“Negro labor. There is none better. I have worked negroes all my life, and prefer them in my business to any other class of laborers. Treat a negro like a man, and you make a man of him.”
I also made the acquaintance of a New Yorker, who was working a gold mine in Orange County, Va., and whose testimony was the same with regard to native methods and negro labor. In short, wherever I went, I became, every day, more strongly convinced that the vast, beautiful, rich, torpid state of Virginia was to owe her regeneration to Northern ideas and free institutions.
Hearing loud laughter in the court-house one evening, I looked in, and saw a round, ruddy, white-haired, hale old man making a humorous speech to a mixed crowd of respectable citizens and rowdies. It was the Honorable Mr. P——, bidding for their votes. A played-out politician, he had disappeared from public view a quarter of a century before, but had now come up again, thinking there was once more a chance for himself in the paucity of able men, whom the barrier of the test-oath left eligible to Congress.
“As for that oath,” said he, with a solemn countenance, “I confess it is a bitter cup; and I have prayed that it might pass from me.”
Here he paused, and took a sip of brandy from a glass on the desk before him. Evidently that cup wasn’t so bitter, for he smacked his lips, and looked up with a decidedly refreshed expression.
“Fellow-citizens,” said he, “I am going to tell you a little story,”—clapping his cane under his arm, and peering under his gray eyebrows. “It will show you my position with regard to that abominable oath. In the good old Revolutionary times, there lived somewhere on the borders a pious Scotchman, whose farm was run over one day by the red-coats, and the next by the Continentals; so that it required the most delicate manœuvering on his part to keep so much as a pig or a sheep (to say nothing of his own valuable neck) safe from the two armies. Now what did this pious Scotchman do? In my opinion he did very wisely. When the red-coats caught him, he took the oath of allegiance to the Crown. The next day, when the Continentals picked him up, he took the same oath to the Continental Congress. Now, being a deacon of the Presbyterian Church, in good and regular standing, certain narrow-minded brethren saw fit to remonstrate with him, asking how he could reconcile his conscience to such a course.
“’My friends,’ said he, ‘I have thought over the matter, and I have prayed over it; and I have concluded that it is safer to trust my soul in the hands of a merciful God, than my property in the hands of those thieving rascals.’
“Fellow-citizens,” resumed the candidate, after a storm of laughter on the part of the crowd, and another a sip of the cup not bitter, on his part, “I have thought over it, and prayed over it, and I have concluded that I can conscientiously take that abominable test-oath; in other words, that it is safer to trust my soul in the hands of a merciful God, than my country in the hands of the Black Republicans.”
He then proceeded to malign the people of the North, and to misrepresent their motives, in a spirit of buffoonery and shameless mendacity, which amazed me. The more outrageous the lies he told, the louder the screams of applause from his delighted audience. I could not have helped laughing at the ludicrousness of his caricatures, had I not seen that they passed for true pictures with a majority of his hearers; or had I not remembered that it was such reckless political lying as this, which had so lately misled to their ruin the ignorant masses of the South.
Having finished his speech and his brandy, he sat down; and a rival candidate mounted the platform.