“The city is flooded with copies of it, and the first scouting party that rides through here will scatter it right and left among the negroes. President Lincoln wrote it.”
“What right’s he got to do anything of the sort? The niggers don’t belong to him.”
“Well, he’s done it, any way, and you and your friends will have to come out of the swamp and go to work if you hope to get anything to eat. My father says we can’t help ourselves, and that’s why I talked to Bob and the rest the way I did a while ago.”
“But I aint agreein’ to no such arrangement,” replied Lambert, who could scarcely have felt more aggrieved and insulted if he had been the largest slaveholder in the State.
“Nobody asked my father if he would agree to it, either; but he’ll have to take war as it comes, and so will you and all of us. The blacks are lost to us and you will have to go to work; I don’t see any way out of it. You might as well turn your prisoners loose and let them go among the Yanks if they want to.”
The ignorant Lambert could not yet understand the situation, for it took him a long time to get new things through his head, and this was the first he had heard of the Emancipation Proclamation. He looked hard at Rodney to see if he was in earnest, then swung his clubbed rifle in the air and shouted “Git!” at the top of his voice; whereupon the frightened darkies took to their heels and disappeared in an instant. But they did not retreat in the direction of the road. They made the best of their way to their cabins in the quarter and hid themselves there. When they were out of sight Lambert put his rifle under his arm and pulled out his cob pipe.
“I’m more of a secessioner now nor I ever was before,” said he. “We uns have just got to whop in this war, kase if we don’t our niggers will be gone, an’ where’ll I get a job of overseein’?”
“You’ll never be an overseer again,” answered Rodney. “You will have to go into the field and hoe cotton and cane yourself.”
“Not by no means I won’t,” said Lambert fiercely. “That there is nigger’s work, an’ I can’t seem to stoop to it. It don’t make no sort of difference to rich folks like you how the war ends, kase you’ve got cotton, an’ cotton is money these times. I aint got nary thing.”
Lambert watched Rodney out of the corners of his eyes while he was applying a lighted match to the tobacco with which he had filled his pipe, but the boy had nothing to say. He thought there was a threat hidden under Lambert’s last words.