The _facts_ remain. The puzzling _why_, let whosoever will endeavor
to elucidate.
Perhaps the most outrageous and debasing of all the acts of the
Bureau, in the eyes of those who love to term themselves "the South,"
was the fact that its officers and agents, first of all, allowed
the colored man to be sworn in opposition to and in contradiction
of the word of a white man.
That this should be exasperating and degrading to the Southern
white man was most natural and reasonable. The very corner-stone
of Southern legislation and jurisprudence for more than a hundred
years was based upon this idea: the negro can have no rights, and
can testify as to no rights or wrongs, as against a white man. So
that the master might take his slave with him when he committed
murder or did any other act in contravention of law or right,
and that slave was like the mute eunuch of the seraglio, silent
and voiceless before the law. Indeed, the law had done for the
slave-owner, with infinitely more of mercy and kindness, what the
mutilators of the upper Nile were wont to do for the keepers of
the harems of Cairo and Constantinople--provided them with slaves
who should see and hear and serve, but should never testify of
what they saw and knew. To reverse this rule, grown ancient and
venerable by the practice of generations, to open the mouths which
had so long been sealed, was only less infamous and dangerous than
to accord credence to the words they might utter.
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