Page:The leopard's spots - a romance of the white man's burden-1865-1900 (IA leopardsspotsrom00dixo).pdf/162

 They surrendered in good faith. They couldn't foresee this. If they had"—

The Preacher paused, his eyes grew misty with tears, and he looked thoughtfully out on the blue mountain peaks that loomed range after range in the distance until the last bald tops were lost in the clouds.

"If General Lee had dreamed of such an infamy being forced on the South two years after his surrender, as this attempt to make the old slaves the rulers of their masters, and to destroy the Anglo-Saxon civilisation of the South—he would have withdrawn his armies into that Appalachian mountain wild and fought till every white man in the South was exterminated.

"The Confederacy went to pieces in a day, not because the South could no longer fight, but because they were fighting the flag of their fathers, and they were tired of it. They went back to the old flag. They expected to lose their slaves and repudiate the dogma of Secession forever. But, they never dreamed of Negro dominion, or Negro deification, of Negro equality and amalgamation, now being rammed down their throats with bayonets. They never dreamed of the confiscation of the desolate homes of the poor and the weak and the brokenhearted. Over two hundred thousand Southern men fought in the Union army in answer to Lincoln's call—even against their own flesh and blood. But if this program had been announced, every one of the two hundred thousand Southern soldiers who wore the blue, would have rallied around the firesides of the South. This infamy was something undreamed save in the souls of a few desperate schemers at Washington who waited their opportunity, and found it in the nation's blind agony over the death of a martyred leader."

The Preacher pressed the Captain's hand and hastened to tell Mrs. Gaston of his plans. He found her seated pale