Gabriel Tolliver: A Story of Reconstruction

by Joel Chandler Harris

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

The Knights of the White Camellia

Matters have changed greatly since those days, and all for the better. The people of the whole country understand one another, and there is no longer any sectional prejudice for the politicians to feed and grow fat upon. But in the days of reconstruction everything was at white heat, and every episode and every development appeared to be calculated to add to the excitement. In all this, Shady Dale had as large a share as any other community. The whites had witnessed many political outrages that seemed to have for their object the renewal of armed resistance. And it is impossible, even at this late day, for any impartial person to read the debates in the Federal Congress during the years of 1867-68 without realising the awful fact that the prime movers in the reconstruction scheme (if not the men who acted as their instruments and tools) were intent on stirring up a new revolution in the hope that the negroes might be prevailed upon to sack cities and towns, and destroy the white population. This is the only reasonable inference; no other conceivable conclusion can explain the wild and whirling words that were uttered in these debates: unless, indeed, some charitable investigator shall establish the fact that the radical leaders were suffering from a sort of contagious dementia.

It is all over and gone, but it is necessary to recall the facts in order to explain the passionate and blind resistance of the whites of the South and their hatred of everything that bore the name or earmarks of Republicanism. Shady Dale, in common with other communities, had witnessed the assembling of a convention to frame a new constitution for the State. This body was well named the mongrel convention. It was made up of political adventurers from Maine, Vermont, and other Northern States, and boasted of a majority composed of ignorant negroes and criminals. One of the most prominent members had served a term in a Northern penitentiary. The real leaders, the men in whose wisdom and conservatism the whites had confidence, were disqualified from holding office by the terms of the reconstruction acts, and the convention emphasised and adopted the policy of the radical leaders in Washington—a policy that was deliberately conceived for the purpose of placing the governments of the Southern States in the hands of ignorant negroes controlled by men who had no interest whatever in the welfare of the people.

But this was not all, nor half. When the military commandant who had charge of affairs in Georgia, found that the State government established under the terms of Mr. Lincoln's plan of reconstruction, had no idea of paying the expenses of the mongrel convention out of the State's funds, he issued an order removing the Governor and Treasurer, and "detailed for duty as Governor of Georgia," one of the members of his staff.

The mongrel convention, which would have been run out of any Northern State in twenty-four hours, had provided for an election to be held in April, 1868, for the ratification or rejection of the new constitution that had been framed, and for the election of Governor and members of the General Assembly. Beginning on the 20th, the election was to continue for three days, a provision that was intended to enable the negroes to vote at as many precincts as they could conveniently reach in eighty-three hours. No safeguard whatever was thrown around the ballot-box, and it was the remembrance of this initial and overwhelming combination of fraud and corruption that induced the whites, at a later day, to stuff the ballot-boxes and suppress the votes of the ignorant.

These things, with the hundreds of irritating incidents and episodes belonging to the unprecedented conditions, gradually worked up the feelings of the whites to a very high pitch of exasperation. The worst fears of the most timid bade fair to be realised, for the negroes, certain of their political supremacy, sure of the sympathy and support of Congress and the War Department, and filled with the conceit produced by the flattery and cajolery of the carpet-bag sycophants, were beginning to assume an attitude which would have been threatening and offensive if their skins had been white as snow.

Gabriel was now old enough to appreciate the situation as it existed, though he never could bring himself to believe that there were elements of danger in it. He knew the negroes too well; he was too familiar with their habits of thought, and with their various methods of accomplishing a desired end. But he was familiar with the apprehensions of the community, and made no effort to put forward his own views, except in occasional conversations with Meriwether Clopton. After a time, however, it became clear, even to Gabriel, that something must be done to convince the misguided negroes that the whites were not asleep.

He conformed himself to all the new conditions with the ready versatility of youth. He studied hard both night and day, but he spent the greater part of his time in the open air. It was perhaps fortunate for him at this time that there was a lack of formality in his methods of acquiring knowledge. He had no tutor, but his line of study was mapped out for him by Meriwether Clopton, who was astonished at the growing appetite of the lad for knowledge—an appetite that seemed to be insatiable.

What he most desired to know, however, he made no inquiries about. He ached, as Mrs. Absalom would have said, to know why he had suddenly come to be afraid of Nan Dorrington. He had been somewhat shy of her before, but now, in these latter days, he was absolutely afraid of her. He liked her as well as ever, but somehow he became panic-stricken whenever he found himself in her company, which was not often.