It looks as if his carriage will never get back to the Spotswood, people press about him so, laughing, crying, congratulating, cheering. Negroes climb upon the carriage steps, shaking his hand, kissing it, shouting: “God bless Mars Davis!” No man was ever more beloved by negroes he owned or knew.
The South was unchained. The South was set free. No! That fall the first election at which negroes voted and whites—the majority disqualified by test-oath provision—did not vote, was held to send delegates to a convention presided over by John C. Underwood. This convention—the Black and Tan—made a new Constitution for the Old Dominion.
“If black men will riot, I will fear that emancipation is a failure.” So spoke the great abolitionist, Gerrit Smith, from the pulpit of the Old African Church Tuesday night after the Davis trial. “Riots in Richmond, Charleston, and New Orleans have made me sick at heart.” On the platform with him were Horace Greeley, Governor Pierpont, Colonel Lewis and Judge Underwood. His audience consisted of negroes, prominent white citizens of Richmond, Federal officers and their wives. The negroes, as ready to be swayed by good advice as bad, listened attentively to the wisest, most conservative addresses they had heard from civilians of the North, or than they were again to hear for a long time. Gerrit Smith, who was pouring out his money like water for their education, told them:
“I do not consider the white people of the South traitors. The South is not alone responsible for slavery. Northern as well as Southern ships brought negroes to this shore. When Northern States passed laws abolishing slavery in their borders, Northern people brought their negroes down here and sold them before those laws could take effect. I have been chased in the North by a pro-slavery mob—never in the South.” Referring to the South’s impoverished condition, he said he wished the Federal Government would give the section six years’ exemption from the Federal tax to make rapid rehabilitation possible. He plead for harmony between races; urged whites to encourage blacks by selling lands to them cheap; urged blacks to frugality, industry, sobriety; plead with them not to drink. “Why cannot you love the whites among whom you have been born and raised?” he asked. “We do! we do!” cried the poor darkeys who had yelled, “We will! we will!” when Hayward was inciting them to mischief.
Horace Greeley said: “I have heard in Richmond that coloured people would not buy homes or lands because they are expecting these through confiscation. Believe me, friends, you can much sooner earn a home. Confiscation is a slow, legal process. (Underwood had not found it so.) Thaddeus Stevens, the great man who leads the movement—and perhaps one of the greatest men who ever sat in Congress—is the only advocate of such a course, among all our representatives and senators. If it has not taken place in the two years since the war, we may not hope for it now. Famine, disaster, and deadly feuds would follow confiscation.” His voice, too, was raised against calling Southern whites “traitors.” “This seems to me,” he said, “to brand with the crime of treason—of felony—millions of our fellow-countrymen.”
It is to be said in reference to one part of Gerrit Smith’s advice, that Southerners were only too ready to sell their lands at any price or on any terms to whoever would buy. Had the negroes applied the industrial education which they then possessed they might have become owners of half the territory of the South. Politicians and theorists who diverted negroid energies into other channels were unconsciously serving Nature’s purpose, the preservation of the Anglo-Saxon race. Upon every measure that might thwart that purpose, Nature seems to smile serenely, turning it to reverse account.
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A lively account of the seating of the first negro in the Congress of the United States was contained in a letter of February, 1870, from my friend, Miss Winfield, stopping in Washington. “Revels,” she wrote, “occupies the seat of Jefferson Davis. The Republicans made as much of the ceremony as possible. To me it was infinitely sad, and infinitely absurd. We run everything in the ground in America. Here, away from the South, where the tragedy of it all is not so oppressively before me and where I see only the political clap-trap of the whole African business, I am prone to lose sight of the graver side and find things simply funny.”
A lively discussion preceded the seating. Senator Wilson said something very handsome about the “Swan Song of Slavery” and God’s hand in the present state of affairs; as he was soaring above the impious Democrats, Mr. Casserly, one of the last-named sinners, bounced up and asked: “I would like to know when and where the Senator from Massachusetts obtained a commission to represent the Almighty in the Senate? I have not heard of such authorisation, and if such person has been selected for that office, it is only another illustration of the truism that the ways of Providence are mysterious and past finding out.” Laughter put the “Swan Song” off key; Casserly said something about senators being made now, not by the voice of God and the people, but by the power of the bayonet, when somebody flung back at him, “You use the shelalah in New York!”
“But the ceremony!” Miss Winfield wrote. “Nothing has so impressed me since the ball to Prince Arthur, nor has anything so amused me unless it be the pipe-stem pantaloons our gentlemen wear in imitation of His Royal Highness. Senator Wilson conducted Revels to the Speaker’s desk with a fine air that said: ‘Massachusetts has done it all!’ Vice-President Colfax administered the oath with such unction as you never saw, then shook hands with great warmth with Revels—nobody ever before saw him greet a novitiate so cordially! But then, those others were only white men! With pomp and circumstance the sergeant-at-arms led the hero of the hour to his exalted position. ‘Some day,’ said my companion, ‘history will record this as showing how far the race-madness of a people can go under political spurs.’ Republican Senators fell over each other to shake Revels’ hand and congratulate him. Poor Mississippi! And Revels is not even a native. General Ames, of Maine, is her other senator. Poor Mississippi!”