"The Sheriff's Children"

After our discussion, I don't really know what to think about the author's intentions in the story. I thought a lot about what the author was trying to say about the civil war, racism and people in general.
I think that he wanted to make a statement about humanity's submissive qualities; how we accept things to be the way they're "supposed" to be, we allow ourselves to be brainwashed and our natural morals to be erased.
It took so much for he sheriff to realize that he had done wrong. Not only did he not realize that it was wrong to prejudge someone based upon their race, but something as obviously immoral as selling two human beings (not only human beings but ones he should have respected and loved) into slavery, should not have taken so much as it did to resonate in his head and for him to finally realize that there are so much more important things in life than doing what is self preserving and crowd pleasing. In the end, he was too late, and I feel like it's a message about the obliviousness of people and our inevitable doom to fail and make conscious mistakes.
I think it also made a statement about the fact that we prejudge things that we have never experienced...The town hadn't been hit by the war, but they waged it themselves even though they were clueless.