“I also wish to say that I do not intend to be intimidated by any publications or any letters I may receive. I have already received several letters which said that if I permitted the execution of these twelve Negroes from Phillips County to go through, I would be assassinated. One of the letters contained a crude drawing of a coffin, represented to be my own in case the Negroes were electrocuted. I received one letter to-day which stated that the entire city of Helena would be burned if these Negroes went to their death. But I repeat that I will not be intimidated by any outside influence in this question. Our own questions must be settled within the boundaries of our State, and I believe that there are not enough representative Negroes in the State to do this.”
So said the governor, but it is rather a question whether in these days of Leagues of Nations and Alliances and “sympathies” one State like Arkansas, washed partly by a great river, can live entirely within its own boundaries and without outside consideration.
The mighty Mississippi rolls onward, bearing the spars and the sands of half the States of America to the sea. And after the massacre at Elaine, for some days, dead bodies of Negroes were washed up on other shores. Doleful messengers, these, on the river of Time.
XVI
AT VICKSBURG
I suppose not many make the pilgrimage of America; land in New England with the Puritans or sail up the James River with the Cavaliers, linger reflectively at Mt. Vernon, consider Boston Harbor and the tax on tea, pause at Bunker Hill, and so on—or visit Sumter, where the Stars and Stripes were hauled down by the South, and then make the tour of the war which followed. It would be worth while—to think a little at Gettysburg and think again in Georgia, walking perchance to the sea after General Sherman. No such pilgrimage would be complete without riding the great mother river of America, and it occurred to me that a fitting place in which to end a pilgrimage, as far as the South is concerned, might be Vicksburg, with its vast National Cemetery of the dead of the Civil War. It is one of the most remarkable war shrines in any land. But, more than that, it is a solemn reminder of all the brothers’ blood that can be shed out of pride and vainglory of heart, and an obstinate refusal on the part of one section of a nation to follow the guiding star of the whole.