[Taken from Confederate Dead in Hollywood Cemetery, page 7.]
MRS. JOHN A. LOGAN WITNESSED OBSERVANCE IN RICHMOND AND MADE THE SUGGESTION.
The New York Herald contains the following contribution from Mrs. John A. Logan, in which she says that the “Decoration Day” in the North was an adoption from the South’s “Memorial Day.”
To the editor of the Herald:
In the spring of 1868, General Logan and I were invited to visit the battle-grounds of the South with a party of friends. As certain important matters kept him from joining the party, however, I went alone, and the trip proved a most interesting and impressive one. The South had been desolated by the war. Everywhere signs of privation and devastation were constantly presenting themselves to us. The graves of the soldiers, however, seemed as far as possible the objects of the greatest care and attention.
One graveyard that struck me as being especially pathetic 291 was in Richmond. The graves were new, and just before our visit there had been a “Memorial Day” observance, and upon each grave had been placed a small Confederate flag and wreaths of beautiful flowers. The scene seemed most impressive to me, and when I returned to Washington I spoke of it to the General and said I wished there could be concerted action of this kind all over the North for the decoration of the graves of our own soldiers. The General thought it a capital idea, and with enthusiasm set out to secure its adoption.
At that time he was commander-in-chief of the Grand Army. The next day he sent for Adjutant-General Chipman, and they conferred as to the best means of beginning a general observance. On the 5th day of May in that year the historic order was put out. General Logan often spoke of the issuing of this order as the proudest act of his life.
It was marvelous how popular the idea became. The papers all over the land copied the order, and the observance was a general one. The memorial ceremonies that took place at Arlington that year were perfectly inspiring to all the old soldiers. Generals Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan and many of those who have since passed away attended the first solemn observance of that day.
Mrs. John A. Logan.
The following valuable bit of history is taken from the Macon (Ga.) Telegraph’s account of the meeting of the United Daughters of the Confederacy in Macon, October, 1905.
“In the presentation to Mrs. L. H. Raines of a gold pin, a testimonial from the United Daughters of Georgia, a very pretty climax to the morning’s session was reached. 292 The speech with which Miss Mildred Rutherford presented the pin in behalf of the Daughters will be memorable to every one present, for it was touched with emotion and instruction as a bit of history. Miss Rutherford explained that when the war between the States ended, the Ladies’ Aid Societies resolved themselves into associations whose work it was to care for the graves of the fallen heroes and to collect the bodies from far-off fields.
“There was a woman in Nashville, who had ever been foremost in Confederate work—a Mrs. M. C. Goodlet, who in 1892 was president of the auxiliary to the Cheatham Bivouac. She had just aided in building the soldiers’ home near Nashville and felt that there was a work not included in the work of the auxiliaries as then constituted. So she resolved to form an organization to be called the ‘Daughters of the Confederacy.’ The purpose of this organization was to be the care of aged veterans and the wives and children of veterans, the building of monuments, the collection and preservation of records.
“Mrs. L. H. Raines was one of the first to write for information to Mrs. Goodlet, and on reply she took the matter before the Savannah auxiliary. This auxiliary, while not willing to lose its individuality in the new organization, quickly formed within its own ranks a chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy. So the charter chapter of Georgia came into existence.”
Miss Rutherford then related how the chapters grew in number until it occurred to Mrs. Raines that strength would come through union. She wrote to Mrs. Goodlet suggesting a “United Daughters of the Confederacy,” and Mrs. Goodlet agreed with the idea, so that a constitution and by-laws were formulated and a convention of the various chapters called at Nashville in 1894, “Mother” Goodlet presiding. The convention of the United Daughters at San Francisco formally recognized Mrs. Goodlet as founder of the Daughters of the Confederacy and Mrs. Raines as founder of the United Daughters.
The following is an extract from the Macon (Ga.) Telegraph’s report of the proceedings of the United Daughters of the Confederacy in Macon on the 26th of October, 1905:
Mrs. Plaine had not then learned that Virginia opened last year a large and comfortable home for Confederate women on Grace street in the city of Richmond. It is a noble monument to our mothers and grandmothers and a needed asylum for some of the very lonely. Mrs. Plaine among other things said:
“We have corrected many falsehoods disseminated throughout the South in Northern histories and readers, substituting impartial and truthful Southern books; and we have children’s chapters as auxiliaries to the United Daughters of the Confederacy that they may learn even more of the imperishable grandeur of the men and women of the old South. But, my dear friends, have we not failed in one paramount duty? Should we not in all these years have made some organized effort for the succor and support of the aged women of the Confederacy whose noble deeds we have been busily recording? Texas is the only State which has made any decided move in this direction. The United Daughters of the Confederacy of that State have purchased a lot in Austin and have several thousand dollars towards building a home to be known as ‘Heroines’ Home.’ They propose to have for these precious old ladies pleasant and comfortable housing, good food cheerfully served, efficient attendants, nurses and physicians, books, and all the little pastimes with which cherished mothers should be provided to keep them satisfied and happy as the depressing shadows grow longer.
“When we of Atlanta were working so hard to have the State accept and maintain the soldiers’ home which had been built by public subscription eight years before and was fast going to decay, the only opposition we had was from those who thought there were too few soldiers left to need such a home. But what has been the result 294 of opening it to them? Why, hundreds of old, infirm and needy veterans have found there a comfortable place in which to pass the remnant of their lives, and we feel more than repaid for our small share in opening it for their use.
“Now, in the effort to establish a home for the aged women of the Confederacy, the same objection will be raised of ‘so few to occupy it.’
“Where are the women who represented the six hundred thousand valiant soldiers who constituted the grandest army the world has yet known?
“Where are those who with unflinching courage sent forth husbands, sons, fathers, brothers and lovers to swell that immortal host which marched and suffered beneath the ‘Stars and Bars?’ Where the little girls who carded and spun and knitted to help their mothers clothe the naked soldiers? Where the young girls who stood by the wayside to feed the hungry and quench the thirst of the men on their long and weary marches? Where the women who with tireless energy ministered night and day to the sick and wounded and spoke words of hope to the dying? Where those who stood at the threshold of desolate homes to welcome with smiles and loving caresses their uncrowned heroes, and who by their courage and patient endurance, amidst want and poverty, saved from despair and even suicide the men by whose heroic efforts a new and greater South has arisen from the ashes of the old?
“Hundreds of these women, my dear friends, some of them once queens in the old Southern society of which we still boast, and who would even now grace the court of the proudest monarch on earth, are still with us, but many of them in poverty and obscurity, suffering in silence rather than acknowledge their changed condition.
“I know personally of four cultured, refined women, born and bred in luxury, who gave some of the best years of their lives to help the Southern cause, and who for the love of it still work with their feeble hands to make the money with which to pay their dues as members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
“I know of another, reared by aristocratic, wealthy parents in this city, who drove with her patriotic mother almost daily to take in their private carriage the sick and wounded from the trains to the hospitals, and who on one occasion retired behind one of the brick pillars of your depot and tore off her undergarments to furnish bandages for bleeding arteries. She is now quite advanced in years, nearly all her relatives dead, and she is in very straitened circumstances. But she is proud and brave still, and makes no moan.
“A few years ago it was announced in an Atlanta paper that a lady from Sharpsburg, Md., was visiting a friend in Atlanta. A gentleman in Griffin, after seeing the notice, took the next train to Atlanta and called to see the lady without giving his name. As she entered the parlor he stared at her for a moment and then grasped both her hands in his and tears sprang to his eyes as he said with great emotion, ‘Yes, yes, this is Miss Julia, only grown older—the same sweet face that looked so compassionately into mine, and the same person who with her beautiful sister Alice and her mother, worthy to have been the mother of Napoleon, nursed me into life as you did so many poor fellows after that awful battle. I have come to take you home with me. My wife and children love you and all your family; your names are honored household words with us.’ Everything in the fine old mansion of that family was literally soaked in the blood of Southern soldiers. To these two young girls, Julia and Alice, scores of Southern families owe the recovery of the bodies of their dead upon the memorable and bloody field of Antietam or Sharpsburg. Most of the people around there were Northern sympathizers, and took pleasure in desecrating Confederate graves, and these young ladies, with the assistance of a gentleman, who posed as a Yankee, made, secretly, diagrams of the burial places of our dead, marking distances from trees, fences and other objects, and sometimes burying pieces of iron or other indestructible articles near by, that they might be able, if need be, to recover the bodies, and thus many were restored to their friends. So much was this 296 family hated by the Yankee element in the surrounding country it became unsafe for them to keep a light in the house after night, for fear of being fired into. I have myself seen since the war the bullets which lodged in the inside walls of the rooms. Just at the close of the war these brave girls, in order to send the body of a noble Confederate captain to his wife, then living in Macon, drove with it in a wagon seventeen miles at night, crossing the broad Potomac in a ferryboat, their only companion a boy of twelve, and delivered the casket to the express agent at Leesburg, Va. Both of these Southern heroines are still living. Poverty long since overtook them; the dear old home has passed into strange hands, and they are left almost alone—one a widow, the other never married.
“Think you that such as these are not deserving the help of those of us who have been more fortunate? In the language of Mrs. Vincent, of Texas, a native Georgian, ‘because they have stifled their cries, and in silent self-reliance labored all these years for subsistence, are we Daughters to close our ears to their appeals, now that the patient hands and the feeble footsteps hesitate in the oncoming darkness?’
“The time will come—is already here—when marble shafts will arise to commemorate the deeds of the Spartan women of the South, but a better and more enduring monument would be a home for such of them as are still alive and in need, and for the benefit of the female descendants of the men and women of the Confederacy who may yet become old and homeless, and are eligible to the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
“Memorial Hall in course of erection by the Daughters of the American Revolution, commemorative of the deeds of our Revolutionary ancestry, is a worthy and patriotic enterprise, but a home for the aged heroines of the Confederacy would serve not alone as a memorial of our dead heroes and heroines, but what is still better, it would be a blessing to worthy, suffering humanity.”
[J. L. Underwood.]
These women of the South not only work for the men, but when the men undertake to work for them, they take up the work and do it for themselves. In March, 1897, the Ladies’ Auxiliary of the George E. Pickett Camp, Confederate Veterans, began a movement to establish a home for the wives, sisters, and daughters of dead and disabled Confederate soldiers. Of this Auxiliary Society Mrs. R. N. Northern was president, Miss Alice V. Loehr, secretary. A call was made to the people of the State and a Confederate festival, in charge of a committee of which Mrs. Mary A. Burgess was chairman, was held in the Regimental Armory in Richmond from the 19th to 29th of May for the purpose of raising funds. The movement was most heartily endorsed by the veterans, by Governor C. T. O’Ferrall, and the people generally, and was continued to complete success. A very desirable building was secured on Grace street and the home dedicated and opened in 1904 and is now occupied by a number of grateful inmates. In all the historic memorials about noble old Richmond there is no monument more touching than this practical offering to the women of the Confederacy. A similar home has already been provided in Texas and the R. A. Smith Camp of Veterans at Macon, Ga., which recently laid the corner-stone of a monument to the Confederate Women, has already begun a movement for the establishment of a home in that city and the United Daughters of the Confederacy are at work for its accomplishment.
[J. L. Underwood.]
The project to erect an appropriate monument to the great Chieftain of the Confederacy was undertaken by the veterans years ago. They raised about $20,000. The Daughters of the Confederacy, just as they always 298 do, then took hold of the matter and they have increased the fund to $70,000. The Georgia United Daughters of the Confederacy, who have built a Winnie Davis dormitory at the Georgia Normal School, have been very active in the work for the Davis Monument at Richmond, and Georgia has the credit of leading all the States in the amount contributed. The city of Richmond has donated a very eligible lot at the crossing of Franklin and Cedar streets, near the splendid R. E. Lee monument. It is fitting that the monuments to the leading civil and military heroes of the great cause shall be so near each other. Very near to these will be monuments each to Gen. J. E. B. Stuart, and to Gen. Fitz Hugh Lee. These monuments will all stand in the Lee district, the new and coming choice residence section of the glorious city.
It is expected that the splendid monument to Mr. Davis will be unveiled at the Confederate reunion in 1907. Work has already begun and the foundations are being laid. Dirt was formally broken on the 7th of November, 1905, by Mrs. Thomas McCullough, of Staunton, president of the Davis Monument Association. Hon. J. Taylor Ellyson, lieutenant-governor elect, a noble veteran, and others, also took part in the historic ceremonies. The picks and shovels will be preserved in the Confederate Museum. The monument will be unique in its design and will worthily tell future generations of the great man and the great cause. The writer confesses to a great pleasure, while preparing this volume, of almost daily visits to see the foundation work of this monument going on. He spent five years of his life in Mississippi in the old days, and he knows Mr. Davis before our war to have been a gentleman, a patriot, and a Christian, and the kindest of masters to his slaves. He was a Chevalier Bayard, a knight sans peur et sans reproche, and yet, under the responsibility laid on him by the Confederate States, he became the mark for all the abuse and slander that could be heaped on the Confederate cause by the fanatics among our foes. His grave in Hollywood Cemetery and the Confederate Memorial Museum building, which was Mr. Davis’s home during the sad war, have been precious 299 though mournful Meccas to the author during many months of hospital suffering in Richmond, and, by courtesy of the Ladies’ Memorial Literary Society, a large part of the actual work on this memorial volume was done in the very rooms occupied by our great leader. May God bless our noble women for the monument which promises to be worthy of its mission.
[J. L. Underwood.]
Humanity and kindness were the rule which marked the treatment of the slaves in the South. For this the Southern people have claimed no credit. A man deserves no credit for taking care of a $50 cow. Much more will his very self interest treat well a $250 horse. How much more to his interest to feed, house, clothe and nurse a $1,500 negro. As in all things human, there were evils connected even with Southern slavery, and Southern patriots rejoice that it is all gone. But history will only render simple justice to the men and women of the South when it records that any real cruel treatment of the negro was very rare.
The writer’s life has nearly all been spent in the negro belts of Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia and South Carolina, and he knew of but three cases where slave owners were charged with habitual cruel treatment of the slaves. One of these, in the Alabama canebrake, gave his slaves the best of medical attention, but they were evidently not supplied with the clothing they ought to have. The other two, one man and one woman, had the reputation of giving way to a cruel temper when chastising their slaves. All of them stood branded with public odium.
The truth is that in Southern slavery there was a sort of mutuality. The owner belonged to the negro as truly as the negro belonged to the white man. In many respects 300 the master rendered service to the slave. The State laws, to say nothing of humanity and religion, made it so, but you say “it was a very pleasant sort of slavery for the master.” Yes, and a very pleasant sort of slavery for the negro. They were the jolliest set of working people the world ever saw. The chains of the negro were not the only shackles removed by the great revolution. When the time came the slave owners felt that a great burden had been rolled from their own shoulders.
As far as the writer knows, the universal feeling of the slave owners was expressed in the language of a good old couple who had worked hard and finally become the owners of a hundred slaves. Said the old man, “I didn’t enslave the negroes, and I didn’t set them free, and I am glad the whole of the great responsibility has been lifted from my shoulders.” His wife, sitting by, said, “I feel like a new woman. I am now set free from a great burden.”
The truth is, while negro slavery was the most convenient property ever owned in America, it made heavy and constant exactions of care, attention, and worry on the part of the owner. The ignorant, childish Africans needed a master more than any master needed them. There lived near the author’s home in Sumter county, Ala., a Mr. Jere Brown. He was of a fine family and a graduate of South Carolina College. He was a splendid type of the intelligent, polished, Christian gentleman of the old school. He owned at least a thousand negro slaves and kept them all near him. While he had overseers and foremen to direct the farm labor, he devoted all his time to attendance upon his slaves. He was their physician and their nurse and very rarely ever left the boundaries of his own land. His slaves all loved him, and it was long said of him that he wore himself out looking after the negroes. They belonged to him and he to them. This identity of interest, the closeness of relationship, the mutual, kind feeling between owners and slaves was never realized by the fanatics and party politicians of the North until since the emancipation. The 301 eyes of the world have been opened to the fact that nearly all of the substantial help for the negro’s school, his church and for himself and his family when in distress, has been rendered by the old slave owners and their children. This practical help has been rendered all over the South.
Alas! this mutual interest is growing weaker very fast. The slave owners and their children, the true friends to the negro, will soon be all dead. How much sympathy the negro is to get from the next generation is for the negro himself to say. He has used his ballot in such a way as to cut himself off from his neighbors, employers and life-long friends; and to bring down the contempt of the world. For years he used it as a bludgeon to beat the life out of what had been sovereign States and free people. Later on he has made it a toy to be sold for a drink of whiskey or thrown into the gutter. The whole American people know this negro ballot to be a travesty on liberty. His natural civil rights are secure in the North and in the South. But his own folly has raised the question of the continuance of the privilege of voting. Anglo Saxons will continue to rule America. They are not a people who will long put up with child’s play and stupidity in politics. They mean business. And if the negro expects to use the ballot, he must catch the step of a freeman. He must vote for the interest of his State and his section and through a prosperous united State, work for the well being of the whole Union. In this Christian land he has met with unbounded sympathy in his helplessness. That sympathy is being at times sorely tried. It is waning, sadly waning. If he expects the privilege of an American, he must act like an American. It saddens the Confederate veterans of 1861 to see how far white and black have drifted apart within the last twenty years. The “friendliness” of which Henry Grady wrote in 1888 will not, it is feared, last to 1908. God grant they may get closer together in all that makes for the good of both races.
[J. L. Underwood.]
Here is a part of the story of the Maryland woman and the Federal flag in the famous poem of John G. Whittier:
“Bravest of all in Fredericktown
She took up the flag the men hauled down;
In her attic window the staff she set
To show that one heart was loyal yet.
Up the street came the rebel tread,
Stonewall Jackson riding ahead:
Under his slouch hat left and right
He glanced; the old flag met his sight.
‘Halt!’ the dust-brown ranks stood fast,
‘Fire!’ Out blazed the rifle blast,
It shivered the window pane and sash,
It rent the banner with seam and gash.
Quick as it fell from the broken staff,
Dame Barbara snatched the silken scarf.”
This is poetry, but it is not history. It is not truth. It does not sound like it. Nobody but men like Whittier, blinded by New England prejudice and steeped in ignorance of Southern people, would for a moment have thought Stonewall Jackson capable of giving an order to fire on a woman. None of the story sounds at all like “Stonewall Jackson’s way.” To their credit the later editions of Whittier’s poems cast a grave doubt on the truth of the story, and now Mr. John McLean, an old next-door neighbor to the genuine Barbara Frietchie, has given to Mr. Smith Clayton, of the Atlanta Journal, the true story showing Whittier’s tale to be nothing but a myth. Mr. Clayton says:
“Coming up to Washington from Richmond the other day I brushed up an acquaintance with a very pleasant, intelligent and, by the way, handsome gentleman, Mr. John McLean, a conductor on the Richmond, Fredericksburg and Washington Railroad. In the course of conversation he mentioned Frederick, Md. I laughed and said:
“Did you ever meet Barbara Frietchie?”
“Why, my dear sir,” he replied, “she lived just across the street from my father’s home.”
“You don’t say so?”
“It’s a fact; and let me tell you, that poem is a ‘fake,’ 303 pure and simple. I was a child during the war, but I’ll give you the truth about Barbara Frietchie as I got it from the lips of my father and mother.”
And then he told me this interesting story:
“Ever been to Frederick?”
“No.”
“Well, just where the turnpike enters the town my father and mother lived in the old homestead. Directly across the way lived Mr. Frietchie. He was a tailor, and a good, clever man and honest citizen. His house had two stories. On the ground, or street floor, was his shop. The family lived up stairs. There was a balcony to the upper story of the house facing the street. It was from that balcony that the flag was waved, but Barbara Frietchie had no more to do with it than you. General Stonewall Jackson, returning from Monocacy, passed through Frederick at the head of his army. He entered the town by the turnpike and marched between the house of Mr. Frietchie and the home of my parents. There was a United States flag in the tailor’s house. His eldest daughter, Mary Quantrell, thinking that the Union army was coming, mistaking Jackson’s men for the Federals, seized this flag, ran out upon the balcony and waved it. Observing her, General Stonewall Jackson, who was riding at the head of his troops, took off his hat, and ordered his men to uncover their heads. They did so, and General Jackson said that he gave the order to uncover because he wanted his men to show proper appreciation of a woman who had the loyalty and patriotism to stand up for her side. Those are the facts. My parents were there. They told me. I tell you. There was no sticking any flag staff in any window. No order by General Jackson to ‘Halt’ and ‘Fire;’ no seizing of the flag and waving it after it had been shot from the staff; no begging General Jackson to shoot anybody’s grey head but to ‘spare the flag of his country’—all of this is described in the poem—but none of it happened. Very funny about Barbara Frietchie being four score and ten.”
“Who was Barbara Frietchie?”
“Why she was the young daughter of Mr. Frietchie—the 304 young sister of Mary Quantrell, who waved the flag—that’s all.”
Mr. McLean told me that he had three brothers in the Federal army. His brother was doorkeeper of the Maryland assembly, and his uncle a member during the stormy sessions held at Frederick, when that body hotly discussed, for many days, the question as to whether Maryland should secede.
[J. L. Underwood.]
When the men of the writer’s generation see or read of the growing sensitiveness in all parts of the country, at the North and South, as to negro social equality, there rush up memories from the days of slavery that make the present jealousy to some extent ridiculous. As to religious equality, the slaves joined the churches of their own choice. In the cities there were some churches composed entirely of negro slaves and nearly all had white preachers. The country has had few if any preachers more eloquent and accomplished than Dr. Giradeau, who in late years was professor in the Presbyterian Theological Seminary at Columbia, S. C. He spent all of his ministry up to the breaking out of the war as pastor of one of these negro churches in Charleston.
In the country towns and villages seats were provided for the negroes to attend the 11 o’clock and night services of the whites. They shared in the ordinances and communed from the same plate and cup in perfect Christian equality with the whites. In the afternoon the house was turned over to their exclusive use and the white pastor was required to preach to them and worthy preachers from among themselves were always encouraged. It always appeared to the writer, all through his boyhood days, that the white preachers preached better sermons to the negroes than they did to the whites. The negro was thus blessed with the most thorough and efficient evangelist work ever done for the benighted. The negroes trained under it have been the salt of the earth to their 305 race in their churches since the war. In those days in the South the white evangelist Phillip rode in the wagon with the Ethiopian and taught him, and both were blessed. When the lamented good old deacon Alex. Smith, of Thomasville, Ga., was ordained a deacon, one of the ordaining elders was his negro slave. At Bainbridge, Ga., Rev. Jesse Davis officiated as a member of the Presbytery ordaining to the ministry his slave, Ben. Munson. What a calamity that this close brotherly association in religious matters should have been so rudely broken in many directions by the politics of the wild reconstruction which was forced on the South.
At home some features of the life amounted to more than social equality. There was “mammy,” for instance, the good old negro nurse, housekeeper, hospital matron, superintending cook, boss of the whole family, and what not. She was father’s friend to counsel and cheer him, and she was mother’s staff and companion. To us children she was just everything. Those strong old arms supported us in babyhood and dandled us and fondled us in childhood. Her old bosom was a city of refuge from even the pursuing father and mother. How quietly peach-tree switches dropped from parental hands when Mammy begged for us. Mammy’s cabin was the white children’s paradise. Well does the writer remember that when his mother had to take a trip for her health away from home, he and a sister a little older than himself were left in the home of a neighboring kindred to be cared for. Kinsfolk did very well till night approached, then our poor little hearts sighed for home and we ran away to Mammy Cynthia and remained in her cabin and slept in her arms in her nice clean bed until mother’s return. The most cruel work done by the reconstruction politics was to enforce the orders of the carpet-baggers and scalawags in compelling these “mammies” to forsake their old “missus” and old homes. Many of them never could be tempted or forced to leave the old home.
Then there was “Daddy Jacob,” the nabob of the farm. Like “mammy” he was given just enough work to keep 306 up appearances and keep him in practice. But it was usually special work, like presiding at the gin or hauling with the two-ox wagon. Many a meal has the little white boy eaten from old daddy’s dinner bucket or from the blue-edged plates in his cabin.
Then there was “Mandy,” the young girl given by the parents to her young white mistress near her age. Mandy caught Miss Mary’s manners, fell heir to her dresses and bonnets, waited on the table, joined the children in their sports, and felt that she was about as good as anybody. And she was, until the devil came along with the bayonets and brought the monster curse to the negro, the “Yankee school marm.” These women were deluded, blind guides of the blind Africans. Reconstruction work has left the negro women, especially the young ones, the most giddy, most idle and aimless and the least virtuous of any set of women in any civilized country. The white Yankee school teachers sent down South by the thousands, forty years ago, sowed the seed of false notions of life and duty and opportunity, and the country is now afflicted with the harvest.
“Jere” was the negro boy companion of young “Mars Henry.” He and Mars Henry played marbles together, fished or swam the millpond, searched the woods for chinquapins or hickory nuts. They rode on the same lever at the old gin and leaped into the lint room together to pack back the loose cotton, and then mounted the mules and rode them to the barn. But the ’possum hunt was the glory of Henry and Jere’s united life. After supper, in which Henry had swapped biscuit from the table for Jere’s pork and roasted potatoes or sweet ash cake, they would put a few potatoes in their pockets, gather an axe, whistle up old “Tige,” the dog, and were soon away in the woods. When the game was captured, and a failure was a rare thing, with the nocturnal Nimrods, a small short hickory pole was split and the tail of the ’possum inserted in the crack and soon each boy had a ’possum pole on his shoulder. But a boy gets sleepy quickly. Worn out with their ramble they would rake up a pile of leaves on the south side of a big log, kindle a fire near 307 their feet and put the potatoes to roasting. “Tige” knew what it all meant and he enjoyed the camping too. He would lie next to the ’possums so that he could keep an eye on them. (The writer’s Tige had but one eye.) A ’possum is the meekest of all animals, when you get his tail in a vice and a dog in three feet of him. Jere would lie next to Tige, close enough to get some of his warmth, and Mars Henry would lie close to Jere. With their feet to the fire they got a few hours of the sweetest sleep the world ever gave. It was Mars Henry’s active, rollicking, rough and tumble open-air life with Jere that gave such vigor, in camp and on the march, to the Confederate soldier.
The only man who has understood the negro, knew his wishes and his failings, knew how to be kind to him when a slave, and a safe counsellor now that he is free, is the man who, when a boy, played with Jere and slept by his side in the midnight campfire. It is mammy’s people, and daddy Jacob’s and Mandy’s and Jere’s people, that understand the negro and have always been his best friends. Had the country abided by Grant and Sherman and Lincoln and Johnson as to the status of the restored Union and left the rights of the emancipated slaves in the hands of their old owners and their interests to be regulated by the Mars Henrys of the South how much better it would have been for the poor negro and infinitely better for the white people. Southern people know best how far the negro may go and where it is best for him to stop. Now when the fearful problems which have been brought about by vindictive politics, personal demoralization and fanatical race prejudices, for which the people of the South are not responsible, the whole country is beginning to realize that if these problems are to be solved in the negro’s favor he himself is to do the solving. “Mars Henry” and “Jere” would once have died for each other. But “Mars Henry” can’t help “Jere” much now. Reconstruction politics led “Jere” too far away from “Mars Henry” and kept him too long. In a very few years there will be no “Mars Henry,” no “Jere.” 308 “Mars Henry’s” children know how to take care of themselves. May God teach poor “Jere’s” children to work out their own good.
[J. L. Underwood.]
In a previous article the author has given an account of what was nearer social equality between the white and black races than will ever again be seen in the South or anywhere else. But the deluded negro has been led to look for something higher than social equality. The most awfully destructive work done by the Northern attempt to reconstruct Southern society has been seen in the complete demoralization of the generation of the negroes succeeding the playmates of the young Southerners of 1861-1865. They were thrown directly under Northern teachers profoundly ignorant of the negro race, their condition, and their danger; but teachers supremely bent on injury, as far as possible, to the white people of the South. From them and the literature which they circulated, and his own folly, the young negroes became imbued with the idea, not of social equality with the white people, but of social superiority to them. They themselves were heralded in the highest places as the “wards of the nation;” the white people were branded as its enemies; they were the lions and the heroes of the revolution, the white people were its victims. They were the acknowledged pets of the triumphant Northern people, while the whites were their doomed enemies. They were to have offices, endowments, and bounties from the government. This government gave them a Freedmen’s Bank and a Freedmen’s Bureau and they saw no bank nor bureau for white people. They saw the white people to whom nothing was promised with no prospect but that of poverty and degradation. The North gave them colleges and the South taxed itself to give them schools. They were lauded in Congress, on the hustings, in the Northern pulpits, and in the party newspapers, as the innocent 309 Uncle Tom-like, angelic people who were to redeem the South and glorify America, while the white people, only living by Northern sufferance, were branded as traitors and rebels and enemies of the government. To insure the triumph of the negro and the degradation of Southern whites Congress kept the ominous Force Bills before the public. Who can wonder that the heads of these poor ignorant people were turned and their moral natures poisoned?
Then, with all this, came the awful lawlessness under which this young generation grew up. There was no longer “old massa and old missus” to see that they were controlled. Their parents gave way to delusive dreams and devoted their energies to “going to town” by day “going to meetin’” by night. Home life in the family was, and is to this day, almost a thing unknown. There was no parental control whatever. When undertaken much of it was so childish or so brutal as to do more harm than good. Some of these boys went to school enough to learn to read a little and sign their names, and right there the most of them graduated. A large portion cannot read now. They seldom went to church, except just enough to be baptized and to join in a special revival shout of
“We are all going to heaven,
Hallelujah!”
At other times when they did go they stood out on the church grounds and smoked cigarettes. The negro preachers, in nine cases out of ten, knew nothing and could teach nothing. The aim of most of them seemed to be to have a happy Sunday religion and enjoy the honor of religious office and prominence. What a passion this has been with the free negro. Then the inevitable collection of the preacher, and all would scatter without a thought of a religion to make good their lives through the remaining six days of the week. Mrs. Stowe’s Topsy said she did not know anything about herself except, “I specs I growed.” Those young reconstruction negroes just “growed.” They “growed” without law at their so-called homes; they “growed” ignorant of, 310 or defiant of the laws of the State, and they “growed” without any aim except self-indulgence in ease and pleasure.
Then there before their eyes rose the Paradise tree of the forbidden fruit—the white women beyond their reach. There was in every State the law against intermarriage of the white and black races which stood and will stand in Median and Persian unchangeableness. Then came, wherever these young negroes were scattered, at the North as well as the South, the mighty resolve of passion, pride, and revenge—“these white women are ours, we are better than they are, they shall not be monopolized by white men.”
The record is awful and the blackest page of American history. This is the saddest chapter the author has ever written. He has been all his long life known and recognized by the negroes as one of their best friends. There is nothing but sorrow in his heart over the wide-spread demoralization of the negro race. He and all other true Southern men rejoice over the great progress of the few. He deplores the enslavement and degradation of the many by whiskey, idleness, and lust. The strong, young African tiger has been found lurking, not in American jungles, but in American homes, highways, barns and fields. His arch crime woman cannot hear named. And to mention it to Southern men is to make their blood boil in their veins and their brains to reel.
The heroism of Southern women cannot be told without this dark page. The trials of the war were nothing compared to the ordeal through which Southern women have just passed. In the wreck of the South brought on by Northern ballots and bayonets, the culminating damage is the demoralization of the generation of negroes now recently grown. In the face of the worse than Gorgan horrors our women have borne themselves with a courage, a patience, and fortitude that are sublime. But let friends of the negro and friends of our women hope. Thank God, the crime is on the decrease. White men somehow will protect such women as God has given our sunny land. The tiger is on the retreat, and thousands 311 of the negro race are awakening to the fact that there must speedily be another emancipation, a redemption of their sons and daughters from their new slavery. The negro has had race emancipation; he needs family emancipation and personal emancipation from the chains of sense and appetite. Good negroes are working and praying for it. The negroes must break their own chains this time. But let patriotic and Christian white men help them everywhere.
“Come Closer, Comrades!”
[J. L. Underwood.]
When the victorious Federal army marched home, at the close of the war between the States, the famous Brooklyn preacher, Henry Ward Beecher, said that in twenty-five years any man in America would be ashamed to admit that he was ever a Confederate soldier. And yet in twenty-five years half of the Cabinet at Washington was composed of Confederate soldiers. In little more than twenty-five years the country sees William McKinley, the Republican President of the United States, himself a veteran of the Federal army, down among the Confederate veterans in Georgia, wearing the Confederate badge, and otherwise fraternizing as a soldier with those who wore the gray, and in his official capacity calling upon Congress to care for the graves of the dead Confederate soldiers just as the Government provides for the dead who wore the blue. And the whole country, North and South, applauded the noble McKinley.
Here is President Roosevelt, forty years after the war, making the same recommendations and Congress actually restoring the captured battle flags to the several Southern States. It is a pity Beecher didn’t live to be in Richmond, Va., on the 18th of October, 1905, and see President Roosevelt by special appointment meet the Confederate Veterans at the foot of the monument of General Robert 312 E. Lee. When he began his talk he said, “Come closer, comrades.” The President of the United States calling those old “rebels” of Beecher his comrades and all the way on his long Southern tour, having at his own request a voluntary escort at every point composed of the veterans from both armies!
Shade of Beecher! Come back to Washington and see President and Cabinet and Congress and Army and Navy gather in tears around the coffin and do the grand honors at the grave of the Confederate General Wheeler!
The truth is the true comrades from both sides have been coming “closer” to each other ever since the bloodshed at Gettysburg and Vicksburg, whenever the politicians would let them. The old “vets” understand each other whether other people do or not. We are “comrades” indeed. Now, comrades of the North, let an old “Confederate vet” who has gloried in the privilege of frequently grasping your hands for forty years, say a parting word to you. Your country is our country. Your heroes are our heroes. We claim the honor of having such patriotic countrymen as Lincoln, such heroes as Thomas, Meade and Hancock, and McClellan and Grant, and McPherson and Farragut. If there were such men as Butler and Milroy and Hunter, they were our countrymen, too, and if they did things worthy of condemnation, let Southerners condemn them with a feeling of sorrow over the failings of erring countrymen—just as Northern men should look truthfully at the lives of Southern leaders and condemn, when it is just, but condemn in sorrow our erring countrymen.
But, comrades, “come closer.” Read the humble tribute of this book to the memory of Southern women of 1861-1865. They were your countrywomen. Their virtues are the glory of all America. We have tried to help you and the world to know them better. We have all come forth from the ashes now. We are rejoicing in a prosperous South and a prosperous North. Our women nobly did their part in the war and nobly have they helped to rebuild the South, not only for our children, but for your sons and your daughters. Our sunny 313 South belongs to the whole country. Our noble women and their children love their whole country. They have shown themselves true to principle and true to duty. “Come closer, comrades,” and study these Southern women. If you find anything wrong in their spirit or conduct, hold it up to just retribution. If they have set a glorious example of courage, of sacrifice and of patriotism, help your children and our children to “come closer” in following their example.