Historical voices

Some day Yankee enterprise will utilize the magnificent water power, convert the forest into gold mines, and find real gold mines in the mountain chasms.

Many have become rich, hundreds have lived in ease, and considering the difficulties in the way, a remarkable proportion supported themselves.

The colony of Roanoke Island, in two years, made improvements whose cost value at the lowest figures was $44,000; more than would have bought the whole island before the war, with all the improvements which the “master class” had put upon…

Here, as elsewhere, “sound conservative views” were greatly in demand; these “views” being always found to have a relation, more or less intimate, to the negro.

One thing is certain, that if the negroes are not made to enter into contracts, and to keep them when made, the most ruinous consequences will result to our farming interests, and provisions enough will not be made to feed our people…

In the Lynchburg hotels they were paid twenty dollars a month—five dollars more than they received for similar services in Richmond.

But how could you punish those equally deserving of punishment at the North, who were just as guilty in bringing on the war?” The questioner was, not a pardoned Rebel, but a speculative Northerner.

My policy for settling up these questions,” said a Yankee, “would be to banish all the leaders, and tell the rest that they had been soundly whipped, and, now, the best thing they could do would be to go to work and repair their ruined…

I tell you, sir,” said a Yankee to a Virginian who didn’t approve of this social equality, “a white man has got just the same right a nigger has—to starve if he won’t work!

Negroes and Rebel soldiers worked harmoniously side by side.

Yes! where are they, when the negro is freed and is so sadly in need of their kind (?) offices?

Where are those who wanted an anti-slavery God and an anti-slavery Bible?

Where are the Christian Commissions of Boston, and the Freedmen’s Aid Societies of Philadelphia?

But be that as it may, the ‘freedmen’ are dying by hundreds and thousands.

Virginians had not yet learned that their interests in laborers did not end when they ceased to own them; and many seemed to gloat over the facts, as a proof of the wisdom of their own opinions, and of the folly of their anti-slavery…

They had not yet learned to take care of themselves; the emancipation had removed them from the care of their masters, and exposure, neglect, and disease were rapidly thinning out the population on which the wasted State had to rely for…

No man could fail to observe that the poor negroes were making much more earnest efforts to rise than the poor whites.

You’re all right personally; we’re proud of you, and you shall have plenty of offices by and by, but just “at this time” it isn’t expedient to embarrass our cause at Washington, by carrying your conspicuous services in the war on our…

It is true, I believe, as a result of the recent struggle, that the entire people of Virginia have accepted the Union and the Government of the United States in good faith.

Statesmen might decide upon the course of statesmen for such emergencies; and whether it was pleasant or unpleasant, Virginia would submit, make the best of it, and go to work to improve her condition.

But the first want of Virginians was a settlement; something fixed on which capital could rely.

We’re all poor; we want to regain our lost money, and we’ve got to let politics alone and go to work to do it.

What we wish is to get settled, to know where we are and what we can depend upon, and then we want to go to work developing our material resources.

If there “ought not to be any politics among a people so unhappily situated,” neither ought there to be the farce of a form without the substance of State Government.