They became a race
of jesters, moonlight masqueraders, personators of the dead. They
instituted clubs and paraded by hundreds, the trained cavalry of
a ghostly army organized into companies, battalions, divisions,
departments, having at their head the "Grand Wizard of the Empire."
It was all in sport--a great jest, or at the worst designed only
to induce the colored man to work somewhat more industriously from
apprehension of ghostly displeasure. It was a funny thing--the
gravest, most saturnine, and self-conscious people on the globe
making themselves ridiculous, ghostly masqueraders by the hundred
thousand! The world which had lately wept with sympathy for
the misfortunes of the "Lost Cause," was suddenly convulsed with
merriment at the midnight antics of its chivalric defenders. The
most vaunted race of warriors seized the cap and bells and stole
also the plaudits showered upon the fool. Grave statesmen, reverend
divines, legislators, judges, lawyers, generals, merchants, planters,
all who could muster a good horse, as it would seem, joined the
jolly cavalcade and rollicked through the moonlight nights, merely
to make fun for their conquerors by playing on the superstitious
fear of the sable allies of the Northmen. Never before was such
good-natured complaisance, such untiring effort to please. So the
North laughed, the South chuckled, and the world wondered.
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