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Buchanan with a catch in her voice. "The night before she ran away to marry him she spent with me, for you were away across the river, and all night we talked. She told me not that she was going but how she cared. She said it bitterly over and over, 'Peters Brown, the carpetbagger and I love him! I tried to comfort her as best I could but it was useless. He was a thief to steal her just a child!"
First ones I got tangled up wid was right down here by de cemetery. Dey just wanted to scare you. Night riders was de same thing. I was one of de fellers what broke 'em up. "Old man Toleson was de head leader of de Negroes. Tryin' to get Negroes to go 'gainst our white people. I spec' he was a two faced Yankee or carpetbagger. "We had clubs all 'round West Point.
Curiously incongruous elements were left arrayed against each other: the North, the government, the carpetbagger, and the slave, here; and there, all the South that was white, whether gentleman or vagabond, honest man or rascal, lawless murderer or martyr to duty.
First it was carpetbagger and Negro against the scalawag; later, when the black leaders insisted that those who furnished the votes must have the larger share of the rewards, the fight became triangular. As a result, by 1874 the Republican party in the South was split into factions and was deserted by a large proportion of its white membership.
Few even made exorbitant demands. They wanted "something" schools and freedom and "something else," they knew not what. Deprived of the leadership of the best whites, they could not possibly act with the scalawags their traditional enemies. Nothing was left for them but to follow the carpetbagger.
Leslie, a South Carolina carpetbagger, declared that "South Carolina has no right to be a state unless she can support her statesmen," and he proceeded to live up to this principle.
Such farmhouses as he came upon he gave a wide berth except at night, and then he only approached them stealthily for such provender as he might filch. Before the week was up he had become an expert chicken thief, being able to rob a roost as quietly as the most finished carpetbagger on the sunny side of Mason and Dixon's line.
He might be superseded at any moment by some carpetbagger with political influence, and it went against the grain that the private feuds of people whose quarrels did not interest him in the least should be able to wreck his career. Alfieri came to him with good credentials.
And it had brought a double prosperity, in that, under the leadership of George S. Houston, the white men of the state, after a desperate struggle, had thrown off the political yoke of the negro and the carpetbagger, and once more the Saxon ruled in the land of his birth. Then was taken a full, long, wholesome, air-filling Anglo-Saxon breath, from the Tennessee Valley to the Gulf.
With fewer than ten thousand soldiers, the generals maintained order and carried on the reconstruction of the South. The whites made no attempt at resistance, though they were irritated by military rule and resented the loss of self-government. But most Southerners preferred the rule of the army to the alternative reign of the carpetbagger, scalawag, and Negro.
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