Sacramento daily record-union. [volume] (Sacramento [Calif.]) 1875-1891, 1886-05-26
DAVIS AND THE NEGRO CHILDREN

At Montgomery, Ala, the colored school
children, arrayed in holiday attire, strewed
flowers in the pathway of jeff Davis and
sang songs in praise Of the ex-rebel chief
When this news was published it caused
no. little establishment abroad People
who remembered the cruel slavery DAYS
and the dark hours of war waged on
one side solely to keep the negro in bond
age, were dumbfounded. Could it be that
the black man of the South regretted his
Liberation from chains and slavery? Could
1t be, after all the blood and treasure
poured out to preserve a Union in which
involuntary servitude, except for punish
ment for crime, should have no more an
ablding-place, that the newly -enfranchised
race gladly stopped to kiss the hand that
sought to forge its letters doubly strong
and forever blot out the hope of human
! freedom for the African of the American
continent? But there was the fact-negro
children whose parents had been owned,
bought, sold and auctioned on the block ;
whose fathers and mothers had been used
as chattels and had toiled in cotton-feld
and sugar-cane to earn ior another and not
picyaune for themselves-these children
strewed flowers in the path of the man
who, in his person, typifed the only OPP
pressor their fathers and mothers had ever
known, and these fathers aud mothers
stood in the by-ways and looked on with
apparent approval. What did it all
mean? Was the war mistake ?
Was 1t error to have freed the
negro? Were Lincoln and Grant and
Sherman and Chase and Stanton and Nor
ton and Oglesby, and all the vast array of
loyal men who stood for the cause of free
dom, wrong? Had their efforts been mis-
directed, and was this rebuke to LOYALTY.
truth, love of liberty and hatred of slavery?
Certainly it looked it. But now the I'M
seen romance of this fower-strewing bust
ness has come to light. The negroes have
made their defense they were compelled
to parade their children as they did, say
they. 1t was case of boycott, or worse,
with them, and so they acted through the
dismal farce while their souls burned
within them, and their hearts for very
shame rose in their throats. 1t is a pitv
they were not more courageous, that they
had not stood out firmly and have taken
all the chances of being prosecuted out OF
school privileges and locked out of workshop
and field. 1t is pity that they had not
more of the stuff in their composition of
which martyrs are made. But assuming
their plea to be true-ahd certainly all the
logic of long and bloody conflict fortifes
it-how does this bit of masquerading pre-
| sent the white people who conceived the
idea and enforced the acting? Are they
| so shortsighted as to entertain the belief
that the world will receive Davis as hero
and martyr, exalt his name among the
great of earth, and canonize bis bones for
deeds of valor and devotion to the cause OF
inhumanity and loyalty to the creed of hui
man bondage? The shame that for a time
we thought the negro's is theirs. We
could have pitied the ignorant black man,
not yet generation removed from the
darkness of bondage and the helplessness
of slavish dependence could have pitied
him for kissing the hand that smote him
but for the whites who drove these ex-
slaves to this humiliating alteration in the
apotheosis of dead and gone infamy and
national shame, the world of right;judging
mankind will fine only execration.
GENERAL j. JOHNSTON JONES, of North