Let it never be forgotten that in Virginia in 1868, 80,000 "carpet-baggers," "scalawags," and negroes voted to disfranchise every Confederate soldier who fought for home and native land, and every man in the State, young or old, who would not swear that he had never given aid or comfort to the soldiers in the field, or sympathized with the Southern cause. Armed Yankee soldiers were posted at every courthouse in the land. Civil law gave place to arbitrary military rule. The names of states were obliterated, the states being designated as "Military Districts Nos. 1, 2, 3," etc. Detectives were abroad in the land. Everything that Yankee ingenuity and malignancy could conceive of was done to humiliate the Southern people. This service was very distasteful to some of the Yankee officers and soldiers, but they were urged on by the venom of a majority at the North. Peaceful citizens were hauled up before the military courts on complaints of worthless and vicious negroes, whose word was taken before that of the white man.
The "carpet-baggers" were unprincipled Northern men who came South after the war—political adventurers and freebooters—to steal and plunder as office-holders. The "scalawags" were native white men, many of them skulkers and deserters during the war, who, like the "carpet-baggers," sought political office—"apostates for the price of their apostasy." They took sides against their kith and kin, fawning on the Northern South-haters and traducers, joining in with the despoilers of the South, "that thrift might follow fawning."
And all these atrocities practiced by the North in the name of "liberty and freedom," and, as it was often expressed, that, "treason might be made odious." "Oh, Liberty, what crimes are enacted in thy name!" Treason, indeed! Lee and Jackson "traitors"? Blistered be the tongue that utters it. The brave men of the South who for four years fought as never men fought before. "Traitors"? Palsied be the hand that writes it. The charge of treason against the South is as black as the hearts that conceived it, and as false as the tongues that uttered it.
Henrich Heine, in speaking of England's banishment of Napoleon and his death on the lonely island of St. Helena, says, "Brittania! thou art queen of the ocean, but all great Neptune's ocean can not wash from thee the stain that the great Emperor bequeathed thee on his deathbed."
Well might it be said of the Washington Government, both during the war and afterwards, that not all the waters of all the oceans can wash away the stains of infamy practiced by it upon the South and her people. The cruel torture of President Davis at Fortress Monroe is a "damned spot that will not out," along with thousands of other acts, some of which I have enumerated.
A large majority of the Northern people were bitter enemies of the South, vilifying and slandering the Southern people, and sought to degrade and oppress them in many ways, but not all of them were so disposed, and many others are beginning to see the heinousness and folly of Reconstruction.
A late Northern paper, the Brooklyn Eagle, says: "Under Reconstruction the Republican party outlawed character, dispensed with fairness, degraded decency, elevated ignorance and invested in barbarism, under all the forms of politics which covered the fact of brigandage." A true and just arraignment by a Northern man, it gives a true statement of facts in a few words.
No wonder, then, the great mass of the people of the South have stood together for their section, and are political opponents of their traducers and persecutors.
There are, however, many just and good men at the North who were opposed to the invasion of the South by the Northern armies and the waging of that cruel war, who have, since the war, battled for the rights of the South, and held in check, to some extent, that puritanical element which, like the Pharisee, ascribes to itself all the virtue and intelligence of the land.
The original Puritans came to this country, as they said, to escape persecution. I think the truth is, they left their native country for that country's good. I have often thought that if the Mayflower had landed at the bottom of the ocean instead of on Plymouth Rock, it would have been much better for this country.