What the Ex-Confederate has done in Peace. 231
millions of white people and four millions enemies in their midst, they know what to do. But these were friends, many of them per- sons for whom we felt not only kindness, but unutterable thanks. The institution of domestic slavery was not so many million dollars. It is true that it represented the accumlated labors of many years; it is true that in a certain sense they bore a pecuniary value that was extremely great; it is true that on the large plantations where there were large numbers of slaves there did not exist much affection between the whites and the blacks ; but as a rule, domestic slavery, especially in the border States and in the cities and on the farms, as distinguished from the large plantations, was an entirely different institution from either the money that was in it or the chattel charac- ter of the negro. There were many to whom we owed thanks for many kindnesses ; in many cases there were bonds of affection between master and slave which extended back through generations. We knew them to be helpless, we knew them to be unfit for their freedom, and we knew them to be incapable of exportation. Christ had died for them ; he had in his providence put them upon us ; they were the responsibility that we had to take with us as we went upwards in our march. And we did not intend that they should be our enemies ; we did not intend to be barbarous or cruel ; and yet we knew that their domination meant ruin and disaster, and that we could not leave the country any more than we could export them. And so we were slaves not only to a non-resident master, but slaves to our own consciences, as it bore upon our relations to this race resident with us and among us. I avow, as I look back upon the twenty-seven years that have passed, that the treatment accorded by the Southern people to this dependent race will hereafter be esteemed a monument to the courage and magnanimity of our people that will separate them from all other people as being able to treat an humble race with kindness and an inferior race with will and courage.
Well, now, under such circumstances we began to build again; and yet it is probably a badly chosen word to say that we began to build. Nobody in modern times ever is at the genesis of anything. We are always in the midst of the evolution of our problems of civilization. We. therefore, if I may change the phrase, took up anew the conditions of life under this new environment, and the first thing to which I desire to call your attention to-night in reference to the Confederate soldier is, that at a time when everything would seem to require a new remedy, he had the sense to utterly condemn
