“May be so, I can’t tell,” said Jesse, dropping his hands by his sides, “but I shall be very sorry to see another war started here, and I didn’t live in the No’th from ’61 to ’67 to come back here and believe that the people there is going to stand by you in killing us off to carry the election. Maybe they’re tired of protecting us, and disgusted with our blunders and our ignorance, but they won’t join you nor nobody, nor uphold nobody in killing us off that way.” “Well, you’ll see we shall carry this next ’lection if we have to carry it with the musket—if we have to wade through blood to our saddle-girths,” said the Deacon. “And more—this black Militia Company at Baconsville has got to stop drilling; it has got to be broken up. It is too much for southern gentlemen to stand—flaunting their flag and beating their drum right under our noses! It is a general thing with us now from shor’ to shor’, and the law can’t do nothing with so many of us if we do break it up, and we’re going to.” “Now, just be careful, Mr. Atwood, what you say, and what you do. I a’n’t going to uphold our colored folks in violating no law, and you know I ha’n’t, nor nobody else neither. I believe in law, and I say let’s stick by the law; and,” gathering up his implements of labor, “I suppose you’ll excuse me, for I’ve got to go around to the other side of this oat field, by the woods there, and mend that other gap; that is, if you don’t care to walk around that way.” The Deacon did not care to walk that way, and so the conversation ended for the time; though the subject was frequently renewed during the subsequent summer months, in the hope of inducing Roome, who was influential among his people, to declare for the white man’s party, but in vain. A scion of a family that, in the early settlement of the State, had procured a large tract of land at five cents per acre, and had retained much of it through unprolific generations by penuriousness that had been niggardly and cruel in its exactions upon slave labor, Deacon Atwood was coarse and gross in temperament, and had received little culture of any kind. All his patrimony had vanished through the war and its results; for the parsimony of his ancestors had formed no part of his inheritance, and he had pledged all for the Confederate loan. His aged mother—a violent rebel, and a widow before the war—yet refused to pledge her land to raise funds for what became the “Lost Cause,” and found means to retain possession of one thousand acres of cotton land, for the management of which her son was now acting as her agent. Mrs. Deacon Atwood was what the reader has seen her, and not an ill-selected specimen of the average planters’ wives, who but seldom left the schoolless vicinities of their homes; and as her family had fared no better than her husband’s in the general financial overthrow, they were quite naturally and rapidly drifting towards their affinity—the social stratum called in ante-bellum times, “poor white trash.”