Democratic Sentinel, Volume 22, Number 40, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 October 1898 — ONE OF THE UNRECONSTRUCTED [ARTICLE]

ONE OF THE UNRECONSTRUCTED

He Did Not Know that the War Woe on Again. "I’he war with Spain,” remarked the handsome druuAner from Philadelphia, “may, as our statesmen and orators tell ns, be a blessing In that it has brought together once more in fraternal anion the two sections of the country split wide open by the civil war, bnt while their speeches are all right in a general way, they are lacking in some of the particulars. For Instance, two weeks ago 1 was passing along a remote road in Mississippi. At the ford of a small stream 1 met a man of about thirty years, who was quite as primitive a, specimen as I ever saw In my life. I asked him the way to the place I was after, and, as he was going the same way, I asked him to join me, and wt enlivened the journey by conversation. Naturally, the first thing I spoke aboul r. "ter the preliminaries was the war, and l said I didn’t suppose he had been in the light. “ ‘No,’ he sakl, ‘but my daddy wuz.’ “ ‘How did it happen that be went in and you didn’t?’ I asked. “ ‘I wuzn’t born then, mister,’ he answered looking at me as if I ought to have known better than to ask such a question. “ ‘Oh,’ I hastened to explain when I caught onto what he was thinking about, ‘I don’t mean the last war between the North and the South, but the one that has been on this summer.’ “‘Geewhillikins,’ he exclaimed, ‘has ther’ been another war?* “ ‘Of course there has,’ I said, laughing at his surprise and his ignorance. “‘Well, I’ll be derned,’ he said, after giving himself a moment’s thought; ‘it do seem like ez es we never would git them dang Yankees licked plumb right; don’t it?’ “Then it took.me a minute to comprehend clearly what was in the mind of this far-away, unreconstructed Southerner, and when I did I never let on that he was mistaken In his facts and conclusions, but jollied him along for a mile down the road, when he turned off into the Yvoods and left me to pursue my way alone, wondering what there was in the world that we had not yet heard of.”