Читать книгу True To His Colors - Castlemon Harry - Страница 9

If any boy who reads this series of books believes that secession was the result of a sudden impulse on the part of the Southern people, he has but to look into his history to find that he is mistaken. They had not only been thinking about it for a long time, but, aided by some of Buchanan's treacherous cabinet officers, they had been preparing for it. The Secretary of the Navy ordered the best vessels in our little fleet to distant stations, so that they could not be called upon to help the government when the insurgents seized the forts that were scattered along the coast; and the Secretary of War took nearly a hundred and fifty thousand stand of arms out of Northern arsenals and sent them to the South. He did it openly and without any attempt at concealment, and the Southern papers publicly thanked him for so doing. The Mobile Register said, in so many words, that they were much obliged to Mr. Floyd for "disarming the North and equipping the South."

After such acts as these on the part of government officials, it is not surprising that private citizens began to take their local affairs into their own hands. A regular system of espionage and ostracism was established all over the South. Everybody who was known or suspected of being opposed to slavery and disunion was not only closely watched, but was denied admission to homes in which he had always been a welcome visitor. Free negroes were given to understand that they could either clear out, or remain and be sold into bondage. Northern men—even those who had long been engaged in business in the South, and whose interests were centered there—were looked upon and treated with contempt, and their lives were made miserable in every way that the exasperated and unreasonable people around them could think of.

But, of course, things did not stop here. These suspected persons very soon became the victims of open violence. Some were taken out of their houses at night and whipped; others were tarred and feathered; and more were hanged by self-appointed vigilance committees, or killed in personal encounters. Up to the time of which we write there had been none of this violence in and around Barrington, but it was coming now. Almost the first thing that attracted the attention of Rodney Gray and his companions when they went into the post-office was a notice that had been fastened upon the bulletin board. It took them a minute or two to elbow their way through the crowd of men and boys who were gathered in front of it, reading and commenting upon the startling intelligence it contained, and when they succeeded they read as follows: