I thought of another Tennessean, and this time I stood in the Alamo, and again I saw ghosts—for who that has blood in his veins can stand there and not see them? And this was another poor white who died there before he would pull down the flag that floated above him, or could notch on the stock of his rifle the dead Mexicans who were piled up before him—dead—giving to his country an empire and to her coming children an inspiration that is greater than land and gold, “yea, than much fine gold.” And I thanked God again that in his youth there had been no cotton mills in Tennessee to do for Davy Crockett what the bear and panther and Indian could never do.
For he, too, was a poor white, and in his day would have been as good for a cotton mill as a coonskin for a pint of whiskey. And his little life would have gone out behind their shuttles of steel instead of the invader’s bayonet, and the mention of his name would have brought no trumpet-blast from the lips of fame: “Thermopylae had her messenger of defeat. The Alamo had none!”
Again I thought of a fighting Tennessean, also a poor white, in his youth, and the legitimate prey of the cotton mills—running his gunboats up Mobile Bay in spite of the bellowing forts and the broadsides of death and the hell of the hidden torpedo. And suddenly the engine stopped and a faint heart shouted from below: “Back—back—torpedoes!” But Farragut, from the greatest post of danger, shouted down: “Damn the torpedoes—go ahead!”
My friends, a man who would steal from a child his childhood, that which makes all his after life worth living, who would filch from it its body, brain and soul, is a human torpedo—a torpedo of hell. And, in the language of Farragut, I say unto you: “Damn them and go ahead!”
There was Forrest, another fighting Tennessean and a poor little white trash, one with fifteen brothers and sisters—just the ideal family made for the maw of a cotton mill—for upon such families do they declare their dividends. And if there had been mills in his day there would doubtless have been no Fort Donelson, Tishomingo Creek and Streight’s Raid. He also, like all his fighting predecessors, was a swearing Tennessean. And so I thank heaven for a good, honest, mouth-filling oath in a noble cause. And again I say unto you: “By the Eternal, stand up for the children of your land!”
They tell me that certain animals in the lower forms of life eat their young—a form of disease which we recognize in the sick hen which eats her egg and the swine which devours its young. Good God! Has our boasted civilization reached the sick and abnormal stage of its existence that it would live upon its young? Has too much wealth and too much glory and too much selfishness and high living made again of some men the man-eater that lived before Adam, except that the hair of his body and his tusks and his claws are gone, and now he is the clean-looking, well-fed, well-groomed son of hell that would fatten on the blood of his own breed? Talk not about his being a Christian, a follower of the sweet and beautiful Savior—the Christ, who, when he had hunted in all the mystic chambers of his God-like mind for some simile to express perfect purity and what we might hope to see in heaven, took the little poor ones in his arms and said: “This is what you must become—this is the kingdom of heaven.”
Once Sargent S. Prentiss, the greatest orator who ever saw the light of day in this country, because his speech was poetry and fire and reason, made a speech in New Orleans in behalf of the starving poor of Ireland. It was only ten minutes’ long, but it sent a shipload of food to Ireland. And he used in that speech a thought which Shakespeare has never surpassed. “He who is able and will not contribute to such a cause as this is not a man and has no right to wear the form. He should be sent back to the mints of nature and there reissued out of baser metal, a counterfeit on humanity!”
THE TESTER-BED AND ITS OLD-TIME COVERINGS
By Susie Gentry
Just now, when everyone who can has a “tester-bed,” the subject of these relics and their coverings is an interesting one.