Greater Britain: A Record of Travel in English-Speaking Countries During 1866-7Dilke, Charles Wentworth, Sir
History
Greater Britain: A Record of Travel in English-Speaking Countries During 1866-7
Dilke, Charles Wentworth, Sir
Great Britain -- Colonies -- History -- 19th century; United States -- Description and travel; Voyages around the world
Nowhere in the Southern States did I find any expectation of a fresh
rebellion. It is only Englishmen who ask whether “the South” will not
fight “once more.” The South is dead and gone; there can never be a
“South” again, but only so many Southern States. “The South” meant
simply the slave country; and slavery being dead, it is dead. Slavery
gave us but two classes besides the negroes--planters and “mean whites.”
The great planters were but a few thousand in number; they are gone to
Canada, England, Jamaica, California, Colorado, Texas. The “mean
whites”--the true South--are impossible in the face of free labor: they
must work or starve. If they work, they will no longer be “mean whites,”
but essentially Northerners--that is, citizens of a democratic republic,
and not oligarchists.
As the Southerners admit that there can be no further war, it would be
better even for themselves that they should allow the sad record of
their rising to fade away. Their speeches, their newspapers continue to
make use of language which nothing could excuse, and which, in the face
of the magnanimity of the conquerors, is disgraceful. In a Mobile paper
I have seen a leader which describes with hideous minuteness Lincoln,
Lane, John Brown, and Dostie playing whist in hell. A Texas cutting
which I have is less blasphemous, but not less vile: “The English
language no longer affords terms in which to curse a sniveling,
weazen-faced piece of humanity generally denominated a Yankee. We see
some about here sometimes, but they skulk around, like sheep-killing
dogs, and associate mostly with niggers. They whine and prate, and talk
about the judgment of God, as if God had anything to do with them.” The
Southerners have not even the wit or grace to admit that the men who
beat them were good soldiers; “blackguards and braggarts,” “cravens and
thieves,” are common names for the men of the Union army. I have in my
possession an Alabama paper in which General Sheridan, at that time the
commander of the military division which included the State, is styled
“a short-tailed slimy tadpole of the later spawn, the blathering
disgrace of an honest father, an everlasting libel on his Irish blood,
the synonym of infamy, and scorn of all brave men.” While I was in
Virginia, one of the Richmond papers said: “This thing of ‘loyalty’ will
not do for the Southern man.”
The very day that I landed in the South a dinner was given at Richmond
by the “Grays,” a volunteer corps which had fought through the
rebellion. After the roll of honor, or list of men killed in battle, had
been read, there were given as toasts by rebel officers: “Jeff.
Davis--the caged eagle; the bars confine his person, but his great
spirit soars;” and “The conquered banner, may its resurrection at last
be as bright and as glorious as theirs--the dead.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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