USA > Florida > Nassau County > Kings Ferry > Re-organization of Florida. An address delivered before a meeting of the citizens of Nassau county, Florida, at King's Ferry, on St. Mary's river, on Saturday, July 22, 1865 > Part 1
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S45 opy 1
RE-ORGANIZATION OF FLORIDA.
AN ADDRESS
DELIVERED BEFORE A MEETING OF THE
Citizens of Nassau County, florida,
AT KING'S FERRY, ON ST. MARY'S RIVER,
ON SATURDAY, JULY 22, 1865,
BY
MAJOR ALFRED F. SEARS, U.S.V.
BOSTON : PRESS O. GEO. C. RAND & AVERY, 3 CORNHILL. 1865.
RE-ORGANIZATION OF FLORIDA.
AN . ADDRESS
DELIVERED BEFORE A MEETING OF THE
Citizens of Hassan County, florida,
AT KING'S FERRY, ON ST. MARY'S RIVER,
ON SATURDAY, JULY 22, 1865,
BY
MAJOR ALFRED F. SEARS, U.S.V.
BOSTON: PRESS OF GEO. C. RAND & AVERY, 3 CORNHILL. 1865.
F316 ,545
17/212-
Co, C. 17:00
ADDRESS.
MY FELLOW-CITIZENS, old friends of Nassau County, - I greet you.
After a long separation, more crowded with great events than any four years you and I have ever known, or ever will know, we come together again, in our old relation, I hope, friends and brethren.
During the last three years, the orders of the Secretary of War have kept me within sight of your homes. I have looked this way across the river that divided us ; have seen the light of the picket-fire in the winter night, and the gleam of the sentry's polished bayonet in the sunshine. I have looked through my field-glass at the pine-trees on this side, imagining what limb would be most convenient to hang to if I should be caught by your fellows ; and I think I discovered the very . tree that seemed most to invite such a decoration.
Doubtless some men believed that I would gladly have come over by stealth, with soldiers, to massacre your guards, or take them captive to Fort Clinch.
But I think I may safely say that to-day there is no man living within fifty miles of my post, in Georgia or Florida, that believes any thing of the kind.
I think that all of you who listen to me now, knowing that during these three years I have never refused to extend my hand to help the suffering people of this county when they were within reach, whether as prisoners, or hostile men covered by a flag of truce, or as deserters or refugees, - in whatever condition or relation I have met them, - will give credit to what I say, when I declare, that, in all these dreadful years, there has been no time when I would not come to you in love,
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with open arms and an open heart, to interpret to you the benevolent wishes of the Government, rather than to do you harm.
It was the State of my adoption. Had I not always friends in this county ? Did I forget that we were men of the same blood, - Americans ?
Could I forget that in times past we had striven together to advance the interests of the State and the Nation, -the great United States ? Was it possible for me to feel in my soul, knowing you as I do, that the good, quiet farmers of Nassau County were traitors ?
I need not reply to these questions. The heart of every man of you finds the answer in his own bosom.
To-day, we come together understanding each other. On my part, I understand that wicked men, willing to be traitors, -for I shall not compromise with names before you, - have been misleading the people for their own selfish purposes. I understand that misguided, mistaken men have given a too- willing compliance to these leaders ; that young men, full of the fire of their young blood,- high-strung, generous, heroic, misled by demagogues,- believed their State was to be op- pressed by Northern fanatics, and, with the same zeal that will hereafter lead them in the right path, plunged into the contest with the purest motives, and fought gallantly what they truly believed to be the enemies of their country. And I under- stand, too, that many staid citizens have been forced to observe the forms of indorsing the despotism of the Richmond Govern- ment while their hearts were in the glorious old Union.
Now this is a meeting of the loyal citizens of the county ; that is to say, it is a meeting of all the classes I have named, except the first, which I call traitors and demagogues.
Thus I have shown you how I understand you. Now I shall tell you how I want to be understood to-day. And, if any man present does not choose to so understand me, it is because he does not know me, or because he does not wish to know the truth. In either event I shall feel as Pat did towards the mule that kicked him behind, - I shall impute the fact to the " ignorance of the baste."
Of myself I should not say any thing, if it were not that I
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wish you to know just how much consolation my words may properly be to you, and how much instruction they contain of value for your future conduct.
I tell you, then, to begin with, I came to you wholly out of my personal regard for you as old friends whose hospitalities I have shared in the times that have gone by ; as my fellow- citizens with whom I have formerly voted, to whom I have spoken in these pine-woods in behalf of what I believed to be our true public policy.
I do not come to make favor with you in order that I may some day get office at your hands. You very well know that you have before offered me that, but could not prevail on me to accept a nomination. No, my friends : I am devoted to a scientific profession, from which I cannot be tempted to po- litical position.
You have known me to take the stump among you as the antagonist of what I thought a great monopoly, and when I was opposing the strongest political influences in the State, in the face of my own ruin, because I believed I was right, and might thereby serve my fellow-citizens.
So, to-day, I come in the same spirit. I come not to lecture as an oracle of wisdom; not even as an officer of the United- States army. I come simply as a brother among men, as your fellow-citizen. I come to talk with you rather than to you.
And in any information I shall profess to impart to you con- cerning the temper of the North, or the policy of the United- States Government, you will understand me as speaking from official documents, published in the newspapers for our guid- ance, and from speeches and editorials made all over the North, illustrating the hearts of the people.
When it is not so, I shall tell you, that you may be honestly advised as to your condition and prospects.
Now you understand me, and I understand you. I take it that you are here to listen in candor and forbearance, just as I am here to speak in candor and love; and, if I say some- thing occasionally to offend some of you, believe me, I do not so speak with the intent to offend.
If I offend, it will be because, in my earnestness to do my
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duty and to serve my fellow-citizens, I forget all personal feel- ings, and repudiate old party predilections.
Be forbearing, then, because I stand in the presence of God and my own conscience, and I intend to speak the truth though the heavens fall.
And first, concerning the War, it is necessary only to say so much as shall lead us to the results we hope to reach by this gathering.
No matter what may have been your past expressions, every orderly citizen rejoices to-day in the triumph of the United States over the wicked combination to take its life.
No good man rejoices or believes in any such thing as a conquest of the South by the North ; of pro-slavery men by abolitionists ; of democrats by republicans.
This proposition is very evident, because there have been loyal Southern States, and many loyal men in all the rebellious States (a loyal union league even in Charleston) ; and there have been traitors in the North : so then, we shall not say the North has whipped the South.
Nor, again, shall we cry out that abolitionists have van- quished pro-slavery men ; because it so happens that many loyal men have come to the help of the Government, who have themselves been slaveholders, and have never ceased to plead and preach for slavery. Witness, for instance, our noble President, a slaveholder of Tennessee ; and bear in mind the fact that the most prominent and bitter abolitionists of the country have continually opposed the Government through- out the war.
But again : I said that in this war we shall not permit re- publicans to claim a victory over the democrats.
Why, behold the strong men of the democratic party, who ranged themselves with the Government when the first matri- cidal shot was hurled against Sumter !- Stanton, Dix, But- ler, Sickles, Dickinson ; - but where, if I begin the list, shall I leave off ?
Now, then, you see that my proposition is correct; and no man has occasion to feel chagrined simply because he is a Southerner, a democrat, or pro-slavery.
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And yet somebody has been whipped. Who is it ? and how was it done ?
These questions are of great importance to us at this time : let us not fear to look them boldly in the face ; for we require correct answers to them to assist us in the re-organization of the State. I say we shall be forced to re-organize in accord- ance with these answers, if we can find correct ones.
It may be disagreeable to some here to look at the truth unless it be a little gilded.
My friends, I desire to make every thing as pleasant as I can ; but I am too far from a political dauber, and there is no gold-leaf in my book. I must therefore present you with the truth, naked as I find it.
When, therefore, I am asked, Who has been whipped ? and how was it done ? I answer, first, in a general way: The spirit of the nineteenth century has met in conflict the demons of barbarism, and only the constant result of nature has oc- curred. This time, be assured, the weapons will not be laid aside till those barbarous ideas are driven from the land.
The irresistible tide of Christian progress hath surged against the Rock of Error, rooted it from its ancient hold, overturned and rolled it away, and now with its divine flood fills the place once occupied with that gloomy boulder, - the roost of the buzzard, the hiding-place of kidnappers and pirates.
This statement may be too general, and there are possibly points in it not exactly understood.
To narrow it down a little, and to make it plain to every- body, when you ask me who has been whipped, and how it was done, I say more definitely what I hope we shall all agree to, that the United-States Government, your government and mine, - so that every loyal man has a share in the fact, -our Government, has had a war with traitors, and has given them damnation.
Now, if this plain talk hurts any man here who pretends to be loyal, I have only to say that he reminds me of a Jew, pro- fessing Christianity, who begged men not to speak harshly of Judas Iscariot because he was a countryman of his.
But a great many have suffered who were innocent of treason. Ah, yes! that's true. Is it the first time since
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Adam was born, that virtuous men have been hurt by the dis- pensation of God's providence ? Was Abel an offender against God?
And after all, my friends, how often will it not appear that if the innocent were a little more careful, he would escape in- jury ! he was possibly where he ought not to be, or per- chance he was not where he ought to have been.
I am sometimes reminded, when I hear these accusations, of a similar complaint before a country justice in New Jersey :- " May it plase your honor," says Pat, "that divil of a bad craythur, Mrs. Finnegan, t'rowed a shtone into me front windy last night, and hit me darter Bridget on her buzzum, saving your honor's prisince, all along of a spite she had agin her, yer honor."
" Did it hurt Bridget much?" says the justice. "Well, plase yer honor," says Pat, " it niver hurt Bridget a bit, thanks be to God, yer honor ; but it broke three fingers on the hand of the young man that's paying his attintions to her, yer honor."
So when I hear some men complain of being hurt by this War, although innocent of antagonism against the United- States Government, I cannot help saying to myself, that if Bridget had been seated on one side of the fire-place, and her sweetheart on the other, the young man's fingers would not have been broken; though in all this I reflect in no man- ner on the young man, but can only feel that his human na- ture made him a little too close to Bridget when Mrs. Finne- gan's spiteful stone came in at the window.
When I say that the United-States Government has thrashed traitors, I refer to that title all men who were active in push- ing forward the scheme for secession, provided those men possessed sufficient intelligence to comprehend what they were doing, and were so acting for the wicked purpose of de- frauding the majority of the nation of their constitutional right to elect a President.
You all remember what miserable pretexts were made for raising the hand of Florida against her best friend. You elected a man from this county pledged to secession. Some of you voted intelligently and patriotically : you knew that
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the United-States Government had bought this territory and paid money for it, and it belonged by a fee-simple title to that government ; you felt gratitude for the protection stretched over you in the Indian wars ; you thought on the immense sums of money disbursed among your citizens to pay for property lost in those wars.
When the President of the Secession Convention declared that the " growth of anti-slavery principles at the North makes our property no longer safe," you said, Nonsense ! the Government that has spent one hundred millions of dol- lars on Florida will not now turn upon her and rob her : men do not invest money in that way. You understood the trick : you saw a convention made up largely of men interested in railroads that were furnished almost entirely by Northern money, - your own road, running through this county, on which rolled elegant cars and the finest locomotives, scarce one of them paid for, and all bought in the North; you saw men of large commercial business gathered there ; you knew they owed the North for their goods, and you said, The North that trusts us will not rob us, even if it wish to, because it won't pay. And you said, too, How can it be possible that the North, which does so much to help us, thinking that the best way to help herself, is going to deprive us of our liberties when she can make us more serviceable by giving us the greatest scope for material development ?
You looked about to see if you had lost yet any portion of your slave property. Could you find that any emissary of the United-States Government had ever robbed you of your ne- groes ? No: you never dreamed of there being the slight- est danger of it.
Whom did you fear ?
The wise among you could not speak: such was the terror held over men, that not one of you dared to say a word against the iniquitous assemblage at Tallahassee consecrated to the work of theft and treason, - two crimes to be sanctified by the prayers of a Christian bishop.
There are men here who saw the wickedness of this thing. I'll wager a bale of cotton against a hoe-handle that I can tell
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the opinions of some of my old friends in Nassau County at that time.
You thought, Well, it may be all as they tell us : but whom shall we believe ? Shall we believe the Government that has till now protected us, and that we have never found false ? or shall we believe a herd of politicians, who, so far as we have known them, have been continually at work to serve themselves ?
You thought, Are we, the people, to be any better off than we have ever been? Shall we not have the same relation to the new government that we had to the old ?
Where, then, are we to be improved ? One thing we do see : that where now there is but one government to support, there will be two ; there will therefore be a host of new offices to fill, new expenses to pay. These places will of course be occupied by the men most busy in bringing the new order of things about, and who, now that their party is fairly beaten, must otherwise lie on the shelf: we shall pay the bills.
It appears, then, you thought that we, the people, are to be no better off: our position is to be in no sense changed from the present, except for the worse ; for we shall be bound in the chains of men who have perjured themselves to make places they had lost.
But they, the politicians, are going to have a good thing of it : we are to be the cats'-paws by which those monkeys are to pull chestnuts out of the fire; and they will eat the chestnuts.
These men proceeded at once to deeds of theft and fraud. They repudiated every debt owed to Northern men. They called it sequestration ; i. e., repudiation made easy. Railroad stockholders, whose property was owned by Northern capitalists, luxuriated a good deal in the smartness by which they had defrauded New York of three to four millions of dollars : they stole United-States funds in the custom-houses and post-offices ; and to-day, after having oppressed the peo- ple during all these four years, conscripted your young men, forcing them into their armies, leaving your country open
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to raids invited by their wickedness, allowing your wives and children to go hungry, - what happens ?
Why, they jostle each other indecently at the post-offices in their haste to get off their petitions for amnesty by the first mail ! Do they plead for you ? Do we find one of them cry- ing to the Government, " Have mercy on our poor people in the country : we led them astray: they are not to blame ; we are the guilty ones"? No! before God I say it, -no ! And some of the young men who are before me to-day as paroled prisoners, without the rights of citizens, but who are nobly honest in your desire to be good citizens of the United States, are in no manner instructed how to proceed, while those who have been your generals have already filed their applications for pardon, leaving you to look out for yourselves without one word of advice.
This, after having ac om lished -what ? They began by complaining that negro property wasn't safe : they were going to make it safe ! And they have saved the institution of slavery with a vengeance, have they not? Yes : when you drop your watch overboard, a Yankee peddler can't steal it from you. There must be comfort in that to these distin- guished statesmen : the slaves are all safe to-day, - nobody will steal a negro.
Thus you reason, and thus we come to conclude that these are the men, my fellow-citizens, who have been whipped : they have been properly punished; but let us not apply the word to the people, although the people have suffered so much: it was simply in the fortune of war.
We are all American citizens : we cannot afford to have such a word as " whipped " among us. We must not cultivate bitterness on the subject of the war; we must not talk of other wars for Mexico or Canada, that shall seem to unite our own people by destroying others, or heal our own wounds by opening new. We are simply back again in the Union. Let us address ourselves with energy to the development of our State and country ; thus we shall become a united people.
Shall we then have bitterness for those who have misled us? No: bitterness for none; good for all. Forgiveness for re- pentance, - that is the law of Christianity. Can it be that you
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will accept the forgiveness of God for yourselves, - that you will pray, "Forgive my sins even as I forgive those that sin against me,"-and then refuse to forgive these unfortunate men who have done you wrong, but who already suffer for it ?
Let us betray no vindictiveness even towards those who misled the weak and persecuted loyal men. Remember Saul, who, from being the leader of persecution, became the prince of Christian apostles. There is no occasion for bad feelings even towards them, guilty as they have been.
The war, instituted by wicked men, has been seized out of their hands by the Eternal Controller of the world ; and what they meant should be a Revolution for the advancement of slavery, white and black, has been turned to the creation of glorious liberty.
It was not the war of a man nor a State ; not the South nor yet the North conducted this war; not Davis with his iron hand, nor Lincoln with his tender love for all men: it was God's war. As the great Father permitted the death of Christ after only three years of ministration, but yet failed not to Christianize the world, so in these days the death of our President has but inaugurated the establishment of his prin- ciples of policy.
" May these endure, and as his work attest The glory of his honest heart and hand : The simplest, and the bravest and the best, - The Moses and the Cromwell of his land."
In what I have said I think I have sufficiently indicated the spirit in which the United States approaches the people of those States that have attempted the subversion of the Gov- ernment.
If you believe any thing I say, you understand that our beneficent Government comes to her children with the old affection. She wishes these States to return to their alle- giance, not as conquered provinces, but as peers of the realm.
It is true that some men at the North do not quite consent to so much favor being shown the unfaithful : they would hold these States in the " grasp of war " until the true public policy is developed in them. But the Government says, "No : let us
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' be glad ; for this thy brother was dead, and is alive again ; and was lost, and is found.' "
But while the United States comes to us with this sentiment, we are not to suppose that we can resume our State govern- ment without remodelling our Constitution so as to make it homogeneous with the Constitutions of those States that have stood by the national authority in this contest, and also with the United-States Constitution, amended as it is by the de- mands of the age.
We are not to suppose that men who have paid $3,000,000,- 000, and laid their best blood on the altar of their country, are willing for the sake of peace to plaster over this horrible gash before all the poison has been cleansed out of the wound.
The people of these States have been taught that Uncle Sam was a fool and a coward, whom it was necessary only to cajole for whatever was wanted. It is true that for many years he has slept with a firebrand and a barrel of gunpowder under his bed; it is true that men have long been at work rolling these antagonisms towards each other to blow up the old gentleman ; but it is also true that the incendiaries have failed to notice a very important habit of our uncle. He slept with one eye open.
Thus it happened, that, when the firebrand and the gun- powder were almost in contact, Uncle Sam suddenly jumped out of bed; after a struggle he has kicked the rascals out of his house, and thrown the firebrand after them.
They knock to be re-admitted : they are naked and hungry, and Uncle Sam is merciful.
They will be re-admitted; but do you imagine our good old uncle is fool enough to let them come in with their old manners, and bring their firebrand with them ?
When you have answered this question correctly, you have solved the whole problem of re-organization.
If a chemist who had never heard of gunpowder were to receive a barrel, and be told that it contained such a dangerous mixture, that he must be careful how he kept it in his house, he would proceed immediately to examine the fine black grains, - he would analyze the article, and ascertain its ingredients : he would learn that it is made of saltpetre, charcoal, and
-
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sulphur; that the charcoal takes fire easily, giving off a cer- tain gas, and ignites the sulphur, so increasing the heat as to draw another inflammable gas from the saltpetre; that these agents act rapidly on each other, evolving their gases so sud- denly as to cause destructive explosion.
Finding, then, that fire was the one thing brought in contact with these black grains that created danger, he would be cautious that no fire approached his mysterious barrel.
Now what would you say of that chemist, if, for the sake of fraternity and peace, he permitted a brother who lived with him to build a fire in his chimney, and use the barrel of gun- powder for a back-log ?
Yet, my friends, I undertake to say that this was just what the United-States Government has been trying to do for sev- eral years. A republic is constituted of these ingredients, -free thoughts, free speech, free men. Now, when you look through all the knowledge of earth, do you find a more explosive mixture than that ? We call it freedom.
What is the most dangerous antagonism to freedom ? Is it abolitionism ? No: the abolitionists have been pleading for free speech and free men for a half century. Abolitionism almost means freedom. I can't find the most dangerous an- tagonism to freedom in any of the forms of religion among our citizens. I can't even find it in any Northern State ; because in all those States you may think and say just what you please concerning public politics, and there, all men are free.
But there have been certain States in which a man could " not say what he pleased, no matter how courteously he spoke, nor how earnest his convictions, nor what his social position, nor what his religious character. There were certain States in which free discussions were not allowed.
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