He seemed to me more concerned with injustices done by the North to the South than with injustices done by the South to the negro. “Sherman said, ‘War is hell,’” so he led off; “but there is a worse state than hell, and we passed through that state. It was called Reconstruction.”[40]
This typical Southern view is forcibly expressed by Mr. Thomas Nelson Page: “The history of that period, of the Reconstruction period of the South, has never been fully told. It is only beginning to be written. When that history shall be told, it will constitute the darkest stain on the record of the American people.... They took eight millions of the Caucasian race, a people which in their devotion and their self-sacrifice, in their transcendent vigour of intellect, their intrepid valor in the field, and their fortitude in defeat, had just elevated their race in the sight of mankind, and placed them under the domination of their former slaves. There is nothing like it in modern history.”—“The Negro: the Southerner’s Problem,” pp. 243, 246.
As to that, however, he was content to let bygones be bygones. His real complaint was of the immediate past and present—of the ignorant intermeddling of Northern folk in Southern affairs, the ignorant and contemptuous criticisms of the Northern Press.
“The other day,” he said, “Mr. Smith, a Congregationalist minister—I’m a Baptist myself, but I have a great respect for the Congregationalists—Mr. Smith came to me and said, ‘I hear that the coloured people in your town are sending their children to school in flies and waggons rather than let them ride in the street-cars. What am I to say to my people in the North about that?’ ‘I suggest, sir,’ was my reply, ‘that you should tell them it is none of their business.’”
He was absolutely opposed in theory to lynching, but seemed hopeless of its being put down so long as outrages on women continued. Here, again, his last word was a _tu quoque_ to the North: “I addressed a meeting in Ohio last year, and I said to them, ‘Here in Ohio you have 2 per cent. of negroes; in Georgia we have 47 per cent.; yet you have lynchings here, not so many fewer than ours. Until we have twenty-three times as many as you have, I don’t see that you have anything to say to us.’”