Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 12.djvu/371

Rh They had no revenges of a personal character to inaugurate against their former masters. This new and hideous crime remained to be inaugurated by a younger generation of negroes, raised amidst the upheaval of those troublous times, while their fathers were mainly engaged in listening to inflammatory appeals, many of a social coloring, by designing and robbing strangers who held political power; and while their fathers themselves had laid aside their industrious habits of life and were leading a careless, wandering existence in their new-born freedom, not one-third of their time being given to productive labor.

Amid such surroundings the new generation of negro boys and men was raised. Parents, in a measure, gradually lost control of their boys in that loose period, and they grew up in idleness and with distorted and ugly ideas of their rights. They felt that they had to assert those rights personally by insolence and bravado toward the white males and females, among whom they had lived. The young negroes remembered that their fathers were held in place by the white troops of the government which had given them freedom. They saw soldiers of their own race parading almost every plantation and town to keep down the whites and hold the negroes in power. Even an ignorant negro boy could see that the "black man's party" was in power, and the "bottom rail on top."

Under these conditions, when the brains of the carpet-baggers were lost to the negroes by a change of government into the hands of the Southern property-holders and educated class, the young negroes could scarcely appreciate the import of the change, and they found that dreams of social equality had vanished forever. This dream had never taken strong hold on the older blacks, but it had seized the younger ones. They recalled all the discussions and talks of the dark days as to the inter-marrying of the races, and the crime of raping a white