Two Wars: An Autobiography of General Samuel G. French

From the wording of her indenture to her master Bordley, it would appear that verily her second condition was worse than her first, and her last worse than all; for in her fifty-seventh year she was to be turned adrift in her old age, possessed of only two suits of apparel – "one of which is to be new" – to struggle with adversity. She was now, however, free to play cards and dice, go to alehouses, taverns, and playhouses, and dance and contract marriage, etc.

It would be interesting to know how she passed the remaining years of her life. That is buried in oblivion. Had she remained a slave – "held to a service of labor," which was her first condition – she would have had a home for life. To depend on the benevolence of the Northern people was to be in a worse condition than that of a slave, for the slave did know that he had a friend and a home for life.

How little is known, even at this day, at the North of the general relation between the owner and the slave in the latter days of slavery's existence! and I hope it will not shock the sensibility or puritanical feelings of ye scribes and Pharisees when I state that in the family graveyard near Columbus, Ga., where my wife's father and mother and some of her brothers and sisters rest, there repose the remains of their Aunt Betty, who nursed all the children of the family. She was, in name, a slave; in reality, she had all the privileges of a member of the family, and when she died the children declared she should sleep beside them in death, as she had lived with them in life and would rise with them at the resurrection.

I could tell where a slave, after her death, was carried near fifty miles to sleep in the family graveyard, with her master and mistress, who had preceded her to the sacred spot where dust returns to dust. These, and other instances I know, speak of kind feelings, and are significant of the ties that existed between the master and the slave; and this intimacy between master and slave, and almost companionship of children and servant, were more common than any harsh behavior toward them. A man who abused a slave was held in contempt, and was, I suppose, shunned by his neighbors. I had no experience with such men. Once the overseer on our place was going to punish a man for persisting in annoying another. The alleged offender sent for me, and I investigated the case. He was charged with being too gallant with another man's wife, an accusation very prevalent in high society now, when my lady can get a divorce in the morning and marry her admirer in the evening, or the husband do so, as the case may be. No punishment was given the negro in this matter, for the want of evidence; and I here state that no whipping of a negro ever occurred on the plantation.

The difference between the wage earner and the slave is, the right to change residence. The former, with his family of wife and children, is too often, for want of means, unable to avail himself of his right, and is therefore practically on a level in this respect with the bondsman, and he becomes reduced to the slavery of wages, which in this age – howling for wealth – becomes a pitiful condition, from which he seeks relief in strikes, so often in vain. He cannot succeed against the money power of the great trusts and monopolies, the power of the State and military interference of the United States forces; so in the end he is only steeped deeper in poverty. From all this the slave was free and happy, if his laughter, song, and dance indicate contentment.

I do dislike egotism, and yet to establish the fact that slaves did possess the power to change masters and homes – and you will admit that practical experience is better than any theory – I will tell you plainly what occurred to me touching this matter.

As administrator of an estate where the land and servants had to be sold, the heads of the families were given notice, months in advance, that they could visit or otherwise see the owners of the neighboring plantations and other persons with whom they would like to live, and induce them to buy the family at the sale: and when the sale was made I think all had selected homes. In this case, at the sales many were informed that they would be bid in by the heirs. I never knew a family to be separated.

I believe it was in the autumn of 1856 I wished to obtain a good cook, and went to New Orleans. Beard & May, cotton brokers, informed me that the German Vice Consul was going home, and had the best cook in the city. I called on Mr. Kock at his office, and he gave me a note to his wife, stating the object of my calling. Madame sent for the cook, and she came into the drawing room and was introduced to me, and my business made known to her. She was a fine-looking woman. She asked me the usual questions – such as "Biddy" in the intelligence office asks persons in quest of a cook – about where I lived, number in the family, if there was a church near by, nearest town, etc. Obtaining the desired information, she told her mistress she did not wish to leave the city, and she was directed to retire. Mrs. Kock said she wished the servant to be satisfied with her new home, etc.

Next Beard & May sent me to a French family. Madame came in, and sent for the cook she wished to sell. This one varied the questions, she asked even as to hot dinners on Sundays, and then she said she would not like to live on a plantation; and so the visit was fruitless. Then Beard & May told me to question the servants they held for sale, and there I found a woman about thirty years old, of fine personal appearance, who was willing to accept a position in the country, and I bought her.

A few days after, Beard & May called on me and said my cook, Maria, wanted to see me; so I went to her, and she then told me she wished I would buy her husband Jim. I expressed my displeasure that she had not told me she was married before I bought her. However, I bought Jim to satisfy her, and took them both home with me. Maria was installed in the kitchen, and proved to be a good cook. Jim had charge of the horses, etc. At the beginning of summer we went North. Jim was put to work in the field. He soon ran away, stayed in the woods by day, came home often at night, and told the overseer that he would come home when I did. When we returned in the autumn, Jim came to see me and explained that he had never worked in the field; so he worked again at the stables and ginhouses. I now learned that Maria and Jim had never been married. When spring came, I told Jim I would take him back to New Orleans, and he was willing to go. I left him with Beard & May to be sold. When we returned in the fall Jim had not been sold. In the winter I visited New Orleans. The steamer arrived during the night. In the morning as I was going on shore I saw a number of fine hacks on the levee awaiting passengers; among them the driver of a fine carriage cried out: "O Master Sam, here is your carriage; ride with me. Don't you know Jim? Mighty glad to see you, Master Sam." He drove me to the St. Charles Hotel. Soon Jim came to see me, and I told him if he did not find a home for himself before I left the city I would have him sold to some one out in the country without consulting him. The result was, Jim got the owner of the livery stable to buy him, and that was the last I saw of Jim. No one would purchase Jim because he told every one who wanted him, "If you buy me, I will run away;" and so he hired himself out for about nine months, at twenty dollars per month, as a hack driver, which supported himself free of expense to me.

And now about Maria: In the spring she got in the habit of having fits, and would foam at the mouth, and the old cook would have to come over. This continued over two weeks.

One morning I saw my neighbor Courtney riding up to my gate rather rapidly. He was excited and said: "Capt. French, I want you to buy my man Parker or sell me Maria." Parker had the main charge of some one hundred and thirty servants on Courtney's place. As I had no use for Parker, I would not entertain buying him, and replied that I would sell him Maria. When he became more composed, he told me that "Parker had become stupid, thoughtless, and could not remember what was told him, and when I called him to account he informed me that he was so much in love with Maria that his mind was all 'up-sot,' but if I would only buy Maria he would be so happy, and be the best hand on the place if she were his wife." And so Maria became Parker's wife, and never feigned having fits any more. Marriage cured them. Her fits were all "put on" to get a new home at Courtney's.

I was now quite tired and wearied with cooks, but nevertheless, being in New Orleans, I made another venture. Beard & May said they had a good cook. She was a woman of about twenty, with a jolly round face, and said she was a fine cook, and I bought her. Her name was something like Amanda, as I remember it. She was a willing, good-natured creature, but so careless that half the dishes were spoiled; so during the summer I took her to New Orleans and left her with Beard & May (early in the morning), then drove to the hotel. I had finished my breakfast and was smoking in the rotunda, when I saw Amanda approaching, accompanied by a tall, elderly gentleman, to whom I was introduced, naming him "my new master." He was from one of the parishes of the State. He asked me some questions about his new servant, and said he thought her a good cook, and honest, from what she told him. He apologized for the early call, as he had to leave on the morning steamboat. Bidding Amanda good-by, I concluded to abide with our old cook again.

I have briefly sketched these, some of my experiences with slaves, to establish the fact that bondsmen on the Mississippi did have the privilege of selecting very often the persons with whom they wished to live, as well as the place, which is by poverty denied the poor white men when in the iron grip of the rich corporations, where they are held by the relentless "slavery of wages."

A man acting for himself and in the interest of his family must have feelings of humanity for his servants. Their welfare and happiness are indissolubly linked with his, aside from his accountability for his acts to his God. Corporations have no souls, and no God to worship except Mammon. They have no ear for the misfortunes or ills of an employee, no physician for sickness, no priest for the dying, nor coffin for the dead. All these the slave has.

Truly the relentless thirst for gold over the road to wealth crushes to death like a worm the poor laborer beneath its tread. There is no provision in the charter of a trust company for care of life or soul of a laborer, and his condition is disguised in the (unknown to him) glorious privileges of independence, liberty, and freedom. What a mockery are all these human rights to a family perishing in a hut by a coal mine for want of clothing and food, with no ministering hand! And yet all the wealth in the world was obtained from the earth by the miner and farmer.

God in the beginning proclaimed the relations and the obligations between master and bond servant in Holy Writ, and he will judge them by their deeds; but God hath not, nor hath man defined the humanities inseparable between a trust company and its employee, except by injunctions and courts and bayonet rule.

Bad as it is, some may be inclined to believe that Betty, under her indenture, had more privilege and enjoyment than most of the white laborers in the employment of many monopolies.

In connection with this indenture is presented the picture of the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher selling slaves on his theatrical pulpit stage in Plymouth Church, Brooklyn, to raise money, and fire the Northern hearts against the South.

The audience is large, and their countenances express delight at this fine scene of buffoonery, which was then considered one of the "eight great personal events of the nineteenth century," and hence worthy of preservation. When passion shall have subsided, and calm judgment presides, it will perhaps be regarded as an act of charlatanry unworthy of so great a man. These great personal events are said to be:

• When Jenny Lind sung in Castle Garden.

• When Henry Ward Beecher sold slaves in Plymouth pulpit.

• When the Prince of Wales was in America.

• When Henry Clay bade farewell to the Senate.

• When Grant went around the world.

• When Lincoln was first inaugurated.

• When Kossuth rode up Broadway.

• When Mackay struck the great bonanza.

I regarded Mr. Beecher an orator, and have listened to his discourses on theology to his congregation with admiration; but his attacks on slavery were made perhaps with as little knowledge of the condition of the bondsmen as that distinguished kinswoman of his, Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, has shown in her ideal novel, "Uncle Tom's Cabin." They produced a diseased state of public sentiment, and Demos, turned loose, strained the ties of love and kindred relations that bound the States by the compact, and precipitated secession and war on the South.

If slavery be considered a wrong, and no doubt it was, then, in justice to all concerned in its establishment in the United States and to the condition of the slaves in 1861 and the means resorted to for their liberation, it becomes a matter of impartial consideration, and when that day comes, the South will stand before the world vindicated, and the verdict will be both parties guilty, as will be shown hereafter.

Slavery was only made possible by bringing in ships negroes from Africa; and that was mainly done by the people of Old England, New England, and New York City. They were large ship owners. They sent their vessels for slaves, and obtained them by theft, by capturing them in the midnight glare of burning villages, or by purchase. They owned them all. They were indeed inhuman slave dealers. They sold some of them to all the thirteen colonies, and to the several States formed of them under the constitution, and they continued this slave trade legally until 1808, and illegally until 1862. (See "American Slave Trade," by J. R. Spears.)

In Old England the question of slavery was discussed calmly, with justice and common sense, and they arrived at an equitable decision – viz., that the government should compensate the owners for their property rights in persons held to labor or (in language undisguised) in slaves, and, as I have already stated, $100,000,000 was appropriated to purchase them and set them free, an act of justice to the owners.

In this land of freedom the pious people of the North (I speak plainly) sold their slaves to the planters in the South, and, with the slave money in their pockets, rejoiced that they were not like the people South, and as Pilate did (figuratively) they took water and washed their hands before the people, saying: "We are innocent of the sin of slavery now!"

Next, from causes already stated, like the crusaders to the Holy Land, the fanatical crowd came down South, and took the slaves that they once owned and sold from the purchasers, and forced the States to set them free without compensation. By this act they took over $3,000,000,000 worth of private property from the owners – the greatest robbery ever committed on earth.

In the common courts of the country it has been adjudged, I believe, that the thief is a greater criminal than the receiver of the stolen property; but when the thieves steal the same property a second time, what should the sentence of the court be? Of that crime the North stands convicted.

There is a higher power than any established by man.

"God moves in a mysterious wayHis wonders to perform."

In days of old he arraigned nations before his august court, and they lived or perished at his will. The day is not far distant when the South, at his command and in his own way, will arise from their down-trodden condition, to the surprise of their oppressors. Her fields will blossom as the rose, the busy hum of industry will be heard in the land, and the commercial sails of the world will ride on the waters of the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, plying to South America and the Orient through the canal that will connect the two great oceans. What position then will the New England States hold in the general prosperity of the States? Then it will be seen, "Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord." And even now along the Atlantic seaboard great steamers go North mainly laden with articles made from wood, lumber, pig iron, cotton goods, fruit, and the great metropolitan hotels and the people generally depend on the fields and gardens of the South for their vegetables half the year; and so it goes on in arithmetical progression of increase.

Leaving out the negroes, the South has a homogeneous population; the solidarity of the nation will rest on her. In 1861 there was less than one foreigner to the hundred in the population of North Carolina, while in the West it ranged from thirty to sixty per cent. (See census reports.) The cities of Chicago and New York contain a population which will be found to be a conglomeration of all the peoples on the face of the earth – with their political ideas, their morality, their vices, their language, and their religion – and on no question will they agree unless purchased for a price, as a business transaction, for money, and "the love of money is the root of all evil," and the history of Rome will be repeated.

Historians estimate the number of slaves carried from Africa to the Americas and the West Indies Islands to have been from eight to twelve millions, out of which number about five hundred thousand died or were killed at sea, and their bodies were thrown overboard. And now let the sin of slavery rest on the North or the South, as it will finally be declared by the consensus of public opinion, when investigation discloses and proclaims the horrible cruelty of the Northern slave owners who brought them here, and contrast it with the amelioration of their condition and their advancement in intelligence and morality acquired by the teaching of the best men and women in the South. This opinion will be recorded.

The negro, as sold by his first owner, was a stupid animal speaking a jabbering lingo; he was now taught and trained in civilization until he was adjudged by the North, when set free, capable to perform all the duties pertaining to the high official positions to which the United States government did appoint him or his brother negroes elected him. Yes, under the teachings and training of their owners on the plantations and in the cities, while slaves, they were converted from fetichism to Christianity, and from cannibalism to gentility of living, and their beastly nature curbed by moral surroundings and force of example; and now, to humiliate the Southern people, who were disfranchised, political plans were arranged to have negro Senators elected instead of whites, and from Mississippi two negroes were occupying at different periods seats in the United States Senate chamber. Their names were Revels and Bruce. The latter I have seen riding through my plantation. From Senator he became Register of the Treasury of the United States, a position long held by my friend, Gen. W. S. Rosecrans, United States army.

Out of the three million soldiers that were in the United States army, there were not as many discharged soldiers holding office in the South in 1869 as there were ex-slaves out of the four hundred thousand negro men eligible to office. This indicates either the soldiers' unfitness for office, or that the selection of negroes was made to humiliate the people of the South.

It may be asked: Whence came Christianity among the slaves? Did it come by nature? No, nature is uniform in her laws, and developed no Christianity among the negroes in Africa, or elsewhere when left to themselves; hence it came by teaching, for on Sundays the master and mistress, nurse and children, in the carriage were always escorted to church by the young men on horseback, dressed in their clean and best attire, where all worshiped together in the Lord's house. Also, on many plantations, clergymen were maintained with ample compensation by two or three neighboring planters to preach the gospel to their people.

Whence came qualifications for business, unless taught by their owners? Reading, writing, and arithmetic do not come by birth, and the peasant and the prince alike have to study to comprehend even "the rule of three."

It is not pleasant to refer to the want of information among the common people in the North and West in regard to the real relation of the bondsmen to their owners, or to the ignorance of the masses of the nations of Europe on this question. In Europe they had a foretaste of freedom in 1848; but slavery in the United States was a sealed letter to them all. For the North there is this excuse: the almost nonintercourse between the North and the South precluded personal observation, and they were taught in the schools, in the lecture room, from the rostrum and the pulpit, by the press in every village, town, and city all over the land, to believe the fabulous accounts of the ills of slavery to be true, and that the slave owners were cruel, illiterate, uncultured, and had "plantation manners," unfit for association with the immaculate people of the North. The populace of the North learned nothing from the utter failure of the advent of John Brown in Virginia, where slaves fled from him with horror and left him to his deserved fate; on the contrary, he was by the North held up as a saint who gave his life for freedom's cause.

Far and wide the abolition and free-soil party preached a crusade against the people of the South to liberate the slaves, and Mr. Beecher's picture shows to what low means they stooped to awaken enthusiasm for their cause. It spread to Europe, and when they commenced the war the illiterate masses there joined in the crusade against the South, as they did to rescue the holy sepulcher from the hands of the infidel, on which occasion, Proctor in his "History of the Crusades" says, "the Welshman forgot his hunting, the Scot his companionship with vermin, the Dane his carouse, and the Norwegian his raw fish," in their fanatical desire to reach Jerusalem; and so again the Welshman, the Scot, the Norwegian, the Dane, the German, and the rest of Europe came over here to enlist as substitutes in the Federal army in its crusade against the institution of slavery which was founded by their ancestors.

Herod the Great, an Idumean, to secure the throne of Jerusalem to the Idumean line of Jews, murdered his wife, the beautiful Mariamne, and his two sons by her. They were handsome, had been educated in Rome, were very accomplished, and beloved by the Jewish people; but as they were, through their mother, of the Asmonean line of Jews, Herod condemned them to death to secure the succession as he desired. When the war between the States ended, the white people of the Confederacy were in the way of the line of succession of the radical party to maintain office; so they were disfranchised, and a new race was made citizens to take their place: they were the late negro slaves, the pets and "wards of the nation!"

Now, when it was told to Augustus Cæsar that Herod had murdered his two sons by Mariamne, he said that "it was better to be one of Herod's pigs than one of his sons;" and so when the white people of the South were politically murdered, many of their friends said: "It were better to be a 'ward of the nation' than a son of the Confederacy." These cruel proceedings have been condemned by all the civilized nations of Europe, and will be condemned by the impartial historians of the North when passions shall have subsided.

The enslaving of the negro race in the colonies – and which was largely confined to those called Southern, and almost entirely to them after the ending of the slave trade – placed the white people of the colonies on a higher and broader plane and released them from the daily struggle after the "almighty dollar."

The busy minds of the Northern people were constantly more and more given to trade and traffic, while those of the South turned to the enjoyment of a home life; freed from restraint and care, they practiced the amenities of social life, with honor, truth, and charity to all. Strange as it may appear, a civilization – based on slave labor, that was tolerant in religion, that encouraged freedom of thought, led their minds to the contemplation of the rights given man by his Creator when he breathed the breath of life into his body as he came into this world – resulted in prompting these men to embody their views on this question of divine right in the Mecklenburg Declaration, made in Mecklenburg County, N. C., May 20, 1775, and which was substantially expressed again, July 4, 1776, in the Declaration of Independence, read in Philadelphia.