A FOOL'S ERRAND & Its Sequel, Bricks Without Straw. Albion Winegar Tourgée
what he had seen to Metta, — who had come with him, and stopped at the Mission-House, visiting with the teachers while the meeting was in progress, — and told her that it gave him more hope for a peaceful and prosperous future than any thing he had yet seen. The enthusiasm of a soldier for his colors had not yet died out in his breast; and he could not conceive that any organization which cultivated only an unbounded devotion for the flag in the breasts of the embryotic citizens, and kept alive the fire of patriotism in the hearts of the old Union element, should be a source of evil to any one. If he could have seen what an affront such a meeting in itself was to his neighbors, what an insult it was to them to flaunt the flag of the Union in their faces while that of the Confederacy, equally dear to them, was yet unforgotten, he would have thought differently. If he had realized how the touch of those dusky hands fouled that gay banner in the thought of so many of his white neighbors, if he had but known what tears they would be called to shed for having sung those patriot songs, his heart would have been sad indeed. But he saw no grim portents, and heeded no omen of evil.
CHAPTER XX
OUT OF DUE SEASON
WHAT is called the period of "Reconstruction" came at last; and in tracing our Fool's story it will be necessary to give some brief attention to this era of our nation's history. It is a short story as one reads it now. Its facts are few and plain. There is no escape from them. They were graven on the hearts of millions with a burning stylus. Short as is the story, it is full of folly and of shame. Regarded with whatever charity, folly and cowardice appear as its chief elements; and it has already been too bitter a harvest of crime to believe that the future holds, enough of good springing from its gloom to make it ever tolerable to the historian. Let us as briefly as possible retrace its essential features.
At the close of the great war of the Rebellion these conditions presented themselves to the statesmen of the land: — the hostile army was dispersed; the opposing governmental forms were disrupted; the Confederacy had set in a night which was declared to be eternal, and its component elements — the subordinate governments or states of which it had been composed — were dissolved.
The North, that portion of the country which for four years had constituted alone the United States of America, was full of rejoicing and gladness, which even the death of its martyr President could not long repress. Sorrow for the dead was lost in joy for the living. Banners waved; drums beat, and the quick step of homeward-marching columns echoed through every corner of the land. The clamor of rejoicing drowned the sighs of those who wept for their returning dead. All was light and joy, and happy, peaceful anticipation. The soldier had no need to beat his spear to a plowshare, or his sword into a pruning-hook. He found the plow waiting for him in the furrow. Smiling, peaceful homes, full of plenty and comfort, invited him to new exertion; and the prospect of rich returns for his labor enabled him all the more easily to forgive and forget, to let bygones be bygones, and throwing away the laurels, and forgetting the struggles and lessons of the past, contentedly grow fat on the abundance of the present and the glowing promise of the future.
At the South it was far different. Sadness and gloom covered the face of the land. The returning braves brought no joy to the loving hearts who had sent them forth. Nay, their very presence kept alive the chagrin of defeat. Instead of banners and music and gay greeting, silence and tears were their welcome home. Not only for the dead were these lamentations, but also for the living. If the past was sorrowful, the future was scarcely less so. If that which went before was imbittered by disappointment and the memory of vain sacrifice, that which was to come was darkened with uncertainty and apprehension. The good things of the past were apples of Sodom in the hand of the present. The miser's money was as dust of the highway in value; the obligor, in his indefinite promise to pay, had vanished, and the hoarder only had a gray piece of paper stamped with the fair pledge of a ghostly nation. The planter's slaves had become freedmen while he was growing into a hero, and no longer owed fealty or service to him or his family. The home where he had lived in luxury was almost barren of necessities: even the ordinary comforts of life were wanting at his fireside. A piece of cornbread, with a glass of milk, and bit of bacon, was, perhaps, the richest welcome-feast that wifely love could devise for the returning hero. Time and the scath of war had wrought ruin in his home. The hedgerows were upgrown, and the ditches stopped. Those whom he had been wont to see in delicate array were clad in homespun. His loved ones who had been reared in luxury were living in poverty. While he had fought, interest had run. War had not extinguished debt. What was a mere bagatelle when slaves and stocks were at their highest was a terrible incubus when slaves were no more, and banks were broken. The army of creditors was even more terrible than the army with banners, to whom he had surrendered. If the past was dark, the future was Cimmerian. Shame and defeat were behind, gloom and apprehension before.
Here and there throughout the subjugated land were detachments and posts of the victorious army, gradually growing smaller and fewer as the months slipped by. The forerunners of trade appeared before the smoke of battle had fairly cleared away. After a little, groups of Northern men settled, to engage in commerce, or to till the soil. The cotton and tobacco which remained of the slender crops of the years of war brought fabulous prices. The hope of their continuance was the one bright spot in the future.
The freedmen, dazed with new-found liberty, crowded the towns and camps, or wandered aimlessly here and there. Hardly poorer than their late masters, they were better prepared for poverty. They had been indurated to want, exposure, and toil. Slavery had been a hard school; but in it they had learned more than one lesson which was valuable to them now. They could endure the present better than their old masters' families, and had never learned to dread the future.
So a part of the re-united country was in light, and the other part in darkness, and between the two was a zone of bloody graves.
The question for the wise was: How shall this be made light, without darkening that? Not an easy question for the wisest and bravest; one which was sure of no solution, or only the ill one of chance or mischance, as the Fates might direct, at the hands of vanity, folly, and ambition.
For two years there were indecision and bickering and cross-purposes and false promises. The South waited sullenly; the North wonderingly.
There were four plans proposed: —
The first was, that the State machinery of the ante bellum days in the lately denationalized sections should be set in motion, and the re-organized communities restored to their former positions without change, except as to individuals; just as you renew a wheel in a worn-out clock, and, starting the pendulum, set it again to its work.
This, without unnecessary verbiage, was the President's plan. It would have done no harm if he had been content to suggest it merely; but he tried to carry it into execution, and thereby not only endangered himself, but raised hopes which he could not satisfy, and sowed the seeds of discontent with whatsoever might be done afterwards.
The second scheme was a makeshift, inspired by fright at what had been done, and a desire to avoid what must be done. Emancipation had left four millions of people in most anomalous relations to the other five or six millions under whom they had been enslaved. They were a new and troublesome element. They must be taken care of by their liberators, or abandoned. This plan was devised in the hope of finding a way to escape doing either. It was, in short, to allow the vagrant States to come back into the national fold, shorn of such strength as they might lose by deducting from their representation the ratio of representative power formerly allowed to the non-voting colored race, unless the same should be enfranchised by their organic law.
The South, which had been led by the foolish usurpative acts of the President to expect an unconditional restoration, rejected his proposition with scorn. They regarded it as an attempt to bribe them into the acceptance of the results of emancipation by the offer of power as a reward for their concurrence. Such a view can not be claimed to have been illogical.
The third plan, which remains to be considered, was of a different character. It neither shirked nor temporized. It accepted the past, and sought to guarantee