«»~^^«»-" 
 
 A PROTEST 11 
 
 AGAINST ' V) 
 
 ^ 
 
 P 
 
 LINCOLN WORSHIP i 
 AT THE SOUTH i 
 
 RICHMOND, VA. 
 
 W. C. HILL PRINTING CO. 
 
 1915 
 
Infamy dogs the heels of nations as of men, 
 Who Esau-like their birth right for mere pottage sells; 
 Pulse upon a shard may nourish mettled men, 
 While dainty viands served on platters of pure gold 
 May poltroons batten and leave them poltroons still. 
 Fast thralls of mammom, we now cringe supine, 
 All whilst the bestial god our holiest shrine invades, 
 Lares and Penates shrinking from his touch profane 
 Topple to the sordid level of the mart. 
 
 
 Nol 
 
A Protest Against Lincoln 
 Worship at the South 
 
 NOT THE SOUTHERN IDEAL 
 
 Sherman, His Lieutenant, Devastated Nearly 
 
 Twice as Much Territory at the South 
 
 as All Belgium Combined 
 
 "In a blaze of burning roof -trees, under clouds of smoke and flame, 
 Sprang a new word into being, from a stern and dreaded name; 
 Gaunt and grim and like a specter, rose that word before the world, 
 From a land of bloom and beauty into ruin rudely hurled, 
 From a people scourged by exile, from a city ostracized, 
 Pallas— like it sprang to being and that word is Shermanized." 
 
 L. VIRGINIA FRENCH. 
 
 What thick hides and short memories we Southern 
 folk have, and how inconsistent we are! We call 
 .jwn anathema on the Kaiser's head for the de- 
 vastation of Belgium; in almost the same breath we 
 raise paeans to Lincoln; who was responsible for the 
 far more causeless and ruthless devastation of the 
 South by Sherman — Sherman, who waged war so 
 atrocious that its very author could find no name on 
 earth to match, but had to go down below to get it. 
 Well might he with Milton's Satan say: 
 
 "Where I am is hell." 
 
 Satan lit it's fires in his own breast; Sherman, in the 
 desolated homes of war, made widows and orphans. 
 
 If Belgium had its Louvain and Antwerp, so also had 
 the South it's Columbia, its Atlanta, its Savannah, 
 its Charleston. 
 
 Countless Belgium homes have been burned. But 
 there has been nothing like systematic, utter de- 
 struction. The Kaiser, outnumbered, hard beset, 
 the very existence of his country in imminent peril 
 has increased his slender store of food by robbing 
 Belgium, electing to starve foe rather than friend. 
 That vengeance, not necessity, prompted the black 
 path that Sherman cut through the South, the 
 evidence is full and damning. On December 18, 
 1864, General Halleck, Chief of Staff to President 
 Lincoln, and necessarily in close touch with him, 
 
 3 
 
writes to Sherman as follows: "Should you capture 
 Charleston, I hope by some accident the place will be 
 destroyed. And if a little salt can be sown on its site, 
 it may prevent the future growth of nullification and 
 secession." Sherman, on the 24th, answers, as follows: 
 "I will bear in mind your hint as to Charleston, and 
 do not think that 'Salt' will be necessary. When I 
 move the 15th, corps will be on the right of the right 
 wing, and their position will naturally bring them 
 into Charleston first, and if you have watched the ; 
 history of that corps, you will have remarked that 
 they do their work pretty well. The truth is, the 
 whole army is burning with an insatiable desire to 
 wreak vengeance on South Carolina." 
 
 One of Wheeler's scouts, observing Sherman's* 
 advance reported that during one night, and from one 
 point, he counted over one hundred burning homes. 
 And as to the looting, a letter written by a Federal 
 officer, and found at Camden, S. C, after the army 
 passed, and given in the Southern Woman's Maga- 
 zine, runs as follows: "We have had a glorious time 
 in this State. The chivalry have been stripped of 
 most of their valuables. Gold watches, silver 
 pitchers, cups, spoons, forks, etc., are as common in 
 camp as blackberries. Of rings, earrings, and breast 
 pins, I have a quart. I am not joking — I have at 
 least a quart of jewelry for you and the girls, and 
 some No. 1 diamond pins and rings among them. 
 Don't show this letter out of the family. 
 
 Sherman long denied burning Columbia. When, 
 after the overwhelming evidence that he did burn 
 it, was adduced, he unblushingly admitted that he 
 did burn it, and that he had lied on Wade Hampton 
 with the purpose of rendering him unpopular, and 
 thereby weakening his cause. But a mere lie shows 
 white against the black ground of Sherman's char- 
 acter. 
 
 I could pile up a mountain of facts as damning as 
 those given. But what boots it to prove what too 
 long ago, has been proven — that not since Attila 
 "The Scourge of God" cut his black swath across 
 Europe fifteen hundred years ago, has Sherman's 
 "March to the Sea" had its fellow. 
 
 The conversion of the Shenandoah region into a 
 waste so complete, that in Sheridan's own words, a 
 crow flying over it would have had to carry his 
 rations — a destruction not only of every vestige of 
 food, of all animals and fowls, but also of every 
 
 4 
 
implement that could be used to make or prepare 
 more food, every mill stone, wagon, plow, rake and 
 harrow, down to the flowers-hoes of the women, 
 may have been a military necessity, for this lovely 
 valley was, in some measure, the granary of Lee's 
 army. 
 
 The necessities of war demanded that Sherman 
 live off the country he traversed. Those elastic 
 necessities may have been stretched to demand that 
 he destroy even the pitiful stint of food that the 
 South had left — that he wrest the last morsel from the 
 mouth of mother and babe, lest, perchance, some 
 crumb thereof reach and nourish the men at the 
 front. But what necessity of war, except that brand 
 that Sherman fathered and sponsored, demanded 
 that the torch follow the pillager, that every home 
 be burned, and famishing mother and babe be turned 
 out in mid-winter to die of cold and exposure. 
 
 The whole world shudders at the robbery and 
 partial ruin of Belgium. Sherman devastated an 
 area nearly twice as great, and devastated it utterly, 
 leaving only blackened chimneys and starving women 
 and children in his wake. That his hell was only 
 some sixty miles wide, was owing to no lack of Satanic 
 ferocity on his part. It would have been much wider, 
 had not Wheeler, with his handful of horse, hung 
 close to Sherman's flanks, with a quick halter for 
 every marauder he caught in the act. Sherman's 
 little finger was heavier than the whole martial 
 fist of the Kaiser. Belgium was a battle ground — the 
 largest and fiercest that even blood soaked old 
 Mother Earth ever saw. But it took five million 
 men five months to work wreck and ruin. Sherman 
 'did it overnight with sixty thousand. The Kaiser 
 found at least a potential sniper in every window, his 
 every step was a battle. Sherman had only a light 
 screen of cavalry to brush aside, and not always 
 even that. 
 
 That there was less starvation in Sherman's path 
 than the Kaiser's — though many a high-born South- 
 ern lady kept life in her children for the time with: 
 the waste corn slobbered from the mouths of the 
 Federal cavalry and artillery horses — was because 
 the South was large and far less densely populated 
 than Belgium, and that the victims sought shelter 
 in the unravaged regions which Wheeler had saved. 
 
 Then there is a hideous chapter in this black book 
 that never has and never will be written — so hideous 
 

 that even the South has been fain to draw over it the 
 curtain of oblivion. I mean the violence that South- 
 ern women suffered at the nands of Sherman's ruf- 
 fians. Tt is a well-known fact, and by none better 
 known than by military men themselves, that men 
 herded in camps, removed from the restraints of home, 
 j-apidly tend to relapse towards barbarism, and that 
 only the iron hand of discipline can hold them in 
 check. Relax that discipline in one respect, sanction 
 the perpetration of one crime, and all crimes, es- 
 pecially the crime against woman, follows as a natural 
 sequence. 
 
 No one who lived in or near Sherman's path in 
 Georgia, South Carolina, or even in this State, after 1 
 the war was over and the troops marching for dis- 
 bandment in Washington, can lack knowledge of 
 cases that came to light, despite every effort of the 
 hapless victims themselves, to hide them. To 
 recall only the cases which abide with me most 
 vividly, that came practically under my own observa- 
 tion, or that I had first-hand knowledge of — the 
 beautiful girl to whose rescue came one of Wheeler's 
 troopers, and who, seized and used as a shield by the 
 ruffian who had abused her, in her agony begged the 
 trooper to shoot through her body and kill him, but 
 by a dexterous movement the brute was killed over 
 her shoulder. 
 
 The cottage, with its rose-covered porch, in which 
 lived the young widow and her three daughters, all 
 noted for their beauty and refinement, at whose 
 door a band of Federal troopers drew rein at dusk — 
 the screams and sobs that all the livelong night the 
 neighbors heard, but dare not stir — the tomb-like 
 aspect of the cottage, with no smoke from the chim- 
 neys, no sign of life for days and days afterwards — 
 the veil of oblivion that the sorrowing neighborhood 
 drew over it ever afterwards. The very first offense 
 of a negro against a white woman that I ever heard of. 
 was committed in this neighborhood by one who had 
 been under Sherman's tutelage. What, indeed, was 
 the saturnalia of crime against Southern women for a 
 generation afterwards, but the aftermath, the legacy 
 of that foulest blot on American history — Sherman's 
 vaunted "March to the Sea." 
 
 It is a maxim of war, as it is of common sense, that 
 the higher the rank, the greater the fame or blame 
 for any given act. In every crime that sprang from 
 this lack of discipline — and no one can question that 
 
 6 
 
practically all did so spring — the men higher up, who 
 invited the crime by lowering the bars of discipline, 
 were worst criminals than the perpetrators them- 
 selves. Above the perpetrator stood the commander 
 of the army, Sherman; above Sherman stood the 
 commander-in-chief of all the Federal armies, Abra- 
 ham Lincoln. If Lincoln ever discountenanced. 
 Sherman and his methods, he has never given word 
 to it, and he was a man of many words. 
 
 However, I hold no brief for the Kaiser. My 
 sympathies are naturally with the mother country, 
 England, though I can not shut my eyes to the fact 
 that the Germans, at once the most prolific and the 
 most efficient and enterprising of all civilized people, 
 must finally prevail, hardly by war, but more likely 
 by peaceful immigration, and that Western Europe 
 and both Americas must in the long run be German- 
 ized. 
 
 My object in this paper is to protest as strongly as 
 I know how against this Lincoln cult; this Lincoln 
 worship if you will, now gaining headway at the 
 South. That Lincoln was an able man, of many 
 amiable qualities, is wholly beside the point. The 
 colossal public crimes of history were committed by 
 men altogether amiable, or estimable, or both, in 
 private life. Julius Caesar, the destroyer of ancient 
 liberty, was the most genial and companionable of 
 men. Charles the First, who but for the headsman, 
 might have destroyed modern liberty, was a tender- 
 hearted, lovable gentleman of stainless private life 
 as was Robes'pierre, who glutted the very guillotine 
 with innocent blood. Who could out-cajole Napoleon 
 or Louis the Fourteenth, arch enemies of mankind, 
 or as to that, Satan, himself. Did it brighten the lot 
 of the shell-torn inmates of Southern hospitals to 
 know that the maker of medical and surgical supplies, 
 contraband of war, was a man of infinite jest? Were 
 the skeletons rotting in the vermin-encrusted burrows 
 of Andersonville, or freezing in the icy sheds of Point 
 Lookout and Fort Deleware, helped by knowing that 
 the breaker of the cartel could not abide the sight of 
 misery? Did it lessen the sorrow of Southern mothers, 
 whose roof-trees ablaze, fled with their little broods 
 to the wintry woods and swamps, to know that the 
 hand that swayed the besom of hell, always rested 
 tenderly on the head of his own children? Did it 
 minish the agony of Southern maidens, writhing in the 
 clutches of Sherman's licentious soldiery, to remem- 
 
 7 
 
ber that the one at the head of it all was a virtuous 
 man. 
 
 Lincoln, the public man, the only Lincoln that we 
 knew, was the creature of the Republican party — the 
 party born of anti-Southernism, anti-Jeffersonism, 
 the innate and truceless foe of individual, local liberty, 
 as opposed to centralism, imperialism. 
 
 Did Lincoln ever rise a hair's breadth above his 
 party? Is there a single instance in which he failed 
 to see with its eyes, act with its spirit? When, during 
 the opening, progress or close of the war, did he 
 display that greatness of mind or of heart, that 
 magnanimity that should wrest homage from even a 
 vanguished and ruined foe? When or where was he 
 other than the incarnation of Republicanism. 
 
 Shall we honor him for the dexterity, not to say 
 duplicity, with which the Peace Commissioners, the 
 able men whom the South sent to Washington in 
 March, 1861, in a strenuous endeavor to avert war, 
 were kept dangling, while in violence of solemn 
 promise, the secret expedition was prepared and 
 despatched to reinforce Sumter, a measure so close 
 akin to perfidy, that it alarmed and enraged the 
 South and precipitated war. 
 
 It has been a platitude of history that the war was 
 inevitable. Like most platitudes, it has very little 
 thought back of it. In exact proportion as we disen- 
 tangle the skein of past diplomacy and past politics, 
 in the same degree do we discern that few of any wars 
 were inevitable. In public, no less than in private 
 life, the soft answer turneth away wrath. At one 
 touch of a frank, honest, sympathetic hand, the 
 most sinister political kaleidoscopes in history have 
 instantly assumed benign combinations. 
 
 But that is all, by the way. The wisest men of that 
 day did not think war inevitable. Men North and 
 South were working hard for peace. Lincoln's words 
 and actions made only for war. 
 
 |£ Shall we honor him for his emancipation proclama- 
 tion? The blackest crime laid at the door of George 
 the Third, was that he unleashed a handful of savages 
 against our frontiers. Lincoln, as far as in him lay, 
 unleashed four million savages (which the North held 
 that slavery had converted the negro into) in our 
 very midst, against our defenceless women and chil- 
 dren. To the good feelings existing between the 
 races, we chiefly owe that the horrors of St. Domingo, 
 
 8 
 
multiplied ten thousand-fold, were not repeated at 
 the South. 
 
 Shall we honor him for the flagrant breach of the 
 cartel, and the resulting hells — Point Lookout, Fort 
 Delaware, Johnson Island, Camp Morton, Camp 
 Chase, Rock Island, at the north Andersonville, Belle 
 Isle, Salisbury at the south, and many more prisons 
 in each republic? 
 
 Shall we honor him for out-Kaisering the Kaiser 
 in making medical and surgical supplies contraband 
 of war, this adding a still lower depths to those hells, 
 as to the whole war, on the Southern side. 
 
 Shall we honor him for Sherman's Gargantuan orgy 
 of crime in Georgia and South Carolin, and for the 
 vile dregs of it that our own women had to drain long 
 after the hostilities ceased? 
 
 Lincolns tragic taking off naturally caused a great 
 revulsion of feeling in his favor at the South. This 
 has prompted us to believe that had he lived, the 
 Republican lion would have transfigured itself into 
 a lamb the moment that 
 
 "That the war drums ceased from throbbing 
 And the battle flags were furled" 
 In Other words, that mildness and benignancy quite 
 angelic, would have marked the reconstruction 
 period, or rather there would have been no reconstruc- 
 tion period at all, but instead, a kind of family re- 
 union, with Seward. Ben Wade and Thad Stevens, 
 et id, as ecstatic ushers. 
 
 But from what act of Lincoln's do we find justifica- 
 tion for this belief, or rather hope. There were good 
 words I know. For, statesman as he was, Lincoln 
 was first, last and always the politician, seeking the 
 » public will before the public weal. Not by words, but 
 deeds, must a man be judged. It is true that when 
 Richmond fell, he authorized the calling together of 
 the Virginia legislature. But it was avowedly because 
 .he believed that it would recall the Virginia troops 
 from Lee's retreating army, and he wished to give 
 opportunity to do so. The moment that Lee sur- 
 rendered, he withdrew the permit, and ordered the 
 arrest of any members who disobeyed the order to 
 quit Richmond promptly. 
 
 It is far more likely than otherwise, that Lincoln's 
 death lightened the heel that sought to grind us in 
 the mire. The incarnation of Republicanism in 
 war, there is not a shadow of reason for believing 
 that in peace, he could have thwarted the politi- 
 
 9 
 
cians of their prey, though he would no doubt 
 have deprecated their violence. The Republican 
 politicians were bent upon the utter humiliation 
 and degradition of the South; upon forcing on her 
 civil rights, miscegenation, mongrelism. Their 
 animus is shown by the clash with Andy Johnson, 
 the fierce fight against even the stint of justice, that 
 a renegade would fain have accorded the land of his 
 birth. So fraught was their attitude to the South 
 with malice prepense, that they in a measure over- 
 reached themselves, and brought about a partial 
 reaction of feeling among the Northern people at 
 large. Then the scrimmage with Johnson distracted 
 their attention. He got many a blow that would 
 otherwise have fallen on our defenceless head. Under 
 Lincoln, their methods would almost surely have 
 been less violent, but probably far more systematic 
 and insidious. Davis might not have been im- 
 prisoned, or Wirz, the commandant of Andersonville 
 prison, executed. But in all likelihood, a more 
 furtive deadly way would have been found to work 
 our undoing. 
 
 The man to whom is really due the gratitude of 
 the South is Grant. Had he not scotched the plan 
 of the Republicans to punish the Southern military 
 leaders, by threatening to throw up his commission 
 if Lee was arrested, there is no telling, the gates of 
 vengeance over ajar, when they would ever been 
 closed. 
 
 Turning from Lincoln the Republican, to Lincoln 
 the man. Is the wily, not to say tricky, politician, 
 the reveller in "smutty" jokes the Southern ideal. 
 Lack we of our own kith and kin, of our own house- 
 hold of faith, great men who were also great gentle- 1 
 men. Are we so poor in heroes that we must needs ' 
 pedestal the man who led his sections somewhat 
 bunglingly, it is true, but without ruth or remorse 
 in the onslaught that virtually destroyed ours. 
 
 Again, is there anything in the achievement of* 
 Lincoln so dazzling that it should blind us to every- 
 thing else? Is there glory for the strong in over- 
 coming the weak, the many the few. Would we 
 ever have heard of Goliath, Xerxes, Darius and all 
 their like, had they won? Such immortality that 
 they were is reflected from the foes they faced, weaker 
 but of better mettle. 
 
 10 
 
Not An attack on Lincoln. Simply a Protest Against the 
 Grovelling Lincoln Worship at the South. 
 
 "What is history but a lie agreed upon" — Napoleon. 
 
 Verily, if the light that is in us be darkness, how great 
 is that darkness! Among the responses to my paper 
 on -Lincoln, which one editor alone, ventured to 
 print, was one from a leading lawyer, who, deprecat- 
 ing the "attack," as he called it, expressed a serious 
 doubt, whether, but for Lincoln's influence, I would 
 now and here be permitted to write as freely as I do. 
 Than this, I could have no better proof of the need 
 of true light on this subject; the light that is in us, 
 being but darkness. Here was an exceptionally 
 well-read gentleman, a man who does his own think- 
 ing and that of a goodly number of his fellows be- 
 sides, in substance, believing that we needed just 
 what we got in the sixties, and ought to be shouting 
 glad that we got it. Shades of the Fathers! We, of 
 the purest strain of the stock that gave freedom to 
 the world; we, from whose very loins sprang the 
 architect, the builder and the defender of American 
 liberty, we, so poor in State craft, so bankrupt in 
 morality, that an alien must needs come with three 
 million at his back, and with fire, sword, and rapine, 
 x save us from ourselves! Yet such is the logical, the 
 inescapable deductions from the premises we accept. 
 
 The North, flinging to us the dross of physical 
 prowess, has arrogated to herself the gold of moral 
 rectitude and political infallibility. We have been 
 taught, and are tamely accepting the dictum, that 
 the South, when she lost hold on the motherly apron 
 strings, when she foolishly ventured from under the 
 , aegis of Northern protection, that she relapsed 
 swiftly towards despotism and anarchy, and that 
 Appomattox alone saved us from political disintegra- 
 tion. 
 
 Is this true? Do we alone deserve the odium of 
 *being the one branch of the race too weak to frame 
 civil institution that could stand the crucible of war? 
 The Romans, the sanest and most practical political 
 people the world has ever seen, always when the ship 
 of State was in peril, put a dictator at the helm. 
 
 "Inter Arma Legem Silent." 
 
 In the clash of arms, law was silent, suspended. 
 Private right, private wrong, had to wait until the 
 foe was vanquished and Rome safe. 
 
 Rome, when beset the hardest, never faced the 
 
 11 
 
disadvantages, and was rarely ever in the extremity 
 that the Confederacy stood from beginning to end. 
 Never in any land was there direr need that a hand, 
 strong, arbitral, untrammelled by peace, built law 
 and usage, garnering every man, every resource should 
 strike as one at the Giant Foe. 
 
 Yet was there a dictatorship at the South, or any 
 semblence of one? Did war submerge law? It is a 
 maxim of our race that free speech, free press, free 
 land. Tyranny ever chains first the tongue, strikes 
 her first blow at the palladium of liberty — free 
 utterance. 
 
 Right here in North Carolina, the Confederate 
 government had its fullest swing. The State lay 
 nearer to Richmond — and distance, owing to crude 
 transportation facilities, was a far more formidable 
 thing. then than now — than any other State as largely 
 free from invasion. It affords a fair instance of the 
 contact of the Confederate government with the 
 civil life of the people. 
 
 Now, living evidence is still abundant that no man 
 was molested for opinion's sake or for word spoken. 
 That the press remained unmuzzled, the files of the 
 Raleigh Standard, which to the very end preached 
 stark treason to the Confederacy, stands in ever- 
 lasting evidence. 
 
 Governor Vance, of North Carolina, and Governor 
 Brown, of Georgia, though patriotic men, seeing fit, 
 even in extremity, to place State rights and other 
 considerations before Confederate success, hampered 
 the Confederate executive to a degree never before 
 or since tolerated under such circumstances. It is 
 true that the impressment and conscription measures 
 were grievous burdens, especially here in such close ... 
 reach, but they were laws of the Congress and not 
 the fiat of the executive. In short, much of the 
 defensive power of the South was lost by the failure 
 of President Davis to weild the full measure of power^ 
 that would readily have been acquiesced in by the 
 people at large. Never, not even in the greatest 
 crises, did Jefferson Davis exercise one-tenth the 
 dominance over the Confederate Congress that Wood- 
 row Wilson now does over the Federal. Davis' de- 
 crease of popularity towards the end, came from no 
 abuse of power on his part, but mainly from the 
 stigma which the world attaches to failure. That is, 
 except in case of the soldier. Around him war flings 
 a saving halo. 
 
 12 
 
Let us glance at the other side of the picture. At 
 the status of the civilian of the North. The Federal 
 government, infinitely superior in resources, had not 
 the same urgent need for unity. Yet we find its 
 actions immeasurably more arbitrary than those of 
 the Confederate Government. Not under the old 
 regime in France were Lettres de Cachet as plentiful or 
 more potent; It was a well-known boast of Stanton, 
 Secretary of War, that he could touch a bell on his 
 table and order the instant arrest of any man in the 
 Union. Fort McHenry, at Baltimore, Fort Lafayette, 
 at New York, Fort Warren, in Boston Harbor, and 
 the old Capitol Prison, at Washington, became 
 veritable bastiles, crammed with political prisoners, 
 men immured for what they had said or for what it 
 was suspected they might say or do. In the Old 
 Capitol Prison at least executions were frequent. 
 
 Never imposed Fate a heavier burden on any 
 people than on the South, when she was made the 
 ladder on which the benighted African must climb to 
 civilization and Christianity. Not the approbium, 
 but the profound sympathy of the whole world, and 
 especially of the Negro himself, is our just due. For 
 never, since time began, has a race climbed from 
 darkness to light, so swiftly and at so small a price to 
 itself — at such fearful cost to the instrument of 
 its elevation. 
 
 As is well known, slavery was no Southern indigene; 
 no plant that grew here only. It was only the in- 
 heritance of the ages. Sanctioned by immemorial 
 and universal usage, and even by Holy Writ itself, 
 it was indeed, the very oldest of all human institu- 
 tions. Founded originally, in part at least, upon 
 morality, upon the pity which spared instead of 
 slaying the captive, it thus became the bedrock of 
 ail civilization. But slavery in this land, and at that 
 date, was a thing strangely out of place and out of 
 time. So much so, indeed, that one wonders as to 
 ' Fate's motive in the misplacement. Did a spirit 
 of impish irony impel her, or was she actuated by 
 deeper motives, when she dropped this Old World 
 estray, this foundling in the cradle of liberty, the 
 New World, the motive that as we 
 
 "Broadened with the act of Freedom" 
 
 We should also 
 "Grow strong beneath the weight of duty." 
 Slavery would surely have gone, even had Lincoln 
 never been born. The drift of the world had set 
 
 13 
 
against it deep and resistless. Harking back two 
 thousand years to Epictetus, it had come to see that 
 not to him who getteth, but to whom who doeth a 
 wrong, cometh the chief harm. Emancipation was 
 inevitable, and to hold that the Southern people, 
 the purest blooded branch of the sane, and virile 
 Anglo-Saxon race, the race which gave liberty to 
 the world, and which in all lands and under all con- 
 ditions, had stood for justice and fair play, as it come 
 to see it, for us to hold that this, our branch, would 
 have been so degenerate, so recreant to the genuis 
 and spirit of the stock, so inferior to its forbears, 
 or even to the "lesser Breeds" to the South of us, 
 that .did put it by, that it lacked the manhood to 
 free itself from the incubus of slavery, is a worse 
 slander than even our foes would dare put upon us. 
 
 It is argued, and by our own writers as well as 
 others, that the slave-holding class dominated the 
 South, and that self-interest, cupidity, would always 
 have impelled this class to block emancipation. 
 I would reply that slavery in divers forms was long 
 an institution with our race. But that the race in its 
 progress put it by, despite the strenuous opposition 
 of the slave-holding class, as it must have done in 
 this case. The whole moral trend of the race rendered 
 any other course impossible. The fact that medieval 
 serf was white and strong, and the modern slave 
 black and weak, would undoubtedly have made the 
 work of emancipation harder, but the race is morally 
 stronger now than then. 
 
 There is one fact generally overlooked, which would 
 have added greatly to the practicability of emancipa- 
 tion. That was the fact that the slave-holding 
 classes at the South were in a minority of about six . 
 to one. Every reform, social or political, that our 
 race has achieved, has been in the face of a wealthy 
 minority far stronger than that. In fact, it is almost 
 a truism of our politics that the people, as opposed , 
 to aristocracjr, always win in the long run. No 
 civilization has survived in which the rule did not 
 hold. The chief reason that the dust covers so many 
 of the splendid civilizations of the past, was because 
 the great mass of the people remained inert to the 
 end. The broadening of the franchise right here in 
 North Carolina in the fifties, whereby the aristocratic 
 dominence of the State Senate was abolished, is a 
 significant proof of what the middle-class manhood 
 of that generation was capable of. 
 
 14 
 
One thing is certain: The South would have 
 avoided the irretrievable error of the North in 
 making the slave a citizen first and a man afterwards. 
 As emancipation would have been gradual, so also 
 would have been the elevation of the freed men. As 
 he attained the full stature of manhood so he must 
 perforce have been invested with the rights and 
 privilege of a man, colonization being impracticable 
 at that late period, segregation would probably have 
 been the solution of the race problem. Even in this 
 sanctimonious age, we exclude the Asiatic. Where 
 would have been the sin in settling the African in a 
 prescribed area of the country, and excluding him 
 from the other parts of it? Compared with the 
 Yellow peril, the Black peril is Olympus to a wart. 
 
 Some degrees of wrong and injustice there might 
 have been. Wrong and injustice are not often absent 
 from the affairs of this world. But who is bold 
 enough to assert that the measure of them could have 
 equalled, or even distantly approached, that infini- 
 tude of injustice and of wrong — that orgy of political 
 madness — reconstruction, whose blighting effect 
 was to distract and stunt, perhaps forever, the 
 development of the negro, and to sow, as far as the 
 hand of malice could sow, the very salt of annihila- 
 tion over the civilization and life of the South. 
 
 As is well known, the emancipation movement in 
 its earlier, saner stages had its warmest and ablest 
 supporters at the South. Washington, Jefferson, 
 Henry, Madison, and the foremost men of that time, 
 sought earnestly for some practicable method of 
 putting an end to slavery, which was generally re- 
 garded as a curse, and especially so to the whites. 
 » But for the perfectly natural reaction caused by the 
 rabid, incendiary methods of . the abolitionists, 
 which, beginning about 1830, flowered so quickly and 
 hideously in the Nat Turner butchery of white 
 j women and children, gradual emancipation would 
 have soon been under way, and would almost surely 
 have ended slavery with that century. I would not 
 deny that the development of cotton growing caused 
 by the perfection of the cotton gin, and the resulting 
 enormous increase in slave values, would have made 
 emancipation a tremendous problem. But sphinxes — 
 political, social, industrial, moral, religious, racial, 
 had lined the pathway of our race down the ages. 
 All had been answered, and we believe, answered 
 right, by the communities which had most at stake. 
 
 - 15 
 
To our branch alone was denied the priceless boom 
 of answering for themselves the most momentous 
 problem of them all, a problem that involves not 
 only our prosperity but our very existence and which 
 now can only deepen and darken with the passage of 
 the centuries. Were our immediate forebears, the 
 men whose courage and heroism in war placed the 
 Lost Cause in fames' eternal- keeping, whose fortitude 
 and sagacity triumphed even over reconstruction, 
 who hurled back the envenomed dart, negro suffrage, 
 upon the heads that sent it weaklings, men whose des- 
 tiny was safer in the hands of an alien and hostile 
 section than in their own. Perish thought so blas- 
 phemous. 
 
 How few of us, too, have ever analyzed the famous 
 emancipation proclamation. Have ever tried to 
 ascertain the proportion of politics, diplomacy and 
 philanthrophy couched therein? Have ever regarded 
 its true purport and bearings? Did it free, or seek to 
 free, all the slaves in the land? Oh no! Only a part. 
 What part? Those in the hands of Lincoln's enemies; 
 those within the Union lines; those in the hands of 
 friends were not affected by the proclamation. They 
 remained in bondage as far as this instrument was 
 concerned. Lincoln had been dead nearly a year 
 before total abolition was legally brought about. 
 Outside of the punitive intent, the prime motive of 
 the proclamation was first to buttress the Republican 
 party against the rising tide of Democracy. Second, 
 the Union arms against those of the Confederacy. 
 The military end sought was to weaken his enemies 
 by destroying their property. Naturally, he struck 
 at their chief asset — their slaves. If he had been able 
 thereby to destroy any or all of other kinds of their 
 property, he would have done so. If his simple ipse 
 dixit would have cut the throat of every work animal, 
 milch cow, fired every roof tree, and imperiled the 
 honor of every woman in the South, there is no reason* 
 to believe that he would have withheld its utterance. 
 For it was his word that sent hundred of thousands 
 through the South to do these very things. 
 
 If we must accept subjugation, even of mind and of 
 spirit; if we must view the whole bloody drama 
 through the eyes of our enemies; if we must believe 
 that the blow came from above and not below; that 
 we not only richly deserved but sadly needed just 
 what we got, then the right men to honor are the 
 pioneer abolitionists, Garrison, Wendell Phillips, 
 
 16 
 
Gerrith Smith, and men of that feather. They boldly 
 stood for abolition, when to so stand meant hatred, 
 contempt, and imminent peril of life and limb. These 
 men had no ulterior motives. They breasted the tide 
 of fortune. Lincoln floated upon it. If honor, we must, 
 the sowers of the wind whose fearful whirlwind we 
 had to reap, Let's honor these, the real heroes, of 
 the cataclysm. True, they sent John Brown pikes 
 to butcher us with, but they were perfectly willing 
 to be butchered themselves in the same cause. 
 
 No one would deny that Lincoln was an enemy of 
 slavery. He was a product of a class and of an en- 
 vironment that drew in hatred of slavery, and of slave 
 holders with every breath. Moreover, most thinking 
 people, North and South, were enemies of slavery in 
 theory. With Lincoln and the North — it was only a 
 theory. With the South, it was a fact, a grim fact 
 which foisted upon us by English and late Northern 
 greed, time had now riveted upon us. The growth 
 was cancerous. But would you go to your butcher to 
 remove even a cancer. 
 
 Emancipation at the time, and in the manner in 
 which Lincoln sought to enforce it, was politico- 
 military measure, and nothing else. 1862 was election 
 year. Lincoln, great man and statesman as he 
 undoubtedly was, was also politician to the core. 
 And when did your politician, big or little, fail to 
 trim his sails to the wind? To save the party and 
 then let the party save everything else. Federal 
 arms had sustained such repeated and disastrous 
 defeat that Northern opinion was turning to the 
 Democratic party which favored peace. Defeat 
 
 i stared Republicanism in the face. Something must 
 be done to stem the tide. The emancipation proclama- 
 tion was the answer. While primarily a political 
 move, great things was also expected of it in a military 
 
 ■ t way. It was largely believed that the slaves would 
 rise and deal with Southern women in a way that 
 would crumble the Southern armies almost in a day, 
 as each man rushed home to save his own. 
 
 As a military measure, it was the fiasco of the 
 ages. Not a slave stirred or lifted hand. But its 
 political effect was immense. It instantly brought 
 into the Republican camp every cohort of abolition- 
 ism, and held all in line to the end, through those 
 these lines bent fearfully under Jackson's blows at 
 Chancellorsville, and again, when soon after the 
 
 17 
 
grey columns surged northward to Gettysburg, and 
 even when much later still, Grant's army recoiled 
 in utter paralysis from the futile assaults on Lee in 
 the Wilderness. 
 
 Still, this is not an attack on Lincoln, nor do I 
 seek to revive sectionalism, further than consistency 
 and self-respect demand. I am well aware that 
 patriotism is a matter of geography. That all depends 
 upon which side of the line you were born. But so 
 also is renegadeism. High moral law demands that 
 we be true to our fellows, our surroundings. The 
 Washingtons and Lees obeyed it. The Arnolds and 
 Iscariots defied it. This is simply an earnest protest 
 against accepting as a Southern hero, a Southern 
 exemplar, a man no matter how personally worthy, 
 who was a leader of Northernism, and of Northernism 
 in its attitude of implacable hostility to the South 
 and Southern ideals. It is natural that the Negro 
 should honor Lincoln. He gave the Negro freedom. 
 And the North; he gave the North dominion over the 
 South. He carried out Northern ideals of centralism, 
 imperalism. The Southern ideal, State rights, home 
 rule, the palladium the world over of the weak, met 
 destruction at his hands. With glaring inconsist- 
 ency, we still hold the ideals to be true, while paying 
 homage to the chief instrument of their destruction. 
 
 "Suppose the South had won." What then? Is 
 the common query, usually in tones of utter depreca- 
 tion. I would reply that the South lost, what then? 
 The blackest page in the annals of our race! Would 
 the Lees, the Davises, the Hamptons, the Vances, 
 the Grahams, the Ashes, the Grimes, the Clarks, 
 the Ransoms, the Averys, been less fit to deal with 
 even the tremendous issues left by the war, than the ( 
 Sewards, the Wades, the Stevenses, the Holdens, the 
 Tourgees, the Deweeses, the Cuflfees, who fumbled 
 them till with an effort that paralyzed all other 
 endeavors for a generation, we wrenched the helm » 
 from their hand. 
 
 The War of 1861, nothwithstanding the unfortunate 
 slavery complication, was as much a war of liberty as 
 that of 1775, or that in the Mother country of 1642. 
 It was a struggle for local self-government against 
 centralism, and of all the evils that have skulked in 
 its shadows, monoply, trusts, extortion in its protean 
 guises. A quicker exploitation of our resources — and 
 a quicker destruction — has undoubtedly ensued. But 
 where has the wealth gone? Would not the product 
 
 18 
 
of these resources be safer in the hands of nature than 
 in the hands that now hold them? Local self govern- 
 ment, the ideal of which the flower of our manhood 
 laid down their lives, was the instinctive effort of 
 our branch of the race to avert these evils, and 
 many others, some unforseen then, some even now 
 only dimly emerging from the haze of the time to 
 come. 
 
 Then the South was the citadel of conservatism. 
 ■ What a brake upon the wild wheels of the world her 
 splendid conservatism would have been, could it 
 only have won the prestige of success. In all human 
 probability, it would have saved us from the maze 
 of fads, follies and isms through which we now grope 
 in utter bewilderment, and from which only some 
 drastic remedy — war or worse — can ever rescue us. 
 
 But it does seem that Southern writers have to 
 stultify themselves every time they approach the 
 subject as to what might have been if the victory had 
 been accorded to us instead of our foes. 
 
 Loud in praise of the statesmenship of the old 
 South; strong in the belief of the justice of her cause; 
 yet no sooner do they reach the point where the 
 stronger battalions of the North prevail, than they 
 drop on their knees and thank Heaven for having 
 si.vved the South from herself. They thank Providence 
 that instead of giving the South a respite from 
 Northern incendiarism, instead of smoothing her 
 way so that she might put by slavery in the least 
 harmful manner, brought down upon her three million 
 of armed men, who destroying the flower of her 
 manhood, breaking the heart of her womanhood, 
 consigning her children to poverty and ignorance, 
 reducing her people to virtual beggars, would have 
 forced miscegenation, mongrelism, upon her, but 
 for the mettle of her stock. Others may think as 
 they will, but I can not bring myself to hold any such 
 slanderous opinions of Providence. I can not see 
 the hands of Providence (though I might a sootier 
 one), in such fell work as on the one hands suffering 
 Northern abolition incendiarism, to arouse and 
 inflame the resentment of the South, and on the other 
 hand Northern ingenuity to invent the cotton gin, 
 and thus at the critical moment, infinitely increasing 
 the value of slaves, forstall the South in her earnest 
 endeavors to put an end to slavery. That the South 
 vras denied the inestimable privilege of abolishing 
 this curse which the cruel hand of fate had fastened 
 
 19 
 
upon her. thus saving herself the unspeakable loss and 
 woe and humuliation that the war entailed, is no proof 
 that the Southern way was the wrong way. Success 
 is no proof of right, nor failure of wrong. Yet men 
 whose very religion is founded on one, who from the 
 low standpoint of material things, sounded the 
 abysmal depths of failure, now cry aloud that it is 
 The Vessel of iron will ever smash the one of gold, 
 against which in the rough mischances of the world 
 it is thrown, though the latter from the fineness c V ■ 
 material and the nobleness of its design might I 
 to edify mankind forever. 
 
 0. W. BLACKNAL- 
 Kittrell, N. C. 
 
 January, 1915. 
 
 20