[9] The writer recalls vividly one such case when his father returned from Appomattox: “Ralph,” he said, as he dismounted at his door, “you are free. You have been a good servant. Turn the horses out.” Ralph is still living.
[10] The total number of colored troops enlisted during the war was 186,097.—“Statistical Records of the Armies of the United States,” by Frederick Phisterer, late Captain, U. S. A.
[11] There was a growing sentiment in favor of enlisting the Negroes to fight the Confederacy, and a number of regiments were enlisted. One of these was enlisted in New Orleans; two were enlisted in Virginia.
[12] The writer never heard of a body-servant deserting, and he knows of sundry instances when they had abundant opportunity. In some cases they would vanish for days and then reappear, laden with spoils that they had gotten from the enemy. The body-servant of the writer’s father, having been punished for some dereliction of duty while before Petersburg, in 1865, ran away, but though he could easily have crossed through the lines not three miles away, he walked sixty miles and came home.
[13] Trevellyan’s “History of the American Revolution,” Part 2, Vol. I.
[14] During the disorders following the war, the older Negroes at the writer’s home were armed and stood guard over the ripened crops.
CHAPTER II
SOME OF ITS DIFFICULTIES AND FALLACIES
Such was the relation between the whites and the blacks of the South when emancipation came. It remains now to show what changes have taken place since that time; how these changes have come about, and what errors have been committed in dealing with the Race-question which still affect the two races.
The dissension which has come between the two races has either been sown since the Negro’s emancipation or is inherent in the new conditions that have arisen.
When the war closed, and the emancipation of the Negroes became an established fact, the first pressing necessity in the South was to secure the means of living; for in sections where the armies had been the country had been swept clean, and in all sections the entire labor system was disorganized. The internal management of the whole South, from the general government of the Confederate States to the domestic arrangement of the simplest household among the slave-holding class, had fallen to pieces.