“I thought it was some New Jersey senator,” I ventured to suggest.
“Oh, no!” (with great positiveness of manner.) “You got that into your head from having New Jersey and the Stockton name associated. But there’s a Missouri family of Stocktons, and its one of the finest in the State. There never was a greater outrage than to turn Stockton out, just to get a party majority.”
“But how can Mr. Stockton be from Missouri? Haven’t they got Mr. Henderson and Gratz Brown there already?”
“Well, what’s to hinder them from having three, I’d like to know, except the infamous usurpation of these Radicals?”
This gentleman owned five large plantations, had an annual income of certainly not less than a hundred thousand dollars before the war, and himself belonged to one of “our first families.”
“Have you heard the news?” said a finely-educated and really very skillful surgeon in one of the inland towns to me one day. “Johnson isn’t going to put up with your Radicals any longer. He is going to prorogue Congress at once, to get rid of its meddlesome interference with his policy!” “I have no doubt,” he continued, in reply to some incredulous expression of mine; “I have no doubt of it in the world. Why, you can see yourself from Voorhees’ speech that, if he don’t, they’re going to impeach him right off. Of course he wouldn’t stand that, or wait for it!” Yet this believer in Voorhees had been educated in Europe, had traveled nearly over the world, and had the hearing and manners of an intelligent and accomplished gentleman.
“Johnson’ll be the next President, as sure as the Mississippi runs down stream,” said a planter, waiting in a bar-room for the ferry-boat. “Why?” “Because he’s got the South with him, sure, to start on. Then he’s got Seward with him, and Seward has had the North in his breeches-pocket for the last six years. I’d like to know how you are going to beat that combination!”
Sitting in a Natchez parlor, one day, conversing with the hostess, we were interrupted by the entrance of a smart, bright-looking negro girl, clothed in a fashionably-short and fashionably-expanded skirt of common striped bed-ticking. The child made its little courtesy to the stranger, and timidly stole behind the chair and clung to the skirts of “Missey.”
“This is our little Confederate nigger,” explained the lady. “She is the only one I have been able to keep; and I only have her because her parents haven’t yet been able to coax her away. You see she wears her old Confederate clothes. When we could get nothing else we were forced to the necessity of ripping up our mattresses to get material for dresses; and we are all too poor yet to buy new things for their every-day wear.