A free colored man named Jordan opened, by permission of the commandant of the post at Columbia, Tenn., a school for the blacks. The school went on smoothly till Monday, the 11th instant, when two soldiers of the Eighth Tennessee Cavalry went into the school, and broke it up; but the teacher, being so advised, resumed his labor the next day. But, on the 14th, Messrs. Datty, Porter, White, and others, including soldiers of the Eighth Tennessee, the party headed by White the city constable, proceeded to the schoolroom, seized the teacher, and brought him under guard to the court-house, where he received a mock trial. When being asked for his authority for teaching a school, Mr. Jordan replied, that Lieut.-Col. Brown and Major Sawyer were his authority, and wished they would bring Major Sawyer in. One of the men went out, but was absent only for a moment, when he came in, stating that Major Sawyer could not be found; whereupon Mr. Andrews ordered that the teacher be given twenty-five lashes. And they were administered, the man receiving the scourge like a martyr, telling his persecutors that he was willing to suffer for the right; and that Christ had received the same punishment for the same purpose; and he thought, if he could teach the children to read the Bible so that they might learn of heaven, he was doing a good work. To this, a soldier of the Eighth Tennessee said, “If you want to go to heaven you must pray: you can’t get there by teaching the niggers. We can’t go to school, and I’ll be damned if niggers shall.”
Volumes might be written, recounting the shameful outrages committed at the South since the surrender of Lee. Not satisfied with murders of an individual character, the Southerners have, of late, gone into it more extensively. The first of these took place at Memphis, Tenn., May 4, 1866. A correspondent of Hon. W. D. Kelley, of Philadelphia, said,—
“I have been an eye-witness to such sights as should cause the age in which we live to blush. Negro men have been shot down in cold blood on the streets; barbers, at their chairs and in their own shops; draymen on their drays, while attempting to earn an honest living; hotel-waiters, while in the discharge of their duties; hackmen, while driving female teachers of negro children to their schools; laborers, while handling cotton on the wharves, &c. All the negro schoolhouses, and all the negro churches, and many of the houses of the negroes, have been burned, this too, under the immediate auspices of the city police and the mayor: in fact, most of these outrages were committed by the police themselves,—all Irish, and all rebels, and mostly drunk. This is not the half: I have no heart to recount the outrages I have seen. The most prominent citizens stand on the streets, and see negroes hunted down and shot, and laugh at it as a good joke. Attempts have been made to fire every Government building, and fire has been set to many of the abodes and business-places of Union people.
“There is no doubt but that there is a secret organization sworn to purge the city of all Northern men who are not rebels, all negro teachers, all Yankee enterprise, and return the city ‘to the good old days of Southern rule and chivalry.’
“When the miscreants had fired Collins’s chapel (a large frame church, corner of Washington and Orleans Streets, which would now cost fully ten thousand dollars, to rebuild), they stood around the fire which lighted the midnight sky, and made the night hideous with their hellish cheers for ‘Andy Johnson’ and a ‘white man’s government!’ And the supporters of the President, aside from being midnight burners of churches and schoolhouses, robbed women and children, and men,—sparing none on account of age, sex, physical disabilities, or innocence of crime,—even burning women and children alive.
“The board of aldermen had their usual meetings last night. Their proceedings show no reference to the riot. No rewards have been offered for the apprehension of the murderous assassins, thieves, and house-burners.”
Next came, on a still larger scale, the rebel riot at New Orleans. The Military Commission appointed to investigate the cause of the riot charge it upon Mayor Monroe, Lieut.-Gov. Voorhies, and the rebel press of the city. The Commission speak of the murders as follows:—
“They can only say that the work of massacre was pursued with a cowardly ferocity unsurpassed in the annals of crime. Escaping negroes were mercilessly pursued, shot, stabbed, and beaten to death by the mob and police. Wounded men on the ground begging for mercy were savagely despatched by mob, police, firemen, and, incredible as it may seem, in two instances by women; but, in two or three most honorable and exceptionable cases, white men and members of the Convention were protected by members of the police, both against the mob, and against other policemen. The chief of police, by great exertions, defended in this manner Gov. Hahn.
“After the attack had commenced, the police appeared to be under no control as such; but acted as and with the mob. Their cheers and waving of hats as they threw the mangled Dostie, then supposed a corpse, like a dead dog into the cart, sufficiently show their unison of feeling with their allies.”
Nothing, we take it, is more apparent from the array of evidence presented in this Report than that the New-Orleans riot was a preconcerted, deliberate, cold-blooded attempt to massacre the Unionists, white and black, of that city. The design can be traced like the development of a tragedy. Mayor Monroe is busy for a long time in advance in stirring up the passions of the mob by stigmatizing the members of the Convention as outlaws and revolutionists, threatening them with wholesale arrest, and preparing his police for action. He might have ascertained that the members had resolved to peacefully submit the legality of their course to the proper tribunals; but he had bloodier ends in view. He knew that the excitement he had fanned would surely lead to an outburst of violence, unless restrained by two forces alone,—his police and the United-States troops. To keep the latter away, Mayor Monroe suppresses all requisition for them until it is too late; and then tries to cover up his conduct with downright falsehood and perjury. His police, instead of being brought forward openly, so that they would have to take sides for the preservation of order, are concealed in hiding-places till the collision occurs; when they rush forth as allies of the mob, murdering negroes in cold blood; firing repeatedly into the Convention, even after a white flag is raised; shooting and barbarously maltreating the wounded; and perpetrating such feats of cowardly brutality and ferocity as were never before seen in this country, except in the congenial affairs of Memphis and Fort Pillow.