Democratic Sentinel, Volume 4, Number 12, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 30 April 1880 — THE SLANDERED SOUTH. [ARTICLE]

THE SLANDERED SOUTH.

Sectional Animosity Rebuked from the Pulpit—Republican Lies Laid Bare in Burning- Language— Sermon by Bev. T. Be Witt Talmage, of Brooklyn, N. Y. A few weeks ago, to meet engagementss in nine of the Southern cities, and to catch a glimpse of tho Southern springtime, and to see how that region is recuperating from the desolations of the war, I started south, equipped with a mind full of questions and hungry for information on all subjects, social political, moral and religious. I started on the tour with no partisan predilections and no prejudices, and resolved to tell on my return what I saw, whether it might be generally approved or denounced by one or both sections. 1 had no political record to guard or defend, for my chief work in the ministry has been done since the war closed. My admiration for. the Democratic party and the Republican party, as parties, is so small that it would take one of McAllister s most powerful magnifying glasses to discover anything of it American politics are rotten, ana that party steals the most which has the most chance. I had all the doors of information opened to me. I talked with high and low—Governors and water-carriers, clergymen and laymen, lawyers, doctors, editors and philanthropists, with the black and the wliite; old residents of the South and new settlers from the North—and I have found that there have been the most persistent and outrageous misrepresentations in regard to the South by correspondents of secular and religious journals, and by men who, overbearing and dishonest in their behavior at the South, have had intimation given to them that their company was not desirable. If a man go South and behave well, he will be treated well. There is no more need of vigorous governmental espionage in Atlanta, Augusta or Macon than there is in Boston or New York. The present disposition of the South has been so wrongly set forth that I propose now, so far as I am able, to correct the stereotyped slanders concerning it.

First, it has often been represented to us that the South were longing for the old system of negro slavery. So far from that being true, they are all glad to have got rid of it. The planters told me that they can cultivate their lields with less expense under the new system than the old. A gentleman who had 125 slaves before the war told me that the clothing and feeding of them, the taking care of the aged who could not work, and the provision for helpless colored children, was an expense and anxiety and exhaustion. Now the planters have nothing to do but pay the wages when they are due; the families look after their own invalids and minors. So they all say without one exception that I could find. If at the ballot-boxes of the Southern States, the question should now be submitted, “ Shall negro slavery be reinstated ?” all the wards, and all the cities, and all the counties, and all the States would give a thundering negative. They fought i to keep it eighteen years ago, but now there is universal congratulation at its overthrow. Thank God that North and South at last are one on that subject. And this effort of our Northern politicians to keep the subject of slavery rolling on is as useless and inapt as to make the Dorr rebellion of Rhode Island or Aaron Burr’s attempt at the overthrow of the United States Government the test of our fall elections. The whole subject of American slavery is dead and damned. I inquired every- j where", “How do the colored people work under the new plan?” The answer was, “Well, very well. We have no trouble. Just after the war I there was the disorganization that naturally came of a new order of things, but now they work well. They work far better than Northcrnjlaborers that come here, because our colored people can better endure our cli- | mate, and on a warm summer’s day at the nooning they will lie down in the field to enjoy the ! sun.” My friends, all that talk about dragging ' rivers and lanes of the South to haul ashore black people, murdered and flung in, though seriously believed by many people at the North, I is a falsehood too ridiculous to mention in a religious assembly. The white people of the South feel their dependence on the dark people for the cultivation of their lands, and the dark people feel their dependence on the white people for their wages. From what I have observed here at the North of the oppression of some of our female clerks in dry-goods stores,and the struggls of many of our young men on insufficient salaries, which they must take or get nothing at all, I give as my opinion that to-day there is more consideration and sympathy for colored 1 labor at the South than there is consideration and sympathy for employes in some of the j stores on Fulton avenue, Brooklyn, or Broad- I way, New York, Washington street, Boston, or Chestnut street, Philadelphia. All the world over there are tyranical employers, and for their ! maltreatment of subordinates, white or black, they are to be execrated ; but the place for us to begin reformation is at home. Another misrepresentation in regard to the j South 1 cure when I say that they are not antagonistic to the settlement of Northern men within their borders. We have been told that Northerners going there are kukluxed, crowded out of social life, unrecognized, and in every way made uncomfortable. But the universal sentiment of the South, as I found it, was “Send down your Northern capitalists; send down your Northern farming machine; buy plantations; open stores ; build cotton factories and rice mills. Come—come right away. Come by tens of thousands and millions.” Of course they have no more liking for Northern fools or Northern braggarts than we have. A man that goes South and sets dowp his valise at the depot and goes upon the nearest plantation to say by word or manner to the planter, “I have come down hero to show you ignorant people how to farm. We whipped you in the war, and now we propose to whip you in agriculture. I am from Boston, I am. That’s the hub. You look very much like the man that I shot at South Mountain. I think it must have been your brother. I marched right through here in the Fourth Regiment of volunteers. I killed and quartered a heifer on your front stoop. What a poor miserable race of peoplg you Southerners are. Didn’t we give it to you? Ha, ha I” Such a man as that, to say the least, will not make a favorable impression upon the neighborhood where he comes to settle He will not very soon get to be deacon in church, and if he" opens a store he will not have many customers, and if he should happen to get a free and rapid ride on that part of a fence which is most easily removed, and*hould be set down without much reference to the desirability of the landing-place, you and I would not be Protestants. Any moral man who will go South and exercise just ordinary common sense will be welcomed, made at home, and, coming from Brooklyn, will be treated just as well as if he came from Mobile. I might give many illustrations—l give one. A member of this church moved to Charleston, S. C., seven or eight years ago. He went without fortune. By his mercantile assiduity he toiled on up. Was he well received ? Judge for yourselves, as I tell you that when, a few days ago, his body was taken to the Episcopal church of which he had become a vestryman, for the obsequies, the members of the Board of Trade, the orphan children of the asylum of which he was a director, and a great throng of the best citizens, assembled amid a wealth of floral and musical tribute, all making an occasion, described by the Charleston Courier, as almost unparalleled at the obsequies of any private citizen. This side of heaven, there is no more hospitable people than the people of the South. And now I bring a message from all the States of the South which I visited, inviting emigration thither. The South is to rival the West as an opening field for American enterprise. Horace Greeley’s advice to go West is to have an addenda in “go South.” The first avalanche of population thither will make their fortunes. It is a national absurdity that so much of the cotton of the South should be transported, at great expense, to the North to be -tranformed into articles of use. The few iketories at the South are the pioneers of the uncounted spindles which are yet to begin the hum of their grand march on the banks of the Savannah, theAppalachicola and the Tombigbee. There stands Georgia with its 58,000 t quare miles, and South Carolina with its 34.000 square miles, and Alabama with its 50,722 square miles, and North Carolina with 50,704 square miles, and the other States, none of them with more than 10 per cent, of their resources developed. When will the overcrowded populations of our great cities take the wings of the morning and fly to the regions where they shall have room to turn round and breathe, and expand and became masters of their own cornfields, or rice swamps, or cotton plantations, or timber forests ? Land to be had there in the Southern States from $1 to S2O an acre. Only sls required to get there, if you are not too particular as to how you go. Do you say the climate is hot? The thermometer everv summer runs up higher in New York than in North Carolina and Georgia, though there the heat is more prolonged. Afraid of the I fever ? The death rates of Michigan and Geor-

gia are equal, while the death-rate, according to the last census, is less, according to the number of population, in Georgia than in Connecticut and Maine. Whether you go West or South, you will probably have one acclimating attack. It is only a different style of shake. There is no need that England or Ireland or Scotland any longer suffer for room or bread. The tides of emigration now pouring into this country are greater than at any time in history. Twentyone thousand six hundred and fifty-eight emigrants last month arrived in New York, 5,000 emigrants last Tuesday in and around Castle Garden. This is only an intimation of what is to come. Make two currents. While you put on extra trains to take them West by the Pennsylvania, Erie, and New York Central, put on extra trains on the Baltimore and Washington and Chattanooga and Atlanta and Charleston routes to take them South. There are tens of thousands of fortunes waiting for men who have the enterprise to go ana win them. The South beckons you to come. Stop cursing the South and lying about the South, and go and try yourselves the cordiality of" her welcome, and the resources of her mines, her plantations, and her forests. Perhaps that is the way that God is going to settle tliis sectional strife. There will be hundreds of thousands of our brightest, most intelligent, most moral young men who will go South for residence, and they will invite the daughters of the South to help them build homes amid the magnolias and orange groves, and their children will be half North and half South, half Georgia and half Vermont, half South Carolina ana half New York ; and thereafter to divide the country you would have to ’ divide the children with some such sword as Solomon sarcastically proposed for the division of the contested child, and the Northern father will say to the Southern mother, “Come, my dear : I guess we had better put this political feud to sleep in this cradle. ’’ The statement so long rampant at the North that the South did not want industrious, useful and moral Northern settlers among them I brand as a political falsehood, gotten up and kept up for political purposes. • Again, I have to correct the impression that the South are bitterly against the Government of the United States" The South submitted to amis certain questions, and most of them are submissive to the decision. There is no fight in them. We hear much about the fire-eaters of the South, but if they eat fire they have a private table and private platter of coals in a private room. I sat at many tables, but I did not see anything of that kind of diet. Neither could I see any spoon or knife or fork that seemed to have been used in fire-eating. Why, sirs, I never saw more placid people—some of them with all their property gone, and starting life at 40 or 60 years of age, with one leg or one arm or one eye, the member missing sacrificed in battle! It is simply miraculous that those people feel so cheerful and so amiable. It is dastardly mean to keep representing them as acrid and waspish and saturnine and malevolent. I have traveled as much as most people, in this and other lands, and I have vet to find a more affable, delicately sympathetic, whole-hearted people than the people of the South. They are to-dey loyal and patriotic, and if foreign foes should attempt to set foot on this soil for the purpose of intimidation and conquest, the forces of Bragg and Geary, McClellan and Beauregard, Lee and Grant, would come shoulder to shoulder, the blue and the gray, and the cannons of Fort Hamilton, Sumter and Pickens would join in one chorus of thunder and flame. The fact is that this country has had a big family fight; but let a neighbor come in to interfere, and you know how that always works. Husband and wife in contest, the one with a cane and the other with a broomstick, if some impertinent individual attempts to come between them he gets both cane and broomstick. I have sometimes thought the North and South would never understand each other until the approach of a common enemy compels them to make a common cause. If foreign despotisms think we have no cohesion, no centripetal force as a nation, they have only to try it. The fact that instead of thirteen colonies we embrace everything from Atlantic to Pacific oceans implies no weakening of national grip. By steam and electricitv our country is within easier control than at the foundation of the Government. It took two weeks to get official communication across the country at the start. Now it takes two minutes. San Francisco and Galveston and Des Moines are nearer to Washington now than Richmond was then. There never was a time when this nation was so thoroughly one as to-day. Would to God we might more thororoughly appreciate it. You see the whole impression of my Southern journey was one of high encouragement. The great masses of the people are right. If a halfdozen politicians at the North and a half dozen at the South would only die, we would have no more sectional acrimony. It is a case for the undertakers. If they will bury these few demagogues out of sight we will pay the entire expense of the catafalque and epitaph, and furnish enough brass bands to play the rogue’s march. But time, under God, will settle it. The generations that follow us will sit in amazement at a state of things which made the national graveyards of Murfreesboro, Gettysburg and Richmond an awful possibility.