The Long Roll | Page 7

crashed in determinedly with "Home, Sweet Home." To its closing
strains the county people, afoot, on horseback, in old, roomy,
high-swung carriages, took this road and that. The townsfolk, still
excited, still discussing, lingered awhile round the court house or on the
verandah of the old hotel, but at last these groups dissolved also. The
units betook themselves home to fireside and supper, and the sun set
behind the Alleghenies.
Allan Gold, striding over the hills toward Thunder Run, caught up with
the miller from Mill Creek, and the two walked side by side until their
roads diverged. The miller was a slow man, but to-day there was a red
in his cheek and a light in his eye. "Just so," he said shortly. "They
must keep out of my mill race or they'll get caught in the wheel."
"Mr. Green," said Allan, "how much of all this trouble do you suppose
is really about the negro? I was brought up to wish that Virginia had
never held a slave."
"So were most of us. You don't hold any."
"No."
"No more I don't. No more does Tom Watts. Nor Anderson West. Nor
the Taylors. Nor five sixths of the farming folk about here. Nor seven
eighths of the townspeople. We don't own a negro, and I don't know
that we ever did own one. Not long ago I asked Colonel Anderson a lot
of questions about the matter. He says the census this year gives
Virginia one million and fifty thousand white people, and of these the
fifty thousand hold slaves and the one million don't. The fifty
thousand's mostly in the tide-water counties, too,--mighty little of it on
this side the Blue Ridge! Ain't anybody ever accused Virginians of not
being good to servants! and it don't take more'n half an eye to see that
the servants love their white people. For slavery itself, I ain't
quarrelling for it, and neither was Colonel Anderson. He said it was
abhorrent in the sight of God and man. He said the old House of
Burgesses used to try to stop the bringing in of negroes, and that the
Colony was always appealing to the king against the traffic. He said

that in 1778, two years after Virginia declared her Independence, she
passed the statute prohibiting the slave trade. He said that she was the
first country in the civilized world to stop the trade--passed her statute
thirty years before England! He said that all our great Revolutionary
men hated slavery and worked for the emancipation of the negroes who
were here; that men worked openly and hard for it until 1832. Then
came the Nat Turner Insurrection, when they killed all those women
and children, and then rose the hell-fire-for-all, bitter-'n-gall Abolition
people stirring gunpowder with a lighted stick, holding on like grim
death and in perfect safety fifteen hundred miles from where the
explosion was due! And as they denounce without thinking, so a lot of
men have risen with us to advocate without thinking. And underneath
all the clamour, there goes on, all the time, quiet and steady, a freeing
of negroes by deed and will, a settling them in communities in free
States, a belonging to and supporting Colonization Societies. There are
now forty thousand free negroes in Virginia, and Heaven knows how
many have been freed and established elsewhere! It is our best people
who make these wills, freeing their slaves, and in Virginia, at least,
everybody, sooner or later, follows the best people. 'Gradual
manumission, Mr. Green,' that's what Colonel Anderson said, 'with
colonization in Africa if possible. The difficulties are enough to turn a
man's hair grey, but,' said he, 'slavery's knell has struck, and we'll put
an end to it in Virginia peacefully and with some approach to
wisdom--if only they'll stop stirring the gunpowder!'"
The miller raised his large head, with its effect of white powder from
the mill, and regarded the landscape. "'We're all mighty blind, poor
creatures,' as the preacher says, but I reckon one day we'll find the right
way, both for us and for that half million poor, dark-skinned, lovable,
never-knew-any-better, pretty-happy-on-the-whole,
way-behind-the-world people that King James and King Charles and
King George saddled us with, not much to their betterment and to our
certain hurt. I reckon we'll find it. But I'm damned if I'm going to take
the North's word for it that she has the way! Her old way was to sell her
negroes South."
"I've thought and thought," said Allan. "People mean well, and yet

there's such a dreadful lot of tragedy in the world!"
"I agree with you there," quoth the miller. "And I certainly don't deny
that slavery's responsible for a lot of bitter talk and a lot of red-hot
feeling; for some suffering