Purity of Soul An Excursion into Northern Politics of Race Virginian though I am, a son of the Shenandoah, and brought up among the lazy rivers of the state of Marse Bob Lee and Stonewall—rivers where the sun always seemed to shine and you could mostly catch catfish, and almost think that being alive was a good thing until further experience intervened—I have to admit the deep vileness in the Southern soul. Yes. It was this that brought forth such scenes as above. I cannot deny that the events portrayed happened in the South.
The south of Manhattan, anyway, the drawing being of the race riots of 1863 in New York, in which Yankee mobs killed 115 or so innocent people, many of them black.
Here was early evidence of the deep regard in which Yankees held black men— and still hold them if you look at actions and not protestations. There is nothing like a damn Yank to tell how good he is, how drowning in the curds and cream of human kindness, without in his actions displaying a trace of it.
But should we be surprised? These were the same blue-coats who exterminated the Indians. “The only good Indian,” said the Yankee general Sherman, “is a dead Indian.” Such charitable musings were not unique to him. It was a Yankee named Custer, if memory serves, who after the war devoted himself in the name of the Yankee government to killing Indians, though with mixed results. Yet another Yankee general, Phil Sheridan, wanted to slaughter the western buffalo to starve the Indians to death. I cannot withold my admiration for Northerners for the consistency of their racial philosopy.
Do not misunderstand me. I do not mean to imply that Northerners are the world’s mother lode of preening fraud and practiced hypocrisy. I mean to state it. To talk to these geysers of virtue, you would be sure that their principal object in life was to help the black man, to admit him to the human race as an equal and a brother. I imagine them waking up in the middle of the night thinking how they might advance their darker brethren. Most of them likely do not get enough sleep because of it.
Yet I confess a desire for confirmation. I want to say to them, “Yea, verily. And when was the last time you had black friends to dinner?”
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