And somehow he could not think of her, or her home, but his heart went back to the old days and the Union he loved. After all, was it not one land, one race, one history, one hope? So his eyes brightened and he wrote a line beneath the caption:
WE MUST BE ONE.
Then the faces of five million slaves, dark, passionate, yet humble; five million black men and women who loved their masters and constituted a laboring class free from crime, penury and jealousy. “They have served us well,” he said. “New England brought them here, we bought them here, and God sought them here.”
He wrote a second sentence:
WE MUST BE FAIR.
Then the faces of the men at Bunker Hill and Lexington and Yorktown and King’s Mountain; those who wrote the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence, and those who, two years later, wrote the declaration of the American nation, the faces of the myriads of the men of the great white race, and with them, one whom he knew had loved him once by the golden rice fields of Ashley, and he wrote another line:
WE MUST BE WHITE.
“These three things,” said he, “constitute what I want to say to my people.”
His heart was full, and his pen moved swiftly over the paper. He told the people of how they had once loved the Union, how there was not one who would read his words but whose father would have died for the Stars and Stripes. Then he spoke in tender words of their long struggle for independence, and how it could be won only in the Union. He led them gently to the Stars and Bars, and let them kiss it as they laid it away forever, and bade them try in the future as they had in the past to play a masterful part in the greater nation. Then he broached the Great Cause, and closed, saying:
“They are here and we are here and God is here. Only one thing is clear, and that is that we must love mercy and do justice and walk humbly before our God. The darker the clouds grow, the more we are persuaded that the two races must separate, that the negro may grow to complete manhood, that the white may be saved from mulattodom. This is the great war. In the unity of the white race is our hope.”