If a slave-owner was cruel to
his slaves, it was because he was a cruel man, and all who came in
contact with him, both man and beast, suffered at his hands. Even his
children did not escape. These men are found everywhere. The old black
mammy, with her head tied up in a white cloth, was loved, respected and
honored by every inmate of the home, regardless of color.

The following incident will be of interest: Hon. John Randolph Tucker,
one of Virginia's most gifted and learned sons, who represented his
State in the U.S. Senate, always celebrated his birthday. I remember to
have attended one of these celebrations. It was shortly after the close
of the war. Mr. Tucker was then between fifty-five and sixty years of
age. He had grown children. Fun making was one of his characteristics.
On these annual occasions, it was his custom to dress himself in a long
white gown and bring into the parlor his old black nurse, whom he called
"mammy." She sat in her rocking-chair with her head tied up in the
conventional snow-white cloth. Mr. Tucker, dressed up as a child in his
nightgown, would toddle in and climb up into her lap, and she would lull
him to sleep with an old-time nursery song, no doubt one of her own
compositions. This could not possibly have occurred had the skin of his
nurse been white.

When a daughter married and set up her own home, fortunate was she if
she took with her the mammy. In many homes the slaves were present at
family prayers. The kitchen and the cabin furnished the white children
places of resort that were full of pleasure.

This was the relation between white and colored as I remember it from a
child in my part of Virginia. And tonight, as I write these lines, while
the clock tolls off the hour of eleven, I cannot keep out of my mind the
words of that little poem by Elizabeth Akers:

"Backward, turn backward, oh time in thy flight,
And make me a child again, just for tonight."

[Illustration: JEFFERSON C. DAVIS.

President of the Confederate States of America. Taken just before his
inauguration.]

How anyone could have desired to break up this happy relationship was
beyond the conception of the child, and more or less incomprehensible to
the adult.

Somewhere between childhood and youth we children all learned that there
was a race of people up North called Abolitionists, who were so mean
that they sent secret agents through the country to persuade the colored
people to leave their homes