f the
Union army. Soon after, three thousand eight hundred bottles of fine old
wines, worth from eight to nine dollars a bottle, were dug up and
destroyed by a Confederate officer's order, to prevent the Union army
from capturing them. Thus was plundered an old and revered governor of
South Carolina--one who was a kind neighbor, a true patriot, and a
Christian gentleman.

The persecutions of the owner of Jehossee did not, however, terminate
with the war; for when the struggle was virtually ended, and the fair
mansion of the rice-plantation retained its heirlooms and its furniture,
Beaufort, of South Carolina, was still under the influence of the
Freedman's Bureau; and when it was whispered that Aiken's house was full
of nice old furniture, and that a few faithful servants of the good old
master were its only guards, covetous thoughts at once stirred the evil
minds of those who were the representatives of law and order. This house
was left almost without protection. The war was over. South Carolina had
bent her proud head in agony over her burned plantations and desolate
homes. The victorious army was now proclaiming peace, and generous
treatment to a fallen foe. Then to what an almost unimaginable state of
demoralization must some of the freedmen's protectors have fallen, when
they sent a gunboat to Jehossee Island, and rifled the old house of all
its treasures!

To-day, the governor's favorite sideboard stands in the house of a
citizen of Boston, as a relic of the war. O, people of the north, hold
no longer to your relics of the war, stolen from the firesides of the
south! Restore them to their owners, or else bury them out of the sight
of your children, that they may not be led to believe that the war for
the preservation of the Great Republic was a war for _plunder_;--else
did brave men fight, and good women pray in vain. Away with stolen
pianos, "captured" sideboards, and purloined silver! What but this petty
plundering could be expected of men who robbed by wholesale the poor
negro, to protect whose rights they were sent south?

The great political party of the north became the pledged conservator of
the black man's rights, and established a Freedman's Bureau, and
Freedman's banks to guard his humble earnings. All know something of the
workings of those banks; and to everlasting infamy must be consigned the
names of many of those conducting them,--men who robbed every one of
these depositories of negro savings,