COMING TO THE FRONT.
In an evil hour Hesden Le Moyne yielded to the solicitations of
those whom he had befriended, and whose rights he honestly believed
had been unlawfully subverted, and became a candidate in his county.
It had been so long since he had experienced the bitterness of
persecution on account of his political proclivities, and the social
relations of his family had been so pleasant, that he had almost
forgotten what he had once passed through; or rather, he had come
to believe that the time had gone by when such weapons would be
employed against one of his social grade.
The years of silence which had been imposed on him by a desire
to avoid unnecessarily distressing his mother, had been years of
thought, perhaps the richer and riper from the fact that he had
refrained from active participation in political life. Like all
his class at the South, he was, if not a politician by instinct,
at least familiar from early boyhood with the subtle discussion of
political subjects which is ever heard at the table and the fireside
of the Southern gentleman. He had regarded the experiment of
reconstruction, as he believed, with calm, unprejudiced sincerity;
he had buried the past, and looked only to the future. It was not
for his own sake or interest that he became a candidate; he was
content always to be what he was--a quiet country gentleman. He
loved his home and his plantation; he thoroughly enjoyed the pursuits
of agriculture, and had no desire to be or do any great thing. His
mother's long illness had given him a love for a quiet life, his
books and his fireside; and it was only because he thought that
he could do something to reconcile the jarring factions and bring
harmony out of discord, and lead his people to see that The Nation
was greater and better than The South; that its interests and
prosperity were also their interest, their prosperity, and their
hope--that Hesden Le Moyne consented to forego the pleasant life
which he was leading and undertake a brief voyage upon the stormy
sea of politics.
He did not expect that all would agree with him, but he believed
that they would listen to him without prejudice and without anger.
And he so fully believed in the conclusions he had arrived at that
he thought no reasonable man could resist their force or avoid
reaching a like result. His platform, as he called it, when he
came to announce himself as a candidate at the Court House on the
second day of the term of court, in accordance with immemorial
custom in that county, was simply one of plain common-sense. He
was not an office-holder or a politician. He did not come of an
office-holding family, nor did he seek position or emolument. He
offered himself for the suffrages of his fellow-citizens simply
because no other man among them seemed willing to stand forth and
advocate those principles which he believed to be right, expedient,
and patriotic.
He was a white man, he said, and had the prejudices and feelings that
were common to the white people of the South. He had not believed
in the right or the policy of secession, in which he differed from
some of his neighbors; but when it came to the decision of that
question by force of arms he had yielded his conviction and stood
side by side upon the field of battle with the fiercest fire-eaters of
the land. No man could accuse him of being remiss in any duty which
he owed his State or section. But all that he insisted was past.
There was no longer any distinct sectional interest or principle to
be maintained. The sword had decided that, whether right or wrong
as an abstraction, the doctrine of secession should never be
practically asserted in the government. The result of the struggle
had been to establish, beyond a peradventure, what had before been
an unsettled question: that the Nation had the power and the will
to protect itself against any disintegrating movement. It might not
have decided what was the meaning of the Constitution, and so not
determined upon which side of this question lay the better reasoning;
but it had settled the practical fact. This decision he accepted;
he believed that they all accepted it--with only this difference,
perhaps, that he believed it rendered necessary a change in many
of the previous convictions of the Southern people. They had been
accustomed to call themselves Southern men; after that, Americans.
Hereafter it became their duty and their interest to be no longer
Southern men, but Americans only.
"Having these views," he continued, "it is my sincere conviction
that we ought to accept, in spirit as well as in form, the results
of this struggle; not in part, but fully." The first result had
been the freeing in the slave. In the main he believed that had
been accepted, if not cheerfully, at least finally. The next had
been the enfranchisement of the colored man. This he insisted had
not been honestly accepted by the mass of the white people of the
South. Every means, lawful and unlawful, had been resorted to to
prevent the due operation of these laws. He did not speak of this
in anger or to blame. Knowing their prejudices and feelings, he
could well excuse what had been done; but he insisted that it was
not, and could not be, the part of an honest, brave and intelligent
people to nullify or evade any portion of the law of the land.
He did not mean that it was the duty of any man to submit without
opposition to a law which he believed to be wrong; but that opposition
should never be manifested by unlawful violence, unmanly evasion,
or cowardly fraud.
He realized that, at first, anger might over-bear both patriotism
and honor, under the sting of what was regarded as unparalleled
wrong, insult, and outrage; but there had been time enough for anger
to cool, and for his people to look with calmness to the future
that lay before, and let its hopes and duties overbalance the
disappointments of the past. He freely admitted that had the question
of reconstruction been submitted to him for determination, he would
not have adopted the plan which had prevailed; but since it had
been adopted and become an integral part of the law of the land,
he believed that whoever sought to evade its fair and unhindered
operation placed himself in the position of a law-breaker. They
had the right, undoubtedly, by fair and open opposition to defeat
any party, and to secure the amendment or repeal of any law or
system of laws. But they had no right to resist law with violence,
or to evade law by fraud.
The right of the colored man to exercise freely and openly his
elective franchise, without threat, intimidation, or fear, was the
same as that of the whitest man he addressed; and the violation of
that right, or the deprivation of that privilege, was, really an
assault upon the right and liberty of the white voter also. No
rights were safe unless the people had that regard for law which
would secure to the weakest and the humblest citizen the free and
untrammeled enjoyment and exercise of every privilege which the
law conferred. He characterized the laws that had been enacted
in regard to the conduct of elections and the selection of local
officers as unmanly and shuffling--an assertion of the right to
nullify national law by fraud, which the South had failed to maintain
by the sword, and had by her surrender virtually acknowledged
herself in honor bound to abandon.
He did not believe, he would not believe, that his countrymen
of the South, his white fellow-citizens of the good old county of
Horsford, had fairly and honestly considered the position in which
recent events and legislation had placed them, not only before the
eyes of the country, but of the civilized world. It had always been
claimed, he said, that a white man is by nature, and not merely by
the adventitious circumstances of the past, innately and inherently,
and he would almost add infinitely, the superior of the colored
man. In intellectual culture, experience, habits of self-government
and command, this was unquestionably true. Whether it were true
as a natural and scientific fact was, perhaps, yet to be decided.
But could it be possible that a people, a race priding itself upon
its superiority, should be unwilling or afraid to see the experiment
fairly tried? "Have we," he asked, "so little confidence in
our moral and intellectual superiority that we dare not give the
colored man an equal right with us to exercise the privilege which
the Nation has conferred upon him? Are the white people of the
South so poor in intellectual resources that they must resort to
fraud or open violence to defeat the ignorant and weak colored man
of even the least of his law-given rights?
"We claim," he continued, "that he is ignorant. It is true. Are we
afraid that he will grow wiser than we? We claim that he has not
the capacity to acquire or receive a like intellectual development
with ourselves. Are we afraid to give him a chance to do so?
Could not intelligence cope with ignorance without fraud? Boasting
that we could outrun our adversary, would we hamstring him at the
starting-post? It was accounted by all men, in all ages, an unmanly
thing to steal, and a yet more unmanly thing to steal from the weak;
so that it has passed into a proverb, 'Only a dog would steal the
blind man's dinner.' And yet," he said, "we are willing to steal
the vote of the ignorant, the blind, the helpless colored man!"
It was not for the sake of the colored man, he said in conclusion,
that he appealed to them to pause and think. It was because the
honor, the nobility, the intelligence of the white man was being
degraded by the course which passion and resentment, and not reason
or patriotism, had dictated. He appealed to his hearers as _white
men_, not so much to give to the colored man the right to
express his sentiments at the ballot-box, as to regard that right
as sacred because it rested upon the law, which constituted the
foundation and safeguard of their own rights. He would not appeal
to them as Southern men, for he hoped the day was at hand when there
would no more be any such distinction. But he would appeal to them
as men--honest men, honorable men--and as American citizens, to
honor the law and thereby honor themselves.
It had been said that the best and surest way to secure the repeal
of a bad law was first to secure its unhindered operation. Especially
was this true of a people who had boasted of unparalleled devotion
to principle, of unbounded honor, and of the highest chivalry. How
one of them, or all of them, could claim any of these attributes
of which they had so long boasted, and yet be privy to depriving
even a single colored man of the right which the Nation had given
him, or to making the exercise of that right a mockery, he could
not conceive; and he would not believe that they would do it when
once the scales of prejudice and resentment had fallen from their
eyes. If they had been wronged and outraged as a people, their
only fit revenge was to display a manhood and a magnanimity which
should attest the superiority upon which they prided themselves.
This address was received by his white hearers with surprised silence;
by the colored men with half-appreciative cheers. They recognized
that the speaker was their friend, and in favor of their being
allowed the free exercise of the rights of citizenship. His white
auditors saw that he was assailing with some bitterness and earnest
indignation both their conduct and what they had been accustomed to
term their principles. There was no immediate display of hostility
or anger; and Hesden Le Moyne returned to his home full of hope
that the time was at hand for which he had so long yearned, when the
people of his native South should abandon the career of prejudice
and violence into which they had been betrayed by resentment and
passion.
Early the next morning some of his friends waited upon him and adjured
him, for his own sake, for the sake of his family and friends, to
withdraw from the canvass. This he refused to do. He said that what
he advocated was the result of earnest conviction, and he should
always despise himself should he abandon the course he had calmly
decided to take. Whatever the result, he would continue to the end.
Then they cautiously intimated to him that his course was fraught
with personal danger. "What!" he cried, "do you expect me to flinch
at the thought of danger? I offered my life and gave an arm for a
cause in which I did not believe; shall I not brave as much in the
endeavor to serve my country in a manner which my mind and conscience
approve? I seek for difficulty with no one; but it may as well be
understood that Hesden Le Moyne does not turn in his tracks because
of any man's anger. I say to you plainly that I shall neither offer
personal insult nor submit to it in this canvass."
His friends left him with heavy hearts, for they foreboded ill.
It was not many days before he found that the storm of detraction
and contumely through which he had once passed was but a gentle
shower compared with the tornado which now came down upon his head.
The newspapers overflowed with threat, denunciation, and abuse.
One of them declared:
"The man who thinks that he can lead an opposition against the
organized Democracy of Horsford County is not only very presumptuous,
but extremely bold. Such a man will require a bodyguard of Democrats in
his canvass and a Gibraltar in his rear on the day of the election."
Another said:
"The Radical candidate would do well to take advice. The white men
of the State desire a peaceful summer and autumn. They are wearied
of heated political strife. If they are forced to vigorous action
it will be exceedingly vigorous, perhaps unpleasantly so. Those
who cause the trouble will suffer most from it. Bear that in mind,
persons colored and white-skinned. We reiterate our advice to the
reflective and argumentative Radical leader, to be careful how he
goes, and not stir up the animals too freely; they have teeth and
claws."
Still another said:
"Will our people suffer a covert danger to rankle in their midst
until it gains strength to burst into an open enemy? Will they
tamely submit while Hesden Le Moyne rallies the colored men to
his standard and hands over Horsford to the enemy? Will they stand
idly and supinely, and witness the consummation of such an infamous
conspiracy? No! a thousand times, No! Awake! stir up your clubs;
let the shout go up; put on your red shirts and let the ride begin.
Let the young men take the van, or we shall be sold into political
slavery."
Another sounded the key-note of hostility in these words:
"Every white man who dares to avow himself a Radical should be
promptly branded as the bitter and malignant enemy of the South;
every man who presumes to aspire to office through Republican votes
should be saturated with stench. As for the negroes, let them amuse
themselves, if they will, by voting the Radical ticket. We have
the count. We have a thousand good and true men in Horsford whose
brave ballots will be found equal to those of five thousand vile
Radicals."
One of his opponents, in a most virulent speech, called attention
to the example of a celebrated Confederate general. "He, too,"
said the impassioned orator, "served the Confederacy as bravely as
Hesden Le Moyne, and far more ably. But he became impregnated with
the virus of Radicalism; he abandoned and betrayed the cause for
which he fought; he deserted the Southern people in the hour of
need and joined their enemies. He was begged and implored not to
persevere in his course, but he drifted on and on, and floundered
deeper and deeper into the mire, until he landed fast in the slough
where he sticks to-day. And what has he gained? Scorn, ostracism,
odiurn, ill-will--worse than all, the contempt of the men who stood
by him in the shower of death and destruction. Let Hesden Le Moyne
take warning by his example."
And so it went on, day after day. Personal affront was studiously
avoided, but in general terms he was held up to the scorn and
contempt of all honest men as a renegade and a traitor. Those who
had seemed his friends fell away from him; the home which had been
crowded with pleasant associates was desolate, or frequented only
by those who came to remonstrate or to threaten. He saw his mistake,
but he knew that anger was worse than useless. He did not seek to
enrage, but to convince. Failing in this, he simply performed the
duty which he had undertaken, as he said he would do it--fearlessly,
openly, and faithfully.
The election came, and the result--was what he should have been
wise enough to foresee. Nevertheless, it was a great and grievous
disappointment to Hesden Le Moyne. Not that he cared about a seat
in the Legislature; but it was a demonstration to him that in his
estimate of the people of whom he had been so proud he had erred
upon the side of charity. He had believed them better than they had
shown themselves. The fair future which he had hoped was so near
at hand seemed more remote than ever. His hope for his people and
his State was crushed, and apprehension of unspeakable evil in the
future forced itself upon his heart.