Page:The Granite Monthly Volume 10.djvu/396

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��Re^niniscences of the Sunny South.

��birdchoi'us filled the storm freshened, richly perfumed air, as only dwellers in that climate can pealize.

The mocking-birds and English robins and larks made a hallelujah chorus full of more exquisite strains and warblings than a Jennie Lind or a Parepa could imitate. With one consent scholars and leader stopped to listen to the divine orchestra.

The after glories of storms were delightful beyond description. The luxuriant foliage, much of it like the magnolia's and bay's, always shining, became a mass of trembling, glisten- ing sheen, bedecked with rainbow- tinted drops. The soft blue of the sky seemed ready to drop some celes- tial elixir, so penetrating was the azure. The soothing exhilaration of sweet odors from numerous flowers and shrubs played upon the senses. The realm of mist and bird life voiced its overflowing vitality and delight, and all the sweet voices of nature seemed to say. Though the storm comes, beauty and radiance and har- mony and delight remain, and the triumph is to them.

" Sorrow endureth for a night, but joy cometh in the morning."

Surrounded by such natural influ- ences, in which an out-door life that filled the senses to satiety was com- pelling, it was not hard to find a reason why the negro had little enterprise, nor why the master's conscience slum- bered, bound by inherited conditions, institutions, and customs. The care- lessness and childish abandon to pres- ent enjoyment, conspicuously a trait of the Southern negro, had none of the stings of poverty in a rigorous climate to whet his energies or quick- en his thoughts.

��Returning after a brief visit North in the summer of '60, it was soon ap- parent that a crisis was inevitable. Early in the autumn military compa- nies were formed for drill, and, as it chanced that their parade ground was in full view of the porch which the ladies of the family frequented, that performance almost daily seized my prescience like the dim foreboding of a frightful dream.

A cotton warehouse made Claiborne a commercial centre for a considera- ble extent of outlying country, and >for that reason it was a stopping- place from other quarters. At the hotel table one would hear an expres- sion of divers opinions ; and all shades of patriotism, from the Southern sec- tionalist to the loyal Unionist, were widely represented.

It has been correctly claimed, re- cently, according to my knowledge, that " it was not a slaveholder's re- bellion." Certainly in that section, plantation owners or small farmers, those who had many slaves and those who had few, as a class, would have chosen to remain in the Union had not sectional pride been a^tpealed to by artful demagogues and hot-headed conspirators, seeking to establish a separate civilization and to make for themselves an opportunity to rule, inflamed sectional jealousies by mis- representing the feelings and inten- tions of the North.

The difference of comprehension and judgment between the rural pop- ulation and the people in cities was conspicuous. Those who lived on lines of transportation, or whose busi- ness required them to travel and min- gle with the Northern people, were capable of appreciating the folly of

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