This speech of the old negro seemed, as it were, the gift of an oracle. It grappled with a great subject of principle. Joshua was indeed an immune, having nothing to fear from the negroes, on account of his extreme old age and enjoying the trust of the Colonel and his daughter.
He looked up at the flag as he concluded, as it seemed to him just now to be overcast with the murky vapors of oppression, and pointing his bony finger toward its scarlet-veined folds, exclaimed with the pathos, the spirit of an orator of nature,
"De grate Lawd forbid dat yore stripes, 'Ole Glory,' shall be washed in de blood ob my ole marser. I welcomed yu in de Souf when I seed yu chassayin in de wild storm; I bowed my ole hed to yu when yu flung yo storry crown toards de hebens; I've marched backards und farrards, tired unto def, when yu led de rigiment, und felt dere wuz power und pride und peace under yo stripes und under yo storrs; und when hongry und starving fur bread, I flung my ole bever in de air und cheered fur de flag ob de Nunion. I lubs my ole marser ez I lubs yu, 'Ole Glory' und he mus not die—he shall not die; ef de blood of Ellick und Efrum wuz upon his hans und upon his soul ez thick ez de mud upon dare gyarments."
Suffice it to say that in the opinion of the jury John W. Seymour had committed the murder alleged in the warrant and was committed to the common jail for the unbailable capital crime.
[CHAPTER XX.]
"A DANIEL COME TO JUDGMENT."
The Reconstruction period in the South was offensively institutional. There was a fascination about the spoils principle, the "cohesive power of public plunder" that allured all conditions of men who put themselves in juxtaposition to the new order of things. There was not a negro who valued his manhood suffrage that did not yield implicit faith and obedience to all that was told him by the carpet-baggers, who came south as the "waves come when navies are stranded." The elective judiciary too was no mean accessory in the wholesale plunder of the people; in the sale, delay and denial of justice. The presence of the judge in the county town to hold the court was, an event that was commonly distinguished by farcical displays; exhibitions as it were of harlequins, bazaars, organ-grinders and negroes. From the four quarters of the county exhausted mules and oxen were brought into requisition and hitched to primitive vehicles; negroes who were the worthless heads of pauper families, astride the bare backs of horned cattle, arriving in the town before the break of day and thronging the public buildings, thoroughfares and court house. The leaders among the negroes would call upon the judge in his chamber with a disgusting obsequiousness that marked the depravity of their origin. Punishments at times were the refinement of oppression and as often a mockery of the law. Partisan judgments were not unusual or surprising.
An untried judge had come to hold the assizes; he had come without the blast of a trumpet, but the compact assemblage awaited with every demonstration of joy his presence upon the bench. The judge was a young man, seemingly of great intellectual reserve, possessing a steel gray eye that shot its glances through the subject as if it were but marking a point through which his judgment of a man would enter. There were courage, self poise, wisdom, integrity apparent in the man who had arrived to administer the law. For the first time this judicial officer saw before him an indistinguishable mass of the freedmen of the south. He knew by intuition that they were ignorant, vicious and corruptible; he saw that the prosecuting attorney was a negro, the deputies of the sheriff were negroes, the foreman of the grand jury was a negro and doubtless he addressed to himself this interrogatory in the law latin cui bono?