The Leopard's Spots (1902)/Book 1/Chapter 11
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 preeminently 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 had 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 moustache 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, pass 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.