South Carolina had bent her proud head
in agony over her burned plantations and
desolate homes. The victorious army was now
proclaiming peace, and generous treatment to a
fallen foe. Then to what an almost
unimaginable state of demoralization must some of the
freedmen's protectors have fallen, when they
sent a gunboat to Jehossee Island, and rifled the
old house of all its treasures!
To-day, the governor's favorite sideboard
stands in the house of a citizen of Boston, as
a relic of the war. O, people of the north,
hold no longer to your relics of the war, stolen
from the firesides of the south! Restore them
to their owners, or else bury them out of the
sight of your children, that they may not be led
to believe that the war for the preservation of
the Great Republic was a war for plunder; - else
did brave men fight, and good women pray in
vain. Away with stolen pianos, "captured"
sideboards, and purloined silver! What but
this petty plundering could be expected of men
who robbed by wholesale the poor negro, to
protect whose rights they were sent south?
The great political party of the north became
the pledged conservator of the black man's
rights, and established a Freedman's Bureau,
and Freedman's banks to guard his humble
earnings. All know something of the workings
of those banks; and to everlasting infamy must
be consigned the names of many of those
conducting them, - men who robbed every one
of these depositories of negro savings, and left
the poor, child-like freedman in a physical state
of destitution, and in a perfect bewilderment of
mind as to who his true friend really was.
