Little influenced by color prejudice (which is common to both races, though from widely different causes and in various degrees, throughout the United States), he possessed great reverence for law, as such; a fact mainly due to a residence of several years among the law-abiding people of that portion of the State of Ohio known as The Western Reserve, at a period when his mind was peculiarity receptive.
Born a slave in 1834, he seized the first opportunity offered by the late war, to flee from bondage and learn to live like a man.
Aunt Phebe preferred to wait with their two little children, her invalid mother, and aged grandfather, for the coming of the “Yankees,” which was confidently and hopefully expected.
And so in 1867 Uncle Jesse returned and found her and their children free, and thriving, in the same cabin in which he left them, though the “big house” was vacant, and the plantation in new hands.
At that time the Southern States were rife with utter lawlessness and bitter animosities; and acts of malicious and cruel outrage were frequent occurrences.
From the first settlement of the State, society had been divided into many and antagonistic classes, throughout which, however, prevailed an universal and sycophantic aping, each class of that above it; while the upper stratum sat in serene security of social distinction—fortune or misfortune, personal respectability or degradation, culture or ignorance, plethora or poverty, all were forgotten or obscured in the penumbra of that formidable and enigmatical word birth, untitled though it must be.
Now that the old landmarks had to some extent been swept away, there followed a general and tumultuous scramble in the debris, each being anxious to secure all that was possible, or failing, to resent the affront of another’s success.
Thus the worst elements and characteristics of every class were made prominent.
Families bred in opulence, and accustomed to claim the unpaid toil of others as their rightful due, and to believe political leadership and oligarchal control their birth-right, and who, like their ancestors for generations, cherished contempt for all who worked for their own subsistence, found extreme humiliation in laboring for their own bread, and submitting to the legal restrictions imposed by the general government, controlled as it was by those they had formerly derided as the “mud-sills” of the North, even though those restrictions were equitable and generous. In resentment of the equal citizenship conferred upon their former chattled slaves, they committed, and defended in each other, such outrages upon the persons and property of the negroes and resident northern whites, as are not even admissable between civilized enemies at open war.
Not a few planters who formerly owned thousands of acres of land, and from three to five thousand slaves, were, by the failure of the Rebellion, for the success of which they had staked all their possessions, as poor as the “cracker” families, which had formerly “squatted” like caterpillars and locusts upon the skirts of their plantations. They were even sometimes subjected to these as magistrates and officials, as they often were to their former slaves.