No discussion with a Rebel ever proceeded very far without his making an assertion like this. It was a favorite declaration of theirs, but its absurdity was comical, when one remembered that the majority of them could not for their lives tell the names of the New England States, and could no more distinguish a Downeaster from an Illinoisan than they could tell a Saxon from a Bavarian. One day, while I was holding a conversation similar to the above with an old man on guard, another guard, who had been stationed near a squad made up of Germans, that talked altogether in the language of the Fatherland, broke in with:
“Out there by post numbah foahteen, where I wuz yesterday, there's a lot of Yanks who jest jabbered away all the hull time, and I hope I may never see the back of my neck ef I could understand ary word they said, Are them the regular blue-belly kind?”
The old gentleman entered upon the next stage of the invariable routine of discussion with a Rebel:
“Wall, what air you'uns down heah, a-fightin' we'uns foh?”
As I had answered this question several hundred times, I had found the most extinguishing reply to be to ask in return:
“What are you'uns coming up into our country to fight we'uns for?”
Disdaining to notice this return in kind, the old man passed on to the next stage:
“What are you'uns takin' ouah niggahs away from us foh?”
Now, if negros had been as cheap as oreoide watches, it is doubtful whether the speaker had ever had money enough in his possession at one time to buy one, and yet he talked of taking away “ouah niggahs,” as if they were as plenty about his place as hills of corn. As a rule, the more abjectly poor a Southerner was, the more readily he worked himself into a rage over the idea of “takin' away ouah niggahs.”
I replied in burlesque of his assumption of ownership: