Red Rock: A Chronicle of Reconstruction

by Thomas Nelson Page

“I don’t mind doing it—for your mother.” It was no accident that a woman was chosen to be the oracle at Delphi. Jacquelin could make no more of the face before him than if he had never seen it before, and he had studied it for years.

Jacquelin agreed to go to the hospital. So he was sent off to the city, where an operation was performed to remove some of the splintered bone and relieve him. And as soon as he was well enough he was sent off on a sailing vessel trading to China. He thus escaped the increasing afflictions that were coming on the county, and his mother, who would have torn out her heart for him, for fear he would come home if he knew the state of affairs, kept everything from him, and bore her burdens alone.

The burdens were heavy.

The next few years which passed brought more changes to the old county than any years of the war. The war had destroyed the Institution of slavery; the years of the carpet-bagger’s domination well-nigh destroyed the South. As Miss Thomasia said, sighing, it was the fulfilment of the old prophecy: “After the sword shall come the cankerworm.” And the Doctor’s speech was recalled by some: “You ask for war, but you do not know what it is. A fool can start a conflagration, but the Sanhedrim cannot stop it. War is never done. It leaves its baleful seed for generations.”

Dr. Cary, when he uttered this statement, had little idea how true it was.

Events had proved that although the people were impoverished, their spirit was not broken. Unhappily, the power was in the hands of those who did not understand them, and Leech and his fellows had their ear. It was deemed proper to put them in absolute control. Leech wrote the authorities that he and his party must have power to preserve the Union; he wrote to Mrs. Welch that they must have it to preserve the poor freedmen. The authorities promised it, and kept the promise. It was insanity.

One provision gave the ballot to the former slave, just as it was taken from the former master. An act was so shrewdly framed that, while it appeared simply to be intended to secure loyalty to the Union, it was aimed to strike from the rolls of citizenship almost the entire white population of the South; that is, all who would not swear they had never given aid or comfort to the Confederacy. It was so all-embracing that it came to be known as the “ironclad” oath.

“It is the greatest Revolution since the time of Poland,” said Dr. Cary, his nostrils dilating with ire. “They have thrown down the man of intelligence, character, and property, and have set up the slave and the miscreant. ‘Syria is confederate with Ephraim.’ More is yet to come.”

“It is the salvation of the Union,” wrote Leech to Mrs. Welch, who was the head of an organization that sent boxes of clothes to the negroes through Leech. Leech was beginning to think himself the Union.

While General Legaie and Steve Allen were discussing constitutional rights and privileges, and declaring that they would never yield assent to any measures of the kind proposed, a more arbitrary act than these was committed: the State itself was suddenly swept out of existence, and a military government was substituted in its place; the very name of the State on which those gentlemen and their ancestors had prided themselves for generations was extinguished and lost in that of “Military District, Number ——.” The old State, with all others like it, ceased to be.