FullReads

I once discovered in Massachusetts what I considered to be the world’s meanest man. It was Rev. Spenser B. Meeser, engineer of a Worcester gospel-mill. He was a beggar’s brat who had been clothed, fed and educated by old Stephen Girard’s bounty, but when he grew to manhood–or doghood–he puked on the grave of his benefactor because the latter elected to be an Atheist instead of a bigoted Baptist. I could not at the time conceive of anything meaner wearing the name of man, of a crime blacker than base ingratitude, of aught more damnable than calumniation of the honored dead; but Massachusetts will have to surrender the pennant of infamy to the South. Texas has succeeded in producing two men, either of whom is infinitely meaner than Meeser. The latter did no more than insult the memory of the man whose bread he had broken, and he did this as an excuse for not contributing a little money towards building him a monument. The meanness of Meeser was solely mercenary–he found it easier to slander the dead than to give up a dollar. The San Antonio lawyers sought to turn a black rape-fiend loose to defile the women of the South, to endanger their own daughters; and to perpetrate this crime strove with tooth and nail to commit one even more damnable.

Fifty years ago Macaulay wrote of Bertrand Barere: “When we put everything together, poltroonery, baseness, effrontery, mendacity, barbarity, the result is something which in a novel we should condemn as caricature, and to which, we venture to say, no parallel can be found in history.” It is indeed a pity the great essayist did not live to contemplate this pair of Texas attorneys. He would have learned, doubtless to his surprise, that “the Anacreon of the guillotine” was a pretty decent fellow–by comparison. Barere was a monster born of a reign of blood. He gave the friends of his youth to the guillotine. So terrible was his savagery that he became known as “the Witling of Terror.” He was an able-bodied and enterprising liar who never told the truth unless by accident; but in his most demoniac moods it did not occur to him to prove recreant to his race, to torture children that he might enjoy their agony, to brand innocent girls, who could scarce look upon their own budding bosoms without a blush, as the depraved paramours of syphilitic Senegambians. Ah Macaulay! from thy Seventh Heaven, reserved for the lords of intellect–the children of genius, who needs must be the favorites of Omniscience–shake down a drop of cold water upon the blistered lips of Bertrand Barere, for they did not frame the supreme falsehood–nor did he strive to unchain a black lecher that he might imperil the honor of the ladies of his native land. Despite all his sin and shame, he would have looked upon that dishonored daughter of the Caucasian race and cried for vengeance.

Carlyle, greatest of critics, the supreme lord of literature–that Scottish Arcturus before whom even Shakespeare’s glorious star pals its ineffectual fires–awards the palm of correlated cussedness to Cagliostro; yet the “count” was merely a successful swindler and professional pander. He plucked rich dupes, but I find not in his long catalogue of crime that he slandered youthful serving maids–for a consideration. He was advocate for many an unclean thing, but it is not recorded that he ever took a fee from a negro rape-fiend–that he ever defended a lecherous son of Ham who had dared raise his wolfish eyes to the fair face of Japhet’s humblest daughter. Even when put on trial for his own worthless life he did not seek to save himself by the perjured testimony of the sons of slaves.

Cagliostro, Barere and Meeser–the positive, comparative and superlative of infamy hitherto! but we must turn to “Grand old Texas” to find unblushing effrontry and irremediable rascality. Some months ago a creature named Otis, who conducts somewhere in Southern California a putrid abortion miscalled a newspaper, declared in his columns that Southern women are often paramours of black bucks, and that the frequent lynching of so-called rape-fiends are due to discovery of these unnatural liaisons. But as Otis commanded a company of coons during the war–a job which no gentleman would have accepted to save his immortal soul–and as he has a head shaped like a gourd and a face strongly suggestive of a degenerate simian, his foolish lies only produced a general laugh; yet here are two alleged Southern gentlemen, certifying in open court that Otis’ cowardly falsehoods have a broad foundation of fact! In the whole world’s history there is but one other instance of such shameless infamy, and that too belongs to Texas. When the 14-year old “ward of the Baptist church” was debauched at its chief storm center of bigotry and bile, Baylor University, the sweet scented son-in-law of President Burleson tried to make it appear that she was enciente by a Senegambian–that young and innocent girls committed to its care were so poorly guarded that it was possible for them to have nigger babies!–Yet this defamer of Baptist womanhood has not yet been introduced to a rope by the male students, attacked from the rear by Baylor trustees, or told to leave town! Fortunately the young lady was able to refute this slander of the University and its inmates by putting a white baby in evidence–the pickaninny specialty having been reserved by Providence for the manager of the Baptist missionary board.