Historical voices

Of course, then, it’s all smooth sailing in business intercourse; but, in the bottom of their hearts, how they must despise us!

Because it’s the thing to display distinguished consideration to these fellows, in order to convince them that we’re willing to forget the past, if they’ll only be good enough to do the same.

Let them get in again, and they would be up and hissing at once.

He insisted that the abatement of Rebel violence, then visible everywhere, was only a torpor, not a radical change.

Give us a couple of hundred Northern men, with money and brains, who were not flunkies, and their honest, straightforward talk would do wonders,” he continued.

Can’t they see that the moment Southern men get power, they’ll kick them all aside?

They imagine it is necessary to truckle to Southern men in order to get trade and acquire influence.

But we can’t make use of our power, because of these miserable toadies.

With the Northern men and the Northern capital we have here, we could absolutely control this city.

I am determined that I will have nothing to do, down here, with any social organization into which politics are permitted to enter!” In his mind the use of the word “Union” as part of the title of a club was the introduction of an…

The next day, I heard that, in the organization of a new club, expressly intended to be established on a loyal basis, the word “Union” had been stricken out of the title by an overwhelming vote.

Northerners having money to invest in the South, men were very willing to forego manifestations of Rebel spite toward them for the sake of furthering their chances of a good bargain.

Trade always softens away angularities of prejudice, and too often of principle also.

They used him, and threw him aside; the betrayer was in turn betrayed, and had nobody to pity him.

Lifted into power by the Banks régime, he had congenially betrayed it, in order to make interest with the returning Rebels; had appointed them to office by scores; had turned out the Unionists that elected him wherever he could find Rebels…

They couldn’t imagine where the worthless things had suddenly sunk to, until it occurred to some of them to observe that this disappearance began shortly after their reconstructed Legislature had embodied its wisdom in laws on the negro…

I subsequently learned that these statements were literally correct, and that many Mississippi planters who had gone to New Orleans for laborers, found they could engage plenty, but lost their hold on every man as soon as they let him know…

An old Mississippian was returning from New Orleans in a great rage: “Do you believe, sah, I even demeaned myself so much as to go to a d——d nigger, who called himself a labor agent, and offered him five dollars a head for all the hands he…

The sable owner of muscle, his woolly head greatly perplexed with this unwonted kindness, held aloof, and seemed, as he respectfully listened to the glowing inducements, to be wondering whether the fly would make anything by his visit to…

Men approached the negro with an effort at kind manners; described to him the comforts of their plantations, and insinuatingly inquired if he wouldn’t like to enter into contract for a year.

Cotton was no longer king, but the cotton-maker was.

In November nothing could exceed the hatred which seemed everywhere felt to the freedmen.

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.

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.