Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 17.djvu/39

 The Race Problem in the South. 31

istic struggles. Thus the hand of Providence is dimly seen reaching kindly down to us through the ages that were made accursed by the institution of slavery, to lift us up to a higher plane of national life. The Anglo-American of the South was educated in the school of the Old Virginian, who always had his goods and chattels, lands and tenements on hand, unencumbered and unconveyed, when the sheriff would come around to levy and sell him out. His ancestors were the rulers of the country, in peace or war. With such a record, and with a pedigree reaching back to colonial times, and with a detesta- tion for tricks and shams, he views with horror the prospects of educating his children in a school for instruction in the art of leger- demain. He fears, too, that at no distant day, that his children may fall a sacrifice to the Ethiopian fetich. The sight of its hideous out- lines paralyzes his heart and brain. With its slimy folds encircling the statue of liberty, its shadow falls across his path in any direction he may turn. His lands have so depreciated in value under the influence of the fetich that they would not sell for as much as when his ancestors first obtained patents for them from the Government. One of the great dangers that are in store for the ex-slave States, is that race prejudice and passions among the colored people will be fomented and encouraged by white men through motives of interest, ambition and revenge.

A GLOOMY PROPHECY.

During the war of the Revolution, one Simon Girty was a candi- date for the position of colonel of a regiment of Ohio militia against William Crawford. Crawford was elected. Girty thereupon joined the band of Indians which afterwards captured Colonel Crawford and burned him at a stake. Girty turned a deaf ear to a white man's appeals to him. He even set the fagots ablaze that surrounded his victim, and otherwise surpassed his savage comrades in cruelty. The history of race conflict, coupled with a white man's perfidy, will repeat itself in the ex -slave States. When the conservative white leaders, around whose standards the negroes now rally, shall have passed away, and when their white allies shall be bound to them by the mutuality of fellowship, and not by the patronage of philanthropy as they now are, then we will descend to a condition of anarchy that on the one side will possess no culture or creed to mitigate its bar- barity.

Race prejudice, ambition and revenge will do their perfect work. Some of the more apprehensive and timid are quieriy selling their