Historical voices

This flunkeyism of Northern men, who “expected to stay in this country and didn’t want to make enemies,” was manifest everywhere.

In other cases they knew that these men were dishonest and unprincipled; and yet they encouraged their confiding subordinates to bind themselves to such men for a year, in remote regions, where there was little hope for protection from the…

We control ’em; and we don’t mean to take ’em to anybody’s plantation without being paid for it.” And, in truth, quite a number of officers were bargaining all the time with the negro-seeking planters for their valuable influence.

Fact is, gentlemen,” I heard an officer wearing the United States uniform say to planters, asking about the chances for hands, when the regiment was disbanded; “Fact is, you had better make your bargains with us than with the niggers.

But, in the main, they are surprisingly orderly, and cases of serious violence among them are quite rare.

If you’d a yielded an inch to ’em then,” he said, “you’d a been pestered and run over by ’em all season. ’S long’s they think they can browbeat you into givin’ ’em things, they’ll do it; an’ if you’d a let ’em plant cotton, every acre…

Have not doctors of divinity attested it; and do we not know them, that their testimony is true?

Yet who shall deny the Christianizing influences of slavery?

Neither men nor women had any comprehension of it; nor could I learn that the highest standing in their churches made the slightest difference.

I do not think it too strong an expression (judging from the evidences on every hand, and from the concurrent testimony of all parties, Northerners, Southerners, whites and blacks) to say that, among the old plantation slaves of Louisiana…

They often manifest abundance of emotion—is it so abundant as to be without depth?

Yet they were kind enough to the poor sufferer; though I could not resist the impression that her life or death was a matter of comparative indifference to them.

The poor negro bled to death, of course; and I called it killing by courtesy.

The very first motion of the knife deluged me with blood!

I always called that death, killing by courtesy; and my conscience won’t stand any more of it; so sir, I stayed away.

I’m glad of his stand, because he’s on our side; but what a miserable demagogue he is and always was!

They’ll do whatever Congress says they must; and so our only hope is in the noble and unexpected stand Johnson is taking for us.

But I tell you what our people will do; I say it with shame; but even South Carolinians, of whom I am particularly ashamed, will do it.

But to whip them back into the Union, and then keep out their representatives till the Northern States had prescribed a rule of suffrage for the South, which they wouldn’t adopt themselves, was a subversion of republican principles.

The instances are very rare in which old and helpless negroes, deserted by their children and by their former masters, are driven off or left to starve by the new-comers.

Sometimes the children support their aged parents; sometimes, as here, they plead that they have their own families to maintain, and seem to feel sure that, rather than see them starve, the whites will take care of them.

In most instances, to their credit be it said, the old masters give the worn-out negroes a little land to cultivate and houses to live in; but very often they have no ability to go further.

One boy was called “’Squire Johnson Brown.” It seemed that his mother, “since dis time come,” (as they always say when they mean since their emancipation,) had chosen to call herself Brown; and, like a dutiful son, he thought it would be…

No man thought he was perfectly free unless he had changed his name and taken a family name.” “Precious few of ’em,” he slily added, “ever took that of their old masters.