In reply to this, Thompson published the following: —
"TO THE VOTERS OF ROCKFORD COUNTY.1
"It has been industriously circulated by the opposition, for the purpose of inducing parties to withhold their support from me, that I took, and appropriated to my own use, two thousand dollars found on the person of John Walters at the time of his death. I did not wish to refer to such old matters, since to do so must necessarily involve many of our best citizens. Those were times of great excitement, and no doubt many things were done which it were better to have left undone. I was at that time the Chairman of the Executive Committee of my party for this county; and I hereby pronounce the charge that I used or appropriated a solitary cent of the money found on the person of Walters for my personal benefit or advantage, to be an infamous, unfounded, and malicious lie. On the contrary, I affirm that every cent of this money was used to defray the current expenses of the party in that campaign, to stuff ballot boxes, and to purchase certificates of election for persons now holding office in the county. I have in my hands the documents necessary to prove these facts, and will exhibit them whenever called upon so to do.
"Respectfully,
"MARCUS THOMPSON."
The Fool read these cards, and smiled, even in the sadness of the memory they evoked, at the sweet and peaceable fruits of that spirit of conciliation which had swept over the land when punishment impended over the heads of these knights of law and order, — the masked Uhlans who had ridden at midnight. As before stated, under the impulse of a divine compassion, it had been enacted in the several States, that all crimes perpetrated by Ku-Klux, Bull-dozers, and other political societies or orders, or by individuals under their authority, direction, or instigation, should be absolutely and entirely amnestied and forgiven. By reason of this enactment, it had become a matter of little or no moment who killed John Walters. That was a charge not even worthy of denial. But the charge that Colonel Thompson had appropriated the money taken from the body of the murdered man was an imputation under which no honorable man would rest.
It would seem, in some states of society, that the open confession that he had used the money thus obtained for the purpose of bribing and corrupting officers of election, would of itself be counted scarcely less nefarious. However that may be, Mr. Thompson evidently felt called upon, in vindication of his personal character, to deny the one, and assert the other. As to the mere killing of the Radical John Walters, he considered it unnecessary for him to make any admission or denial. That was an act of no more consequence than the infantile query, "Who killed Cock Robin?"
The Fool pondered this matter sadly and earnestly. He thought it indicative of a distorted and blunted moral sense; yet he could not but pity the suffering, and admire the resolution, which had wrought such insensibility of soul. He remembered the story of the Spartan youth who stood smiling and indifferent while the stolen fox gnawed at his vitals.
1 There is a remarkable similarity between these circulars and the open letters recently published by the chairman of the executive committee of Yazoo County, Mississippi, and the late Mr. Dixon, then an independent candidate for sheriff of that county.
CHAPTER XLI
"PEACE IN WARSAW"
Table of Contents
As time wore on, the personal relations which the Fool sustained to his neighbors continued to improve. It seemed as if there had been a mutual discovery of agreeable attributes. Men who had kept aloof from him during all the years of his sojourn, or had greeted him but coolly, and had been accustomed to speak of him to others with any thing but kindliness, came gradually to manifest, first tolerance, and then something of kindly partiality for him. This was especially true of the cultivated and active-minded men of the vicinage. They seemed to recognize, with a kind of surprise, the fact that the man they had been accustomed to denounce so bitterly was yet not entirely uncompanionable. So, among these, his companionship increased in a way that reminded him of the forbearance sometimes extended to a not altogether unpleasing and quite harmless lunatic.
This state of things not unfrequently caused the Fool to smile, though he had now become wise enough to prize aright the honest effort which many of these men made to overcome an hereditary prejudice, and accord to him that personal recognition which they believed him to have merited. He no longer wondered that the welcome which the ever-ready West extends to the ceaseless tide which crowds its gates was not given to him on his arrival; but he did wonder that these men could so overcome the force of a prejudice which had become instinctive, an exclusiveness which had been for some generations almost as complete as that of the Celestial Kingdom, and a pride which had been so deeply wounded by the ruthless outcome of recent events, as even to recognize his personal right and merit when the same was entirely disassociated from any recognition of political privilege. He did not deceive himself in regard to these appearances. He knew that they did not portend any cessation of what was termed political intolerance; that there was no relaxation of that feeling which would not allow practical opposition to its mandates. He knew that he was not tolerated because his political convictions were conscientiously entertained, nor because of any feeling, on the part of those with whom he was surrounded, that every man was entitled to entertain and advocate such political views as he might prefer, or that such freedom was an essential element of republican government, — but rather in spite of his conscientiousness, and because his views could have no chance of practical application in the future. The language which they held of him in their hearts, he correctly believed to be "He's a terrible Radical; but he is not so bad a man, after all. His political views can do no harm now. No doubt he is honest in them: it is natural that a Northern man should hold such views. But, otherwise, he is not so disagreeable." So his daily life became far more endurable.
A conviction of the utter powerlessness of those elements with which the Fool had politically co-operated no doubt had a certain effect upon his mind and conduct. His views had not been changed by the great counter-revolution which had swept on around him. His belief in the equality and inherency of human right, whether it be termed a principle or a prejudice, was equally strong as upon that day when it first flashed upon his mind that those around him excepted from the operation of this democratic formula all individuals of the African race. He could not bring himself to see that race, color, or previous condition of servitude, had any thing to do with the doctrine of inherent right. Neither could he adopt that belief with which the judicial philosophers of our American bench had reconciled themselves to neutrality in the more recent conflict for liberty, which is more usually formulated in the expression, "Suffrage is not a right, but a privilege." So he could not reconcile himself with any line of thought or policy which depended for its success upon silencing and negativing — either by fraud, misrepresentation, or violence — the voice of the majority. The fact that a man had been born a slave did not, in his eyes, affect the question of his inherent right; because he regarded slavery simply as an unnatural and wrongful accident, — a state of society which had been superimposed on the rightful and natural one, suspending the operation of the latter, and taking from certain parties the rights which they had. On account of which, when such false and anomalous relations ceased, all parties affected by it were relegated to those rights they would have been entitled to, if it had never existed; and these rights, he thought, must relate back to, and take effect from, the first, precisely as if this unnatural state of servitude had not intervened.
It is by no means improbable, however, that he found fewer occasions to utter such opinions, and took less trouble to inculcate such views, from the fact that it might cause suffering to those who should accept and believe the doctrine. For himself, he could not see that a man's race or condition, wealth or poverty, ignorance or intelligence, should affect his civic right: he was sure they should not, if the theory of republican and democratic governments be true, — that the majority should rule. He felt that ignorance, poverty, and an
ebon skin, were each of them terrible afflictions, and acknowledged that they might all of them be classed as public evils in our American democracy; but he could not admit that either or all of them constituted true or just limitations of political power or inherent right. He despised that lack of manhood which seeks to avoid responsibility by silence, or which submits to wrong to avoid the trouble of resistance.
Yet he admitted to himself that if he were one of the unfortunate and despised race, if he shared its poverty, inexperience, and helplessness, in short, if he were even as one of his colored fellow citizens in these respects, he would not think of such a thing as exercising or asserting his political rights, but, on the contrary, would submit, with such patience as he could command, to whatever might impend, hoping and waiting for one of two things to occur; viz., either an improvement in the temper and inclination of the ruling class, or an opportunity to get away to some region beyond their power. He really thought it an amazing piece of heroism that the colored man should so long have taken, not merely his own life, but the lives of his little ones, in his hand, and have gone to the ballot-box to deposit his ballot against such fearful odds of power. He thought that those who had died of one form of intolerance and another, since the time when a great nation falsely guaranteed to them safety, liberty, and the rights of citizenship; the thousands who fell victims to the violence of Ku-Klux and Rifle Clubs, the natural sad barbarity which inaugurated and sustained the Repressive policy, — these thousands he deemed to have constituted an army of martyrs for those very principles which he still believed, and of which he was once so proud.
Yet he did not feel that it would be right for him to induce or encourage other thousands to tempt the same fate, or to seek to exercise the same rights. He could not encourage them to do what he would not do under like circumstances. So he did not feel like urging them to make any further stand for what were termed their rights, nor to seek to gain any thing by the exercise or assertion of them.
While, therefore, he was not silenced by personal fear or violence, while he even boasted with no little stubborn pride that he could declare his opinions there as freely as on the hills of New England or in his native Western home, he could not but smile at the fallacy which lay hid in his own words. The Repressive policy had as effectually eradicated his desire for self-assertion as if it had consummated the design which was instituted at Bentley's Cross. He might not be in any danger from declaring his opinions; but he well knew that those who listened to him would invite danger and suffering, should they resolutely seek to carry his views into effect. He was, in a sense, at liberty to act as he chose; but the consequences of his action to others were so terrific that he must have been either more or less than man to have invited them. So, without abandoning his principles, as he called them, — for he had come almost to believe that what are termed "principles" are only ingrained habits of thought, and hereditary systems of belief, — he submitted quietly to having them rendered inoperative and nugatory by the suppression of the will of the majority, or, rather, by excluding from the estimate those who were opposed to the white majority. By this course he found himself enjoying a personal peace and toleration which was very grateful, after what had gone before. Where he had been hated without stint, and maligned without scruple, he was now tolerated with an "if," or commended with a "but."
The Fool felt that he was learning wisdom in thus submitting himself to the inevitable, and gradually came to regard himself and his neighbors with far more of reasonable complacency than he had hitherto done. He saw that he had expected too much, that he had been simple enough to believe that the leopard might change his spots, while yet the Ethiopian retained his dusky skin. He was even grateful for the toleration which was extended to him, and looked with a sort of wonder on the men who so far forgot, or put aside, the past, as to do this. He even advanced to the point where he looked back with no inconsiderable surprise at the state of mind which had once possessed him. He was inclined to ridicule many of the exalted notions of manhood and independence which he had once entertained, and to wonder that he could ever have been so idiotically stupid as to have expected aught except what had in fact occurred. So there arose a spirit of mutual forbearance; they forbore to take offense at his views, and he forbore to express them; they excused his views because of his Northern birth and education, and he excused their acts because of their Southern nativity and training; they disregarded his political convictions because a method had been discovered to prevent their crystallizing into results, and he refrained from urging them because to do so was a useless travail.
In fact, by this change of heart, the Fool gradually ceased to interest himself in those things which had formerly been of such engrossing moment to him. Realizing his own folly, and the foolishness of that struggle with the spirit and civilization of a great people which had been so rashly inaugurated, he sought only to enjoy what was pleasant in his surroundings, and to put behind him the conflicts of the past. He had learned that the spirit, the mode of thought, the life of the North, can not be imposed upon the South in an instant; that if the two divergent civilizations are ever to meet, and harmonize with each other, it must be when time and circumstance are more propitious than the present, or when some great convulsion has so swerved the currents, that they meet in one overwhelming flood.
So there was peace at Warrington. Without forgetting old friends, the Fool made new ones, blessed the sunshine and the shade, thought less of the welfare of his fellows and more of his own comfort, and rejoiced that the struggle which the Wise Men had cast upon his fellow-workers and himself was at an end. He had fought stubbornly and well. All admitted that. Until he felt that he was betrayed, renounced, discredited, and condemned by the very element which had thrust this burden on him, he had never thought of surrender. Having given in his adhesion to the plan of reconstruction, even though it were under protest, he felt that he could not honorably abandon the contest until discharged by the act or permission of those allies in the contest. This had been done, and he was relieved from further duty. When the power of the Nation was withdrawn, the struggle was at an end. Failure was written above the grave of the pet idea of the Wise Men. It was with a feeling of relief, if not of satisfaction, that the Fool recognized this result. He was like the battered soldier, who, though not victorious, sits in his old age, crowned with the glory of many wounds, peaceful and contented despite the undesired outcome of his warfare.
He still believed in the cause for which he had struggled, and believed in the capacity of those with whom he had worked to achieve for themselves, at some time in the future, a substantial freedom; but in that struggle he could do but little. He believed that it would be long and tedious; that the wavering balance would hang in doubt for generations; and that, in the mean time, that haughty, self-reliant, and instinctively dominant element which had already challenged the Nation to a struggle of strength, had been defeated, and out of disaster had already wrested the substantial fruits of victory, would achieve still greater triumphs, and would for an indefinite period dominate and control the national power. He saw this without envy; for it was apparent to him that a people who could perform such wonders of political legerdemain without awakening the fears, or hardly the distrust, of these whose power they had felt, but whose prestige they had overthrown — whose glory they had already trailed in the dust until it was accounted far more honorable to have struck at the Nation's life than to have interposed a life to avert the blow — had, in a peculiar degree, those characteristics which are necessary to secure and hold dominion.
While it was not without chagrin that he noted these facts, and while his cheek flushed with something like shame as he remembered the halting, shuffling indecision of his own people, and how they had pandered to a sickly sentimentalism, relinquishing therefor the substance of power, betraying and abandoning their allies, and heaping upon them the contempt and shame of the failure which resulted thereby, he could but admit, with something of pride in the
conviction, that those who had thus thwarted and overthrown their conquerors were born rulers of men, whose empire was not likely to fail from any lack of vigor. He looked forward to see them regaining the proud supremacy of ante bellum days, — not indeed with satisfaction; for what he had so long called his "principles" stood stubbornly in the way, and he was sure that they would fall some time, — but at least with admiring pride in the capabilities of that branch of the American stock.
So the days flew on, and the sun shone, and Warrington grew brighter, and Lily grew fairer and riper, and Metta looked more matronly and grave, and the Fool sat in the sunshine. The tie between Lily and her father, unusually strong before, had been redoubled in strength and intensity by her heroic act. Before, she had been his companion and his pupil; since then, she had been his companion even more frequently, but the idea of pupilage seemed to have been absorbed in the self-abnegation of parental hope and pride. To her improvement he now devoted the ripest powers of the life she had saved. Comprehending fully the defects of her somewhat desultory education, when he came to examine the results he was surprised at what had been accomplished. The basis which Metta had laid with untiring devotion had been strongly built upon by that confiding freedom which had been exercised toward her by both her parents, and especially by her father's custom of conversing with her upon all those subjects which had especially engaged his attention. The desire to converse with him intelligently upon these themes had induced her, partly by means of questions directed to such subjects, and partly by consulting the books and periodicals which he read, to familiarize herself with them, until there were few subjects of current thought upon which she was not able to converse, not only intelligibly, but readily, and with a clearness and originality which had surprised the few strangers with whom she had opportunity to exchange thought. Seeing this foundation laid, Servosse decided to continue her education in pretty much the same manner, directing it now towards specific objects, and making what are termed accomplishments the fringe of her education, rather than its web, it being his impression that about the same relation should be maintained between them as should exist in real life. Being of the opinion that true education consisted more in a power to master a subject, to perceive, discover, and marshal facts in relation thereto, than in the mere acquisition of those facts, he did not confine her to dry details, nor occupy her mind with the probing of specific systems. For her sake, he turned again to those fields of thought which had been the delight of his youth and early manhood, and with a gentle hand led her feet through the fair fields of literature, — the history of the world's thought. Side by side with this, he unfolded before her that other book which we call history, — the story of the world's outward happenings, the deeds of her heroes, the wrongs of her martyrs, and the sins of her great criminals, together with the little which we know of the sufferings, burdens, and misfortunes of her great masses. She had never known any other school than her home, and no masters but her devoted parents. For her sake they had banished from the home-circle the language of their childhood, and had confined themselves to dialects which had grown unfamiliar to their tongues from long disuse. She had learned three things which Servosse accounted all important; first, that education was a life-work, and not a matter to be crowded into a few early years; second, that the learner must in most matters be also the teacher; or, in other words, that the province of the teacher is rather to test the attainments of the learner than to direct his acquirements; and, third, that to know is to observe, to understand, and to delineate.
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