Black America

The Civil War ended in 1865, and the Confederacy lay crushed and dead. With it died slavery in the United States. The Slavery Question was, of course, the fons et origo of the war, but it was by no means the sole, or even the ostensible, point at issue between North and South. Nor was anything beyond the mere manumission of the slave ever involved in the slavery question. The North did not fight that the manumitted slave might be placed on terms of perfect equality with the white man, or even that he might obtain the franchise. It fought, so far as slavery was concerned, for manumission, and for nothing else; and it gained its point. The point is expressed in the Amendment XIII. to the Constitution, which declares that “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”

And it may be said at once that there is now nowhere in the United States any party which regrets that slavery has been abolished, or which would restore it to-morrow, even if it were able to do so by a stroke of the pen. Yet there is, and always has been, not merely in the South, but also in the North and West, a very powerful party which is of opinion that the manumitted slave and the uneducated negro and coloured man ought not to be placed on terms of perfect equality with the white man, and ought not to be permitted to exercise the franchise. Indeed, the slave’s emancipation, as well as his citizenship, was effected as a tribute to military and political, rather than to moral, exigencies. Writing to W. S. Speer, on October 23rd, 1860, Mr. Lincoln said:—

“I appreciate your motive when you suggest the propriety of my writing for the public something disclaiming all intention to interfere with slaves or slavery in the States; but in my judgment it would do no good. I have already done this many, many times, and it is in print and open to all who will read.”

And, writing to Mr. Lincoln on December 26th following, Mr. Seward said:—

“I met on Monday my Republican associates on the Committee of Thirteen, and afterwards the whole Committee. With the unanimous consent of our section, I offered three propositions which seemed to me to cover the ground of the suggestion made by you through Mr. Weed, as I understood it. First, that the Constitution should never be altered so as to authorise Congress to abolish or interfere with slavery in the States. This was accepted.”

This attitude of the Republican leaders changed as the war went on; but even then the giving to the negro of full political rights and perfect equality was not contemplated. Amendment XIII. says nothing on that head, and Mr. Lincoln, in his last days, expressed himself as opposed to such a wholesale measure. But, the South having been conquered, means had to be devised for keeping it for a time under political subjection, and no means were more obvious or ready to hand than, firstly, a military occupation, with all that such occupation entails; and, secondly, the extension of the suffrage and of the full rights of citizenship to the people who, up to the time of the war, had been slaves. These people, not two or three per cent. of whom possessed the simplest rudiments of education, naturally looked upon the North as a Heavensent deliverer, and were in consequence anxious, when they obtained the suffrage, to support their Northern friends. Thus they were Republicans almost to a man. The Southern whites were, and still are, with nearly equal unanimity, Democrats. In the North, so far as my observation enables me to judge, the Republican party enfolds the majority of the brains and ability of the population. In the South, beyond all doubt, the Democratic party is the party of knowledge and mental power. And in the South, moreover, so far as educated white men are concerned, it is practically the only party. There are Southern Republicans; but they are, almost without exception, negroes, coloured people, or the lowest and most ignorant class of whites.

At first, the process of “reconstructing” the ex-Confederate States was not made to involve the employment of the liberated slave as an agent for the subjection of his former master; but as time went on the black man’s obvious utility was perceived. The following sketch will show how the eight old Slave States in which there was, and still is, the largest negro and coloured element, passed from the condition in which they found themselves at the end of the war to the condition in which they are at the present moment. The particulars concerning Alabama are mainly summarised from a paper by Mr. Hilary A. Herbert, member of Congress for that State; those concerning North Carolina from a paper by Mr. Zebulon B. Vance, United States Senator for that State; those concerning South Carolina from a paper by Mr. John J. Hemphill, member of Congress for that State; those concerning Georgia from a paper by Mr. Henry G. Turner, member of Congress for that State; those concerning Florida from a paper by Mr. Samuel Pasco, United States Senator for that State; those concerning Virginia from a paper by Mr. Robert Stiles, a distinguished Virginian; those concerning Mississippi from a paper by Mr. Ethelbert Barksdale, ex-member of Congress for that State; and those concerning Louisiana from a paper by Mr. B. J. Sage. These papers, with others, were collected and published during the past year by Mr. Hilary A. Herbert at Baltimore, under the general title of “Why the Solid South?”^[3] and they form, I think, the most instructive key that has yet been fitted to the great question, “Why are the United States practically two nations?” I have had the honour of meeting several of the writers, and I believe them to be all men of uprightness and fairness. I have added numerous illustrative details which have been supplied to me from other trustworthy sources, which, however, I need not here catalogue.

After the close of the war, each of the vanquished States received from the President a provisional governor, who had authority to call a convention to frame a constitution of government. The States soon recognised the new situation. Under the new order of things the suffrage was still confined to white men, and senators and representatives were duly elected, and awaited permission to act. They were almost all Democrats. This fact had its effect upon the Republicans, and when the Thirty-ninth Congress opened in December, 1865, Mr. Thad. Stevens, who thenceforth took the lead in the matter, said:—“According to my judgment, they” (the insurrectionary States) “ought never to be recognised as capable of acting in the Union, or of being counted as valid States, until the Constitution shall have been so amended as to make it what its makers intended, and so as to secure perpetual ascendency to the party of the Union.”

Mr. Stevens’ plans were two—to reduce the representation to which the late slave-holding States were entitled under the Constitution, and to enfranchise blacks and disenfranchise whites. But even so late as 1865–6 the North was not prepared to grant negro suffrage. Pennsylvania, Ohio, Connecticut, and other States, would have none of it. It was agreed, however, in February, 1866, that neither House should admit any member from the late Insurrectionary States until the report of a joint committee which had been appointed to consider the question of reconstruction should be received.

This was a declaration of war upon President Johnson’s plan of pacification, but President Johnson did not give way. He vetoed a Bill to confer many rights—not including suffrage—upon the freedmen, because, in his opinion, it was unconstitutional. Then followed the struggle over the proposed Amendment XIV. to the Constitution, an amendment which apportioned representatives in Congress upon the basis of the voting population, and which provided that no person should hold office under the United States who, having taken an oath as a Federal or State officer to support the Constitution, had subsequently engaged in war against the Union. This struggle led to much bad blood, in spite of the fact that the amendment in its original form did not pass.

Still worse feeling was stirred up by the action of the Freedmen’s Bureau agents in the South. The Freedmen’s Bureau had been established in 1865 to act as the guardian of freedmen, with power to make their contracts, settle their disputes with employers, and care for them generally. Many of the agents of this Bureau traded upon their position, and, with a view to furthering their own political aspirations, deliberately fomented race hatreds. They widely disseminated among the freedmen a belief that the lands of their former owners were, at least to some extent, to be divided among the ex-slaves; and, said General Grant, “the effect of the belief in the division of lands is idleness and accumulation in camps, towns, and cities.” A more salutary lesson would have been that in the sweat of his face must a man earn his bread; but this the agents, as a mass, did not teach. On the contrary, they demoralised the labour situation in the South, and, later, nearly all of them took advantage of, and reaped profit from, the demoralisation which they had created. Their ranks supplied an enormous number of candidates for office.

In the meanwhile the joint committee on reconstruction was at work. It consisted of twelve Republicans and only three Democrats; and on the sub-committee, which collected evidence respecting the condition of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas, there was no Democrat at all.

The situation in those and the other Southern States was confessedly not good. The ex-Confederate soldiers had returned home demoralised by defeat, and found four millions of slaves demoralised by sudden manumission and by the action of the Freedmen’s Bureau agents; and, naturally, there was much friction between the races. But the committee’s report of the nature and amount of that friction was greatly exaggerated. As to the State of Alabama, only five witnesses were examined, all of them being Republican politicians of notoriously partisan character. These witnesses had everything to gain and nothing to lose by “reconstruction”; and, as a matter of fact, when “reconstruction” followed, one of them became Governor of his State, a second a Senator in Congress, a third a permanent official at Washington, a fourth a Circuit Judge in Alabama, and the fifth a Judge of the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia. It may not have been propter hoc, but it was certainly post hoc, and the coincidence is suspicious.

Upon the strength of the report the ex-Confederate States were held to be out of the Union. Their exact status remained to be determined by the voice of the North, as expressed at the polls. The elections were held in due course; and on the first Monday in December, 1866, the Republicans came back to the last session of the Thirty-ninth Congress flushed with victory. They had a majority of thirty-one in the Senate and of ninety-four in the House.

But President Johnson, with his vetoes, still stood firm; and “for the purpose of securing the fruits of the victories gained” the impeachment of the President was determined upon. I need not go into the circumstances of that impeachment, the ultimate excuse for which was the dismissal of Mr. Stanton from the Secretaryship of War. Suffice it to say that Congress took steps for “the extension of the suffrage to the coloured race in the district of Columbia, both as a right and as an example.”

Mr. Buckalew, of Pennsylvania, discussing the Bill, said, fairly enough, “Our ancestors placed suffrage on the broad common-sense principle that it should be lodged in, and exercised by, those who could use it most wisely, and most safely, and most efficiently to serve the ends for which Government was instituted,” and “not upon any abstract or transcendental notion of human rights which ignored the existing facts of social life. I shall not vote to degrade suffrage. I shall not vote to pollute and corrupt the foundations of political power, either in my own State or in any other.” On the other hand, Senator Sumner declared, “Now, to my mind, nothing is clearer than the absolute necessity of suffrage for all coloured persons in the disorganised States.” (This was in reference to an informal understanding that the late Confederate States were to share the fate of the district of Columbia.) “It will not,” he continued, “be enough if you give it to those who read and write. You will not in this way acquire the voting force which you need there for the protection of Unionists, whether white or black. You will not secure the new allies who are essential to the national cause.”

The Bill, thus cynically supported, passed; but on January 7th, 1867, was vetoed by the President. The Republican majority, however, was not to be balked. In spite of the facts that all resistance to Federal authority in the South had long since ceased, and that, according to a decision of Mr. Justice Nelson, of the Supreme Court, States in which the civil government had been restored under the pacific Presidential plan were entitled to all the rights of States in the Union—in spite of these facts Congress solemnly decided that the war was not over; and in March, 1867, it passed the celebrated Reconstruction Acts, in face of the President’s veto. These Acts annulled the State Governments then in operation; divided the States into military districts, and placed them under martial law; enfranchised the negroes; disenfranchised all, whether pardoned or not, who had participated in the war against the Union, if they had previously held any executive, legislative, or judicial office under the State or general Government; and provided for the calling of conventions, the framing and adopting of State constitutions, and the election of State officials. In the interim the military commanders were given absolute power, death sentences only being subject to the approval of the President.

This action of the Republicans was far from being in accordance with the just and statesmanlike principles of Lincoln, who, writing in 1862 to Governor Shepley, in Louisiana, said that only respectable citizens of Louisiana, voted for by other respectable citizens, were wanted as representatives in Washington. “To send,” he continued, “a parcel of Northern men here, elected, as would be understood, and perhaps justly so, at the point of the bayonet, would be disgraceful and outrageous.” In less than five years party spirit had blinded even great Republicans to these dictates of generosity and far-seeing patriotism. Garfield so far forgot his usually chivalrous character as to say exultingly, “This Bill sets out by laying its hands on the rebel governments and taking the very breath of life out of them; in the next place it puts the bayonet at the breast of every rebel in the South; in the next place it leaves in the hands of Congress, utterly and absolutely, the work of reconstruction.”

Now, indeed, the ex-Confederate States were about to pay dearly for their faults in the past. They had fought, and had poured forth blood and treasure; they had been beaten, and they had submitted, but they were not forgiven. They had enslaved the black. Henceforth, for a season, the black, ignorant, unscrupulous, dissolute, and corrupt, was to enslave them.

What I have written so far applies equally to all the Southern States. The miserable fortunes of each individual State from the time of the passing of the Reconstruction Acts have next to be followed. I will endeavour to be brief, but no study of the negro question in the United States can, as has been said, be perfect, or even comprehensible, without some allusion to the terrible penalty that was exacted from a brave but vanquished people in and after 1867. The States were one and all Democratic. By June, 1868, eight out of the eleven were represented in both branches of Congress. Of the representatives, all but two were Republicans; of the Senators, not one was a Democrat; and one-half of the whole were Northerners, who had been elected by means such as Mr. Lincoln, in 1862, had declared to be disgraceful and outrageous. In 1871, when all the States had been reconstructed, the South was represented at Washington by seventy Republicans and only fifteen Democrats.

RECONSTRUCTION IN ALABAMA.

In Alabama, as elsewhere, a working and fairly satisfactory Government had been summarily overthrown by the Reconstruction Acts. It now made way for a Republican Government dominated by negroes, most of whom could neither read nor express an intelligent opinion on any current topic. The negroes almost to a man were Republican, and so violent was unreasoning party feeling among them that a few blacks who were Democrats were expelled from their churches. There was a negro majority in the Convention which was elected in 1867 to frame a new Constitution; and, although it was required that for the ratification of the Constitution a majority of the registered electors of the State should vote, the new Constitution was ratified by Congress, in defiance of the fact that the necessary majority had not voted. Under the new Constitution began an era of Republican control of an avowedly Democratic State, with twenty-six negroes in the House and one in the Senate. During this period legislators, as one of their number is reported to have said, “sold their votes for prices that would have disgraced a negro in the time of slavery.” Money was obtained for public works, but never legitimately expended, and the only people to profit were the Northern “carpet-baggers” and the Southern negroes, many of whom were not even taxpayers. A state of strife and ill-feeling was sedulously kept up between the races, and jobbery and corruption were universal and unveiled. After the elections of 1872, so outrageous were the frauds on the part of the managers that both Democrats and Republicans claimed the victory, and for a season there were rival Legislatures in existence. The Democrats, however, submitted, in presence of United States’ troops.

All kinds of most incompetent men were appointed to judicial positions. For example, the first judge of the criminal court at Selma was one Corbin, an old Virginian, who had never practised law. Its first clerk was Roderick Thomas, a coloured man, who until after his manumission was wholly without education. When Corbin left the Bench, Thomas succeeded him, and another coloured man, as ignorant as Thomas, succeeded to the position of clerk. Here is an extract, illustrative of the character of Corbin, from that eccentric judge’s charge to the grand jury on July 27th, 1874:—

“Time was, and not very distantly, gentlemen, when this charge was done up and delivered in grand old style: when grand old judges, robed in costly black silk gowns and coiffured with huge old periwigs, swelling out their august personages, were escorted into the Court-rooms by obsequious sheriffs, bearing high before them and with stately step their blazoned insignia of offices.... Fair ladies and courtly old dames of pinguid proportions, in rich and rustling silk brocades, flocked to grace the Court-room with their enchanting presence and to hear the august, gowned, and periwigged old judges ventilate their classic literature and their cultivated oratory in the grandiloquent old charge.”

Corbin quarrelled with his party, which got rid of him. His characteristic comment was that the Republicans were “a parcel of pigs; as soon as one got an ear of corn the others took after him to get it away.”

Such appointments as his were some of the fruits of ignorant negro dominion in Alabama. They exasperated the Democrats, who, in spite of much that is not creditable to them, are, and ever since the war have been, the most respectable party in the State. In less than seven years this negro domination rendered the State bankrupt and the population furious. The elections of 1874 were, in consequence, attended by much regretable fraud and violence, and, by some means, a Democratic majority was obtained. It has kept itself in office ever since; it has remodelled the Constitution; it has brought back economy and, I believe, honesty in the administration of the public funds; it has largely reduced the State indebtedness, and it has wholly restored the public credit. It may have gained and preserved its object by discreditable means, but it has not abused its power, and to-day, save for the black shadow of the Race Question, Alabama flourishes.

RECONSTRUCTION IN NORTH CAROLINA.

North Carolina fared much as did Alabama. Under the Reconstruction Acts and Amendment XIV. her most intelligent voters were proscribed, and power fell into the hands of plunderers and adventurers. The result of the voting for the Constitutional Convention in 1867 was that one hundred and ten Republicans and only ten Democrats were returned by a notoriously Democratic State; and the new Constitution of 1868 introduced an era of despotism and fraud. The negroes were permitted to vote before they were legally entitled to the suffrage, and in the new Senate there were thirty-eight Republicans and twelve Democrats, while in the House there were eighty Republicans and forty Democrats. Several of the negro members of the Legislature were unable to read. At every opportunity these men robbed the State and trifled with its credit. There was open corruption and universal bribery. There was formed a political “ring,” which demanded, and generally received, 10 per cent. on all appropriations passed by the Legislature. Lavish entertainments were given and paid for out of public money. “A regular bar was established in the Capitol, and it was said that, with somewhat less publicity, some of its rooms were devoted to the purposes of prostitution. Decency fled abashed; the spectacle of coarse, ignorant negroes sitting at table, drinking champagne and smoking Havannah cigars, was not uncommon.

“I cannot refrain,” continues Mr. Vance, “from telling a story which I have heard of one, old ‘Cuffy,’ who was a member of that body, and a shining light in the movement of progress—one who, in the language of Mr. Hoar, had his ‘face turned towards the morning light.’ A friend, going to see him one night at his rooms, found him sitting at a table, by the dim light of a tallow dip, laboriously counting a pile of money, and chuckling to himself. ‘Why,’ said his visitor, ‘what amuses you so, Uncle Cuffy?’ ‘Well, boss,’ he replied, grinning from ear to ear, ‘I’se been sold in my life ’leven times, an’, fo’ de Lord, dis is de fust time I eber got de money.’”

The boldness of the robbers of the State was extraordinary. On one occasion they obtained authority for an issue of bonds to the amount of nearly £3,000,000 sterling, for the construction of a railway. These bonds were all issued, but not so much as a single yard of the line was ever laid down. Yet the people submitted patiently, until what was known as the Schoffner Act was passed. This, under the pretence of suppressing internal disorders, authorised the Governor, at his discretion, to declare any county in a state of insurrection, to proclaim martial law, and to try accused persons by drumhead court-martial. It also authorised the raising of two regiments of troops, one of which was composed of negroes, and the other of which was made up of white desperadoes, under the command of the infamous Kirk. The proceedings under this Act were of such a terrorising nature that the whole country took alarm. Many Republicans, black and white, joined the Democrats; at the elections of 1870, after a shorter reconstruction period than fell to the lot of many other States, the Democrats successfully reasserted themselves, and North Carolina was redeemed. She has not since recovered her financial position, but she bids fair to do so.

RECONSTRUCTION IN SOUTH CAROLINA.

So cruelly did South Carolina suffer during the era of reconstruction, and so completely was she abased, that before the period of her sufferings ended she became known as the “Prostrate State.” Her best white citizens being disfranchised, she could not make her real voice heard, and, in 1867, the election of delegates to the Convention for the framing of a new constitution for her resulted in the return of sixty-three negroes or coloured people and but thirty-four whites. The latter were, almost without exception, either Northern adventurers or Southern renegades; the former were, as a body, as ignorant as it is possible to conceive. In 1868 the constitution which had been drawn up by this strange Convention was adopted, chiefly upon the strength of the votes of the negroes who were not then legally enfranchised, but who, nevertheless, were encouraged by the Republican managers to go to the polls.

Under the new constitution a General Assembly was elected. It included seventy-two whites and eighty-five coloured men or negroes, and of the total number one hundred and thirty-six were Republicans and only twenty-one Democrats. All this happened in spite of the fact that Amendment XV. to the United States Constitution, the amendment which conferred the franchise upon the negro, was not ratified until March 30, 1870. General R. K. Scott, of Ohio, an ex-officer of the Freedmen’s Bureau, was chosen Governor, and, almost immediately, the black majority, assisted by the white Republican carpet-baggers, began to tyrannise over the white Democrats, and to exploit the State in their own private interests.

An Act passed in 1869 abolished the long-established rule of evidence that all men shall be considered innocent until proved guilty, and expressly directed that if the person whose rights under the Act were alleged to have been denied happened to be coloured, then the burden of proof would be on the defendant; so that any person or corporation named in the Act, if simply accused by a person of colour, was thereby to be presumed to be guilty, and was liable to be subjected to heavy penalties upon this mere accusation, without a particle of proof by the plaintiff or any other witness.

As for the extravagance of the new rulers, it was unlimited. When they first met in legislative assembly, in 1868, they used the same building which the whites had occupied before them, and they furnished it inexpensively. But as soon as they realised their power, they exhibited their luxurious tastes, and furnished anew the legislative halls in the State House. For clocks that had cost 8s. 6d. they substituted clocks that cost £120; for spittoons that had cost 1s. 8d. they substituted spittoons that cost £1 14s.; for benches that had cost 16s. 6d. they substituted crimson sofas that cost £40; for chairs that had cost 4s. 2d. they substituted crimson plush gothic chairs that cost £12; for desks that had cost £2 they substituted desks that cost £35; and for looking-glasses that had cost 16s. 6d. they substituted mirrors that cost £120. The furnishing of the hall of the House of Representatives of this impoverished State cost £19,000. The same hall has recently been very nicely refurnished for £612. At least forty bed-rooms were furnished at the public expense, some of them three times over. A restaurant was also maintained in one of the committee rooms of the Capitol at Columbia, and there officials and their friends and relatives helped themselves, without stint, to food, liquors, and cigars, at the cost of the taxpayer. For six years this restaurant was kept open every day from eight o’clock on one morning until three o’clock on the next. In a single session the restaurant swallowed up £25,000.

Nor was this by any means all. In 1873 Mr. J. S. Pike, late United States Minister to Holland, a Republican, and originally a staunch Abolitionist, wrote a little book^[4] on the situation in South Carolina. His testimony cannot be challenged. He, at least, was no Southern Democrat, full of hatred to “niggers,” and to all the works of the North; and the picture that he painted is one which shows corruption, extravagance, and legislative wickedness such as never prevailed even in Hayti in its worst days. Describing “A Black Parliament,” he says:—

“Here, then, is the outcome, the ripe, perfected fruit of the boasted civilisation of the South after 200 years of experience. A white community that had gradually risen from small beginnings till it grew into wealth, culture, and refinement, and became accomplished in all the arts of civilisation; that successfully asserted its resistance to a foreign tyranny by deeds of conspicuous valour; that achieved liberty and independence through the fire and tempest of civil war, and illustrated itself in the councils of the nation by orators and statesmen worthy of any age or nation—such a community is then reduced to this. It lies prostrate in the dust, ruled over by this strange conglomerate, gathered from the ranks of its own servile population.... In the place of this old aristocratic society stands the rude form of the most ignorant democracy that mankind ever saw invested with the functions of government. It is the dregs of the population habited in the robes of their intelligent predecessors, and asserting over them the rule of ignorance and corruption through the inexorable machinery of a majority of numbers. It is barbarism overwhelming civilisation by physical force.... We will enter the House of Representatives. Here sit 124 members; of these twenty-three are white men, representing the remains of the old civilisation.... These twenty-three white men are but the observers, the enforced auditors, of the dull and clumsy imitation of a deliberative body, whose appearance in their present capacity is at once a wonder and a shame to modern civilisation.... The Speaker is black, the clerk is black, the door-keepers are black, the little pages are black, the Chairman of the Ways and Means is black, and the chaplain is coal-black. At some of the desks sit coloured men whose types it would be hard to find outside of Congo; whose costumes, visages, attitudes, and expressions only befit the forecastle of a buccaneer.”

Such were the rulers of a State that then contained over 300,000 white men and women.

In 1869 an exclusively coloured militia was organised, and, by the end of 1870, 96,000 men were enrolled in it. To fourteen regiments of these men arms and ammunition were issued before the re-election of General Scott in 1870; they officially attended political meetings and were paid for their services there, and they were confessedly enrolled and used for political purposes. An armed constabulary was maintained for the same objects. On June 25, 1870, J. W. Anderson, a deputy-constable, reported to his chief:— “We can carry the county (York) if we get constables enough, by encouraging the militia, and frightening the poor white men. I am going into the campaign for Scott.” And on July 8, 1870, Joseph Crews, a deputy-constable, reported from Laurens county:—“We are going to have a hard campaign up here, and we must have more constables. I will carry the election here with the militia if the constables will work with me. I am giving out ammunition all the time. Tell Scott he is all right here now.” Again, testifying before a legislative committee in 1877, J. B. Hubbard, the Chief Constable, said:—

“It was understood that by arming the coloured militia and keeping some of the most influential officers under pay, a full vote would be brought out for the Republicans, and the Democracy, or many of the weak-kneed Democrats, intimidated. At the time the militia was organised, there was, comparatively speaking, but little lawlessness. The militia, being organised and armed, caused an increase of crime and bloodshed in most of the counties, in proportion to their numbers and the number of arms and amount of ammunition furnished them.”

Governor Scott spent £75,000 of public money in the advancement of his candidature, and his majority of 30,000 votes was due entirely to terrorism and bribery. In 1871 it was discovered that the Financial Board had illegally issued several millions of State bonds, and there was a movement for the impeachment of Scott, who was a member of the Board. To save himself Scott issued three warrants upon the Armed Force Fund, leaving the amounts blank, and gave them to two of his political associates. The warrants were afterwards filled up for £9,729, and the money was used to bribe members of the Legislature, the result being that the Governor escaped. In the meantime, so outrageous was the waste of public money, and so unabashed the general corruption, that several outbreaks occurred. These were suppressed by a suspension in certain counties of the writ of habeas corpus; but there is no doubt that they represented chiefly the efforts of honest citizens to protect themselves when they found that the Government did not protect them.

Mr. Franklin J. Moses, jun., succeeded General Scott as Governor, in 1872; and under him corruption grew more rampant than ever. Writing soon after that person had assumed office, Mr. J. S. Pike said:—

“The whole of the late Administration ... was a morass of rottenness, and the present Administration was born of the corruptions of that.... There seems to be no hope, therefore, that the villainies of the past will be speedily uncovered. The present Governor was Speaker of the last House, and he is credited with having issued during his term of office over $400,000 (£80,000) of pay certificates, which are still unredeemed and for which there is no appropriation, but which must be saddled on the taxpayers sooner or later.... Taxation is not in the least diminished; and nearly $2,000,000 per annum are raised for State expenses where $400,000 formerly sufficed.... The new Governor has the reputation of spending $30,000 to $40,000 a year on a salary of $3,500; but his financial operations are taken as a matter of course, and only referred to with a slight shrug of the shoulders.... The total amount of the stationery bill of the House for the twenty years preceding 1861 averaged $400 (£80) per annum. Last year it was $16,000 (£3,200).... It is bad enough to have the decency and intelligence and property of the State subjected to the domination of its ignorant black pauper multitude, but it becomes unendurable when to that ignorance the worst vices are superadded.”

Moses’s rule was far worse than Scott’s. There was more waste, more corruption, and more lawlessness. In 1874 a committee was appointed to represent the state of affairs to the President; but Moses and his fellows learnt betimes of this intention, and, having misappropriated £500 of public money for the purpose, were able to checkmate the move. It is impossible here to go into details of the various legislative and political scandals of the period. So venal was Moses, and so notoriously did he sell his power, that, more than once, judges announced from the bench their unwillingness to put the people to the expense and trouble of convicting criminals for the Governor to pardon.

Governor D. H. Chamberlain, a well-meaning and honest Republican, succeeded this miscreant in 1874; yet he proved too weak to control his party. Owing to the action of a remnant of Scott’s negro militia, a bloody riot occurred in Edgefield county in January, 1875; and in his treatment of this event, as well as in his attempts to lessen the public expenditure, Mr. Chamberlain showed that he was animated by the best desires; but in 1875 his efforts to ensure the purity and integrity of the Bench were circumvented by a conspiracy among his followers; and among the judges then chosen was the infamous ex-Governor Moses. Mr. Chamberlain refused to commission him, and the man never served. The circumstances of his choice, however, aroused the country, and determined the people to oust the Republicans. At the elections of 1876 they chose as their Governor General Wade Hampton, and put Democrats and white men into all official and representative positions. In this election there were fraud and violence on both sides; but, while the Democrats were fighting for their liberty, and almost for their lives, the Republicans were fighting mainly for office alone. And the victors have not, upon the whole, abused their victory. They have introduced administrative economy; they have restored the credit of their State; they have cared for education and general progress; and they have brought back a fair measure of peace and a large one of prosperity.

And here I should add one word more concerning Moses. After his fall from power he became a criminal of the vulgarest character. In 1881 he was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment for fraud to the amount of $25; in 1884 he was sentenced to three months’ imprisonment for swindling; in 1885 he was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment for fraud to the amount of $34; and in the same year he was sent to prison for three years for five other fraudulent transactions. After his release he was arrested for stealing overcoats from the hall of a New York house. He was apparently an incorrigible scoundrel first and last.

In 1877 a committee was appointed by the Legislature of South Carolina to inquire into and report upon the scandals of the period from 1867 to 1876. I cannot resist the temptation of making a few extracts from the report:—

“If the simple statement was made that Senators and Members of the House were furnished with everything they desired, from swaddling clothes and cradle to the coffin of the undertaker, from brogans to chignons, from finest extracts to best wines and liquors, and that all was paid for by the State, it would create a smile of doubt and derision; but when we make the statement, and prove it by several witnesses and by vouchers found in the offices of the Clerks of the Senate and House, all must, with sorrow, admit the truthfulness of the report.

“A. O. Jones, Clerk of the House, testifies that supplies were furnished under the head of ‘legislative expenses,’ ‘sundries,’ and ‘stationery,’ and included refreshments for committee rooms, groceries, clocks, horses, carriages, dry goods, furniture of every description, and miscellaneous articles of merchandise for the personal use of the members.

“It is shown that on March 4, 1872, Solomon furnished the Senate with $1,631 worth of wines and liquors, and on the 7th day of the same month with $1,852 75c. worth.

“Whilst fraud, bribery, and corruption were rife in every department of the State Government, nothing equalled the infamy attending the management of public printing.... From 1868 to 1876 the sums paid for public printing amounted to $1,326,589 (£265,318)—a sum largely in excess of the cost of public printing from the establishment of the State Government up to 1868.... The public printing in this State cost $450,000 (£90,000) in one year, and exceeded the cost of like work in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Maryland, and New York by $122,932 (£24,588).”

The Committee gives a list of the names of twenty-two Senators and Representatives who received sums varying from £10 to £1,000 under what was called the “division and silence arrangement,” and it also gives a list of those who were bribed to vote for these enormous appropriations. Governor Moses received £4,000, Mr. Cardozo (treasurer) received £2,500, and so on. It is not surprising that under so iniquitous a system the State printing bill, which, during the seventy-eight years ending 1868 had been but £121,800, mounted up in the eight years (1868–76) to £265,318. During the negro-Republican era of reconstruction South Carolina’s monthly printing bill averaged £11,133; during General Wade Hampton’s administration it averaged £103.

RECONSTRUCTION IN GEORGIA.

In Georgia the reconstruction period was likewise full of fraud and corruption. In one short session the pay and mileage allowances of members and officers of the General Assembly amounted to $979,055, or £195,811, and there were no fewer than one hundred and four clerks, or nearly one clerk to every two members. Between 1868 and 1870 the State debt increased from $5,827,000 to $18,183,000, and the State bonds became almost unmarketable, while all public works either fell to ruin or were “run” by, and mainly for the benefit of, unscrupulous adventurers of the worst type. During his term of three years Governor Bullock, the Reconstruction Governor, pardoned three hundred and forty-six offenders against the law, some of whom actually received pardon before trial. Indeed, seven pardons before trial were granted to one man, who pleaded them to seven separate indictments. The elections of December, 1870, put an end to this. The Democratic victory was overwhelming, and, before the Deputies of the people could confront him, Bullock had resigned office and fled the State. Since that moment prosperity has revived.

RECONSTRUCTION IN FLORIDA.

In Florida, the first Reconstruction Governor, Harrison Reed, very nearly doubled the State expenditure during his four years of office. Railway and legislative scandals were common. From Governor downwards every official seemed to be equally corrupt and equally devoid of patriotism. On one occasion an Act of the Legislature was forged; and, armed with it, the Governor claimed, but failed to obtain, some agricultural land scrip that was in the hands of the Treasury at Washington. The ballot-boxes were tampered with, and the election returns falsified. In the meantime the State Treasury was often so empty that even telegraph charges could not be paid. The second Reconstruction Governor, O. B. Hart, who assumed office in 1873, realised the deplorable condition of affairs, but proved powerless to effect reforms. People were kidnapped, really that they might be unable to vote, but professedly in order that they might appear as witnesses in distant courts of justice. A similar process was, on at least one occasion, applied to members of the State Senate, two of whom were arrested and carried to Jacksonville, in order that they might not imperil by their votes the nefarious schemes of their Republican colleagues. The elections of 1876 placed the Democrats in power and introduced a new and more reputable era.

RECONSTRUCTION IN VIRGINIA.

During the reconstruction period Virginia’s sufferings were less painful and considerably briefer than were those of most of the other old slave States with which I am dealing. Such misfortunes as she experienced were attributable, nevertheless, to causes exactly the same as those which brought South Carolina to the lowest depths of misery and degradation. In Virginia, as elsewhere, the reconstruction laws disfranchised the majority of the best native whites and handed over the country to the tender mercies of ignorant blacks, prompted by unscrupulous carpet-baggers. Yet in Virginia the process known as reconstruction seems to have been singularly uncalled for save as a purely party measure. It was not needed for the protection of the negroes. Professor Alexander Johnston, in the “Cyclopædia of Political Science,” calls attention to the conspicuous equity of the Virginia statute, made after the war but before reconstruction, for the regulation of contracts between blacks and whites. Reconstruction was needed only for the preservation of Republican power. It ended in 1870, but while it lasted it had a very bad effect upon all the institutions of the State, and especially upon the judiciary. Says Mr. Robert Stiles:—“The writer has appeared in a circuit court of Virginia before a bench upon which sat a so-called Judge, who had the day before been a clerk in a village grocery store, and who was not better fitted for the dignity and duty devolved upon him than the average grocery clerk would be.”

RECONSTRUCTION IN MISSISSIPPI.

In Mississippi the period was much longer and much more severe and stormy. It was Mr. John Q. Adams, of Massachusetts, who, describing the treatment during this time of the vanquished and resigned Southerners, said that the Northerners scorned the protests of the ex-Confederates, “repelled their aid, insulted their misery, and inflicted on them an abasement which they felt to be intolerable in posting over them their slaves of yesterday to secure their pledge of submission to the Constitution of the United States.” The South, therefore, was by no means alone in feeling that she was aggrieved.

In Mississippi, as in other States, a Convention met after the passing of the Reconstruction Acts to draw up a new State Constitution. The Convention was of the usual “black and tan” complexion, and in the qualities of ignorance, corruption, and depravity was almost all that the imagination can conceive. “It was,” says Mr. Ethelbert Barksdale, “a fool’s paradise for the negroes, who undertook to perform what they were incapable of doing; and, as to their mercenary white leaders, the stream of purpose which ran through all their actions was plunder and revenge. Not one of the authors and abettors of the plan was actuated by a higher motive than party success. Not one of them believed that it would promote the restoration of the Union to substitute the rule of knaves and negroes for the State Governments which they had overthrown. They knew the depravity of the white renegades whom they had commissioned to do this work, and they knew, to employ the language of a Northern statesman and Union soldier, that ‘in the whole historic period of the world the negro race had never established or maintained a Government for themselves.’”

The Convention was very deliberate in its action. Its members lived in a state of luxury unknown to their previous habits. They voted themselves $10 (£2) a day, and paid their innumerable hangers-on correspondingly high wages; and, although the body cost about £100,000 sterling while it sat, it would have cost far more but for the inexorable attitude of the commanding general, who, in the interregnum, was practically dictator.

The Constitution which the Convention drew up was promptly rejected at the polls, and was only ratified in a modified form upon the holding of a second election in 1869. As originally devised it would have excluded half the intelligent white population from all offices, and would even have actually and permanently disfranchised anyone who during the war had charitably contributed to the relief of sick and suffering Confederate soldiers.

The first election under the Amended Constitution returned a Legislature four-fifths composed of negroes and carpet-baggers, and the negroes had a majority. The immediate consequences were that corruption began to regulate every public and legislative transaction, and that the State started on a career which led it with daily accelerating speed in the direction of ruin. Within six years 6,400,000 acres of land were adjudged forfeited for non-payment of the taxes which were necessary to support the extravagance and folly of the ruling clique. Thenceforward, until, at least, these lands were redeemed, taxation fell with correspondingly increased weight upon the rest of the unfortunate State. And so matters went from bad to worse until, after years of tyranny, waste, and extravagance on the part of their governors, the whites could submit no longer.

From a taxpayers’ petition addressed to the Legislature on January 4th, 1875, I extract the following:—

“To show the extraordinary and rapid increase of taxation imposed on this impoverished people, these particulars are cited:—In 1869 the State levy was 10 cents on the hundred dollars of assessed value of lands. For the year 1871 it was four times as great. For 1872 it was four times as great. For the year 1873 it was eight and a half times as great. For the year 1874 it was fourteen times as great.... In many counties the increase in the county levies has been still greater.”

At this crisis Mr. George E. Harris, a Republican ex-Attorney-General and member of Congress, wrote:—“The people are in a state of exasperation, and in their poverty and desperation they are in arms against the burden of taxes levied and collected on their property.” But the petition was laughed at by those who were profiting by the misery of the citizens. The people, therefore, roused themselves, and, partially, it may be, by violence and fraud, but wholly in self-defence, rescued the State at the elections of 1875 from its abasement. Since then there has been no important break in the steady financial, agricultural, educational, and industrial improvement of Mississippi.

RECONSTRUCTION IN LOUISIANA.

Louisiana, alas, fared much worse than Mississippi—worse, in fact, than any of the old slave States; for even in South Carolina the agony was not so bloody.

The Constitutional Convention of 1867 was elected on a registration list which had been so manipulated as to show only 45,218 white voters to 84,436 black ones; and at the legislative elections of 1868 the successful candidates were chiefly negroes. Indeed, in the Senate there were but about half a dozen whites.

To the summit of this mass of ignorance and corruption a creature named Henry C. Warmoth at once climbed. By arts which can best be compared with those of the political schemer in a burlesque, he had already ingratiated himself with the negroes; and he had little difficulty in inducing his protégés to make him the first Reconstruction Governor of Louisiana.

Warmoth originally went to Louisiana in the Federal Army, from which he is said to have been dismissed for good cause. He should appear in history as one of the very worst of the carpet-baggers; yet he was a man of, in some respects, a remarkable character. From his earliest assumption of power he took measures not merely to render himself supreme, but also to render himself irremovable. He was “inaugurated” in July, 1868. Democratic members of the Legislature were, with very few exceptions, excluded by the operation of a test oath imposed by the majority; all election machinery and the disposal of nearly all important offices were entrusted to the hands and sole will of the Governor; and a Board of Registration was appointed, the object of which was to ensure that elections should result favourably to the party in power. Warmoth, whenever he made a considerable appointment, adopted the precaution of simultaneously obtaining from the appointee a resignation in blank; so that rebellious or troublesome officials could always be summarily got rid of by the simple act on the part of the Governor of filling up the blank forms. So complete in time became Warmoth’s system that, says Mr. B. J. Sage, “a practically unanimous people could not have driven the Republicans out, save by a popular uprising.”

Of the members of the Legislature only ten among the dominant party were taxpayers; and, consequently, the House was not in the slightest degree of sympathy with the people, who soon began to be burdened with a taxation such as had before been undreamt of. Corruption and bribery reigned supreme, “and the knaves, to avoid any possible danger, refused to pass any bribery law, so that it was no crime to bribe a public official.” To assist himself and his fellows in controlling elections, Warmoth raised what was in fact, though not in name, a standing army, and subsequently a small fleet; and he caused the establishment in all parishes of Republican newspaper organs, to the conductors of which was given a monopoly of printing the laws and public advertisements. The State expenditure rose to five times its normal level; the cost of the short session of 1871 amounted to £1,230 sterling per legislator; and the State debt, of course, increased rapidly and alarmingly, until proportionately to the population it became, within only a year and a half, very much larger than that of any State in the Union. Bonds were issued for all kinds of fraudulent objects—many at a rate as high as 8 per cent.; and all sorts of valuable privileges and franchises were given away to the favourites of the men in power. In fact, the State was plundered wholesale and in every direction. It is calculated that Louisiana was the loser in these years of the equivalent of about £24,000,000 sterling, or of more than half the total estimated wealth of the State.

Warmoth’s own share of the spoils was large, but its exact amount can never be ascertained. Up to the time of his accession the average printing expenses of the State had been about $37,000 (£7,400 a year). During the first two years and a half of Warmoth’s rule the New Orleans Republican, in which he was the principal shareholder, received $1,140,881 (£228,170) for public printing. Warmoth also took upon himself the appointment of the judges—from whom he exacted the usual blank resignations; and thus with an army, a navy, a press, a bench, a legislature, and election managers all securely, as he believed, tethered to his chariot, he was absolute dictator.

He found his justification in the elections of 1870, which went exactly as he willed them to go. Not even Lopez in Paraguay was more powerful than Warmoth in Louisiana. “But,” says Mr. Sage, “over the spoils arose the inevitable quarrel, and the two factions that formed went heartily into their only good work, which was to acquaint Louisiana and the world with their rascalities and infamy, and make manifest the gross wrong of Congressional reconstruction.” For over two years the Warmothites and the anti-Warmothites fought, often in arms, frequently with much bloodshed; and in 1872–73 the State was in a condition of disgraceful anarchy, which was in nowise ended by the substitution of Pinchback, the Lieutenant Governor, for Warmoth, and by the impeachment of the latter; for by that time another Governor, who claimed to have been properly elected, was in the field in the person of Mr. W. P. Kellogg. Kellogg was sustained by United States troops; but, although there were many riots and much bloodshed on his behalf, he was never popularly recognised. In one riot alone sixty-three persons were killed.

Kellogg was worse even than Warmoth had been. In 1874 the whites organised themselves for their protection under the style of the White League. Their attempt to arm themselves led to a bloody battle at New Orleans, in which forty people were killed and 100 wounded. Immediately afterwards Kellogg was overthrown; but he was re-seated by the Federal forces. At the 1874 elections the Democratic whites again swept the State; but Warmoth’s cunningly devised Returning Board, which still existed, neutralised the results by summarily rejecting nearly half the successful opposition candidates, and by thus manufacturing another Republican Legislature. Indeed, a number of Democratic members of the House were actually arrested by Federal troops. A Congressional Committee, it is true, afterwards recognised the illegality of these acts, and reinstated a majority of the Democrats, but the policy of the committee did not reconcile the State with Kellogg and with his numerous other enormities. For example, the Governor illegally arrested between 500 and 600 persons at various times, generally on blank warrants; and in every instance in which any of these cases were investigated in Court the charges were dismissed.

The struggle of 1874 had not satisfied Kellogg that there was a point beyond which he should not go in his requests for Federal assistance. He determined to make further requests, with a view to securely intrenching his party during the elections of 1876. Once more, however, and in spite of wholesale bribery on the other side, the Democrats swept the State; and again the results were neutralised by the operations of the old infamous Returning Board. Renewed anarchy, with two Governors and two Governments, followed. One Government—that of Packard, the Republican leader—was unable, nevertheless, to exercise even a vestige of authority outside the State House, which, crowded with people, lay in a state of siege, in spite of the fact that small-pox had broken out there. Packard waited for the active Federal support which had never been refused to Kellogg, but he waited in vain; and when, after months of hesitation, the President withdrew the National troops, Packard and his Government collapsed. Governor Nicholls, a Democrat, then assumed full authority; and from that day Louisiana has formed part of the “solid” Democratic South.

And here let it not be forgotten that public gambling and public lotteries owed their establishment in Louisiana to Warmoth. The gambling has since been abolished; the Louisiana lottery, owing to its having been granted a twenty-five years’ charter, still exists to remind the world of the evil methods of the period of reconstruction. Warmoth himself said of the Legislature which he had caused to be elected in 1870:—“There is but one honest man in it,” and to a delegation he cynically remarked, “Corruption is the fashion; I do not pretend to be honest, but only as honest as anybody in politics.”

I might also trace the history of reconstruction in Tennessee, in West Virginia, in Missouri, and in Arkansas; but I am chiefly confining my attention to those Southern States which constitute the “Black Belt”—the district, that is, throughout which blacks and whites are nearly evenly balanced, and in which there are particular commonwealths containing more blacks than whites. Moreover, on this branch of the subject I have written enough, I believe, to show reason, if not to show excuse, for the political feeling which occupies the first place in the heart of every Southern white man.

That feeling is, by itself, a political creed stronger than the creed of Republican or of Democrat; and it may be thus formulated. You have freed our slaves, and, far from regretting, we rejoice in what you have done. Without properly consulting us, you have given those ex-slaves the suffrage and civil rights. There, we think, you have greatly erred. While we will admit that some negroes and coloured people are fit to exercise the suffrage, we are of opinion that the vast majority of them, owing as well to natural lack of mental ballast as to ignorance, are incapable of exercising the suffrage to their own best welfare, to the benefit of the white people among whom they live, and to the general advantage of the nation. Apart from this opinion of ours, and quite regardless of the question whether that opinion be sound or not, we are steadfastly determined never again to submit to any form, direct or indirect, of negro government. We have experienced a form of such government during the Reconstruction Era. In those days the chief sufferers were ourselves, and the chief gainers were, not the negroes, who, like machines, registered the desires of their patrons, but the unscrupulous whites who exploited the negroes. We intend, therefore, to risk no more of that kind of thing. Here and there the negroes may be more numerous than we whites. It must make no difference. The white must rule, no matter at what cost. You shall never again, while we exist, compel us to relinquish that determination. Our view does not, it may be, accord with the principles of your Amendment XV., but it accords with our ideas of the minimum of social comfort and security, and we intend steadfastly to adhere to it, even if adherence should cost us blood and treasure and much more that we hold dear. You Northerners have never known any form of negro domination, and have never been in danger of it. Indeed, you know little about the negro. We have to live with him, and we are familiar with his failings as well as with his virtues. Our knowledge tells us that it would be suicidal folly to entrust ourselves, our families, and our fortunes to his political discretion. You think otherwise; but do not, we pray you, ever attempt to make us practise in all their fulness your very humane theories. We would rather die at once. Congress, we know, once passed a Civil Rights Bill, which directed “that all persons within the jurisdiction of the United States should be entitled to the full and equal enjoyment of the accommodations, advantages, facilities, and privileges of inns, public conveyances on land or water, theatres, and other places of amusement, subject only to the conditions and limitations established by law, and applicable alike to citizens of every race and colour, regardless of any previous condition of servitude.” That was very well in theory, but the Act has been held by the United States Supreme Court to be unconstitutional, and, in any case, you must never ask us to accept it. There are occasions when we cannot admit that whites and blacks are equal.

The above position is one upon which the whites of the South are, as I convinced myself during my stay and inquiries here, practically unanimous. It is a position of danger, for it is a position of covert, if not open, hostility to the spirit of laws of the Union. A strict and rigid enforcement of those laws, supposing that it could be attempted, would, there is no doubt, create an exceedingly grave crisis. On the other hand, there is, or may be, danger in the fact that the negro as a citizen does not get all that to which he is legally entitled. How he is deprived of very much that the law affects to give him will be the subject of the next chapter.