At last we came to an eating-house. “We’d better hurry,” some one suggested. “Oh, there’ll be plenty of room,” said the Texan. “There’s a lot of cowardly Yankees in the front car. You don’t ketch them payin’ a dollar for dinner. They stole enough at the breakfast-table to last till to-morrow mornin’.”
All this was, of course, the merest froth, thrown not without scum to the surface of the social agitation. A civil engineer, holding a responsible position on a leading Southern railroad, whom I encountered the next day, expressed very clearly the prevailing views of the better classes.
“What do they mean at Washington? They said the war was to maintain the Union. They succeeded in it and wouldn’t let us go out. What then? Why, they next refuse to let us in.”
This man was a gentleman; he was intelligent, familiar with political questions, apparently not bitter. Yet, when I tried to explain to him the view at the North, that every one who had in any way attempted to overturn the Union was a traitor to it, not to be again invested with civil rights till atonement for the treason had been made, or, at least, till security was given against its repetition, he seemed to regard it as something monstrous, unheard of, not to be endured.
“It all resolves itself back into this: we honestly thought we had a right to go out. You thought differently; went to war about it, and established by numbers what you could not by argument. We submit. We accept the situation. Then, having refused to let us out, you slam the door in our faces and won’t let us in. During the war you maintained that we were not out, and never could get out. The war over, you now maintain that we are out, and must stay out till you subject us to fresh humiliations.”
“I tell you,” he continued, with evident sincerity and deep feeling, “no free people in the history of the world were ever treated with such indignity. There was some feeling, not of love for the Union, but of readiness to be at least obedient, even though we could not become affectionate children. They are destroying all this at Washington. Our people feel that you are cruelly and wantonly trifling with us—yes, insulting us; that, having conquered, you have not the magnanimity of brave conquerors, but are bent upon heaping humiliation on your unfortunate victims.”
“Do you mean that the people feel like making armed resistance to the action of Congress?”
“Feel like it? Yes. Likely to do it? No. You have us at your mercy. We are powerless, impotent. You can work your will upon us; but men do not forget things seared into their hearts. The time will come when the Yankees will learn to regret their present course.”
Of a hundred conversations with intelligent gentlemen from different parts of the interior (not politicians), this one gave the clearest statement of the common feeling. I believe it to have been almost universal in Mississippi, and to have been entertained by a majority of the citizens in West Tennessee, and in the interior of Georgia and Alabama.
The mistake made by Northern statesmen, through the whole winter of 1860, was in not believing the South to be in earnest. They thought the conventions were political bluster; the secession itself a piece of bravado. Perhaps there is danger of a similar mistake again. To us, all this talk of defeated traitors about the humiliation of not being immediately reinvested with political rights in the Government they tried to destroy, seems very absurd bluster. Perhaps their politicians see it in the same light; but their people do not. Very many in some of the States, certainly a majority, actually smart under the exclusion of their representatives as a studied, brutal insult to a beaten and helpless enemy.