Note 27 — Chapter XXI · Scenes in Mobile—The Cotton Swindles.

He was subsequently permitted to renew it. Shortly afterward, copying and indorsing the foolish falsehood that Chief-Justice Chase had given it as his opinion, since his Southern tour, that the negro race would speedily root out the whites throughout the Gulf States, he thought it wise and in good taste to say:

“The Judge, before he made his recent tour through the South, believed that every white man within these States was too lazy to work, and, instead of going out in the morning to get the meat that was desired for dinner, would seize a young negro and pitch it into the dinner-pot, to be served up for the post-prandial meal. By diligent inquiry he found out that this was not true; and so he agreed to make a compromise between his prepossessions and the facts he discovered in his journey. The result is announced in the telegraphic report which we reprint above. We do not eat little negroes, as he believed, but we are so lazy that he seems to be fearful that, as we do not eat them, we are bound, from our demoralized condition, to be presently eaten by them. Well, this is what he has been teaching for many years—the right of the negro to eat the white man.

“But why should a sensible man deal with such folly? The expression of it shows with how little wisdom the world is governed, and shows, moreover, how little wisdom there is in the fanatical hosts of which Judge Chase is the most conspicuous member; and yet this man was feted and caressed in his travels through the South, by Southern men and Southern women.”