divided between Blackstone and the curriculum, and he was to continue the study at home with his father's old partner, Colonel Foley.

Archie's wish was to eschew politics and confine himself to his profession, but this was not permitted him by the society in which he lived. There was no half-way course to be taken at that time in a State situated as Alabama was. He lived in the northern portion of the State, not far removed from the Tennessee border. His county contained a respectable minority of white Republican voters, who had been Whigs before Secession came, and were avowed Unionists during the Rebellion.

-a name

This class were popularly known as "Red Strings derived from the red-flannel hat-bands, which a secret union organization, called "the Heroes of America," wore during the war as a sign of recognition to deserters from the Confederate armies, and to escaped Union prisoners making their way from Andersonville and Salisbury to the mountains of Tennessee and Kentucky. These so-called Red Strings numbered in their ranks some conscientious patriotic men. Not holding slaves themselves, they resolved early in the war never to carry a musket in defence of "the peculiar institution."

Then came the passage of a general conscript law by the Confederate Congress, containing the very unwise exemption from active service of men owning as many as twenty slaves. This, known among all the non-slaveholders of the South as the twenty nigger law," permanently alienated from the Confederacy a large class of men living in the foot-hills of the Blue Ridge from Virginia to Alabama.

66

This element existed, as has been said, to some extent in Dunham County, and their ears greedily devoured the street rumor, that young Moran had turned Radical while at college.

In practical politics Archie was a complete novice. It was a subject which engaged no part of his thoughts. Though his father's estate was badly reduced by the emancipation proclamation, enough remained to make his own and his mother's life. comfortable, and if the coldness he was now made to feel was a

foretaste of what might be expected from political enemies when once his real war paint was put on, he wished to have no part in the conflict.

These Red String fellows, however, gave him no more peace after his return from college than his old friends did. They sorely lacked influential leaders, and left no stone unturned to inflame his imagination with bright pictures of what might be done politically in that part of the State if only he would lead. The older ones among them had consistently voted for his father in all his victories and defeats in the old days of Whiggery, and to whom could they look so naturally for a successor, they said, as to his son. They would send him to Congress when he was old enough, they would make him Governor as his father had been, and as to law practice they would give him their practice, if the Ku Klux Democrats refused to employ. As to the negroes, their acres of ivory were in broad and happy smile, when the designing youth of his own age and station gave currency to the slightly founded rumors of his changed politics.

At last came a crisis in his life. He was asked to deliver the Fourth of July address in his county town in the year 1869, and though he protested in the speech that he was not a voter, and hence ineligible to office; though he made not a single political allusion; he rode back to his plantation home late in the night of that day a banned man, socially an outcast, a very Cain among the people of the Southern earth. There was no suspicion on his part when he accepted the invitation that the Democrats of the town and county would en masse absent themselves, and that every negro who could ride, walk or hobble would be present, that a detachment of U. S. troops, who were stationed in the vicinity, would in solid and solemn square be his nearest and least noisy hearers, and that of those for whom he had especially composed his rhetorical flowers, no single soul would expose to such contamination a yard of silk or a bow of ribbon.

It was a sore day of trial, and his young heart hardened under the causeless contumely cast upon him, and through him upon

the country which, it was his loving boast to say, the South had done the bigger part to start a-going in the race of nations.

Worse luck yet befell him. On this day, estranged it would seem for no fault of his own from the friends of his childhood, he took his first drink of ardent spirits, given him by a venerable Moonshiner" of enthusiastic Union proclivities, to strengthen him on the stand, the old sinner said.

66

The exhaustion incident to the stand prompted him to take another quaff of the corn juice, while the rude congratulations of his auditors, continued to a late hour of the afternoon, so unsettled his regular habit of life, that he was again and again solicited to drink with them the stale toasts of the nation's natal day, till (I record it with sincere pity) our young hero, at a late hour, after a most furious headlong gallop in the night, stole to his bed decidedly fuddled in his thinking powers.

He woke early the next morning, to hear his aged mother singing in the dining-room just under his chamber, the sweet strains of that beloved household hymn, the "Even me." So patiently and tenderly went the refrain :

"Pass me not! Thy lost one bringing,

Bind, O bind my heart to Thee;

While the streams of life are springing,

Blessing others-O bless me.-Even me."

Then it was he hid his head in the pillow and wept as if his heart would break. He was a fool to be a Union man when the country was covered with Ku Klux; he was a scoundrel to be drunk in Dunham and disgrace his dear mother, who would make any sacrifice for him—her last child, her Benjamin, her hope in the winter of life that was now setting in. Let us vilify him roundly, reader, but let us pity him too, that, at a time of life when he knew nothing, he thought he knew everything. There are so many like him in the world that he ought to have sympathizers.

CHAPTER V.

A MOONSHINER AND SOME OF HIS OPINIONS. Ravenscroft had been the home of the Morans from the time of the removal of the family from Carolina, when Alabama was yet a territory. It had a most commanding situation on the one high hill of the neighborhood. The house was the traditional Southern eight-room brick square, except that its stuccoed, rifle-barrelled chimney flues were enclosed by a handsomely railed upper deck, resting on a roof broken with attic windows, while roomy bow-windows flanked the lower piazza. The house had thus quite the look of a fort when viewed from the surrounding river lands; and to add to this delusion, Archie's father had erected a flag-staff, from which on gala days the ensign of the old Union floated. Always during a political campaign it could be seen, even in the streets of the county town three miles distant. Its owner dying before Secession, Mrs. Moran had never replaced it with the Stars and Bars of the Montgomery government; but associating it proudly with the triumphs of her husband, who had been a noted officer in the Mexican war, the piece of bunting, carefully lavendered, had lain in her drawers for eight years unused.

This loyal emblem, in spite of some protests from his mother, —who gave way, however, when she learned how badly abused her son had been by her old neighbors on the afore-mentioned Fourth of July,―Archie now floated from the peak of Ravenscroft, and felt there was a mighty menace in its every fold to the now popular Ku Klux Klan, a branch of which he knew had been organized in the county town of Dunham the very day, of his speech. The country back of Ravenscroft was rude and broken up to the foot of a mountain range, the farther boundary of the county. In this region—which, far removed from any large

water course, was poor in soil-many small farmers, owning no slaves, had made their living before the Rebellion by distilling corn whisky. It was here that the white Republican vote, "the Red Strings," of whom mention was made in the last chapter, lived, loved and "liquored."

This population formed a veritable Whig clan in the old days, and were as much attached to Gov. Moran as the Campbells to . Macallum More.

The most prominent man of this wild yeomanry was one Gilbert Kroom, an octogenarian, but as vigorous in mind and limb as when he turned the meridian.

"Uncle Gilbert," or "Grandpap," was his neighborhood name, accordingly as his friends or his own numerous progeny hailed him. He had been the father, by one wife, of sixteen children. Of these his first brace of twins, Manuel and Jeff, had taken him to live with them, after the death of the old woman; Jeff was a bachelor, and had, since manhood, always resided with Manuel, who was as uxorious as his father.

The two had been almost reared in a distillery, and it will not, therefore, seem strange that, accustomed thus to regard the boiling of corn into spirits as the one staple industry of their locality, they should have regarded with peculiar disfavor the attempt to enforce the U. S. Internal (they called it invariably Infernal) Revenue Laws in Northern Alabama.

A loyalty to the old government, which had not quailed during a long imprisonment in Castle Thunder, Richmond, for treason to the Confederacy, which had been proof against conscription, tithing laws, the raids of Wheeler's cavalry, who ate out their poor substance as the locusts eat grass, the visits of Confederate impressing officers, who rated all their fat stock at a government figure, and handed them checks, payable "six months after the ratification of a treaty of peace with the United States "this loyalty now showed signs of faltering. But the "Heroes of America were wiser in their generation than the pimps of the Revenue Service. They said, "This order has never yet been of any use except to pilot Yankee prisoners, who