CHAPTER II.
REVOLUTION AND WAR.
During the ten years intervening between the precipitate appearance of the runaway slave at the Schofield home and the coming to Edisto Island, South Carolina, of Miss Martha Schofield for the purpose of founding an industrial school for the colored race, the new form of liberty conceived by our fore-fathers and dedicated to the principle that all men are born free and equal, had been put to a severe test as to whether this new form of government could be put into practice. The great Civil War predicted by Martha as inevitable in the settlement of the problem of slavery broke out in all its fury in 1860-61 and was not only attended by the loss of hundreds of thousands of priceless lives, whose bodies filled countless hospitals of pain, and made gory the prairies and furrows of old fields, as they on the side of the South as well as they on the side of the North bled and died for the eternal right as each saw what was their duty; but the demoralization precipitated by this gigantic conflict, followed by the assassination of President Lincoln, the idol of the whole free-civilized world, was even more staggering in its influence on the lives and fortunes of those left to solve the problems created by the great revolution.
The waste of inconceivable sums of money through the awarding of contracts involving millions and millions of dollars by which fortunes, through little or no effort at all, were made in a single night was openly countenanced at Washington.
Superfluous wealth chocked the nation at the North with its mighty grip and the riot of speculation, corruption and debauchery which followed, in the voting away of the public lands free of any charge to private corporations and the granting of subsidies of millions of dollars without any compensation whatever, laid such burdens upon the people that many of them until this day (1916) remain undischarged.
The paralysis experienced by the business interests as a result of this whirlwind of corruption resulted in the decline of the credit of the country to such an extent that the six per cent. bonds of the Republic dropped to about seventy-three cents on the dollar in the open market. But the disastrous financial calamity which the war produced is of no consequence in comparison with the moral degradation into which the country sank.
A few years before the panic of 1873 nearly everybody in the North and West, where conditions were prosperous in spite of the war, wanted to go to the cities where fortunes were waiting for them, and almost every farmer’s son took an oath that he would never cultivate the soil. At the age of twenty-one they left the dreary and desolate farms in droves and rushed to the cities to become bookkeepers, doctors, lawyers, merchants and sewing machine agents, anything to escape the heavy work of the farm. Those with capital wanted to engage in something promising huge and quick returns and so these built railroads, established banks and insurance companies. Some speculated in stocks of Wall Street, while others gambled in grain in Chicago with the result that the riches of the whole country flowed to their coffers in immense volume, and in their carriages and palaces the pitied their poor brothers on the farm, who as earnestly envied them.
But the lap of luxury in which these citizens were being nursed was doomed to become thread-bare as, indeed, it did do, and always will do, when the world’s advance is checked by the want of assistance and co-operation of all classes of laborers. The railroad and insurance presidents became bankrupts and their companies went into the hands of receivers by the score. Large numbers of young men who imagined they had entirely too much education to be wasted on the farm and flocked to the cities in incredible numbers became in time, either absconders and fugitives from justice, or plain tramps and hobos, a demonstrative force to prove the saying, that the only really solvent people, the only independent people, are the tillers of the soil.
At the South which had been reduced to the most degraded type of poverty there were no such opportunities for the accumulation of wealth as existed at the North and in the West. The few railroads that before the war intersected this section had been torn up by the necessities of war and needed rebuilding, but there was no money to be had anywhere with which to do the work. All the strongest blood and brain had been either slain in battle or rendered incapacitated for the tasks which the new order of conditions had forced upon the country. Aside from the loss of millions and millions of dollars as a result of the Emancipation Proclamation freeing the slaves the South was forced also to bear the burden of an exorbitant tax on all crops produced, especially the cotton tax.
The agitation set up by many of the acts of Reconstruction, impeachment proceedings against President Johnson and the foment and strife engendered by the rule of the military authorities opposed by the Ku Klux Klan, all served, to keep for years longer than necessary, the bleeding and prostrate South securely on its back, a helpless beggar at the mercy, in many instances of an army of unscrupulous and grafting office-seekers. Under such conditions it was impossible to obtain credit anywhere for the most necessary things of life and as there was almost nothing of any value produced, the greatest hardships and suffering, if not actual misery, was endured by the people of the South.
Scores of persons gave up in despair and died. Cow peas, corn bread and molasses of such quality as only a few years before would have been considered unfit food for the slaves formed the sole diet, for the first few years after the war, of delicate and cultured women. Little children often went to bed crying from hunger. An element of the Negro population, rendered conspicuously brutal and vicious by service in the army, stole and threatened even blacker crimes, just as the game of war has affected the morality of all races of men throughout the history of recorded warfare.