“It’s all this Captain Doc and his lawless band,” said another Georgian. “This Baconsville is an awful place,” he continued, regardless of the presence, shrieks and wailings of the families of the slain, except as he must needs pause occasionally for the sounds to subside, that he might be heard. “They are all a set of thieves. It’s a very Sodom!”
“There’s no more of that kind of doings here than in any other place in the South,” said a third, “the fact is there a’n’t more than forty-five or fifty white persons live in this village, and the Bakers and Gaston and them, think they shouldn’t be responsible to any laws passed by colored men, and think it is an outrage if they or other white folks are arrested for violating them; and the niggers have mostly let them do as they pleased, which has made the exceptions seem personal and harder to stand.
“On the other hand, it’s likely the niggers don’t waste any love on old Bob, as they naturally can’t forget how he got his property; and it is likely there’s all the envious feelings the poor are apt to have against the rich, besides, which makes their overbearing ways and impositions, and violations of town ordinances seem more offensive; and it’s possible they take offence sometimes when none is intended; maybe it is so on both sides, though the niggers are not naturally suspicious, we know. It’s just an envious, suspicious village, with overbearing and suspicious white neighbors.”
“There’s a little more than that too,” said another man. “Here’s a State with a big nigger majority on election days, and a county with a bigger one; and a State and national campaign a coming, and it’s the centennial, and the nigger ‘gush’ is tantalizing to them that don’t want a union with the North, unless they can control it; and the whites naturally want to begin the next hundred years with the State in their hands.”
“Oh, fol-de-rol-dol! The superior race ought to rule. That’s the whole of it,” said another.
“All that doesn’t make this right,” said the first speaker. “The whites have had the best chance to be civilized, and the negroes have never done anything like this. Talk about Georgia! Georgia has never been guilty of such a barbarous thing as this, and had it not been for those Bean Island men, it never would have happened.”
“That stirs fury all over one, sir; to have that said after I have strove so hard to keep things quiet in Bean Island!” said Uncle Jesse, “I shall inquire about that;” and scarcely bidding a hasty adieu to his friends, he abruptly left the place, and mounting his horse, rode home, and hastened to the residence of Deacon Atwood.
“Deacon,” said he, “a very nice gentleman from Georgia says that had it not been for Bean Island people, that them men would never have been killed.”
“It’s a lie! It’s a lie!” cried the Deacon, “and if they go on talking that way, the whole cat will be let out at once. There an’t a word of truth in it! There wa’n’t a Bean Island man shot a gun. Dr. Ava and Joe Ennery guarded the prisoners, and when they were to be killed, they were to be delivered into the hands of unknown parties that the law couldn’t detect them. That was a plan laid before. They didn’t fire a gun there, nor kill a man; not one! There was nobody stayed over there from Bean Island, but some drunken fellows that couldn’t get away; and if they keep on talking in that way, the whole cat will get out of the water.”