Martinsburg Weekly Independent

PUBLIC MEETING IN MEMPHIS.

A large number of citizens, both white and black, met in the Exposition Building of Memphis, Tennessee, on Friday, August 28, and adopted resolutions denouncing the lynching of the negro insurrectionists in Gibson county in unqualified terms.

The following, among other speeches were delivered:

Loud calls were made for President Jefferson Davis, who upon ascending the rostrum was loudly cheered. Mr. Davis then spoke as follows:

Friends and Countrymen:

You have assembled to-night, not for the bare purpose of giving an expression which humanity demands, but you have assembled for a higher and holier duty. (Applause.) It is what you owe to your sires, what you owe to your posterity, what you owe to the living, and what you owe to the gallant dead who fell for the sake of Southern Independence. Never has a country been more truly in a condition of having lost all save its honor, and you men of the counties of Jackson, Grundy, Polk and many others of wide reputation, may be expected to denounce whatever would stain the honor and whatever would tarnish the fair name of the living. [Applause.]

You are not here, then, merely to express your horror of a particular crime; still less are you here to argue what is due from one race to another. It is a crime, and a crime to be punished as it deserves, but that belongs to the law and its officers. That they will do their duty, only those who distrust our people can fail to believe. But you come to appeal to the moral sense of the world; your words are to go abroad to mankind. Let it understand that you are not a race of assassins; that you are not the men who mask, but stand in the dignity of your manhood, and in the likeness of your Creator: with eyes open and exposed you dare assert your rights and protect them to the best of your ability, and to the end of your lives will go forward with honor which never seeks concealment, wears no mask and never blackens its face. (Applause.) I was peculiarly struck with the remark of the negro who was called upon by one of the committee sent to South Carolina, and who was expected to give testimony which would involve General Wade Hampton in the ku-klux outrages. He was asked if he knew Wade Hampton. He said he did, and had known him since the time they were boys together. They then said to him, "Do you believe he has been engaged in these kuklux outrages?" "No, I don't believe it." "Why don't you believe it?" "Because if Mars Wade Hampton had been in it it would have been the white man, and not the negro, that he would have struck."

The negroes were not our enemies; why should they become so? We are their friends. Yes, and the Southern men are the only friends they have to-day in any part of the world. It becomes us to be their friends. Every Southern man in his memory runs back to the negro woman who nursed him: to the boy who hunted with him: to the man who first taught him to ride and to swim: and, as he grew to manhood, the cordial welcome given him by the old nurse, with a tenderness scarcely inferior to that of his own mother, and while he has such memories clustering around him, he cannot be the enemy of that useful race which was the main strength of our country, when we stood in this relation, which I believe God intended us to occupy.

If we have been diverted from such relation, and if hostility has sprung up to any extent, it has been the work of those incendiaries who have come in to destroy the natural relations of the races, and thus fomenting a discord by producing the evils which now exist in society. But my friends, it rests with you, whatever be the result to show to the world that you are incapable of secret crime; that you hate the man who wears a mask (applause), and whatever it is necessary for the public peace to do. They require the white man to provide for them and protect them as much as they ever did; and I believe they will require him to do so to the end of time. Now then, as to these white men who believe in a war of races that the black may be exterminated, and see in this a future that is desirable. I have no sympathy. (Applause.) The negroes were my friends in the olden times. They were our protectors when our brave men went to the field, and the women and children remained at home. (Applause.) It was they who brought the Mississippi valley into cultivation, and by them alone can that valley, in my opinion, ever be cultivated. They are as necessary to us as we are to them; and that kind of relation existing between us, is no reason why the prosperity of the future shall not exceed that of the past. But I do not intend to trench upon a question on which every one has undoubtedly formed his opinion, I would only say for myself that as I cannot have hostility to these deluded people, the only feeling of indignation I have is against the white men who have disturbed this relation between us: who have fomented discord; who have led the imaginative negro into evil; against them I say hurl the thunderbolt of our vengeance.

General Forrest said he was there to enter his protest against the late outrage, and he was ready to start to-morrow to hunt the murderers and bring them to justice. (Cheers.) It was time this thing should stop, and if they would be as determined as he was they could stop it. They should hunt the men up and do everything to punish them. The General said he was ready at a moment's notice to go in search of them, and was loudly applauded.