Some nights there were other sounds more ominous. The town was crowded with strange negroes, who were hanging around the camp of the garrison. One night a drunken gang came shouting and screaming up the alley close beside the house, firing pistols and muskets. They stopped at the house, and one of them yelled, “Burn the rebel’s house down! It’s our turn now!”
The terrified boy rushed to the kitchen and called Nelse. In a minute, Nelse was on the scene. There was no more trouble that night.
“De lazy black debbels,” said Nelse, as he mopped the perspiration from his brow, “I’ll teach ’em what freedom is.”
The next day when the Rev. John Durham had an interview with the Commandant of the troops, he succeeded in getting a consignment of corn for seed, and to meet the threat of starvation among some families whose condition he reported. This important matter settled, he said to the officer:
“Captain, we must look to you for protection. The town is swarming with vagrant negroes, bent on mischief. There are camp followers with you organizing them into some sort of Union League meetings, dealing out arms and ammunition to them, and what is worse, inflaming the worst passions against their former masters, teaching them insolence and training them for crime.”
“I’ll do the best I can for you Doctor, but I can’t control the camp followers who are organising the Union League. They live a charmed life.”
That night, as the Preacher walked home from a visit to a destitute family he encountered a burly negro on the sidewalk, dressed in an old suit of Federal uniform, evidently under the influence of whiskey. He wore a belt around his waist, in which he had thrust, conspicuously, an old horse pistol.
Standing squarely across the pathway, he said to the Preacher, “Git outer de road, white man, you’se er rebel, I’se er Loyal Union Leaguer!”
It was his first experience with Negro insolence since the emancipation of his slaves. Quick as a flash, his right arm was raised. But he took a second thought, stepped aside, and allowed the drunken fool to pass. He went home wondering in a hazy sort of way through his excited passions what the end of it all would be. Gradually in his mind for days this towering figure of the freed Negro had been growing more and more ominous, until its menace overshadowed the poverty, the hunger, the sorrows and the devastation of the South, throwing the blight of its shadow over future generations, a veritable Black Death for the land and its people.