Little by little, the self-respect which had been
ground out of him and his family by generations of that condition
of inferiority which the common-liver, the self-helper of the South,
was forced to endure under the old slave _regime_, began to
grow up in his heart. He began to feel himself a man, and prized
the rank-marks on his collar as the certificate and endorsement of
his manhood. As this feeling developed, he began to consider the
relations between himself, his family, and others like them, and
the rich neighbors by whom they were surrounded and looked down
upon. And more and more, as he did so, the feeling grew upon him
that he and his class had been wronged, cheated--"put upon," he
phrased it--in all the past. They had been the "chinking" between
the "mud" of slavery and the "house-logs" of aristocracy in the
social structure of the South--a little better than the mud because
of the same grain and nature as the logs; but useless and nameless
except as in relation to both. He felt the bitter truth of that
stinging aphorism which was current among the privates of the
Confederate army, which characterized the war of Rebellion as "the
poor man's war and the rich man's fight."
So, when the war was over, Lieutenant Jordan Jackson did not return
easily and contentedly to the niche in the social life of his native
region to which he had been born and bred.
Pages:
376
377
378
379
380
381
382
383
384
385
386
387
388
389
390
391
392
393
394
395
396
397
398
399
400