Old time negroes intuitively knew who “belonged” to them and who did not. The following incident is told of Senator Sumner’s visit to friends at Gallatin, Tennessee, some years before the war; the colloquy is between the Senator and “Old Virginia Jeff:”
“Jeff, I hear you call all the white folks down here ‘Marse’—‘Marse Henry,’ ‘Marse John’ or what not, isn’t that true?”
“Yas, sah.”
“And you always call me ‘Mister Sumner.’ Now, Jeff, here’s a quarter. During the rest of my visit you call me Marse Charles, you hear?”
Major John C. Wrenshall
P. G. T. Beauregard born, 1818
May Twenty-Ninth
If we wish to be free—if we mean to preserve inviolate those inestimable privileges for which we have been so long contending—if we mean not basely to abandon the noble struggle in which we have been so long engaged, and which we have pledged ourselves never to abandon until the glorious object of our contest shall be obtained—we must fight! I repeat it, sir, we must fight! An appeal to arms and to the God of Hosts is all that is left us!
Patrick Henry