Mixed Bloods
“I can carry you to Columbus, Georgia. There was ten mulatto Niggers born there and you would think they were all white; but they were all colored. They were slaves, but their master was their Daddy.
“I’ll tell you somethin’. W. H. Riley and Henry Miller,—You know them don’t you—they are blood brothers,—had the same mother and the same father. Riley’s grandfather was a white man named Miller. Miller got mad at his son, Riley’s father, and sold him to a white man named Riley. Riley took the name of his father’s second master. After freedom, Henry and Josephine took the name of Miller, their real grandfather. They said, ‘Miller had never done anything’ for them.”
Curious Beliefs and Slave Expectations of Freedom
“I was looking right in Lincoln’s mouth when he said, ‘The colored man is turned loose without anything. I am going to give a dollar a day to every Negro born before Emancipation until his death,—a pension of a dollar a day.’ That’s the reason they killed him. But they sure didn’t get it. It’s going to be an awful thing up yonder when they hold a judgment over the way that things was done down here.”
Lincoln’s Visit to Atlanta
“When the war was declared over, Abraham Lincoln came South and went to the capitol (of Atlanta), and there was so many people to meet him he went up to the tower instead of in the State House. He said, ‘I did everything I could to keep out of war. Many of you agreed to turn the Negroes loose, but Jeff Davis said that he would wade in blood up to his neck before he would do it.’
“He asked for all of the Confederate money to be brought up there. And when it was brought, he called for the oldest colored men around. He said, ‘Now, is you the oldest?’ The man said, ‘Yes Sir.’ Then he threw him one of those little boxes of matches and told him to set fire to it and burn it up.
“Then he said, ‘I am going to disfranchise every one of you (the white folks), and it will be ten years before you can even vote or get back into the Union.’”