The Leopard's Spots (1902)/Book 3/Chapter 13
WHEN General Worth received Gaston's brief and startling letter, the wires were hot between New York and Asheville for hours. His last message was a peremptory command to his daughter to join him immediately at Independence.
When Sallie arrived at Oakwood the General was already there, and the storm broke in all its fury. At every bitter word she only quietly smiled, until the General was on the verge of collapse. Day after day he begged, pleaded, raged and finally took to hard swearing as he looked into her calm happy face.
In the meantime McLeod and his henchman on the judge's bench had seen a new light. The excitement over the arrest of Gaston seemed to have fanned the flames of the Red Shirt movement into a conflagration. He was alarmed at its meaning. The judge heard a rumour that five thousand Red Shirts were mobilising at the foot of the Blue Ridge near Hambright, and that they were going to march across the mountains, into Asheville, demolish the jail, liberate Gaston, and hang the judge who had committed him without bail.
The rumour was a fake, but he was not taking any chances. He issued an order releasing Gaston on his own recognisance, and left for a vacation.
Gaston returned to Hambright showered with congratulatory telegrams from every quarter of the state.
He received a brief note from Sallie saying the war was on but had not reached its final climax, as the General was now devoting his best energies to the Democratic convention which was to meet in ten days, when he expected to crush any "fool movement of young upstarts!"
Gaston knew of his organisation but he was sure the number of delegates pledged to the General's machine was not enough to dominate the body, even if he could hold them in line.
When this convention met at Raleigh, no body of representative men were ever more completely at sea as to the platform or policy upon which they would appeal to the people for the overthrow of an enemy. The coalition that conquered the state and held it with the grip of steel for four years was stronger than ever and was absolutely certain of victory. The enormous patronage of the Federal Government had been in their hands for four years, and with the state, county and municipal officers, a host of powerful leaders had been gathered around McLeod's daring personality. Apparently he was about to fasten the rule of the Negro and his allies on the state for a generation.
When Gaston entered the convention hall he received an ovation, heartfelt and generous, but it did not reach the point of a disturbing element in the calculations of the three or four prominent candidates for Governor. General Worth had drilled his cohorts so thoroughly in opposition to him, that any sort of stampeding was out of the question.
The platform committee was composed of seven leaders, among whom was Gaston. There was a long wrangle over the document, and at length when they reported, a sensation was created. For the first time since their triumph over Simon Legree the committee was divided, and, refusing to agree, submitted majority and minority reports. The committee stood five for the majority and two for the minority.
Gaston and a daring young politician from the heart of the Black Belt signed the minority report. The majority report as submitted, was merely a rehash of the old platform on which they had been defeated by McLeod twice, with slight additional impeachment of the incapacity and corruption of the State Administration. The delegates from the Black Belt and the counties where the Red Shirts had been holding their noonday parades received it with silence. General Worth's machine cheered it vigourously, and gave a rousing reception to their chosen champion who made the presentation speech.
When Gaston rose to offer and defend his minority report, a sudden hush fell on the sea of eager faces. A few men in the convention had heard him speak. All had heard he was an orator of power, and were anxious to see him. His leadership in the Revolution of Independence and his subsequent arrest and imprisonment had made him a famous man.
"Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen of the Convention," he began with a deliberate clear voice which spoke of greater reserve power than the words he uttered conveyed—"I move to substitute for this document of meaningless platitudes the following resolution on which to make this campaign."
You could have heard a pin fall, as in ringing tones like the call of a bugle to battle he read,
"Whereas, it is impossible to build a state inside a state of two antagonistic races,
And whereas, the future North Carolinian must therefore be an Anglo-Saxon or a Mulatto,
Resolved, that the hour has now come in our history to eliminate the Negro from our life and reëstablish for all time the government of our fathers."
The delegates from New Hanover, Craven, and Halifax counties, the great centres of the Black Belt, sprang on their seats with a roar of applause that shook the building, and pandemonium broke loose. When one great wave subsided another followed. It was ten minutes before order was restored while Gaston stood calmly surveying the storm.
Just before him sat General Worth, pale and trembling with excitement. The audacity of those resolutions had swept him for a moment off his feet and back into the years of his own daring young manhood. He could not help admiring this challenge of the modern world to stand at the bar of elemental manhood and make good its right to existence. He was about to summon his messengers and rally his lieutenants when Gaston began to speak, and his first words chained his attention.
While the tumult raised by his resolutions was in progress he lifted his eye toward the gallery and there just above him where it curved toward the platform sat his beautiful secret bride. His heart leaped. Her face was aflame with emotion, her eyes flashing with love and pride. She slyly touched with her lips the tip of her finger and blew a kiss across the intervening space. He smiled into her soul a look of gratitude, and with every nerve strung to its highest tension resumed his place by the speaker's stand. When the tumult died away he began a speech that fixed the history of a state for a thousand years.
His resolutions had wrought the crowd to the highest pitch of excitement, and his words, clear, penetrating, and deliberate thrilled his hearers with electrical power.
"Gentlemen:" he said, and the slightest whisper was hushed. "The history of man is a series of great pulse beats, whose flood overwhelms his future and fixes its life. Like the dammed torrent on a mountain side, it breaks the conservatism that holds it stagnant for generations and floods the world with its sweep. Theories, creeds, and institutions hallowed by age, are cast as rubbish on the scarred hills that mark its course. The old world is buried and a new one appears.
"The Anglo-Saxon is entering the new century with the imperial crown of the ages on his brow and the sceptre of the infinite in his hands.
"The Old South fought against the stars in their courses—the resistless tide of the rising consciousness of Nationality and World-Mission. The young South greets the new era and glories in its manhood. He joins his voice in the cheers of triumph which are ushering in this all-conquering Saxon. Our old men dreamed of local supremacy. We dream of the conquest of the globe. Threads of steel have knit state to state. Steam and electricity have silently transformed the face of the earth, annihilated time and space, and swept the ocean barriers from the path of man. The black steam shuttles of commerce have woven continent to continent.
"We believe that God has raised up our race, as he ordained Israel of old, in this world-crisis to establish and maintain for weaker races, as a trust for civilisation, the principles of civil and religious Liberty and the forms of Constitutional Government.
"In this hour of crisis, our flag has been raised over ten millions of semi-barbaric black men in the foulest slave pen of the Orient. Shall we repeat the farce of '67, reverse the order of nature, and make these black people our rulers? If not, why should the African here, who is not their equal, be allowed to imperil our life?"
A whirlwind of applause shook the building.
"A crisis approaches in the history of the human race. The world is stirred by its consciousness to-day. The nation must gird up her loins and show her right to live,—to master the future or be mastered in the struggle. New questions press upon us for solution.
"Shall this grand old commonwealth lag behind and sink into the filth and degradation of a Negroid corruption in this solemn hour of the world?"
"No! No!" screamed a thousand voices.
"What is our condition to-day in the dawn of the twentieth century? If we attempt to move forward we are literally chained to the body of a festering Black Death!
"Fifty of our great counties are again under the heel of the Negro, and the state is in his clutches. Our city governments are debauched by his vote. His insolence threatens our womanhood, and our children are beaten by negro toughs on the way to school while we pay his taxes. Shall we longer tolerate negro inspectors of white schools, and negroes in charge of white institutions? Shall we longer tolerate the arrest of white women by negro officers and their trial before negro magistrates?
"Let the manhood of the Aryan race with its four thousand years of authentic history answer that question!"
With blazing eyes, and voice that rang with the deep peal of defiant power, Gaston hurled that sentence like a thunder bolt into the souls of his two thousand hearers. The surging host sprang to their feet and shouted back an answer that made the earth tremble!
Lifting his hand for silence he continued,
"It is no longer a question of bad government. It is a question of impossible government. We lag behind the age dragging the decaying corpse to which we are chained.
"Who shall deliver us from the body of this death?
"Hear me, men of my race, Norman and Celt, Angle and Saxon, Dane and Frank, Huguenot and German martyr blood!
"The hour has struck when we must rise in our might, break the chains that bind us to this corruption, strike down the Negro as a ruling power, and restore to our children their birthright, which we received, a priceless legacy, from our fathers.
"I believe in God's call to our race to do His work in history. What other races failed to do, you wrought in this continental wilderness, fighting pestilence, hunger, cold, wild beasts, and savage hordes, until out of it all has grown the mightiest nation of the earth.
"Is the Negro worthy to rule over you?
"Ask history. The African has held one fourth of this globe for 3000 years. He has never taken one step in progress or rescued one jungle from the ape and the adder, except as the slave of a superior race.
"In Hayti and San Domingo he rose in servile insurrection and butchered fifty thousand white men, women and children a hundred years ago. He has ruled these beautiful islands since. Did he make progress with the example of Aryan civilisation before him? No. But yesterday we received reports of the discovery of cannibalism in Hayti.
"He has had one hundred years of trial in the Northern states of this Union with every facility of culture and progress, and he has not produced one man who has added a feather's weight to the progress of humanity. In an hour of madness the dominion of the ten great states of the South was given him without a struggle. A saturnalia of infamy followed.
"Shall we return to this? You must answer. The corruption of his presence in our body politic is beyond the power of reckoning. We drove the Carpet-bagger from our midst, but the Scalawag, our native product, is always with us to fatten on this corruption and breed death to society. The Carpet-bagger was a wolf, the Scalawag is a hyena. The one was a highwayman, the other a sneak.
"So long as the Negro is a factor in our political life, will violence and corruption stain our history. We can not afford longer to play with violence. We must remove the cause.
"Suffrage in America has touched the lowest tide-mud of degradation. If our cities and our Southern civilisation are to be preserved, there must be a return to the sanity of the founders of this Republic.
"A government of the wealth, virtue and intelligence of the community, by the debased and the criminal, is a relapse to elemental barbarism to which no race of freemen can submit.
"Shall the future North Carolinian be an Anglo-Saxon or a Mulatto? That is the question before you.
"Nations are made by men, not by paper constitutions and paper ballots. We are not free because we have a Constitution. We have a Constitution because our pioneer fathers who cleared the wilderness and dared the might of kings, were freemen. It was in their blood, the tutelage of generation on generation beyond the seas, the evolution of centuries of struggle and sacrifice.
"If you can make men out of paper, then it is possible with a scratch of a pen in the hand of a madman to transform by its magic a million slaves into a million kings.
"We grant the Negro the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness if he can be happy without exercising kingship over the Anglo-Saxon race, or dragging us down to his level. But if he can not find happiness except in lording it over a superior race, let him look for another world in which to rule. There is not room for both of us on this continent!"
Again and again Gaston raised his hand to still the mad tumult of applause his words evoked.
"And we will fight it out on this line, if it takes a hundred years, two hundred, five hundred, or a thousand. It took Spain eight hundred years to expel the Moors. When the time comes the Anglo-Saxon can do in one century what the Spaniard did in eight.
"We have been congratulated on our self-restraint under the awful provocation of the past four years. There is a limit beyond which we dare not go, for at this point, self-restraint becomes pusillanimous and means the loss of manhood."
He then reviewed with thrilling power the history of the state and the proud part played in the development of the Republic. He showed how this border wilderness of North Carolina became the cradle of American Democracy and the typical commonwealth of freemen.
He played with the heart-strings of his hearers in this close personal history as a great master touches the strings of a harp. His voice was now low and quivering with the music of passion, and then soft and caressing. He would swing them from laughter to tears in a single sentence, and in the next, the lightning flash of a fierce invective drove into their hearts its keen blade so suddenly the vast crowd started as one man and winced at its power.
Through it all he was conscious of two blue eyes swimming in tears looking down on him from the gallery.
The crowd now had grown so entranced, and the torrent of his speech so rapid they forgot to cheer and feared to cheer lest they should lose a word of the next sentence. They hung breathless on every flash of feeling from his face or eloquent gesture.
"I am not talking of a vague theory of constructive dominion," he continued, "when I refer to the Negro supremacy under which our civilisation is being degraded. I use words in their plain meaning. Negro supremacy means the rule of a party in which negroes predominate and that means a Negro oligarchy.
"I call your attention to one typical county of over forty thus degraded, the county of Craven, whose quaint old city was once the Capital of this commonwealth. What are the facts? The negro office-holders of Craven county include a Congressman, a member of the Legislature, a Register of Deeds, the City Attorney, the Coroner, two Deputy Sheriffs, two County Commissioners, a Member of the School Board, three Road Overseers, four Constables, twenty-seven Magistrates, three City Aldermen and four Policemen. There are sixty-two negro officials in this county of 12,000 inhabitants, and their member of the Legislature is a convicted felon. The white people represent ninety-five per cent of the wealth and intelligence of the community, and pay ninety-five per cent of its taxes and are voiceless in its government.
"Would a county in Massachusetts submit to such infamy? No, ten thousand times, no! There is not a county in the North from Maine to California that would submit to it twenty-four hours. Will the children of Lexington, Concord and Bunker Hill demand such submission from the children of Washington and Jefferson? No. The passions that obscured reason have subsided. The Anglo-Saxon race is united and has entered upon its world mission.
"We will take from an unprofitable servant the ballot he has abused. To him that hath shall be given, and from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath. It is the law of nature. It is the law of God.
"Yes, I confess it," he continued, "I am in a sense narrow and provincial. I love mine own people. Their past is mine, their present mine, their future is a divine trust. I hate the dish water of modern world-citizenship. A shallow cosmopolitanism is the mask of death for the individual. It is the froth of civilisation, as crime is its dregs. Race, and race pride, are the ordinances of life. The true citizen of the world loves his country. His country is a part of God's world.
"So I confess I love my people. I love the South,—the stolid silent South, that for a generation has sneered at paper-made policies, and scorned public opinion. The South, old-fashioned, mediaeval, provincial, worshipping the dead, and raising men rather than making money, family loving, home building, tradition ridden. The South, cruel and cunning when fighting a treacherous foe, with brief volcanic bursts of wrath and vengeance. The South, eloquent, bombastic, romantic, chivalrous, lustful, proud, kind and hospitable. The South with her beautiful women and brave men. The South, generous and reckless, never knowing her own interest, but living her own life in her own way!—Yes, I love her! In my soul are all her sins and virtues. And with it all she is worthy to live.
"The historian tells us that all things pass in time. Wolves whelp and stable in the palaces of dead kings and forgotten civilisations. Memphis, Thebes and Babylon are but names to-day. So New Orleans and New York may perish. African antiquarians may explore their ruins and speculate upon their life; but we may safely fix upon a thousand centuries of intervening time. On your shoulders now rests the burden of civilisation. We must face its responsibilities. For my part, I believe in your future.
"The courage of the Celt, the nobility of the Norman, the vigour of the Viking, the energy of the Angle, the tenacity of the Saxon, the daring of the Dane, the gallantry of the Gaul, the freedom of the Frank, the earth-hunger of the Roman and the stoicism of the Spartan are all yours by the lineal heritage of blood, from sire and dame through hundreds of generations and through centuries of culture.
"Will you halt now and surrender to a mob of ragged negroes led by white cowards who at the first clash of conflict will hide in sewers?
"I ask you, my people, freemen, North Carolinians, to rise to-day and make good your right to live! The time for platitudes is past. Let us as men face the world and say what we mean.
"This is a white man's government, conceived by white men, and maintained by white men through every year of its history,—and by the God of our Fathers it shall be ruled by white men until the Arch-angel shall call the end of time!
"If this be treason, let them that hear it make the most of it.
"From the eighth day of November we will not submit to Negro dominion another day, another hour, another moment! Back of every ballot is a bayonet, and the red blood of the man who holds it. Let cowards hear, and remember this! Man has never yet voted away his right to a revolution.
"Citizen kings, I call you to the consciousness of your kingship!"
Gaston closed and turned toward his seat, while the crowd hung breathless waiting for his next word. When they realised that he had finished, a rumble like the crash in midheaven of two storms rolled over the surging sea of men, broke against the girders of the roof like the thunder of the Hatteras surf lashed by a hurricane. Two thousand men went mad. With one common impulse they sprang to their feet, screaming, shouting, cheering, shaking each other's hands, crying and laughing. With the sullen roar of crashing thunder another whirlwind of cheers swept the crowd, shook the earth, and pierced the sky with its challenge. Wave after wave of applause swept the building and flung their rumbling echoes among the stars. These patient kindly people, slow to anger, now terrible in wrath, were trembling with the pent-up passion and fury of years.
What power could resist their wrath!
Through it all Gaston sat silent behind the group of the majority of the platform committee, with eyes devouring a beautiful face bending toward him from the gallery. She was softly weeping with love and pride too deep for words.
While the tumult was still raging, before he was conscious of his presence, General Worth's stalwart figure was bending over him, and grasping his hand.
"My boy, I give it up. You have beaten me. I'm proud of you. I forgive everything for that speech. You can have my girl. The date you've fixed for the marriage suits me. Let us forget the past."
Gaston pressed his hand muttering brokenly his thanks, and his soul sank within him at the thought of this proud old iron-willed warrior's anger if he discovered their secret marriage.
The General turned toward the side of the platform; for he had seen the flash of Sallie's dress on the stairs of the balcony leading to the stage. He knew her keen eye had seen his surrender and his heart was hungry for the kiss of reconciliation that would restore their old perfect love.
He met her at the foot of the stairs and she threw her arms impulsively around his neck.
"Oh! Papa, dear! I am the happiest girl in the world. The two men of all men—the only two I love—are mine forever!"
While the applause was still echoing and reëchoing over the sea of surging men, and thousands of excited people were crowding the windows from the outside and blocking the streets in every direction clamouring for admittance, a tall man with grey beard and stentorian voice, sprang on the platform. It was General Worth's candidate for Governor. He had not consulted the General but he had an important motion to make. The crowd was stilled at last and his deep voice rang through the building,
"Gentlemen, I move that the minority report offered by Charles Gaston"—again a thunder peal of applause—"be adopted as the platform by acclamation!"
A storm of "ayes" burst from the throats of the delegates in a single breath like the crash of an explosion of dynamite.
"And now that our eyes have seen the glory of the Lord, as we heard His messenger anointed to lead His people, I move that this convention nominate by acclamation for Governor—Charles Gaston!"
Again two thousand men were on their feet shouting, cheering, shaking hands, hugging one another and weeping and yelling like maniacs.
A speech had been made that changed the current of history, and fixed the status of life for millions of people.