Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 11.pdf/585

 546

marched forth to display their super-pa triotism, "to fire the Northern heart," and seek promotion and profit for themselves out of the political chaos. Mark Antonys innumerable, in mock heroics, " waved the bloody shirt " and cried " The rebellion is not dead while the arch-traitor Davis lives." The "carpet-bagger" also was abroad in the land, and his trend directly south. The white peo ple of the South being disqualified as a result of the war, and their slaves endowed with citi zenship, laws of social gravity were complete ly reversed. The white race, the descen dants of Anglo-Saxon thanes, with ancestry tracing back of the Norman conquest, were relegated to civil vocations, often manual la bor in their fields, while their ex-slaves, late Hottentots and Senegambians, sat in State legislatures, and from the seats of Calhoun and Pinckney made laws for them. Under the influence of the insatiable car pet-bagger, their domination was one of in justice, rapine, and plunder. They enacted tax-laws which hardly exempted air and sun shine to the owners of any description of property. This condition, too unnatural forlongendurance, was more than an interruption of the healing process, it was a tearing open of old wounds, a long set-back to the ideal union. But all this was a natural consequence of civil war, of war whose horrors the poverty of language is too great to express in fitter words than those of Sherman, " War is hell." In like comparison "reconstruction," to the people of the South at least', was purgatory. Let us draw the curtain of oblivion over the dark and grewsome memory. The bounding years of the century's close have brought quick and amazing changes. The dismembered and waning States, re united at Appomattox in eighteen hundred and sixty-five, in little more than three dec ades have assumed the mighty proportion of a "world-power." A transformation so sudden and astounding could only be ac

complished by a united people moved by the spirit of American institutions. The war with Spain called the country to confront a foreign enemy. A despotism, the antipodes of the American Republic, was to be expelled from the western hemi sphere. A common enemy was to be en countered by a united people. To the call of the government " to arms," the response of the South was eager and spontaneous. Confederate veterans and their sons prompt ly enlisted for the war. Side by side with the men of the North they offered up their lives in the service of their country. Their valor and skill .were conspicuous on land and sea, and attest that they were then, as ever, true and loyal Americans. What five and thirty years of peace had not fully attained at home, was suddenly completed on foreign soil and in distant waters. It was for Appomattox to witness a reunion of the dismembered States, but the reunion of the Ameriean people was sealed in the distant bay of Manila, on the heights of San Juan, in the offing of San tiago. The Union being now complete and strong in the conscious power of the loyalty of all the people, it may be well before en tering upon the career of a great " worldpower," whatever that may imply, to deter mine some matters of purely domestic rela tion. From the commencement of the civil war down to the present day, the people of the North have applied to the Confederate sol dier, in the sense of odium and derogation, the epithet of " Rebel." While the use of that term is of little mo ment as a mere matter of parlance, it is of grave and far-reaching import when im printed in the cold, indelible type of his tory. The history of a country should be sacred to the maintenance of Truth, and written for a light and guide to posterity. Future generations will ask only for the "fish and egg" of historic facts, stated with