“It is very agreeable to be here with those in full accord on social and political subjects,—not that I am a politician; but since we are the victors, I hold that we cannot ignore the principles for which we fought. I think that it behooves Wade Hampton, Toombs, Cobb and Robert Ould to hold their tongues, and to be thankful that they are not punished for their evil deeds, rather than be so blatant of their own shame. I am sorry to find you in favor of Mr. Seymour. He is from my own State, but he is a blot upon it; personally he is a gentleman,—as far as a dough-face and a copper-head can be one. A few Northern politicians may, for self-interest, humble themselves and praise traitors, but the masses are as much disposed as ever to make treason odious. The South ought not again to fall into the error of 1860, and estrange their real friends, and irritate the Northern masses. We have undisguised admiration for General Longstreet and his class who became reconstructed and attend to business.
“I do not admire Mr. S. W. Conway nor other adventurers in Louisiana, but their opponents are still more unreasonable and unprincipled. It will take me some time to become convinced that plantation negroes will make good legislators. I have not been in favor of negro suffrage, but now it seems the only expedient left us for the reconstruction of the turbulent South. All sorts of lies are trumped up by the Democrats about Grant and Colfax. I always object to personal abuse in a political controversy.
“I see my services will be no longer required in Louisiana, and my leave expires next month. I see with equal clearness that beyond my immediate circle of friends I shall scarcely be missed. How humbling to a conceited man, who thinks himself essential, to return and find the household going on just as well without him!”
With such amenities of intercourse between the conquered and the conquerors it may not seem to some observers extraordinary that reconstruction progressed so slowly. Mr. Richard Grant White said in the North American Review respecting the great struggle of the Sections: “The South had fought to maintain an inequality of personal rights and an aristocratic form of society. The North had fought, not in a crusade for equality and against aristocracy, but for money—after the first flush of enthusiasm caused by ‘firing on the flag’ had subsided. The Federal Government was victorious simply because it had the most men and the most money. The Confederate cause failed simply because its men and its money were exhausted; for no other reason. Inequality came to an end in the South; equality was established throughout the Union; but the real victors were the money-makers, merchants, bankers, manufacturers, railwaymen, monopolists and speculators. It was their cause that had triumphed under the banners of freedom.”
Words cannot give so strong a confirmation of the above as the fact of the South’s pitiful 175,000 men against the 1,000,000 men of the North mustered out of service after the surrender. But it is not my purpose to enter upon the history of the civil war farther than it touched my own life.
“Write our story as you may,
————————but even you,
With your pen, could never write
Half the story of our land——
———————
“Warrior words—but even they
Fail as failed our men in gray;——
Fail to tell the story grand
Of our cause and of our land.”
A pretty young creature said to her aged relative: “Why, money can never make people happy!”
“No, my child,” replied the old lady, “but it can make them very comfortable.” The South learned in the direst way—through the want of it—the comfort of money. It has learned also through the aggressions of trusts and monopolies how comfortable and dangerous a thing money may prove to be to the liberties of a people. It was during the war and soon after it that vast fortunes were made at the North.
The South has long ago accepted its destiny as an integral element of the United States and the great American people. It has set its face resolutely forward with historic purpose. It clings to its past only as its traditions and practices safe-guarded constitutional rights and the integrity of a true republic. Its simpler social structure has enabled it to keep a clearer vision of the purposes of our forefathers in government than the North, with its tremendous infiltration of foreigners ingrained with monarchical antecedents, and with the complex interests of many classes. Never, perhaps, so much as now has a “solid South” been needed to help to keep alive the principles of true democracy. But “old, sore cankering wounds that pierced and stung,—throb no longer.”
Money is comfort, but love is happiness. The love of one God and a common country “has welded fast the links which war had broken.”