The people of
the South began, little by little, to realize that they held their
future in their own hands--that the supervising and restraining
power of the General Government had been withdrawn. The colored
race, yet dazed with the new light of liberty, were divided between
exultation and fear. They were like a child taking his first
steps--full of joy at the last accomplished, full of terror at the
one which was before.
The state of mind of the Southern white man, with reference to the
freedman and his exaltation to the privilege of citizenship is
one which cannot be too frequently analyzed or too closely kept in
mind by one who desires fully to apprehend the events which have
since occurred, and the social and political structure of the South
at this time.
As a rule, the Southern man had been a kind master to his slaves.
Conscious cruelty was the exception. The real evils of the system
were those which arose from its _un_-conscious barbarism--the
natural and inevitable results of holding human beings as chattels,
without right, the power of self-defence or protestation--dumb
driven brutes, deprived of all volition or hope, subservient to
another's will, and bereft of every motive for self-improvement
as well as every opportunity to rise. The effect of this upon the
dominant race was to fix in their minds, with the strength of an
absorbing passion, the idea of their own innate and unimpeachable
superiority, of the unalterable inferiority of the slave-race, of the
infinite distance between the two, and of the depth of debasement
implied by placing the two races, in any respect, on the same
level.
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