THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
powered” but “not conquered”; that the war had only proved the fighting superiority of the Southerner over the Northerner, man against man, and that the cause of Southern independence was lost only for the time being, to rise again at some future day with increased strength. To them the Southern Union man who had stood by the Federal Government during the Civil War was a black-hearted traitor who ought not to be permitted to live in the South—and, indeed, in many places Southern Unionists had to suffer cruel persecutions and saw reason to fear for their lives, except under the immediate protection of Federal garrisons. On the first Fourth of July after the close of the war, celebrations of the national birthday were attempted in Savannah and in Mobile, but they were participated in substantially only by colored people who were furiously set upon by white mobs. Public demonstrations in honor of the national flag or the Federal Government were generally denounced as wanton outrages to the Southern people.
Such sentiments of the “unconquered” found excited and exciting expression in the Southern press and were largely entertained by many Southern clergymen of different denominations and still more ardently by Southern women. General Thomas Kilby Smith, commanding the Southern district of Alabama, reported to me that when he suggested to Bishop Wilmer of the diocese of Alabama, Episcopal, the propriety of restoring to the liturgy that prayer which includes the President of the United States, the whole of which he had ordered his rectors to expunge, the bishop refused, first upon the ground that he could not pray for a continuance of martial law, and, secondly, that he would, by ordering the restoration of the prayer, stultify himself in the event of Alabama, and the Southern Confederacy regaining independence.
The influence exercised by the feelings of the women of
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