the hatred the women bore to the Yankee Government. Such mild titles as “Rebel,” failed to meet the case.
Of old, travelers in the South were perpetually regaled by the siren song of the affection between the 417negro and his master. “Free them all to-morrow, and it would make no difference. They know instinctively that their masters are their best friends. You could no more make them fight against us than you could make them fly.” ”

“ Presently a group of negroes, with many a respectful scrape of the foot and tug at the hat, threw open the last gate, and, under a refreshing canopy of trees, we drove to the old country church, which, time out of mind, has been the central worshipping place for both whites and blacks of St. Helena. Overflowing all the church-yard, flooding the road, through which our carriages could hardly be driven, and backing up against the grave-yard, were the negroes, gay with holiday attire, many-colored kerchiefs, and the best their earnings (and the sutler’s extortions) would permit them to buy. ”

“ If they could make money, growing cotton, he knew he could. If they could make the niggers work he would adopt their policy, and he knew he could do as well with niggers, whenever he found out how to get the power to control them, as any Yankee could.
I have conversed with dozens of planters, before and since, whose talk all runs in the same channel. They have no sort of conception of free labor. They do not comprehend any law for controlling laborers, save the law of force. When they speak of a policy of managing free negro laborers, they mean a policy by which they can compel them to work. ”

“ Unseduced by wicked demagogues, he would never dream of these impossible things.
“Let us trust that our Legislature will make short work of Ethiopia. Every real white man is sick of the negro, and the ‘rights’ of the negro. Teach the negro that if he goes to work, keeps his place, and behaves himself, he will be protected by our white laws; if not, this Southern road will be ‘a hard one to travel,’ for the whites must and shall rule to the end of time, even if the fate of Ethiopia be annihilation.” ”

“ They’ll vote the ticket we tell them is the ticket of our friends; and, as fast as they can, they’ll learn to read and judge for themselves.”
“Sir,” he continued, “the white population of Georgia is five hundred thousand, and, of that number, fifty thousand, or one in ten, can’t read and write. Give us three years to work in, and, among our younger adults, the proportion who can not read and write will be no greater. But, sir, these whites don’t read and write because they don’t want to; our people don’t, because the law and public feeling were against it. ”

“ A Major-General, in full uniform, occupied the desk and was addressing the crammed audience of negroes in a plain, nervous, forcible manner. It was an odd sight, but General Saxton certainly adorns the pulpit. Ladies would call him a handsome man; and his black hair and luxurious English whiskers and mustache would be their especial admiration. He looks—to judge of his intellect by his face and head—narrow, but intense; not very profound in seeing the right, but energetic in doing it when seen; given to practice, rather than theory ”

“ It must always be the great shipping point for the Virginia and North Carolina coast; the heaviest vessels can lie by its wharves, and between it and Hampton Roads is room for the navies of the world. But, thus far, there is scarcely any business, save what the army has brought, and what the impoverished inhabitants who remain are themselves able to support. Sutlers have sat in the high places until they have amassed fortunes; but the merchants whose deserted store rooms they are occupying are paroled and ruined Rebel officers. No trade comes or can come from the interior. ”

“ He only dreaded its effect on the blacks themselves. Hitherto they had, in the main, been modest and respectful, and mere freedom was not likely to spoil them. But the deference to them likely to be shown by partisans eager for their votes would have a tendency to uplift and unbalance them. Beyond this, no harm would be done the South by negro suffrage. The old owners would cast the votes of their people almost as absolutely and securely as they cast their own. If Northern men expected in this way to build up a Northern party in the South, they were gravely mistaken. ”

“ It has been currently supposed at the North, that the desolation wrought by the war, would lead to an intense hatred of the leaders who brought it on. But this hatred has taken another turn. Instead of hating their own leaders they hate ours. They do not realize that such men as Mason, Yancey, Davis, and Toombs led them, for selfish purposes, into this sea of blood; they followed these leaders willingly, believe in them still, and insist that the North brought on the war by illegal encroachments, which they were bound in honor to resist. ”

“ I know the heart of the working-man, for I have known his experience. When a boy on a farm, in Ohio, where then the unbroken forest lay close to our dwelling, I knew what work was. In our rough log cabins we fared as hard and labored as hard as you fare or labor. All we had to go upon—all the capital we had—was good wills to work, patient endurance, and fair opportunity for education, which every white in the country, thank God, could have then ”