“The French Revolutionists established a tannery where they tanned the hides of dead aristocrats into leather with which they shod the common people. This was France in the eighteenth century with a thousand years of Christian culture. “When the English army conquered Scotland they hunted and killed every fugitive to a man, tore from the homes of their fallen foes their wives, stripped them naked, and made them follow the army begging bread, the laughing stock and sport of every soldier and camp follower! This was England in the meridian of Anglo-Saxon intellectual glory, the England of Shakespeare who was writing Othello to please the warlike populace. “I say to my people now in the language of the inspired Word, ‘All things are yours!’ I have been drilling and teaching them through the Union League, the young and the old. I have told the old men that they will be just as useful as the young. If they can’t carry a musket they can apply the torch when the time comes. And they are ready now to answer the call of the Lord!” They crowded around Tim and wrung his hand. * * * * * Early in 1867, two years after the war, Thaddeus Stevens passed through Congress his famous bill destroying the governments of the Southern states, and dividing them into military districts, enfranchising the whole negro race, and disfranchising one-fourth of the whites. The army was sent back to the South to enforce these decrees at the point of the bayonet. The authority of the Supreme Court was destroyed by a supplementary act and the South denied the right of appeal. Mr. Stevens then introduced his bill to confiscate the property of the white people of the South. The negroes laid down their hoes and plows and began to gather in excited meetings. Crimes of violence increased daily. Not a night passed but that a burning barn or home wrote its message of anarchy on the black sky. The negroes refused to sign any contracts to work, to pay rents, or vacate their houses on notice even from the Freedman’s Bureau. The negroes on General Worth’s plantation, not only refused to work, or move, but organised to prevent any white man from putting his foot on the land. General Worth procured a special order from the headquarters of the Freedman’s Bureau for the district located at Independence. When the officer appeared and attempted to serve this notice, the negroes mobbed him. A company of troops were ordered to Hambright, and the notice served again by the Bureau official accompanied by the Captain of this company. The negroes asked for time to hold a meeting and discuss the question. They held their meeting and gathered fully five hundred men from the neighbourhood, all armed with revolvers or muskets. They asked Legree and Tim Shelby to tell them what they should do. There was no uncertain sound in what Legree said. He looked over the crowd of eager faces with pride and conscious power.