A pause ensued, after which Marmor resumed. “I’m almost tired of this State, and if my business could be squared up I’d get away; but I shan’t be driven out. I wish the colored people had the spunk to emigrate to some of the idle western land. It is a heap better and richer than this here, by all accounts; and though it might be some colder, it would make them stronger and smarter, and they’d be heaps better off than they are here.” “There _are_ a great many _talking about it_, don’t you know—going by colonies? It would be a deal better than going to Africa. I shall go myself if the old Confederates ever get into power here again.” “See you stick to that, Elly; and, as for me, I reckon I shall have to go by that time, or before. I was born in South Carolina, and shed my blood in defense of her (as I thought then), at Fort Sumter, got wounded there, and I was as good as any of them till I consented to accept a clerical office under a Republican administration; and then the old Confederates persecuted me and my wife, till I found out how it felt to others, and I have seen under what tyranny a man lives here. He dares not think for himself at all. I served under Hampton in the war, before I got my eyes open. Like most of the private soldiers, and plenty of commissioned officers, I was made to believe a lie, or I never would have raised a hand against the National Government in the world. I used to say just this way: If the No’th would only let us manage our State matters ourselves, and would let our slaves alone (you know I owned a few slaves), I didn’t care if the Territories and new States were free. But Lincoln, and Garrison, and Greeley shouldn’t come down here, and take our nigger property away from us; they shouldn’t be emancipated by the United States Government—the slaves shouldn’t. Enough others said the same, and dozens of our speakers said it on the stump and platform, and plenty of the great leaders were right there—consenting by their silence, if not saying the same things, when _they_ knew well enough that these were just the principles of the Republican party—the ‘Unionists’ who elected Lincoln. What did _we_ care for their ‘sympathy for the slaves,’ or their _wishes_ for the ‘constitutional right’ to liberate them, so long as they admitted they hadn’t got it, and we knew they couldn’t get it short of a two-thirds indorsement by the States through a direct vote of the people? There was slave property enough in sixteen of the thirty-four States to make us pretty sure on that score, in addition to the interests of cotton manufacturers and sugar dealers in the No’th who wanted our products and no interruption of business. Then we had the Fugitive Slave Law for the return of our runaways.” “But you know the Republican idea was that the new States coming in, being all free, they could at last secure the constitutional two-thirds.”