The Tender Mercies of the Yankees.
Some time during the last year,
Lincoln sent to Hayti, for the purpose of colonizing them there, five hundred and sixty-six unfortunate negroes, whom his thieves, miscalled soldiers, had stolen from various plantations in the lower part of
Virginia and
Maryland.
The remnant of these "colonists," numbering 407 persons, have returned and are now at a place which the
Yankees have named "
Freeman's village," and which lies on the south side of the
Potomac.
All that was ever written or preached of the horrors of the "Middle Passage," falls short of conveying an idea of what these poor wretches suffered, under the auspices of the humane philanthropic, negro-loving Yankees.
The New York
Tribune, the vilest of all the vile mouth pieces of the abolitionists, confesses as much.
While they were on the passage from
Fortress Monroe outward, the small pox broke out in the vessel.
The disease soon spread, and the wretched victims when they arrived in the
West Indies, were landed on the sandy beach of an island upon which there was not a house, and there left to help themselves or perish.
That they did perish in immense numbers, may be known from the fact that only 407 out of 566 returned to tell the tale.
One hundred and fifty-nine died upon that inhospitable island, and left their unburied bones bleaching in the sun; a striking yet faint testimonial of the value of Yankee philanthropy, and an everlasting record of Yankee humanity.
The 407 who survived, after having undergone sufferings, the bare narrative of which is sufficient to curdle the blood, contrived by some means to reach
Virginia.
And such a spectacle never was beheld in
Virginia before.
The very mothers who bore them would not have recognized them, so wan, so emaciated, so unlike anything human had they become, from disease, hunger, watching, excessive labor, and every evil that is incident to the condition of man where most deplorable.
They were barefooted to a man, ragged to a degree of indecent exposure, and filthy to the utter nausea of everybody who came near them.
They protested, to a man, that they preferred the severest labor, under the hardest overseer that ever existed in the whole Southern States, to such freedom as they had enjoyed since they had had the folly to leave their homes and follow the fortunes of the thieves who, under pretence of freeing them from bond age, had provided them with a yoke which was incomparably harder to bear.
Such is Yankee compassion for the negro, such his philanthropy, such his humanity.
Utterly heartless himself, his first hope is to make something out of the negro by getting him in his power.
His next is to ruin his master by depriving him of his value.
These are his great objects.
He cares no more for the poor negro than he does for the horse he steals; nay, not so much, for he will take good care of the horse, which is his property, while he will leave the negro to starve; for it is his creed that the negro cannot be property.
The misery he has entailed upon the negro race is beyond all calculation.--He generally finds him in a comfortable home, where he is well fed, well clad, well attended to in sickness — where he has never been overworked, and never treated with undue severity.
By the shrewd name of liberty he lures him from his home, and leaves him either to die of hunger or to fall by the bullet of his master.
The accounts which dally reach the public of the manner in which the negroes of
Louisiana are treated by these enlightened humanitarians are too shocking even to be alluded to. It is a great pity that the negro cannot he convinced by the reports of so many men of color, but must needs "try the elephant" himself.
