But there wuz plenty more white-headed old negroes—why, one could hardly tell one from another—of what use wuz it to mention the failure of one or two?
Many a young and eager one with white blood throbbin’ in his insulted and tortured breast stood up and fought for home, and dear ones, and liberty, all that makes life sweet to prince or peasant.
What became of them? Let the dark forests reveal if they can what took place in their shadows.
Let the calm heavens speak out and tell of the anguished cries that swept up on the midnight air from tortured ones. How the stingin’ whip-lash mingled with vain cries for mercy. How frenzied appeals wuz cut short by the sharp crack of a rifle or the swing of a noose let down from some tree-branch.
How often Death come as a friend to hush the lips of intolerable pain and torture!
Sometimes this tyrannical foe felt the vengeance he had called forth by his cowardly deeds, and a white man or woman fell a victim to the vengeance of the black race.
Then the Associated Press sent the tidings through an appalled and horrified country—
“Terrible deed of a black brute—the justly incensed citizens hung the wretch up to the nearest tree—so perish all the enemies of law and order.”
And the hull country applauded the deed.
The black man had no reporters in the daily papers; if he had, their pens would have been worn down to the stump by a tithe of the unrecorded deeds that are yet, we believe, put down on a record that is onbought and as free to the poorest class as to the highest, and is not influenced by political bias.