"Sheriff."
As before said, the sentiment at the North is changing in favor of the South; many are beginning to learn the true history of the past and present state of affairs, though the South still has its traducers and slanderers there, for in this year of grace, 1907, a Sunday-school magazine up North printed in its columns the following: "And when General Lee invaded Pennsylvania, at the time of the battle of Gettysburg, destruction and rapine followed in the wake of the invaders. There was evil and misfortune at every turn." A bigger lie was never told. A fouler slander was never uttered.
The South, despite its enemies, is advancing rapidly in material interests, and is destined to be the most prosperous portion of the United States. "King Cotton" is coming to his throne again. The South has always been the most chivalrous, conservative and American-like, holding more closely to the traditions, customs, and manners of the old days, where the high and unselfish principles of right, justice and honor, which go to make up the true gentleman and patriotic citizen, have always prevailed. The pure Anglo-Saxon blood still predominates in the South, as well as the spirit of the cavalier. Blood will tell.
The average Yankee has a very poor conception of what is right and honorable in his transactions and intercourse with his fellow-man, and very faint conceptions of those principles of right and justice which are the same among men of honor, world without end. To drive a sharp bargain, to get money no matter how, but to get money, and diffuse and enforce his own ideas and notions, seem to be the summa summorum of all his ends—as witness the developments in the past few years of rascality and thieving being brought to light at the North, as it exists among the "great captains of finance," as they are wont to be called; I think "great thieves" would be a much more suitable appellation. The foundations of many of the great, overgrown fortunes at the North were laid during the war by swindling and stealing by Government contractors, and they are still at it. Graft, graft; fraud, fraud, everywhere and in everything they touch.
As before said, the South is coming to its own again. I firmly believe the days of retribution will come when the evil deeds the North perpetrated in the South during and since the war, will be avenged, not in kind perhaps, but in some way. "The gods wait long, but they are just at last;" their "mills grind slowly, but they grind exceeding fine." God is just; His will be done.
I have written much more than I anticipated in the beginning—the subject and occurrences opened up the "cells where memory sleeps." The more I wrote, the more I recalled.
These reminiscences were commenced several years ago and virtually completed last February. Since then they have been gone over, revised, added to and some parts rewritten, and now on this, the 31st day of December, in the year of our Lord, 1907, the last day of the year, are completed.
W. H. Morgan