“General Price said: ‘We played for the negro, and the Yankees fairly won the stake, with Cuffy’s help.’ Let them have him and keep him! Your father has just had a settlement with his freedmen. They are extremely dissatisfied with the result. Though they acknowledge every item on their accounts, furnished at New Orleans wholesale prices, it is a disappointment not to have a large sum of money for their year’s labor—that, too, after an extravagance of living we have not dared to allow ourselves, and an idleness for which we are like sufferers, as the crop was planted on shares. I am convinced the negroes are too much like children to understand or be content with the share system.
“I have a good cook, but she has a cavaliere servente, besides her own husband and children, to provide for out of my storeroom, which she does in my presence very often—though it is not in the bond. I am impatient when she takes the butter given her for pastry and substitutes lard; yet I cannot withhold my admiration when I see her double the recipe in order that her own table may be graced with a soft-jumble as good as mine. Somebody has said: ‘By means of fire, blood, sword and sacrifice you have been separated from your black idol.’ It looks to me as if he is hung around our necks like the Ancient Mariner’s albatross. You ridicule President Johnson’s idea of loaning us farming implements. You must not forget who burned ours. We need money, for we have to pay the four years’ taxes on our freed negroes!
“There is bad blood between the races. Those familiar with conditions here anticipate that the future may witness a servile war—a race war—result of military drilling, arming and haranguing the negro for political ends. Secession was a mistake for which you and I were not responsible. But even if our country was wrong, and we knew it at the time—which we did not—we were right in adhering to it. The best people in the South were true to our cause; only the worthless and unprincipled, with rare exceptions, went over to the enemy. We must bear our trials with what wisdom and patience we may be able to summon until our status is fully defined. I cannot but feel, however, that if war measures had ceased with the war, if United States officers on duty here, and the Government at Washington, had shown a friendly desire to bury past animosities and to start out on a real basis of reunion, we should have become a revolutionized, reconstructed people by this time. But certain it is that the enemy—authorities and ‘scalawag’-friends, who now cruelly oppress the whites and elevate the negro over us—are hated as the ravaging armies never were, and a true union seems farther off than ever.”
CHAPTER IX.
MISS VINE’S DINNER PARTY AND ITS ABRUPT CONCLUSION.
War is demoralizing, and ever since “our army swore terribly in Flanders,” profanity has been a military sin. In my neighborhood it extended to the women and children who had never before violated the third commandment. I knew a little girl who, having seen a regiment of Federal soldiers marching along the public highway, ran to her mother crying, “The damned Yankees are coming!” She was exempt from reproof on account of the exciting nature of the news. She had doubtless heard the obnoxious word so often in this connection that she deemed it a correct term.
I tried to preserve my own household “pure and peaceable and of good report,” and I plead with my five girls to avoid all looseness of expression. But Fannie Little asked: “Mrs. Merrick, may I not even tell Rose to ‘go to the devil’ when she puts my nightgown where I can’t find it, and makes me wait so long for hot water?”
“No, indeed, my child! Only Christian ministers can speak with propriety of the devil, and use his name on common occasions.”