Historical voices

We feel confident that the President will not yield any more ground to them, if indeed he does not withdraw from them what he has conceded.

These Southern Rebels have their fate in their own keeping, and they are nursing their wrath to keep it warm.

The war was closed out two years too soon. * * The mild and benignant policy of the President has been abused; is not at all appreciated by Rebel leaders, but is insultingly demanded as their right!

In North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama, unpardoned Rebels are running for Congress, boasting that they are still unpardoned and do not intend to change.

Louisiana is proposing to elect ex-Governor Allen, now a refugee traitor in Mexico, to gubernatorial honors, on the ground that he is endeared to the people because of his services rendered in the cause of the rebellion.

The Southern leaders still have the devil in them, and presuming upon the leniency of the President, they are losing sight of their real positions.

More hanging and fewer pardons would, as they thought, better suit the existing wants of the South.

A prophet is generally without honor in his own country, and it is not surprising that there should be other places in the United States where they have more confidence in President Johnson than at Knoxville.

The freedmen have more hope from Virginia Rebels than from East Tennessee Loyalists, if the public sentiment of Knoxville may be accepted as a test.

The prejudices against them were, with the most, intense; and if any way of driving them out of the country can be found, it will be very apt to be put in force.

There was, I should judge, absolutely no public sentiment in favor of negro suffrage, and scarcely any in favor of negro education.

Returned Rebels had not unfrequently been notified that they must leave the country, under penalty of being treated precisely as they had treated Union men when they had the power.

Its people had not been accustomed to depend for support upon their slaves; they suffered the less, therefore, from the sudden disappearance of slaves.

Burnt houses and solitary chimneys over one whole quarter of the city, showed that the heart of East Tennessee loyalty had not been without its sufferings.

The great mass of our lands are fit for nothing else, and you’ve destroyed the only labor with which we can cultivate them in cotton.

The abolition of slavery was the death-blow to the great cotton interest of the United States.

He hoped the Yankees would come down with their money and machinery, and have good luck growing cotton, for their good luck would now be good luck to everybody.

Why not depend on the power of wages, if they work, or of want, if they don’t, to settle the labor question?” I asked one.

When they speak of a policy of managing free negro laborers, they mean a policy by which they can compel them to work.

They do not comprehend any law for controlling laborers, save the law of force.

They have no sort of conception of free labor.

If they could make the niggers work he would adopt their policy, and he knew he could do as well with niggers, whenever he found out how to get the power to control them, as any Yankee could.

He had gone North, utterly down-hearted, and willing to sell out for a dollar an acre in gold; but they had treated him well in New York; there was less revengeful, bitter feeling than he had expected; Yankees were coming down to cultivate…

He wasn’t in favor of negro suffrage as a condition of re-admission to Congress, but he thought the Southern States themselves might, before long, come to see that an intelligent negro would have as good a claim to the ballot as an…