“Oh, father,” she exclaimed, “the Yankees have killed me!”
Every physician in the village and city and her father’s three brothers were summoned, but nothing could be done except to alleviate her sufferings. She could only lie on her right side, with her left arm in a sling suspended from the ceiling. Every attention was given by relatives and friends. Her grandmother Durham came and brought with her the old family nurse. Sallie’s schoolmates and friends were untiring in their attentions.
During the week that her life slowly ebbed away, there was another who ever lingered near her, a sleepless and tireless watcher, a young man of a well known family, to whom this sweet young girl was engaged to be married. Sallie was shot on Friday at 7.30 A. M., and died the following Friday at 3.30 A. M. General Stephenson was in command of the Federal post at Atlanta. He was notified of this tragedy, and sent an officer to investigate. This officer refused to take anybody’s word that Sallie had been shot by a United States soldier from the train; but, dressed in full uniform, with spur and sabre rattling upon the bare floor, he advanced to the bed where the dying girl lay, and threw back the covering “to see if she had really been shot.” This intrusion almost threw her into a spasm. This officer and the other at Atlanta promised to do all in their power to bring the guilty party to justice, but nothing ever came of the promise, so far as we know.
As a singular coincidence, as well as an illustration of the lovely character of Sallie, I will relate a brief incident given by the gifted pen already quoted: “One of the most vivid pictures in my memory is that of Sallie Durham 283 emptying her pail of blackberries into the hands of Federal prisoners on a train that had just stopped for a moment at Decatur, in 1863. We had been gathering berries at Moss’s Hill, and stopped on our way home for the train to pass.”
THE NEGRO AND THE MIRACLE
[In Grady’s New South, pages 97-118.]
What of the negro? This of him. I want no better friend than the black boy who was raised by my side, and who is now trudging patiently, with downcast eyes and shambling figure, through his lowly way in life. I want no sweeter music than the crooning of my old “mammy,” now dead and gone to rest, as I heard it when she held me in her loving arms and bending her old black face above me stole the cares from my brain, and led me smiling into sleep. I want no truer soul than that which moved the trusty slave, who for four years, while my father fought with the armies that barred his freedom, slept every night at my mother’s chamber door, holding her and her children as safe as if her husband stood guard, and ready to lay down his humble life for her household. History has no parallel to the faith kept by the negro in the South during the war. Of five hundred negroes to a single white man, and yet through these dusky throngs the women and children walked in safety, and the unprotected homes rested in peace. Unmarshalled, the black battalions moved patiently to the fields in the morning to feed the armies their idleness would have starved, and at night gathered anxiously at the big house to “hear the news from marster,” though conscious that his victory made their chains enduring. Everywhere humble and kindly; the body-guard of the helpless; the observant friend; the silent sentry in his lowly cabin; the shrewd counsellor; and when the dead came home, a mourner at the open grave. A thousand torches would have disbanded every Southern army, but not one was lighted. When the master, going to a war in which 284 slavery was involved, said to his slave, “I leave my home and loved ones in your charge,” the tenderness between man and master stood disclosed. And when the slave held that charge sacred through storm and temptation he gave new meaning to faith and loyalty. I rejoice that when freedom came to him after years of waiting, it was all the sweeter, because the black hands from which the shackles fell were stainless of a single crime against the helpless ones confided to his care.
This friendliness, the most important factor of the problem, the saving factor now as always, the North has never, and it appears will never, take account of. It explains that otherwise inexplicable thing—the fidelity and loyalty of the negro during the war to the women and children left in his care. Had “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” portrayed the habit rather than the exception of slavery, the return of the Confederate armies could not have stayed the horrors of arson and murder their departure would have invited. Instead of that, witness the miracle of the slave in loyalty closing the fetters about his own limbs, maintaining the families of those who fought against his freedom, and at night on the far-off battlefield searching among the carnage for his young master, that he might lift the dying head to his humble breast and with rough hands wipe the blood away and bend his tender ear to catch the last words for the old ones at home, wrestling meanwhile in agony and love, that in vicarious sacrifice he would have laid down his life in his master’s stead. This friendliness, thank God, survived the lapse of years, the interruption of factions and the violence of campaigns in which the bayonet fortified and the drum-beat inspired. Though unsuspected in slavery, it explains the miracle of 1864; though not yet confessed, it must explain the miracle of 1888.