The Southern Soldier Boy: A Thousand Shots for the Confederacy

“President Davis spent a night with us; he was in fine spirits, but seemed deeply touched at the sight of so much suffering. We passed by the battle-ground two days after the battle; the field was rolling; our dead were all buried; it looked like a thousand-acre field of potato hills. The enemy were still lying where they fell. They must have fought with great desperation, as their line of battle was plainly to be seen by about every third man being killed. This line could be traced one mile and a half.

“After waiting a few days to rest, and the enemy showing no disposition to renew the fight, our men, from privates to general officers, began a general hunt for them pesky little fellows that are not known in polite circles. I have seen five hundred men have their shirts off at one time, looking for – what they were sure to find. After this campaign we had a great deal of typhoid fever; the hospitals being full of wounded, the most of the cases were treated in camp, more successfully than they would have been in Richmond hospitals. Lest we forget.”

The Negro Problem

Say what you will, it is the cause of all the sectional prejudice and hatred ever engendered in this country. Thousands of millions of money and hundreds of thousands of lives of good white men have been sacrificed in the solution of the Negro problem for this country, and still it hangs over us the darkest cloud that obscures the bright vision of peace and good will to all men. And as the biologists say, “He stands out in his dark isolation a perpetual challenge to the dogma of the unity of the races.” We understand him as a slave. In that capacity he filled every expectation that could be required of him, always reflecting the character of his master. If the master was very religious, so was he. If the master was a drunkard and a sinner, so was he. Always a good imitator, but never an originator. He liked to be flattered and honored and was always faithful to every special trust. When kindly treated he loved his master like a child. These were the conditions that the discipline of slavery obtained. Now his status has changed and all personal restraints are removed and strict discipline stopped. He is now thrown upon his own resources, and must stand upon his own merits. He is now inclined to neglect the patient, hard-earned virtues of the whites, and to imitate their easy vices. He is handicapped at every turn by race prejudices. The professions in most places are closed to him. He is not wanted anywhere except as a cheap hewer of wood and drawer of water. All intelligent white labor resent his competition, even in the humblest work. White lawyers and doctors get some pickings out of him, and where he is numerous white merchants have a good pull on him. All who are getting anything out of him are willing to tolerate him. All who get nothing out of him would gladly see him deported. Wherever he gets a foothold in country or city he depreciates real estate by making conditions more or less intolerable. He is a prolific subject for religious fanatics and cranks to practice upon. He is an alien here in his native country among his own people. He is the only man in all the world ashamed of himself and his color. His greatest ambition is to be evoluted into a white man, and he wants to start right now, and so long as that boon is denied him will he be an aggressive alien. Since the old masters and old servants have passed away there is no friendship or kind interest between their descendants, and the gulf is widening all the while. This great country, leading the vanguard of civilization for all the world, must do justice to all men. Now what can we do with the Negro? Shall we keep him here a standing menace and a perpetual challenge to mob law, and increase our police force, or deport him and sustain a strictly white man’s country. If we deport him as fast as Europeans come in, we would soon be done with him as a factor in politics and labor; but as yet we have no place to send him. Through industrial and commercial relations we will soon absorb Mexico and the Central American States, and upon the completion of the Panama Canal we can expand rapidly into South America, where there is a vast area of unsettled country that would make an ideal Negro country – throughout all of the Amazon River country territory could be procured for the colonization of all our Negroes under the fostering care of the United States, where the black man may hold all the offices and fulfill all the functions of complete citizenship, with close commercial relations in the exchange of products. I have been taxed forty years for freeing him, and would consent to be taxed forty years more to remove him to such a paradise as herein suggested.

We want the Chinese excluded because they are too docile and carry a head of their own. Then we want the Jap excluded because he is too smart for us to compete with. When we lose a few million white men fighting Japan, as we will have to do soon, as they swarm over here, dictating how they shall be treated, then the white man’s burden will be pretty heavy with the colored problem, and a general house-cleaning may follow that will purify the political atmosphere somewhat.

In the meantime all of our great, soulless corporations, transportation and manufacturing companies regard all “coons alike,” whether they be white, black, yellow, brown or ring-streaked or striped. They exploit them for what profit there is in them without regard to the interest of the present or future generations. What did it matter to the Pharaohs what was to be the future of their country, so long as they had plenty of slaves to rear gigantic pyramids to their own selfish ambition.

In peace or war, where is the town that would have Negro troops quartered in it, for fear at any time they be offended, shoot up the town and massacre the women and children? Anywhere in this country that the Negro is denied full social rights, he stands offended and ready to enact any tragedy that promises to advance his social position. The whites must decide whether they shall warm him in their bosoms or cast him off. Nothing has ever been more firmly implanted in the human breast than race prejudice. No first-class white man can feel at ease on social equality with the colored races.