The Anderson intelligencer. [volume] (Anderson Court House, S.C.) 1860-1914, 1870-09-08
Southern Patience.

line SC. Louis lGpuOstCuH Patyo tulo Juoo WIZ
ute to the Southern character: Patience was
not once esteemed Southern virtue, but annie
tions sometimes reveal heroic attributes that
prosperity and success cannot develop. Our
Southern brethren were thought to be brave
and passionate, but the slow-burning furnace
thew have been subjected to for five years past
has shown that, without being less brave and
passionate than we esteemed them, they possess
profounder properties of heroism than they
have been credited with. Their condition at
the close of four years exhaustive and un-
successful war, in which absolute failure had
followed the expenditure of all their resources,
was pitable to degree that has seldom been
witnessed. Defeated, disarn1ed, and utterly
impoverished, would appear to make up the
full measure of misery to a people; but IN the
case of our Southern countrymen there was
added to this the rare humiliation OF being
placed in political subsection to their own slaves
AN ignominy which none but themselves can
fully comprehend.
For a time the accumulated burdens seemed
more than they could bear, and the commence
ment of respondent migration to Brazil was
apprehensively regarded as the initiative OF
movement that might possibly make the South
the desolate. exclusive home of semi-barbaric
Africans. But fortunately for their Northern
kinsmen. and fortunately for the Government
that seemed resolved to drive them to despair,
the Southern leaders came forward and exerted
the personal authority which had demonstrated
such potency in the war. They condemned the
Brazil movement, and advised their people to
remain at home and accept what might come.
Their counsel was obeyed, and they thus be-
came the instruments of saving to the country
an element which that country appeared anx-
ious to get rid Of but which it will yet learn to
appreciate
Beaten in the war, disarmed, deprived of the
political rights which were part OF them
selves, harassed by constant military lnterter-
ence, and annoyed by the offensive conduct OF
the ignorant masses into whose hands had been
entrusted the authority they once welded, there
was nothing left them but to seek partial OBJ
livion of their affections in hard labor in their
mortgaged cotton field while their ex-slaves
wallowcd in franchises they knew not the value
of, and an unfriendy party in Congress spent
year after year in passing measures to perpetu-
ate the subiection Of four million Americans to
four million Africans. It was this weary or
deal of five years, in which Southern heads
were smitten down whenever they dare to lift
themselves up, that has added to the Southern
character fortitude that it was not supposed
to possess, and such as few people have ever ex-
hibited. Had this people been brave and pas
sionate only, they would have broken out in re-
peated futile resistance to the Federal author
ity.
But they made no such resistance. Their
submission at Appomatox was absolute, and
has been maintained and unbroken every hour
since then. They recognize that it was their
duty to suffer, and they have endured their suf-
ferings, apathy and despair, but with an un-
murmnring patience thoroughly heroic. They
have added their valuable little cotton crops,
produced by their own labor, to the wealth of
the country they have assisted to pay the debt
that represents the cost of their defeat; they
have submitted without opposition to orders
and process issued by those who were once their
servitors they have seen their hardly earned
substance devoured by greedy and charactcrlcss
adventures from distant States, and they have
done and borne all this without either resent
ment or influence.
In view of the spectacle they have thus pre-
sented, and are still presenting, tmay be asked
in their behalf, if it is not time that their op-
pressions should cease? Has the Government
of the United States, this day, more valuable
and virtuous citizens in any part of its entire
domain than those prescribed white people of
the South? And can any government, with
Justice to itself, persist in depressing and dis
abling people whose only answer to the in
Fiction is the mute elo9uence of fortitude
that has scarcely parallel"