They wel-
comed freedom with a cry. They shrank from the master who
still strove for their chains; they fled to the friends that had
freed them, even though those friends stood ready to use
them as a club for driving the recalcitrant South back into
loyalty. So the cleft between the white and black South grew.
Idle to say it never should have been; it was as inevitable as
its results were pitiable. Curiously incongruous elements were
left arrayed against each other,--the North, the government,
the carpet-bagger, and the slave, here; and there, all the
South that was white, whether gentleman or vagabond, hon-
est man or rascal, lawless murderer or martyr to duty.
Thus it is doubly difficult to write of this period calmly, so
intense was the feeling, so mighty the human passions that
swayed and blinded men. Amid it all, two figures ever stand
to typify that day to coming ages,--the one, a gray-haired
gentleman, whose fathers had quit themselves like men, whose
sons lay in nameless graves; who bowed to the evil of slavery
because its abolition threatened untold ill to all; who stood at
last, in the evening of life, a blighted, ruined form, with hate
in his eyes;--and the other, a form hovering dark and mother-
like, her awful face black with the mists of centuries, had
aforetime quailed at that white master's command, had bent
in love over the cradles of his sons and daughters, and closed
in death the sunken eyes of his wife,--aye, too, at his behest
had laid herself low to his lust, and borne a tawny man-child
to the world, only to see her dark boy's limbs scattered to the
winds by midnight marauders riding after "damned Nig-
gers.
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