Last winter in the United States : $b being table talk collected during a tour through the late Southern Confederation, the Far West, the Rocky Mountains, &c.Zincke, F. Barham (Foster Barham)
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Last winter in the United States : $b being table talk collected during a tour through the late Southern Confederation, the Far West, the Rocky Mountains, &c.
Zincke, F. Barham (Foster Barham)
United States -- Description and travel; United States -- Social life and customs -- 1865-1918
As I have already intimated, I frequently heard Southern people
expressing an apprehension that a war of races was imminent. Their
reasons were that the disappointment felt by the blacks at the
smallness of their gains from emancipation was constantly deepening,
and that their posture towards the whites was becoming very
unsatisfactory. It is impossible, of course, to foresee what ignorant
and excitable Africans may do. Still I think a war of races a most
improbable event. The blacks have sense enough to know that there would
be no chance of their coming victorious out of such a conflict; for
they would be outnumbered by the whites, if all the Southern States
are regarded as a single unit, which they most assuredly would be for
the purposes of such a war; and they would be comparatively unarmed,
without resources, and without organisation. They also know that, even
if they were able to exterminate all the whites in the South, they
would gain nothing by this; for that then they would only be putting
themselves in the position of the Indian races, to be ousted from the
land whenever it suited the convenience of the North. And they are well
aware that in any rising they might contemplate they could expect no
help from the Northern force that was sent at the end of the war into
each State of the South to coerce the whites and protect the blacks.
The feelings of these men, I believe, are well known; at all events,
I heard one of them in a railway car in the South give expression to
his own feelings on this point, and he did it so as to include his
comrades. ‘They have sent us down here,’ his words were, ‘to look
after the whites and take care of the blacks. But that is not what we
are going to do. We are not going to help niggers to cut white men’s
throats. If they move a finger against the whites, we are not going
to mind colonels or generals, but will shoot every d—d nigger in the
place.’ Nor is it possible to conceive the existence of any other
feeling; for in no class in the United States is the antipathy to the
negro race so strong as in that from which the army is recruited. This
the negro knows very well.
[Sidenote: _The Blacks must Die Out._]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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