Historical voices

A farm of a hundred acres can thus be bought, in many localities, for five or six hundred dollars, half or more of it on long credits.

Half-a-dozen families, purchasing farms of one or two hundred acres apiece, adjacent to each other, may thus make up a little neighborhood of their own, which can sustain its own school, and which will be sure to form the nucleus for…

It would be much better for Northern men, who seek to avail themselves of these advantages, to go in small colonies.

The feeling against Northerners is not so bitter as through most of the South.

All in all, however, Alabama offers better inducements to the Northern emigrant than almost any of the other Southern States.

I wouldn’t fight no mo’ for the stars and bars than for an old dish-rag.” “Nor for the stars and stripes nuther,” exclaimed his companion, and the sentiment elicited general approval.

We’ve got to change our whole system of labor,” said another planter.

Lands that are worth sixty and eighty dollars an acre, you’re selling for ten and twelve.

First you lost your slaves, and now you propose to give away your plantations!

Off the lines of travel, in remote quarters where neither railroads nor good wagon-roads penetrate, I heard that the case was different; but in all the out-of-the-way places I reached, I felt just as safe as in Washington and just as free…

Since entering the cotton States I had not seen, on the whole trip, an indication of the slightest desire to interfere with free speech.

You could talk abolition as safely in that Mississippi country-tavern as in Faneuil Hall.

Remember its old stagers have been hungry eight years, while the Black Republicans have been feeding at the public crib?

Things have changed mightily if he can’t buy up enough Congressmen to carry his ends.” “It’s as sure as fate, that the Democratic party will carry the next Presidential election.

What struck me most, however, in the conversation of all these gentlemen was the utter scorn with which they treated any professions of principle.

All we want now is to get back to civil government and the making of our own laws!

The truth is, sir, the Southern people have been so soundly thrashed that just now they’ve got d——d few opinions of any kind.

He has made us feel that we have some standing ground, some chance still to battle for our rights; and for this, there has now sprung up throughout the whole South a warm feeling of regard and gratitude.

Last spring, you can form no conception of the utter, abject humiliation of the Southern people.

We think him on our side because of what he has done, and what we know him to be.

Johnson can force through Congress anything he wants.

Pressure is not likely to affect an honest man in a conscientious interpretation of an explicit law.

He’s the ablest man in the country, and everybody but a blockhead knows it.

They cannot fare any worse, and they have a chance that inheres in all things sublunary, of possible improvement.