July Eighteenth
Uncle Remus was quite a fogy in his idea of negro education. One day a number of negro children, on their way home from school, were impudent to the old man, and he was giving them an untempered piece of his mind, when a gentleman apologized for them by saying: “Oh well, they are school children. You know how they are.”
“Dat’s what make I say what I duz,” said Uncle Remus. “Dey better be at home pickin’ up chips. What a nigger gwineter learn outen books? I kin take a bar’l stave and fling mo’ sense inter a nigger in one minnit dan all de school houses betwixt dis en de New Nited States en Midgigin. Don’t talk, honey! wid one bar’l stave I kin fairly lif de vail er ignunce.”
(Quoted by) Henry Stiles Bradley
July Nineteenth
What was my offense? My husband was absent—an exile. He had never been a politician or in any way engaged in the struggle now going on, his age preventing. The house was built by my father, a Revolutionary soldier, who served the whole seven years for your independence.... Was it for this that you turned me, my young daughter and little son out upon the world without a shelter? Or was it because my husband was the grandson of the Revolutionary patriot and “rebel,” Richard Henry Lee, and the near kinsman of the noblest of Christian warriors, the greatest of generals, Robert E. Lee?... Your name will stand on history’s page as the Hunter of weak women and innocent children; the Hunter to destroy defenseless villages and refined and beautiful homes—to torture afresh the agonized hearts of widows; the Hunter of Africa’s poor sons and daughters, to lure them on to ruin and death of soul and body; the Hunter with the relentless heart of a wild beast, the face of a fiend and the form of a man.
Henrietta B. Lee
[Extract from letter to General Hunter, often referred to as the best example of excoriating rebuke in American literature. Mrs. Lee’s home was burned July 19, 1864]