Chapter 3: A Cannonade of Hoofbeats
dcharles
Banned
Chapter 3: A Cannonade of Hoofbeats
“My gun’s in the holster. Don’t pay ye no mind to the badge, and don’t worry. I’m a lawman, yessir, but not that kind. This here’s a good place for you. Them slave catchers, they do make it up here from time to time, so keep your head on swivel. But ye catch wind of one, ‘member to let us know…They don’t make it out too often. It’s an unhealthy spot, like, so we try to watch over ‘em. I reckon it’s all the skeeters we got. There was one feller, come up this way looking for a n—. Them mosquitos et him up fierce. Bad et up. Covered up in bites the size o’ 44 slugs, he was. ”
—Sam Sixkiller, 1866; quoted in Carter G. Woodson, Bass Reeves: From Contraband to Fire Boss. (New Orleans: Dixie Free Press, 1931), 61.
TO: Col. Santos Benavides, DSS Chief Inspector, Ariz. & Calif. Terrs.
CC: Dir. Jacob Thompson, DSS; Gen. GT Beauregard, Pres., CSA.
FROM: LH McNelly, DSS Dep. Inspector, Calif. Terr.
PROTECTED AND CLASSIFIED
August 6th, 1874
Col. Benavides,
Pursuant to your request of the 18th ult., what follows, a brief report on the various misfit, malcontented, and undesirable personalities and elements persisting in the California Territory, especially those in and around Ensenada, is divided into two parts. The first part describes the characteristics of the several factions, while the second focuses on the characters therein. It must be noted that while the information contained is produced with the utmost efforts towards accuracy and totality, the factions described are fluid in personnel, mobile in locality, and dynamic in alignment. While this is a source of frustration in tactical endeavors, I believe it to be a great asset in terms of strategic planning and flexibility. When subversive organizations are still in their stages of metamorphosis, they may be diverted, quashed, or balanced as the Directorate sees fit. Once they have achieved a robust maturity, such manipulations become more arduous…
…the newspaperman Albert Parsons. Though Parsons did honorable service both in the war and in the MVEF, he has taken a dangerous turn toward freethinking and radicalism in the years since. Around the end of 1867 or the beginning of 1868, he applied for a position as an overseer with the managing broker at the Waco branch of Forrest & Son . He was taken on, but was dismissed in November of 1868 for reasons which remain unclear. The present managing broker (who did not come into his position until 1871), claims the records were destroyed, while the Memphis headquarters has thus far been unresponsive to my inquiries. What sources I have been able to find have only heard second and third hand accounts, and they say variously that Parsons was negligent in allowing the Negroes to abscond, soft in his discipline, or that he quarreled with his fellow overseers. His whereabouts during 1869 and most of 1870 are uncertain. I think it probable that he spent some amount of time abroad, both in the Empire of Mexico and the United States, and there is one report that he was in London for the Workingmen’s Congress of 1870. I believe this report to be plausible, for records show him entering the port of New Orleans in October of that year. Though it is unclear when he established a relationship with his mulatta consort, Lucia Carter, he is recorded as traveling with a female slave when he disembarked. Though Carter is free–manumitted by either her father or Parsons–clerical errata may have recorded her as otherwise. From New Orleans, the pair proceeded to El Paso by locomotive. By the end of that year, the two had established themselves in Ensenada, and the first issue of The Ensenada Shout/ El Grito de Ensenada was printed on New Year’s Day. The Shout, which is printed in both English and Spanish in alternating pages, typically outsells the other dailies, La Voz and The Ensenada Confederate. Though The Shout rarely comments on national issues, its local sympathies invariably lie with the coarsest classes of the territory, including cowboys, miners, free Negroes, peons, and exiled Mexican radicals. Possibly due to Parsons’ own history as a veteran, The Shout evinces a strongly pro-veteran editorial line, and Parsons continues to maintain acquaintance and contacts within the core group of original settlers from the MVEF. Presumably because of his degraded and degenerate lifestyle, Parsons enjoys a certain fraternity with the free Negroes of Ensenada, a community which we suspect to be peppered with fugitive Contrabands. He is also known to drink alongside and to make acquaintance with numerous outlaws and desperadoes who drift into Ensenada, including Procopio Murrieta, ‘Thunderclap’ Young, and Doc Scurlock. He has nowhere been reputed to espouse any overt abolitionist sentiments, however, based on the context of his associations, I believe it likely that he harbors covert sympathies. Of all the personalities thus far surveyed, Parsons should be singled out for close surveillance…”
“As always, young gentlemen, an uncertain future awaits. That is as true now as it was in the long gone days when I sat where you are now sitting. If the events of the last two decades have shaken the faith of some in the American ideal, I am heartened to see that the men of Yale have the fortitude to resist the mad urge to defenestrate our national heroes…
While this is a celebratory occasion, and the acceptance of this award gives me a great deal of personal gratification, I would be remiss to let this moment pass without a few remarks addressing the recent work by Dr. Howard Zinn which has caused so much controversy. Now, now, gentlemen–Dr. Zinn is a colleague, he is at least that–it would be a professional discourtesy if we failed to correct the errors of our friends at the New School…
…despite the amplification of grievances and grumbles from the radical nooks and crannies of the Academy, the great mass of Americans still venerate Seymour, just as their fathers and grandfathers did. The common sense understands that the values of 1968 are not the same in every particular as those of 1868. Progress marches on. And yet, for those of us whose roots on this continent predate the century, we understand that the foundations for the progress of today were laid in the hoary days of Seymour and Logan.
The Amendments of National Rebirth, the four cornerstones of the Second Republic–which Dr. Zinn seems to delight in belittling–were passed, every one, between 1865 and 72. The ending of slavery and the prohibition on secession, the guarantee of the right to vote and abolition of poll taxes, the very preservation of the national bloodline; a startling array of accomplishments by any light. Between Washington and Roosevelt, does any other man’s shadow loom so large? A wry conservative might point to Jefferson or Jackson, or a romantic to Custer, but even to be mentioned in that company is a testament to the titanic legacy of the Great Democrat…”
—Allan Nevins, 1968; in remarks accepting the Thomas Hart Seymour Award, presented by Phi Alpha Theta, Yale University, New Haven, CT.
Well John Henry had a dozen ladies,
But oh, he was just a man,
And with a greedy eye,
He made sly designs,
On a pretty yellow gal named Sadie,
(Lord, Lord,)
That John Henry was a gambling man,
(Lord, Lord,)
John Henry was a gambling man;
Well John Henry said to the Captain,
‘I want to buy your fine Sadie Red,
Now you name a price,
Or we can throw the dice,
As for me, I’m a gambling man,
(Lord, Lord,)
As for me, I’m a gambling man,
(Lord, Lord,)
Me, I’m a gambling man;’
The ol’ Captain said ‘I ain’t a-selling!
An’ them games of chance is a sin,
I won’t throw no dice,
You can’t name no price,
Cause that lass, she’s just so ripe and willing,
(Lord, Lord,)
And me, I ain’t no gambling man,
(Lord, Lord,)
Me, I’m a God-fearing man;’
Well, John Henry pulled his forty-four gun,
And he shot the Captain down,
‘You should have took my advice,
An’ gone and thrown them dice,
Now damn you, I’ve a marshal to outrun,
(Lord, Lord,)
Well I told you I’s a gambling man,
(Lord, Lord,)
Damn you, I’m a gambling man;
Oh! Take my hand, now won’t you Sadie?
For it’s time for us to fly,
I’ve gone and killed this man,
Why won’t you hold my hand?
Fickle girl, do you think you can betray me?
(Lord, Lord)
Can’t you see that I’m a hot-blooded man?
(Lord, Lord)
Sadie Red, I’m a cold killing man;’
— Traditional, “Ballad of John Henry,” stanzas I-V, (c. 1880); quoted in Moe Asch, Windows to Forbidden Worlds: Ballads of the Confederate West, (New Orleans: Tulane and Benjamin University Press, 1951) 109.
“To say merely that the years have changed Captain Smalls does a disservice to time and fate. The young man with playful eyes, subtly smirking from a WANTED notice, is gone with the wind. When he died and where he is buried I know not, but Captain Smalls today is as gruff and grave a man as ever walked. One is struck at first by the hair, ash gray at the temples, and grown long in braid-like ropes, as is the custom among many of the Negroes in the far West. Then one notices the left ear, or lack thereof, and the long scar across his jaw, both wounds from the same cut. His mustaches are long, after the fashion of the Mexican, and turn gray below the corners of his mouth, giving him the appearance of a permanent frown. When he speaks, his gold teeth sparkle. When he breaks into a rare smile, it lights the room in unnerving flashes. Though the outlaw lifestyle has kept him lean for a man of his age, the years have seen him fill out, and he is no longer wiry. The Devil of Beaufort County walks with a stiff legged limp that almost seems like a strut, and he wears the boots and bandoliers so common to the Western desperados. The only remaining token of his Sea Island nativity is the broad straw hat, woven, he claims, with his own hands…
….the initial impression is one of gravity, but not the leonine gravity of his fellow dusky fanatic, the late Frederick Douglass. That is to say, Smalls is frightful but not majestic. Rather, the gravity of Captain Smalls is lupine; a grave threat that bears passing similarity to something familiar and loyal, as the wolf does the dog. As I began to know the man behind the Devil, I sometimes wondered if I had it backwards, and if he was not instead a dog with a wolf’s appearance. With hindsight I settled briefly on the notion that he was a tame wolf, and then for a time, I came back to my original proposition. He was a wild wolf after all, simply one who, as the hunter’s stories have attested, took a liking to a person, walked alongside them, and then left. No doubt my feelings will one day change again, but I fear that I may have been wrong all along. It may be that Captain Smalls was never a wolf. I suspect it just as likely he is the coyote, a cousin of the wolf, as endemic in the West as the Indian, and twice as cunning…
When I pointed out that the violence of he and his cohorts has made many masters who might otherwise consider manumission hesitant, Smalls was obstinate. ‘No. I say damn the lot, Miss Bisland. Damn the lot of them! Their guilt’s what’s making them shy, not me. I just remind ‘em what they got to feel guilty for.’
‘But you would concede there are kind masters,’ I offered. ‘Amidst all the burnings, even you protected the McKee Plantation.’
‘Ol’ Massa Henry…’ Smalls frowned, pausing like a barrister to collect his thoughts, and raised an index finger when the answer came. ‘If a horse thief is kind to his animals, does that erase the stealing, or will the thief still hang?’ Smalls gave one of his brilliant, unsettling lupine grins. ‘I don’t damn them for their kindness, Miss Bisland. I damn them for their thievery.’”
—Elizabeth Bisland, The Mexican Dispatches; or, Conversations With the Devil of Beaufort County. (New Orleans: Dixie Free Press, 1894), 2-3.
“Gordon was in a bind. Wheeler’s fiery announcement at the Odd Fellow’s Hall was premature by an election cycle. In less than an hour on stage, Wheeler had turned some brandy-induced big talk between two fast friends into an incipient Great Awakening. With the election only months away and without a party organization behind him, Gordon faced the hard reality that there was no extant political network to spread his message (whatever it turned out to be). To solve the problem, he reached out to 100,000 of his closest friends. Gordon wrote to Wheeler in July that he would ‘whip the Old Bullfrog yet. There are better than fifty Georgia regiments that served with me in Virginia, and a dozen more with you in Kentucky. In the proper type of outfit and organization, with uniform, etc., we shall make fine use of these fellows.’
It was a sound tactic. Confederate regiments were recruited from localities and organized accordingly. (To take one regiment as an example, the 13th Georgia hailed from the counties between Atlanta and LaGrange, each company largely recruited from a particular county.) The officers, most of whom had personal relationships with Gordon, were often leading men in their communities. The enlisted veterans comprised a numerically huge proportion of the voting population and had a moral influence that was even greater than their numbers. No one had sacrificed more than they had in the struggle for nationhood and the bonds of wartime were still fresh. What was more–and perhaps more important in the long run–a facsimile of that organization and camaraderie was already present on the homefront when Gordon and the other veterans returned from the war. Independent, local committees of soldiers’ wives–aka ‘bonnet brigades’-- had organized throughout the state (and the Confederacy) during the war[1], engaging in mutual aid and advocating for material support and military protection. Their presence and their contribution to Gordon’s run, though often behind the scenes, helped a political campaign take on the character of a mass movement. As much as Gordon relied on the soldiers for votes and political mobilization, he also relied on the erstwhile bonnet brigades to reinforce the essential communion of the undertaking. Without this parallel civilian organization, it is questionable whether the Gordon campaign would have so readily provided the nucleus around which the broader New South movement coalesced.
If their numbers were a multitude and their moral gravitas unmatchable, a politician who could mold them into an electoral bloc would be almost unbeatable. The only thing left to do was spread the word, so Gordon’s Red Shirts fanned out across the state like a horde of latter day John the Baptists. In the long summer of 1865, they marshaled the faithful and converted the agnostic from the Ringgold to Brunswick. As zealous and conspicuous as missionaries on crusade, where Gordon went, the Red Shirts prepared straight paths in anticipation. Where he left, they echoed his promise to clear away the chaff of wartime governance. Unlike the campaigns of the late antebellum, dominated by debates over legal abstractions and imagined futures, Gordon’s rhetoric was concrete and it aimed to deliver a verdict on the recent past. Though he was a lawyer by training (if not by vocation), the style and substance of many of Gordon’s statements implicitly refute the legalism of antebellum discourse. ‘Point me to the section of the Constitution where it says a governor has got a right to undermine the war effort,’ he demanded at a speech in Augusta in late July. ‘Where is the clause in that document that commands us to turn our backs when our fellows are beset by servile insurrection…and what should stop them from doing the same to us if that calamity should visit this country?’ Wheeler was even more dismissive. In Decatur that August, he publicly rejected a defense of Brown proffered by The Daily Constitutionalist. ‘The scribblers down at the Constitutionalist want to say that Governor Brown was only looking out for States’ Rights when he was holding back rifles and trying to appoint his cronies to the officer corps. Now States’ Rights, it’s a fine idea,’ he said. ‘But you talk about rights? A soldier on the march has got a right to a pair of shoes and a rifle that shoots straight, and they’ve got a right to a governor who makes sure they’ve got every little thing they need. And I reckon that trumps all the ideas the croakers and the scribblers at the Constitutionalist ever did have.’
The applause was thunderous.
In essence, the Gordon campaign was accusing Georgia’s wartime government of failing to uphold their end of the social contract. The citizens had done their patriotic duty and paid in blood for their troubles, in return, their leaders undermined their efforts and failed to equip them with even the necessities they possessed. Though Brown was not solely to blame for the failures of wartime governance and supply in the Confederacy, he was the most powerful spokesman for the opposition in Georgia (and one of the most visible nationally), and the Georgia gubernatorial race was the first high profile election of the postwar period. In these early days, the coherence of the Red Shirts was not in their devotion to a particular set of policies, but in their fraternity, and in their shared sense that they were the yeoman heirs to a patrimony stolen by a wicked and undeserving Claudius, and had returned to put things right. Judging by their correspondence at the time, Gordon and Wheeler were unaware of the larger political consequences of this tactic. By definition, a citizen army like the Confederacy’s will include more men of humble means than men of wealth. But the Confederate Army in particular skewed toward the laboring classes, with its numerous draft exemptions for professionals, manufacturers, bankers, and the ‘twenty Negro men’. That Gordon was so thoroughly identified with the cause of the soldiers and veterans meant that by transference, Gordon was identified with the interests of the common man. Though Gordon’s embrace of yeoman nationalism seems to have arisen somewhat incidentally, it nonetheless became the dominant ethos of the New South Party, formally organized in Richmond the following year in the wake of the attempted impeachment of Davis.
Smart editors took notice of the changing mood. While The Southern Confederacy and The Soldier’s Friend had been in Gordon’s corner from the first, Atlanta’s Daily Intelligencer, the city’s leading paper, was at first skeptical. In late July, waxing poetic, they pointedly asked what was ‘signified by all of Gen’l Gordon’s sound and fury?’ By September, they were admonishing Brown. ‘It has always been the Governor’s custom to quarrel and feud with his foes, and to show his cronies the greatest munificence. A man of Brown’s station ought to have known that there should be a reckoning ahead.’ Even the Savannah Republican, one of Georgia’s oldest and most elitist papers, seemed resigned to the outcome by October 1st, lamenting that ‘the stampede is upon us. A prudent man might stand aside of the herd, and the opportunist might walk abreast of it, if only to corral it when passions have cooled. To meet it head on will invite ruin.’ The Republican’s prediction was proven accurate two days later, when the four term governor went down to defeat, 57% - 42%. Gordon’s 65,550 votes were the most ever polled by a candidate in Georgia at the time, besting Brown’s 1859 record by almost 1800 votes.
Several details about the returns stand out. Most notable is that Brown, despite having polled only 42% of the electorate, actually won more than 48,000 votes, by far his best showing of the 1860s. While this suggests that Brown lost few voters, and that the soldier vote was decisive in his loss, there is a further nuance to consider: the shifting electoral geography of Brown’s voter base. Since 1857, when he’d run strongest in the north Georgia hills and the pinewood flatlands in the south, Brown’s support base had first expanded, picking off many middle Georgia black belt counties in 1859 and 1861, and then shifted in 1863 when he’d run strongest in the central Georgia counties on either side of the black belt. In 1865, Brown’s strongest counties were still concentrated in middle Georgia, but his slow conquest of the black belt was nearly complete. This evolution in electoral geography is mirrored in Brown’s own political evolution. Having stormed onto the scene as a populist spokesman of the yeomanry, Brown drifted ever closer to the planter and railroad interests which had long dominated state politics. By 1865, much of his rhetoric was almost indistinguishable from old-line Whigs like Alexander Stephens. Gordon, in contrast, was elected by a coalition only hinted at in previous contests. Himself born in the black belt and raised in the mountains south of Chattanooga, Gordon dominated across north Georgia, in the counties around Columbus, and in those cities and towns which had seen a population influx due to wartime manufacturing, especially Atlanta, Macon, and most surprisingly, Augusta, a stronghold of elite antebellum conservatism. While he ran strongly in the pine flats of south central Georgia, his margins there were not as great as in north Georgia, and he lost Savannah and the surrounding counties outright.
In many ways, Brown was a victim of his own rhetoric as much as he was a victim of Gordon’s and Wheeler’s. Along with Zebulon Vance of North Carolina and John Gill Shorter of Alabama, Brown had made some of the strongest efforts of any governor to provide relief for the wartime indigent, especially soldier’s wives. But the efforts never met the need, and the need was created in part by rampant price gouging and speculation, activities which Brown did little to curb. Thus, any goodwill he accrued was mitigated because people perceived that the government was allowing racketeers to rob them into poverty and starvation in the first place. His many public spats with Jefferson Davis, often involving controversies over miniscule and obscure points of law, often causing real hardships to soldiers in the field, created the impression that he was more interested in political aggrandizement than he was in the welfare of the people. Though the wily Brown was far from finished politically, for the time being, his brand of antagonistic populist parochialism was on the wane in Georgia. For the next few decades, parochialism as a political force would be most strongly espoused by the plantation aristocrats who came to dominate the ranks of the Constitutional Liberals…
Ambitious veterans and politicians across the South snapped to attention at the election result. In Tennessee, John Calvin Brown, a brigadier who’d served with Wheeler in Kentucky, borrowed from Wheeler’s organizational playbook in his 1866 campaign for governor. Lacking as colorful an opponent as Gordon’s in Joe Brown, John Calvin Brown ran on a platform of robust rebuilding, generous widow’s pensions, strengthened public education, and vigorous anti-Toryism. Wheeler gladly lent his personal oratorical skills to the 1866 Arkansas gubernatorial campaign of General Patrick Cleburne, the Red Right Hand of Jackson and Wheeler’s fellow corps commander in the Army of Kentucky. Cleburne, who was running for an open seat, could not run the same kind of backward-focused campaign as Gordon had, since there was no incumbent to point a finger at. His platform borrowed liberally from John Calvin Brown’s, and developed it in a number of areas, promising to rebuild and expand Arkansas College, fund a new state geological survey, sponsor apprenticeships and scholarships for the orphaned children of veterans, to disenfranchise unrepentant Union veterans, punish Tory guerillas, and to ban former Unionists who did not take loyalty oaths from serving in the militia, holding office, or practicing law. John Calvin Brown and Cleburne both won their races resoundingly, with 58% and 71%, respectively. General William Mahone, the freshman Congressman from Virginia who had served with Gordon in the Army of Northern Virginia, took notes as he prepared for his own gubernatorial run in 1867. It was Mahone, chafing in the atmosphere of a Congress increasingly at odds with both Davis and itself, who began corresponding with Gordon in early 1866, intimating from a very early stage that it would be necessary for ‘men of progress, patriotism, and common sense’ to make common cause ‘lest Wigfall and the other swindlers take the lot.’
Though the meeting at Richmond’s Spotswood Hotel was scheduled for October, at the end of the second Congressional session, Mahone had arranged it in June, at the end of the first Congressional session. The proximity to the failed impeachment vote, though coincidental, doubtless drove attendance, and many in the Confederate Congress attended–JLM Curry and Clement Clay of Alabama, Duncan Kenner and Charles Villere of Louisiana, Augustus Hill Garland of Arkansas, Robert Jefferson Breckenridge Jr., of Kentucky, and William Dortch of North Carolina. Joining the Congressional delegation were publisher JDB DeBow and industrialist Joseph R. Anderson, master of the Tredegar Works, among others. Rounding out the group were the Young Bulls: Gordon, Brown, Cleburne, Wheeler, and Mahone. Although Beauregard, the most prominent of all the New South partisans, did not attend the initial gathering, Charles Villere was the future President’s former brother-in-law and a close friend. It is reasonably certain he was aware of the proceedings…”
[1] See: Mary Elizabeth Massey, Bonnet Brigades at the Barricades. (Louisville: Berea University Press, 1965)
—Vann Woodward, War Child: Joe Wheeler, John Gordon, and the Origins of the New South Party. (New Orleans: Free University Press, 1969) 19-23.
“The question foremost on my mind, which had troubled me from the very first, was not one I dared to broach for the first half-hour of our rendezvous. When the Jesuit watching over the meeting came first with a plate of tacos and then with two coffees, fortified with cream, cinnamon, rum, and red pepper, I managed to find my courage. ‘Why is it that you come forward now?’ I saw from his furrowed brow that if he understood the question itself, he did not understand the meaning behind it. ‘I was scarcely born when the war happened.’ I said. ‘It was long ago, and you’re in Mexico now. Surely you could lead a quiet life?’ His response, part confession and part indictment, I reproduce here for the reader entirely:
‘It is as you say, Miss Bisland. There’s a time for doing and a time for talking, and I’m getting old. I have…I have done. In my life, I have burned nine plantations, liberated six trains of Negroes–one from Anderson, five from Forrest–robbed two more trains of their specie, stolen two ships, staged a dozen bank robberies, rustled a thousand head of cattle, and held up more stagecoaches than I can remember. I have been stabbed, shot, hanged, burned, and drowned.
'All along the way, I have killed slavers. I killed them in South Carolina, in Beaufort and Walterboro and all the country in between. I killed them in Cuba. I shot JO Shelby there, outside of Puerto Padre with a Gorgas & Morse repeater and a cartridge milled in the Augusta works—a damned fine gun and damned fine powder, made with Negro hands. I fought ‘em in California and Arizona and Texas and Mexico. Caught Pat Garrett–the big, lying bastard–right between the eyes in Yuma, Arizona. John Bell Hood? Killed by me as he left a poker game in Matamoros. The fool was so drunk he thought I was his valet. And all the banks, all the train cars, all that money–it bought guns and dynamite, it taught Negroes to read, it paid for Midnight Cutters to Jamaica and Mexico, it sponsored newspapers.
'Your country, Miss Bisland, seethes with discontent, no matter what they do, no matter how much the Directorate thinks it knows. Not just the slaves, not just the black folk and the colored folk. The bookrah*, too. Y’all got all them Reds up in Tennessee and Virginia…down in Alabam’. Y’all got Sicilians and Jews down in New Orleans, Irish in Louisville, freethinking ladies like you…the Cherokee, the Choctaw, Apaches. I guess they ain’t bookrah, but they ain’t happy, neither. That money rollin’ in now, but y’all floating on a barrel of gunpowder and don’t even know it. I’ve already lit a thousand fires, Miss Bisland. This will light a hundred thousand more, and all your great men are gone. Lee has been dead so long his children have started to die. Jackson? Finally dead, and out of his head for God knows how long. Stuart? Forrest? Gone! Harvey Hill? Dead for nigh on three year’ now. Beauregard just passed…and the Young Bulls are all dead men or old men. Who will you turn to when the fire comes? Will you trot out what’s left of Longstreet again? Tillman? Ha! You can no more imagine Tillman shaking hands with Bonaparte any more than you can imagine him shaking hands with me.
I may not be far behind them, but the day of your nation cometh, and that right soon.’
…Is Smalls himself a Red, as many have alleged? When I pressed him on the matter, his response was as enigmatic as the man himself. ‘A Red?’ he asked, holding up the back of his hand. ‘I am as black as can be. But I tell you this, when the day of liberation–when that day cometh indeed, we will free not only the bondsman. We will free the hireling too.’”
— Elizabeth Bisland, The Mexican Dispatches; or, Conversations With the Devil of Beaufort County. (New Orleans: Dixie Free Press, 1894), 12-14.
* A Gullah word for white person. It's usually spelled "bucra" or "buckra," but that makes a lot of people mispronounce it. Whenever I've heard Geechees say it, the u-sound in the word doesn't rhyme with "tuck." It's more like the sound in "cook," which I why I spell it in a nonstandard way.
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