He was a good enough man.
His father had been an honest man, and an old citizen. Nobody knew
a word against his wife or her family, except that they had been
poor. The people who had given their hearts to the Confederate
cause, remembered too, at first, his gallant service; but that had
all been wiped out from their minds by his subsequent "treachery."
Even after the attack on Red Wing, he had been warned by his friends
to desist.
One morning, he had found on the door of his store a paper containing
the following words, written inside a little sketch of a coffin:
[Illustration: JORDAN JACKSON, If you don't get out of here in
three days, you will go to the bone yard. K.K.K.]
He had answered this by a defiant, ill-spelled notice, pasted just
beside it, in which he announced himself as always ready to meet any
crowd of "cowards and villains who were ashamed of their own faces,
at any time, night or day." His card was English prose of a most
vigorous type, interspersed with so much of illiterate profanity as
to satisfy any good citizen that the best people of Horsford were
quite right in regarding him as a most desperate and dangerous
man--one of those whose influence upon the colored people was to
array them against the whites, and unless promptly put down, bring
about a war of races--which the white people were determined never
to have in Horsford, if they had to kill every Radical in the county
in order to live in peace with their former slaves, whom they had
always nourished with paternal affection and still regarded with
a most tender care.
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