The Broken Sword Part 7

"Und hit warnt yu nudder dat drunk up de sakryment de dekons stode away under de mussy seat?"

"No, indeed! why do you ask such a question?"

"Kase," replied Joshua quite saucily, "dem dare too eyes of yourn puts me in membrance of dat scalyhorg in de scriptur whay wuz drug outer de kote house ded, him und Sofy Mariah, too, kase day made er mis. .h.i.t erbout dat lan."

"Oh Jerusalem!" retorted the scalawag "Lets get back to the subject."

"Jess so! Jess so!" exclaimed Joshua, laughing, "yu sees yu's dun und kotched, und yu aims to drap back in de convenshun agen."

"We pay one dollar in gold and a jug of whisky to every Laflin man that votes with us. Do you hear?" observed the scalawag.

"Now yer is er a gettin down to de pint," exclaimed the negro smiling.

"Is yer man agwine to git lected?"

"Certainly, certainly, sir."

"Dats all right, den, when dos I git de munny und de sperrits, fore I wotes ur arterwurds?" asked Joshua dubiously.

"We don't pay in advance," replied the scalawag.

"Don't, hey?" exclaimed Joshua.

"Well Laflin, he do, und I mout wote fore I git de pay, und yer man mout not git lected, den my wote wud be flung away, und de munny und de sperrits too, dats de pint. Yer see, boss," Joshua continued argumentatively, "us franksized woters is bleeged to make er leetle kalkerlashun und den ef we gits disappinted its kase de white fokses obersizes de n.i.g.g.e.rs. Don't yer see how de cat is agwine to jump, boss?"

he whispered confidentially, "yer mout put de spirits in de jimmyjon now, und I mout take a drap ur too fore I wotes und yer mout hold back de munny twelt yer man is lected; how dos dat do?"

"All right," announced the scalawag. "You come with me." And old Joshua in his "hop, step and go fetchit" way followed the politician until he brought up squarely against one of Laflin's lieutenants, who took him savagely by the limp paper collar.

"Wher's yer agwine lak a struttin turkey gobbler, wid dat white man, yer fool n.i.g.g.e.r? Don't yer know dat ar white trash will put yer back in slabery?"

The rival candidates were running for the legislature. On one side of the court house square were aligned the adherents of Laflin, the carpet-bagger; on the other side the adherents of Hale the scalawag. Each was haranguing the black sovereigns of the South--men who in other fields had toiled ever so hard for their country, but whose hands were unskilled, and whose minds were untutored in this the grandest of human endeavors--the building up of an immense superstructure that shall stand "four square to all the winds that blow."

Each candidate had his claquers, slipping into rough, h.o.r.n.y hands the paper representative of manhood, intellectual, patriotic manhood--manhood compromised by no overt act of treason.

Every star and every stripe upon that magnificent banner just overhead accentuated the fact that in devious wanderings over blood stained battle fields, fire scathed villages, homes and plantations it had followed manhood suffrage as faithfully as it did the t.i.thing agent throughout the South. Suspended above the heads of the free men, across the street, was this blood-red warning "No man shall vote here who followed Lee and Jackson." Vain delusion; as if there could be treason under that flag; or traitors lurking in its shadows like mad Malays!

Stranger still, that the dust of Jackson should re-animate hearts that had been broken in a catastrophe, too terrible to be uttered by patriots. Strangest of all, that living heroes should gather at a banquet where toasts were spoken in frantic curses of the brave by fanatics! To the right were barrels of whiskey on tap; to the left were huge piles of yellow tickets with appropriate devices upon them; and to the front waved over a bloodless conquest the "Star Spangled banner,"

just as triumphantly as it did at the head of the charging battalions of Lee and Jackson in Mexico, just as proudly as when the Southern cross yielded its sovereignty upon the ill-starred field of Appomattox.

Crimsoned to a deeper blush to-day methinks because it is made to dishonor Lee and Jackson, who shall live forever in the pantheon of history--as men worthy of emulation, as heroes whose fame is already written upon amaranthine tablets.

"Who sees them act but envies every deed-- Who hears them groan and does not wish to bleed; Great men struggling with the storms of state, And greatly fallen with a falling state."

"Welcome, my son, here lay him down, my friends, Full in my sight, that I may view at leisure The b.l.o.o.d.y corse and count those glorious wounds.

How beautiful is death when earned by virtue."

About high noon Joshua, with his old beaver caved in on both sides and one skirt of his blue coat torn away, was seen to oscillate, as it were, betwixt the whiskey barrel on the Laflin side and the rum barrel on Hales' side, and doubtless, so far as his vote was concerned, preserving a strict neutrality, that is to say, in the plantation language of the old negro, "Bress de Lawd, I was so flushtrated wid dat meextry o' rum und sperrits dat I flung in six wotes fur de cyarpet-sacker und er eben haf dozen fur de scalyhorg." The result officially declared, made the agreement between Joshua and Hales' manager about the payment of money "arter yo man is dun und lected" a nude pact.

Laflin was nominated, and in his address to his const.i.tuents flattered himself that the nomination came unsought and with practical unanimity.

"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 n.i.g.g.e.rs 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 pa.s.sage at arms, felt that now the war was over, that the country should settle down on the great common principle of the const.i.tution--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 const.i.tutional 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 repet.i.tion of itself.

Despite the catastrophe that overlaid the South because of the unhappy issue of the war; the gravity of which enemies, both domestic and foreign, have scandalized by calling it "rebellion," despite the fact that disbanded forces were still prosecuting their conquests, not against disciplined armies in the field, but against men, women and children, in the lawful pursuit of peace and happiness, with a vengeance hourly reinforced by new resources and fresh horrors, and with a terror that mastered our fettered souls; our people felt that there was at least one refuge from the blast of the tornado--still a sheltering rock to which they could flee from the cruel cloud-burst.

In pa.s.sing the eye rapidly over the outline of the circ.u.mstances in which persecution originated; in reviewing the cause that unsettled the deep foundations of social life, the southern people felt that there were hallowed spots of ground so strongly b.u.t.tressed in the hearts of the people that the violence of the storm could not rustle a leaf or shake a twig; that these consecrated precincts they could lawfully appropriate, and as to this claim, the carpet-baggers with all their hosts of misrule had the honor, magnanimity and mercy to forget, forgive and forbear. Here at least there could be no intrusion, because the baser pa.s.sions were fenced upon the outside; and amid this sad continuity of graves the heart would be uplifted in grat.i.tude to G.o.d, who in his great mercy had given to the nineteenth century and to the South, such undying examples of patriotism and valor. Here lie the bones of men who dared to say, when the political system of the South was strangely inverted, that it was such a menace to southern inst.i.tutions that it could not go unchallenged; a palpaple violation of the public faith. To what other convulsions and changes are we predestined? they asked. Shall we leave our character, our civilization, our very being to the unresisted a.s.sault and prepare such an epitaph for our tombs? Shall we declare ourselves outlawed from the community of nations? "Nay, war rather to the cost of the last dollar, and slaughter of the last man."

Such was the sentiment of the men who sleep so peacefully in these graves. Such was the sentiment of the men, women and children, who to-day stand over these graves to honor the brave, and to reproduce a fresh page in history, and lay it reverently by in our southern Valhalla.

Col. Seymour was the orator of the day. "Stonewall Jackson," his old commander, the subject, and his friends, Judge Bonham and the ex-governor honored auditors. The old governor, whitelocked and furrowed, in introducing the orator observed with a proper decorum. "For what Stonewall Jackson and his brave men did, we have no apologies to make here or elsewhere. I had rather wear here," said he, striking his aged breast, "a scar from the victorious field of Mana.s.sas, than the jewelled star of St George, or the Victorian Cross."

I can reproduce in a fragmentary way parts of the patriotic address which I herein give to the reader, to show that there was "life in the old land yet."

"MY COMRADES, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN:

"One year ago to-day, with the reverence of a pilgrim, I stood by the grave of Stonewall Jackson; and I remembered that every battle order he ever wrote, every victory he ever won, was a thank offering to the christian's G.o.d.

"I thought, too, of the thousand highways that rayed out from citadels of oppression, barricaded with human bones. I thought of the seas of human slaughter, whose redundant tides flowed on and on as libations upon the altars of ambition.

"I saw as it were the faded crowns and the crumbling thrones of dead despots, who once girdled the earth with a cincture of fire, and marked its boundaries with the sword, writing again their achievements where mankind might read and wonder.

"I saw again the accusing throngs of pensioned widows from the Moselle, the Rhine, the Danube, the Nile, and wherever else the scarlet standards of fanaticism flaunted their challenge, hastening to record their anguish, where the tyrants had memorialized their deeds.

"I saw everywhere the badges of speculative knavery, of incorrigible wrong; Cossacks all, who knew no law but force, and no patriotism but greed.

"I thought of the Spaniard, riding to the stirrup-leather in the blood of babes in the Netherlands; of the Hun and his proclamation 'beauty and booty,' and I thought of the angel of G.o.d's mercy proclaiming an armistice; giving a refreshing peace to the saturated earth after these monsters were dead, and I bowed with a profounder reverence at this hallowed grave in the valley of Virginia.

"I thought then of Alcibiades at Abydos; of Alexander at Issus; of Scipio at Zama; of Hannibal at Cannae; of Pompey at Pharsalia; of Caesar at the Rubicon; of Napoleon at Marengo; and I thought, as Vattel thought, that warriors such as these failed to prosecute the rights of their countrymen by force.

"I thought of the keen blade of the a.s.sa.s.sin that cut in twain the heart of Alcibiades; of the dagger of Brutus; of the murder of c.l.i.tus; of the hemlock; of the suicide's sword at Thrapsus; of the a.s.sa.s.sination at Miletus; of the fifth paragraph in the will of Napoleon; and then I thought of the bleeding earth these warriors had scarified and scourged, until they were drunken with excess of human slaughter; and then I looked back over the tide of centuries for a single example of disinterested patriotism, and I bowed my head once more to hear a protest from princ.i.p.alities in their orphanage, and commonwealths in their sorrow.