and I, General, might have chosen a different destiny for them, under the
Constitution, yet Providence knows best.”
“You can’t do much with ’em,” interrupted Col. Sellers. “They are a
speculating race, sir, disinclined to work for white folks without
security, planning how to live by only working for themselves. Idle,
sir, there’s my garden just a ruin of weeds. Nothing practical in ’em.”
“There is some truth in your observation, Colonel, but you must educate
them.”
“You educate the niggro and you make him more speculating than he was
before. If he won’t stick to any industry except for himself now, what
will he do then?”
“But, Colonel, the negro when educated will be more able to make his
speculations fruitful.”
“Never, sir, never. He would only have a wider scope to injure himself.
A niggro has no grasp, sir. Now, a white man can conceive great
operations, and carry them out; a niggro can’t.”
“Still,” replied the Senator, “granting that he might injure himself in a
worldly point of view, his elevation through education would multiply his
chances for the hereafter–which is the important thing after all,
Colonel. And no matter what the result is, we must fulfill our duty by
this being.”
“I’d elevate his soul,” promptly responded the Colonel; “that’s just it;
you can’t make his soul too immortal, but I wouldn’t touch him, himself.
Yes, sir! make his soul immortal, but don’t disturb the niggro as he
is.”
Of course one of the entertainments offered the Senator was a public
reception, held in the court house, at which he made a speech to his
fellow citizens. Col. Sellers was master of ceremonies. He escorted the
band from the city hotel to Gen. Boswell’s; he marshalled the procession
of Masons, of Odd Fellows, and of Firemen, the Good Templars, the Sons of
Temperance, the Cadets of Temperance, the Daughters of Rebecca, the
Sunday School children, and citizens generally, which followed the
Senator to the court house; he bustled about the room long after every
one else was seated, and loudly cried “Order!” in the dead silence which
preceded the introduction of the Senator by Gen. Boswell. The occasion
was one to call out his finest powers of personal appearance, and one he
long dwelt on with pleasure.
This not being an edition of the Congressional Globe it is impossible to
give Senator Dilworthy’s speech in full. He began somewhat as follows:
“Fellow citizens: It gives me great pleasure to thus meet and mingle with
you, to lay aside for a moment the heavy duties of an official and
burdensome station, and confer in familiar converse with my friends in
your great state. The good opinion of my fellow citizens of all sections
is the sweetest solace in all my anxieties. I look forward with longing
to the time when I can lay aside the cares of office–” [“dam sight,”
shouted a tipsy fellow near the door. Cries of “put him out.”]
“My friends, do not remove him. Let the misguided man stay. I see that
he is a victim of that evil which is swallowing up public virtue and
sapping the foundation of society. As I was saying, when I can lay down
the cares of office and retire to the sweets of private life in some such
sweet, peaceful, intelligent, wide-awake and patriotic place as Hawkeye
(applause). I have traveled much, I have seen all parts of our glorious
union, but I have never seen a lovelier village than yours, or one that
has more signs of commercial and industrial and religious prosperity–
(more applause).”
The Senator then launched into a sketch of our great country, and dwelt
for an hour or more upon its prosperity and the dangers which threatened
it.
He then touched reverently upon the institutions of religion, and upon
the necessity of private purity, if we were to have any public morality.
“I trust,” he said, “that there are children within the sound of my
voice,” and after some remarks to them, the Senator closed with an
apostrophe to “the genius of American Liberty, walking with the Sunday
School in one hand and Temperance in the other up the glorified steps of