Adventure | Science Fiction | Ghost stories | Poetry | Children | History BookOpen Original Text moved till 1872; in 1876 he was
elected governor of North Carolina, and in 1879, United States
Senator, having been elected and his seat refused him in 1870. His
death occurred in Washington City, and he is buried in Asheville. His
State is now preparing to erect a monument expressing her honor and
devotion to her illustrious son.
WORKS.
Speeches: (in Congress and on Public Occasions.)
CHANGES WROUGHT BY THE WAR.
(_From All About it--an address before the young men of Raleigh,
N. C.; published in "Land We Love" January, 1867._)
Virginia to the north of us was settled by English Cavaliers; South
Carolina, mainly by French Huguenots, both among the noblest stocks of
Western Europe. North Carolina, with but a slight infusion of each,
was settled by a sturdier--and in some respects--a better race than
either. She was emphatically the offspring of religious and political
persecution, and the vital stream of her infant life was of
Scotch-Irish origin. A cross of those two noble races has produced a
breed of men as renowned for great deeds and modest worth as perhaps
any other in this world. Two instances will suffice for this. Perhaps
the most manly and glorious feat of arms in modern times was the
defence of Londonderry, as the boldest and most remarkable state paper
was the Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence. Both were the work
mainly of men such as settled North Carolina.
_The Country Gentlemen._--Perhaps one of the most remarkable changes
which we may expect, is one that will soon be apparent on the face of
our country society. The abolition of slavery will do wonders here. It
puts an end to the reign of those lordly-landed proprietors, planters,
and farmers, who constituted so striking and so pleasant a feature in
our rural population. No longer the masters of hundreds of slaves
wherewith to cultivate their thousands of acres, the general cheapness
of lands in the South will prevent their forming around them a system
of dependent tenantry, since every industrious man will be able to
plough his own farm. They will therefore gradually sell off their
paternal acres, no longer within the scope of prudent management, and
seek homes in the towns and villages, or contract their establishments
to their means and altered condition. Agriculture will then pass
gradually into the hands of small farmers, and the great farms will
forever disappear.
I can scarcely imagine it possible for any one to view the steady
disappearance of the race of Southern country gentlemen without
genuine sorrow . . . the high-toned, educated, chivalrous,
intelligent, and hospitable Southern gentlemen, of whom each one who
hears me has at least a dozen in his mind's eye in Virginia and the
Carolinas: whose broad fields were cultivated by their own faithful
and devoted slaves, whose rudely splendid mansions stand where their
fathers reared them, among the oaks and the pines which greeted the
canoe of John Smith, welcomed the ships of Raleigh, and sheltered the
wild cavaliers of De Soto; whose hall doors stood wide open, and were
never shut except against a retreating guest;[30] whose cellar and
table abounded with the richest products of the richest lands in the
world, and whose hospitality was yet unstained by unrefined excess;
whose parlors and fire-sides were adorned by a courtly female grace
which might vie with any that ever lighted and blessed the home of
man; whose hands were taught from infancy to fly open to every
generous and charitable appeal, and whose minds were inured to all
self-respect and toleration, and whose strong brains were sudden death
to humbuggery, all the _isms_, and the whole family of mean and
pestilential fanaticism.
_The Negroes._--There is also a great change at hand for the
negro. . . Who that knew him as a contented, well-treated slave, did
not learn to love and admire the negro character? I, for one, confess
to almost an enthusiasm on the subject. The cheerful ring of their
songs at their daily tasks, their love for their masters and their
families, their politeness and good manners, their easily bought but
sincere gratitude, their deep-seated aristocracy--for your genuine
negro was a terrible aristocrat,--their pride in their own and their
master's dignity, together with their overflowing and never-failing
animal spirits, both during hours of labor and leisure, altogether,
made up an aggregation of joyous simplicity and fidelity--when not
perverted by harsh treatment--that to me was irresistible!
A remembrance of the seasons spent among them will perish only with
life. From the time of the ingathering of the crops, until after the
ushering in of the new year, was wont to be with them a season of
greater joy and festivity than with any other people on earth, of whom
it has been my lot to hear. In the glorious November nights of our
beneficent clime, after the first frosts had given a bracing sharpness
and a ringing clearness to the air, and lent that transparent blue to
the heavens through which the stars gleam like globes of sapphire,
when I have seen a hundred or more of them around the swelling piles
of corn, and heard their tuneful voices ringing with the chorus of
some wild refrain, I have thought I would rather far listen to them
than to any music ever sung to mortal ears; for it was the outpouring
of the hearts of happy and contented men, rejoicing over the abundance
which rewarded the labor of the closing year! And the listening, too,
has many a time and oft filled my bosom with emotions, and opened my
heart with charity and love toward this subject and dependent race,
such as no oratory, no rhetoric or minstrelsy in all this wide earth
could impart!
Nature ceased almost to feel fatigue in the joyous scenes which
followed. The fiddle and the banjo, animated as it would seem like
living things, literally knew no rest, night or day; while Terpichore
covered her face in absolute despair in the presence of that famous
_double-shuffle_ with which the long nights and "master's shoes" were
worn away together! . . . .
Who can forget the cook by whom his youthful appetite was fed? The
fussy, consequential old lady to whom I now refer, has often, during
my vagrant inroads into her rightful domains, boxed my infant jaws,
with an imperious, "Bress de Lord, git out of de way: dat chile never
kin git enuff": and as often relenting at sight of my hungry tears,
has fairly bribed me into her love again with the very choicest bits
of the savory messes of her art. She was haughty as Juno, and
aristocratic as though her naked ancestors had come over with the
Conqueror, or "drawn a good bow at Hastings," . . . and yet her pride
invariably melted at the sight of certain surreptitious quantities of
tobacco, with which I made my court to this high priestess of the
region sacred to the stomach.
And there, too, plainest of all, I can see the fat and chubby form of
my dear old nurse, whose encircling arms of love fondled and supported
me from the time whereof the memory of Previous Next |