[52]. Mr. Simmons said in the Georgia Convention: “Let us repudiate only under the lash and the application of military power, and then, as soon as we are an independent sovereignty, restored to our equal rights and privileges in the Union, let us immediately call another Convention and resume the debt.”
[53]. Some weeks before this, on the 17th of September, 1865, the balances to the credit of the Sea Island negroes, in their National Bank, amounted to $195,587 08.
CHAPTER XXXVI.
Montgomery—The Lowest Phase of Negro Character—Politics and Business.
From Atlanta I took the railway for Montgomery, Alabama. We had been traveling, thus far, in third-class passenger cars. Now we came down to box freight cars, around the sides of which a board bench was placed for the accommodation of such passengers as cared to sit down.
“’Ere’s your Cincinnati and Nashville papers, Gazette, Commercial, Press, and Times! All about the execution of Champ Ferguson!”
“Yes, and I wish it was all about the execution of the scoundrels that tried him.”
The scene was a box-car on the West Point (Georgia) Railroad; the speaker an Alabama planter, on his way home from Atlanta.
I have been seeking to exhibit, as fairly as I could, the actual talk and temper, not of the office-holders or office-seekers, who are, of course, all things to all men, but of the people one meets on the cars, in the hotels, at the wayside, and on the plantations. The expression above quoted, about Champ Ferguson, is but a specimen of what was often heard among men proverbially outspoken, and, then, more than ever disposed, in the bitterness of their defeat, to let out all the gall that was in them. The Tennessee guerrilla had far more friends and sympathizers throughout this region than had the men who convicted him. The unjust detention of Mr. Jefferson Davis was everywhere deplored. “By —,” exclaimed an Alabamian to me to-day, with a horrible oath, “are you going to hang Jeff. Davis? That’s what I want to know. You might as well hang all the honorable men in the South, for he was only their trusty agent.” Even Wirz was covered with the broad mantle of Southern charity. It was universally thought that his trial had been grossly unfair; that Government gave him no opportunity to get witnesses, and that he was entirely innocent.[[54]] The report of his execution had just arrived, and while some refused to believe it, others took great delight in repeating the words of the dispatch, as sweetened to suit the prevailing taste, by some Southern news agent: “He died bravely, protesting his innocence.”
I do not mean that these people are nursing a new rebellion. For many years they will be the hardest people in the civilized world to persuade into insurrection. But they nurse the embers of the old one, and cherish its ashes. They are all Union men, in the sense that they submit, (since they can’t help themselves,) and want to make all they can out of their submission. But to talk of any genuine Union sentiment, any affection for the Union, any intention to go one step further out of the old paths that led to the rebellion, than they are forced out is preposterous. They admit that they are whipped; but the honest ones make no pretense of loving the power that whipped them.