“Stoneman frowned: ‘Such things must be very exceptional.’
“‘They are everyday occurrences and cease to excite comment.... Our school commissioner is a negro who can neither read nor write. The black grand jury last week discharged a negro for stealing cattle and indicted the owner for false imprisonment. No such rate of taxation was ever imposed on a civilized people. A tithe of it cost Great Britain her colonies. There are 5,000 homes in this country—2,900 of them are advertised for sale by the sheriff to meet his tax bills.... Congress, in addition to the desolation of the war and the ruin of black rule, has wrung from the cotton farmers of the South a tax of $67,000,000. Every dollar of this money bears the stain of the blood of starving people. They are ready to give up, or to spring some desperate scheme of resistance——’
“The old man lifted his massive head and his great jaws came together with a snap:
“‘Resistance to the authority of the national government?’
“‘No; resistance to the travesty of government and the mockery of civilization under which we are being throttled! The bayonet is now in the hands of a brutal negro militia. The tyranny of military martinets was child’s play to this.... Eighty thousand armed negro troops, answerable to no authority save the savage instincts of their officers, terrorize the state. Every white company has been disbanded and disarmed by our scalawag governor. I tell you, sir, we are walking on the crust of a volcano!... Black hordes of former slaves, with the intelligence of children and the instincts of savages, armed with modern rifles, parade daily in front of their unarmed former masters. A white man has no right a negro need respect. The children of the breed of men who speak the tongue of Burns and Shakespeare, Drake and Raleigh, have been disarmed and made subject to the black spawn of an African jungle! Can human flesh endure it? When Goth and Vandal barbarians overran Rome, the negro was the slave of the Roman empire. The savages of the North blew out the light of ancient civilization, but in all the dark ages which followed they never dreamed the leprous infamy of raising a black slave to rule over his former master! No people in the history of the world have ever before been so basely betrayed, so wantonly humiliated and degraded!’
“Stoneman lifted his head in amazement at the burst of passionate intensity with which the Southerner poured out his protest.
“‘For a Russian to rule a Pole,’ he went on, ‘a Turk to rule a Greek, or an Austrian to dominate an Italian, is hard enough, but for a thick-lipped, flat-nosed, spindle-shanked negro, exuding his nauseating animal odor, to shout in derision over the hearths and homes of white men and women is an atrocity too monstrous for belief. Our people are yet dazed by its horror. My God! when they realize its meaning, whose arm will be strong enough to hold them?’
“‘I should think the South was sufficiently amused with resistance to authority,’ interrupted Stoneman.
“‘Even so. Yet there is a moral force at the bottom of every living race of men. The sense of right, the feeling of racial destiny—these are unconquered and unconquerable forces. Every man in South Carolina to-day is glad that slavery is dead. The war was not too great a price for us to pay for the lifting of its curse. And now to ask a Southerner to be the slave of a slave——’”
That such a terrible description should be taken seriously, even in frenzied fiction, is an indication that the ambitious negro is out of place in the United States, where he is as a man without a country. In the North he can not compete with the whites; in the South he is a dissatisfied servant. He is too ambitious for his opportunities here. Let him go to the tropics where the whites can not compete with him.