Black and White | Page 9

some circumstance which
justifies the murder and exculpates the murderer. The black always

deserves his fate. I give the paragraph:
"SPEAR, MITCHELL CO., N.C., March 19, 1884.--Col. J.M. English,
a farmer and prominent citizen living at Plumtree, Mitchell County,
N.C., shot and killed a mulatto named Jack Mathis at that place
Saturday, March 1. There had been difficulty between them for several
months.
"Mathis last summer worked in one of Col. English's mica mines.
Evidence pointed to him being implicated in the systematic stealing of
mica from the mine. Still it was not direct enough to convict him, but
he was discharged by English. Mathis was also a tenant of one of
English's houses and lots. In resentment he damaged the property by
destroying fences, tearing off weather boards from the house, and
injuring the fruit trees. For this Col. English prosecuted the negro, and
on Feb. 9, before a local Justice, ex-Sheriff Wiseman, he got a
judgment for $100. On the date stated, during a casual meeting, hot
words grew into an altercation, and Col. English shot the negro. Mathis
was a powerful man. English is a cripple, being lame in a leg from a
wound received in the Mexican war.
"A trial was had before a preliminary court recently, Col. S.C. Vance
appearing for Col. English. After a hearing of all the testimony the
court reached a decision of justifiable homicide and English was
released. The locality of the shooting is in the mountains of western
North Carolina, and not far from the Flat Rock mica mine, the scene of
the brutal midnight murder, Feb. 17, of Burleson, Miller, and Horton by
Rae and Anderson, two revenue officers, who took this means to gain
possession of the mica mine."
My knowledge of such affairs in the South is, that the black and the
white have an altercation over some trivial thing, and the white to end
the argument shoots the black man down. The negro is always a
"powerful fellow" and the white man a "weak sickly man." The law and
public opinion always side with the white man.
CHAPTER IV

The Triumph of the Vanquished
There are those throughout the length and breadth of our great country
who make a fair living by traducing better men than themselves; by
continually crying out that the black man is incapable of being civilized;
that he is born with the elements of barbarity, improvidence and
untruthfulness so woven into his very nature that no amount of
opportunity, labor, love, or sacrifice can ever lift him out of the
condition, the "sphere God designed him to occupy"--as if the great
Common Parent took any more pains in the making of one man than
another. But those who utter such blasphemy, who call in the assistance
of the Almighty to fight the battles of the devil, are the very persons
who do most by precept and example to make possible the verification
of their blasphemy. They carry their lamentations into the pulpit, grave
convocations, newspapers, and even into halls of legislation, State and
Federal. They are the false prophets who blind the eye of reason and
blunt the sympathies of honest, well-meaning men. They are the
Jonases on board the ship of progress. They belong to that class of men
who would pick flaws in the finest work of art. They find fault with the
great mass of ignorance around them, contending that the poor victims
have only themselves to blame for their destitute and painful condition,
and, therefore, are not entitled to the sympathy or charity of their more
fortunate brethren--unmindful that the great Master, judging by the
false laws of men, declared that "the poor ye have always with you;"
while the very rich are held up as monsters of selfishness, rapacity and
the most loathsome of social vices. It is, therefore, hardly to be
expected that this class of persons would find anything good in the
nature of the lately enslaved black man, or any improvement in his
condition since a generous Government had made him an ignorant
voter and a confirmed pauper--the victim of his former master, to be
robbed outright by designing and unscrupulous harpies of trade, and to
be defrauded of his franchise by blatant demagogues or by outlaws, to
whom I will not apply the term "assassins" for fear of using bad
English.
When the American Government conferred upon the black man the
boon of freedom and the burden of the franchise, it added four million

men to the already vast army of men who appear to be specially created
to labor for the enrichment of vast corporations, which have no souls,
and for individuals, whom our government have made a privileged
class, by permitting them to usurp or monopolize, through the accepted
channel of barter and trade,