After All The Attempts
Made On This Plantation To Improve The Moral
Nature Of These Men And Women, Governor Aiken,
During a yellow-fever season in Savannah after
the war, while visiting the poor sufferers, intent
upon charitable works, found
In the lowest
quarter of the city, sunk in the most abject depths of
vice, men and women who had once been good
servants on his plantations.
In old times Jehossee was a happy place for
master and for slave. The governor rarely
locked the door of his mansion. The family
plate, valued at fifteen thousand dollars, was
stored in a chest in a room on the ground-floor
of the house, which had for its occupants, during
four months of the year, two or three negro
servants. Though all the negroes at the quarters,
which were only a quarter of a mile from the
mansion, knew the valuable contents of the
chest, it was never disturbed. They stole small
things, but seemed incapable of committing a
burglary.
When the Union army marched through
another part of South Carolina, where Governor
Aiken had buried these old family heirlooms and
had added to the original plate thirty thousand
dollars' worth of his own purchasing, the soldiers
dug up this treasure-trove, and forty-five
thousand dollars' worth of fine silver went to enrich
the spoils of the Union army. Soon after, three
thousand eight hundred bottles of fine old wines,
worth from eight to nine dollars a bottle, were
dug up and destroyed by a Confederate officer's
order, to prevent the Union army from capturing
them. Thus was plundered an old and revered
governor of South Carolina - one who was a
kind neighbor, a true patriot, and a Christian
gentleman.
The persecutions of the owner of Jehossee
did not, however, terminate with the war; for
when the struggle was virtually ended, and the
fair mansion of the rice-plantation retained its
heirlooms and its furniture, Beaufort, of South
Carolina, was still under the influence of the
Freedman's Bureau; and when it was whispered
that Aiken's house was full of nice old furniture,
and that a few faithful servants of the good old
master were its only guards, covetous thoughts
at once stirred the evil minds of those who were
the representatives of law and order. This house
was left almost without protection. The war was
over. 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.
A faithful negro of Jehossee Island was but
one among thousands of such cases. While the
tumult of war vexed the land, the faithful negro
overseer remained at his post to guard his late
master's property, supporting himself by the
manufacture of salt, and living in the most
frugal manner to be able to "lay by" a sum for his
old age. Having saved five hundred dollars, he
deposited them in the nearest Freedman's bank,
which, though fathered by the United States
government, failed; and the now destitute negro
found himself stripped in the same moment of
his hard-earned savings, and his confidence in
his new protectors.
As the war of the rebellion was slowly
drawing to its close, Mr. Lincoln's kind heart was
drawn towards his erring countrymen, and he
made a list of the names of the wisest and best
men of the south, who, not having taken an
active part in the strife, might be intrusted with
the task of bringing back the unruly states to
their constitutional relations with the national
government. Governor Aiken was informed
that his name was upon that list; and he would
gladly have accepted the onerous position, and
labored in the true interests of the whole people,
but the pistol of an assassin closed the life of
the President, whose generous plans of
reconstruction were never realized.
In the birth of our new Centennial let us
eschew the political charlatan, and bring
forward our statesmen to serve and govern a
people, who, to become a unit of strength, must
ever bear in mind the words of the great
southern statesman, who said he knew "no north, no
south, no east, no west; but one undivided
country."
On Monday, at ten A. M., two negroes assisted
me to launch my craft from the river's bank at
the mouth of the canal, for the tide was very
low. As I settled myself for a long pull at the
oars, the face of one of the blacks was seemingly
rent in twain, as a huge mouth opened, and a
pair of strong lungs sent forth these parting
words:
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