On April 6, 1865, William Lloyd Garrison, United States Senator Henry Wilson, of Massachusetts, Judge Kelly of Pennsylvania, Theodore Tilton and his intimate friend Rev. Henry Ward Beecher of New York, with George Thompson of England, visited Charleston.
By General Saxton of Massachusetts, they were personally conducted to the Citadel Green on Calhoun Street, a circumstance calling for some facetious remarks by Major Delany, a very remarkable colored member of the General’s Staff, and there the general presented the great abolitionist to the immense throng that had gathered to hear him. But, as thoroughly as the general and his distinguished guests considered that they understood conditions, it is possible, they were slightly surprised by the aplomb with which Samuel J. Dickerson (as a slave a bricklayer, but as a local freedman, dropping his tools for a higher pursuit and destined to become the mountebank of the bar) thrust himself and his two daughters into the very centre of the picture. In a fluent speech, Dickerson presented Garrison with a wreath. The great man complimented him in his reply, exalted the State of Massachusetts and himself introduced Senator Wilson, as one of the “mudsills” of Massachusetts, who had from such condition risen to the eminence he had attained. Then the great abolitionist gave way to the Senator, who proclaimed the occasion “the proudest day of his life.”
Shouting to the excitable throng before him that he felt “the slave power under his heel” he bellowed out his sentiments as follows:
“I want the proud and haughty chivalry of South Carolina to know ... that the black men and black women of South Carolina are as free as they are.... And further that they are loyal to the flag of the country, while they are false and traitorous.... We have beaten; we have whipped them; their power is broken and they are lost forever.”[180]
He was followed by Judge Kelly, who denounced ex-President Buchanan and eulogized Sam Dickerson. Other speeches followed in a similar vein and to such an extent did the orgy of oratory extend that the apparently one sane member of the band felt himself impelled upon the occasion of a later address delivered at Zion Church to warn the Negroes against—
“their remaining enemies, pride, indolence, impertinence; they are the serpents which will tempt the people.”[181]
The war was not as yet absolutely over and this speech of Senator Wilson’s widely advertised must have rendered many Confederate officers desperate. Don C. Seitz in his very valuable volume, “Braxton Bragg, General of the Confederacy” gives a most interesting letter from Wade Hampton, not a fortnight later, to Jefferson Davis, arguing against acceptance of the terms of General Sherman to General Johnston, in which he pictures most effectively the conditions worse than war, which were foreshadowed by surrender. But fierce as was the blaze that Wilson and his like were fanning, it became a devouring flame with the assassination of Lincoln. This President Johnson, with the aid of Seward, strove earnestly to quench.
Born in North Carolina, the most democratic State of the old South, Andrew Johnson had raised himself from the humblest of origins to a position of distinct prominence in that western Southern State Tennessee, mainly peopled from North Carolina. Having been governor of and senator from Tennessee, he had been placed in the dangerous office of war governor in that State at a time, when through it echoed and reëchoed the continual tramp of opposing armies, as they reeled back and forward in contests rivalling those which soaked the soil of Virginia with blood.
With nothing of the personal magnetism or the attractive traits of his predecessor, the great rail splitter and wrestler of the West; immovable to every suggestion that he should purchase support with prostitution of the appointing power, even for a good end; giving out his sentiments with an aggressive honesty, which must have shocked the careless average; nothing could have more clearly marked the gulf between him and the sentimentality of the abolitionists, Garrison, Davis, Kelly and others, than his reception in the very first days of his presidency of the delegation of colored men who called upon him chiefly to indulge in that, to them the dearest right of freedom, free speech. To these and to the general public of the North, his reply must have been offensive, whatever truth it may have contained. He said in part:
“It is easy in Congress and from the pulpit, North and South to talk about polygamy and Brigham Young and debauchery of various kinds; but there is also one great fact that four millions of people lived in open and notorious concubinage. The time has come when you must correct this thing. You know what I say is true and you must do something to correct it by example as well as words and professions.... I trust in God the time may come when you shall be gathered together in a clime and country suited to you, should it be found that the two races cannot get along together.”[182]