The Women of the Confederacy

by J. L. Underwood

It is expected that the splendid monument to Mr. Davis will be unveiled at the Confederate reunion in 1907. Work has already begun and the foundations are being laid. Dirt was formally broken on the 7th of November, 1905, by Mrs. Thomas McCullough, of Staunton, president of the Davis Monument Association. Hon. J. Taylor Ellyson, lieutenant-governor elect, a noble veteran, and others, also took part in the historic ceremonies. The picks and shovels will be preserved in the Confederate Museum. The monument will be unique in its design and will worthily tell future generations of the great man and the great cause. The writer confesses to a great pleasure, while preparing this volume, of almost daily visits to see the foundation work of this monument going on. He spent five years of his life in Mississippi in the old days, and he knows Mr. Davis before our war to have been a gentleman, a patriot, and a Christian, and the kindest of masters to his slaves. He was a Chevalier Bayard, a knight sans peur et sans reproche, and yet, under the responsibility laid on him by the Confederate States, he became the mark for all the abuse and slander that could be heaped on the Confederate cause by the fanatics among our foes. His grave in Hollywood Cemetery and the Confederate Memorial Museum building, which was Mr. Davis’s home during the sad war, have been precious 299 though mournful Meccas to the author during many months of hospital suffering in Richmond, and, by courtesy of the Ladies’ Memorial Literary Society, a large part of the actual work on this memorial volume was done in the very rooms occupied by our great leader. May God bless our noble women for the monument which promises to be worthy of its mission.

RECIPROCAL SLAVERY

[J. L. Underwood.]

Humanity and kindness were the rule which marked the treatment of the slaves in the South. For this the Southern people have claimed no credit. A man deserves no credit for taking care of a $50 cow. Much more will his very self interest treat well a $250 horse. How much more to his interest to feed, house, clothe and nurse a $1,500 negro. As in all things human, there were evils connected even with Southern slavery, and Southern patriots rejoice that it is all gone. But history will only render simple justice to the men and women of the South when it records that any real cruel treatment of the negro was very rare.

The writer’s life has nearly all been spent in the negro belts of Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia and South Carolina, and he knew of but three cases where slave owners were charged with habitual cruel treatment of the slaves. One of these, in the Alabama canebrake, gave his slaves the best of medical attention, but they were evidently not supplied with the clothing they ought to have. The other two, one man and one woman, had the reputation of giving way to a cruel temper when chastising their slaves. All of them stood branded with public odium.

The truth is that in Southern slavery there was a sort of mutuality. The owner belonged to the negro as truly as the negro belonged to the white man. In many respects 300 the master rendered service to the slave. The State laws, to say nothing of humanity and religion, made it so, but you say “it was a very pleasant sort of slavery for the master.” Yes, and a very pleasant sort of slavery for the negro. They were the jolliest set of working people the world ever saw. The chains of the negro were not the only shackles removed by the great revolution. When the time came the slave owners felt that a great burden had been rolled from their own shoulders.

As far as the writer knows, the universal feeling of the slave owners was expressed in the language of a good old couple who had worked hard and finally become the owners of a hundred slaves. Said the old man, “I didn’t enslave the negroes, and I didn’t set them free, and I am glad the whole of the great responsibility has been lifted from my shoulders.” His wife, sitting by, said, “I feel like a new woman. I am now set free from a great burden.”

The truth is, while negro slavery was the most convenient property ever owned in America, it made heavy and constant exactions of care, attention, and worry on the part of the owner. The ignorant, childish Africans needed a master more than any master needed them. There lived near the author’s home in Sumter county, Ala., a Mr. Jere Brown. He was of a fine family and a graduate of South Carolina College. He was a splendid type of the intelligent, polished, Christian gentleman of the old school. He owned at least a thousand negro slaves and kept them all near him. While he had overseers and foremen to direct the farm labor, he devoted all his time to attendance upon his slaves. He was their physician and their nurse and very rarely ever left the boundaries of his own land. His slaves all loved him, and it was long said of him that he wore himself out looking after the negroes. They belonged to him and he to them. This identity of interest, the closeness of relationship, the mutual, kind feeling between owners and slaves was never realized by the fanatics and party politicians of the North until since the emancipation. The 301 eyes of the world have been opened to the fact that nearly all of the substantial help for the negro’s school, his church and for himself and his family when in distress, has been rendered by the old slave owners and their children. This practical help has been rendered all over the South.

Alas! this mutual interest is growing weaker very fast. The slave owners and their children, the true friends to the negro, will soon be all dead. How much sympathy the negro is to get from the next generation is for the negro himself to say. He has used his ballot in such a way as to cut himself off from his neighbors, employers and life-long friends; and to bring down the contempt of the world. For years he used it as a bludgeon to beat the life out of what had been sovereign States and free people. Later on he has made it a toy to be sold for a drink of whiskey or thrown into the gutter. The whole American people know this negro ballot to be a travesty on liberty. His natural civil rights are secure in the North and in the South. But his own folly has raised the question of the continuance of the privilege of voting. Anglo Saxons will continue to rule America. They are not a people who will long put up with child’s play and stupidity in politics. They mean business. And if the negro expects to use the ballot, he must catch the step of a freeman. He must vote for the interest of his State and his section and through a prosperous united State, work for the well being of the whole Union. In this Christian land he has met with unbounded sympathy in his helplessness. That sympathy is being at times sorely tried. It is waning, sadly waning. If he expects the privilege of an American, he must act like an American. It saddens the Confederate veterans of 1861 to see how far white and black have drifted apart within the last twenty years. The “friendliness” of which Henry Grady wrote in 1888 will not, it is feared, last to 1908. God grant they may get closer together in all that makes for the good of both races.