"Our enemies," said he, "shall feel our power, and you will be asked to
co-operate in such manner as will place you above them in this
government. Can I depend on you?"
"Dat yer kin!" came from a hundred throats. "Hurrah for de boss! He is
de ginrul fur dis kentry, und he will lick out de white trash! Yes
siree!"
Such were the exclamations that deafened the ear and horrified the
sense. Joshua was too drunk to be offensively partisan. He lay in the
street waving his old beaver hat and hurrahing the best he could for
Laflin, as he held on to "de jimmyjon," and singing in a drunken,
maudlin way--
"Dis jug lak a ribber is er flowin,
Und I don't keer how fast it flows on boys, on;
While de korn in de low groun is er growin,
Und dis mouf ketch de stuff as it runs."
When Joshua got home next morning the sun was blazing like a great ball
of fire from the mid-heavens. Both skirts of his old blue coat were
gone. His old beaver was flopping and hung limp and crownless over his
right eye, and his old wife paused in her work in her garden to observe
the dilapidated negro as he approached his cabin. She could hear him
muttering to himself, "Talk erbout de niggers ergwine ter de conwenshun,
und er runnin dis here kentry, und er gittin de eddykashun und er bossin
de white fokeses, ef ennybody is er mint ter gin me wun dollar fer my
pribileges, I'm ergwine ter sell out, und I mout tak pay in Federic
munny."
"Ergwine ter sell out, is yer!" exclaimed Hannah with a grunt.
Joshua looked up startled, and pushing the broken brim of his old hat
from his eyes, he saw it was Hannah who had interrupted his soliloquy,
and she continued in ridicule, "Yu is too brash, Joshaway; yer mout git
ter be presydent, den yer cud git er cote wid two skurts to hit. Yu keep
er wotin und er wotin, und bimeby yu is ergwine ter be wun ob dem
Mishunary possels wid whings, same ez er blue herron."
Joshua saw that his wife was making him ridiculous, and he slunk away
into the old cabin and fell asleep upon the rickety bed.
CHAPTER VIII.
MEMORIAL DAY.
The patriotic men of the South who had so valorously insisted upon their
rights throughout the deadly passage at arms, felt that now the war was
over, that the country should settle down on the great common principle
of the constitution--the principle that had triumphed in 1780. They had
an intuitive abhorrence to confiding extravagant power in the hands of
the corrupt and ignorant. They could not understand how the Union could
be preserved by the annexation of eleven conquered provinces, and asked
themselves the question, "Will not the light of these eleven pale stars
be totally obscured by a central sun blighting and destroying every germ
of constitutional liberty?" The Union, said they, was safe in the hands
of President Lincoln. Rome was safe when Cincinnatus was called from the
plow, but she was torn asunder by the wars of Scylla and Marius, and
history is more or less a repetition of itself.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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