THE ASSASSINS OF THE PEACE OF THE SOUTH.
To the people of the South the infliction of the carpet-bag government
was an outrage that "smelled to heaven." The changed character--the
degradation of the South was a deplorable consequence--it was the
inoculating of a virus into the circulation of the body politic that it
will take a century to cleanse.
The power of attainting and confiscating, forbidden by the law from a
full knowledge of its lamentable use by the factious parliaments of
Great Britain, was shamelessly exercised by local jurisdictions of the
South until nothing was left to the most virtuous of patriots but their
name, their character, and the fragrance of their great and illustrious
actions, to go down to posterity. A stranger coming to any legislature
would have taken it at one time for a disorderly club-room, where
ignorant and vicious partisans, white and black, were assembled to lay
plans for their own aggrandizement and the prostration of the country.
At another time he would suppose it to be a hustings for the delivery of
electioneering harangues; at another, an areopagus for the condemnation
of all virtuous men; then a theatre, for the entertainment of a most
diverted auditory; always a laboratory for the compounding of alarms,
conspiracies and panics. In the deliberations of the members there was
no check to the license of debate, or the prodigal expenditure of money;
no voice to control their judgments of outlawry and sequestration.
Radamanthus himself, in some stage of his infernal process, would at
least listen to his victim; "First he punisheth, then he listeneth, and
lastly he compelleth to confess." The inventors of mythology could not
conceive of a Tartarus so regardless of the forms of justice as not to
allow the souls of the condemned to speak for themselves; but
reconstruction, trampling upon all laws, denied to the long-suffering
people of the South the right to plead their innocence in the face of
the concentrated accumulation of frightful accusations, all founded upon
the "baseless fabric of a vision."
Centuries ago the last saurian died in the ooze of the bad lands in
Kansas, but by an unnatural law of reproduction the carpet bagger and
scalawag, with the same destructive instincts, with the same malodorous
presence, found its bed of slime in the heart of the South and disported
with a devilish energy. Monsters of malice, spawning evil gendering
fanaticism, focussed their evil eye upon the millions of freedmen, whose
destiny and happiness were closely interwoven with their old masters;
with masters who had yielded their swords but not their honor; who were
"discouraged, yet erect; perplexed, yet not unto despair; pursued, yet
not forsaken; smitten down, yet not conquered." The poor negro, under
the seductive charms of these human serpents, languished, and
languishing, did die.
The carpet-baggers preached to the negroes an anti-slavery God, from the
gospel of hate, of revenge. Slavery was the tempest of their poor souls,
and revenge must assuage the swollen floods. "The thronged cities--the
marks of Southern prosperity and the monuments of Southern
civilization," said they, "are yours, yours to enjoy, to alienate, to
transmit to posterity. Your empire is established indestructibly
throughout the new South. This land shall not be permitted to remain as
a lair for the wild beasts that have clutched at the throat of this
republic to destroy it. We have heard the cries of our Israel in
bondage, and we have come to give you the land that flows with milk and
honey." Poor black souls! What a delusion! The day will surely come when
the curtain shall be drawn and the deceivers, active and dormant, in
this dark tragedy, shall be dragged before the footlights to receive the
curse of an indignant reprobation. Poor negro! He is starving for bread
and they give him the elective franchise. He begs to be emancipated from
hunger, and they decree that he shall be a freedman.
Who will dare assert that the pride, the patriotism, the spirit of the
South was not alarmingly compromised by the issues of the Civil War?--a
war that was the exercise of both violence and discipline by sovereign
authority. We are told that wars are an evil, come when they may; they
are just or unjust, moral or immoral, civilized or savage, as the
ingredients of violated rights--demand of reparation and refusal--shall
be observed, neglected or abused. Perhaps the prostrated South should
have been advertent to this fact before she delivered the first blow.
But whether right or wrong, when the armies were disbanded, when it
yielded its organic being--its sovereignty--to overwhelming resources
and numbers, the law of nations laid upon the paramount sovereignty
obligations which have never been performed, either in letter or spirit.
The government that re-instated its authority was bound by a circle of
morals, including the obligations of justice and mercy, reciprocally
acting and reacting.
The emancipation of five million slaves was a supplemental act of war; a
renewed declaration that the tramp of embattled armies should echo and
re-echo from the Potomac to the Rio Grande, until the foot of a slave
should not press its "polluted" soil. Their enfranchisement was neither
an act of war or of exasperation, but an act of diplomacy,
extra-hazardous as results have shown, with the effect of humiliating
the conquered South. It introduced throughout the South a sacrilegious
arm against the fairest superstructure of Christian manhood the world
has ever known; stamped the history of the nation with dishonor, and
betrayed the proudest experiment in favor of the rights of man. It
taught the freedmen, through the vicious counsel of intriguing,
designing demagogues, that their liberty was still insecure; that to
accomplish it in its ultimate triumph and blessing, the savage axe must
be laid at the root of the social institutions; that they must lay
violent hands upon the men, women and children who had made their
emancipation an accomplished fact. Hence a war whose horrors should be
accentuated by the lighted torch was inaugurated, and an inglorious
campaign of reprisals by placable tools, whose zeal to preserve what
they now purposed in their blind fanaticism to destroy, was a few years
before as ardent and persevering.
Poor, pitiable, deluded human beings, who as chattels real--impedimenta
of Southern plantations--had guarded the peace of the home, and many of
whom were faithful unto death!
Reconstruction superimposed an artificial citizenship--a citizenship
essentially lacking in every resource of intellectual strength--it was
without ideals or examples for the government of the freedmen of the
proud Southern commonwealths. The allegiance of the negroes was as
friable as a rope of sand; they were without a definite conception of
the responsibilities of sovereignty--without a fixed principle to guide
them in governmental policy--with impulses of brutish suggestion, and
under masters more inexorable, more exacting than those they had
deserted upon the abandoned plantations. How painful was such a crisis
that split up the old South into disgraced and bleeding fragments!
We come to speak for a moment of the microbes that ate their way into
the hearts of the seceded commonwealths, while the ruins of southern
homes were still smoking; and before the blood of chivalrous southrons
had dried upon our battle-fields. I commend the chalice to the lips of
those who will deny the truth of what is herein written and desire that
such a man might realize a bare modicum of what was suffered and
endured. The elective franchise was the panacea for every evil; an
antispasmodic, when there were occasional exacerbations in the public
mind; our fathers valued the elective franchise because in its patriotic
expression was the covenant of freemen.
When our hopes were feeblest, and our horizon darkest, the scalawag fled
like a hound to the sheltering woods whence he sallied forth like an
outlaw. The reddened disc of the sun that went down at Appomattox gave
him an inspiration for his hellish work, and he went out in the gloom of
the starless night, declaring with a more vicious temper than did Henry
of Agincourt "the fewer the men the greater the honor" or in its
appropriate paraphrase "the deeper the pockets the greater the spoil."
His philanthropy and selfish interests never clash. He claimed always to
be rigidly righteous, and was seen in the camp-meeting and the church
sanctified and demure to a proverb. He spoke of the poor negro in
paroxysms of charity--a most rare benevolence which employed its means
in theft and crime; a charity which performs its vows and gives its alms
with money plundered from the freedmen. The scalawag like other
unclassified vermin was without respectable antecedents; with an acute
sense of smell like the "lap-heavy" scout of the Andes, he sought his
prey when there was no fear of the approach of man. As an Irish
barrister once wrote upon the door of a plebians' carriage, "Why do you
laugh?" so the humorist of the sixties could have written upon the
shirt-front of the scalawag "Why do people hold their noses?" He was
never mentioned by naturalists, unless under some other name he was
paired off with the vulture. In reconstruction days the transformation
of this abortion of nature from vulture to serpent was made without the
break of a feather or the splitting of a talon. With a seductive grimace
he whispered into the open ear of the freedmen "In the day that thou
eatest thereof thou shalt not surely die." He was as much an augury of
evil as the brood of ravens that once alighted upon Vespasian's pillar.
Had he been seen plying his vocation in the first empire Napoleon would
have said to Fouche, "Shoot the accursed beast on the spot." The carpet
bagger when not fighting the pestiferous vermin in the Chickahominy
swamps was pilfering. He went into the army conscripted like a
gentleman; he came out of the army at night when the back of the sentry
was turned and without a furlough, like a patriot. These twain were the
autocrats of the new south, which had its christening in the blood of
heroes; they were the furies that rode the red harlot around the circle,
when her flanks were still wet with human slaughter, and her speed was
increased by the jeering negroes. When Sister Charity in an occasional
fit would fall unconsciously into the receptive bosom of her black lover
in the prayer-meeting, with the wild exclamation "Bress Gord I sees de
hosses und de charyut er cumin!" they would clap their hands in joy and
shout, "Persevere in the good cause my sister." When old deacon Johnson
upon some happy suggestion from the "sliding elder" would turn up the
white of one eye, they would turn up the whites of the others; and when
deacon Thompson came around for alms for the heathen, they would slip
under the pennies a brass-button and inwardly thank God they were not
like the poor publican or the hypocritical pharisee. Their first meeting
with the freedmen was flattering and agreeable; it was an expression of
frail vows of love, sweet but not permanent, which bore but the perfume
and dalliance of a moment; it was the fusing of units of power for the
purpose of spoil, and plunder. Sambo had prayed ardently for this
revelation, and it had come. The scalawag, carpet-bagger, and freedman
were parties of the first part, second part and third part in the
tripartite agreement, until the negro became the party of no part or the
worst part, and he began to mutter to himself in vulgar doggerel:
"Ort is er ort und figger is er figger,
All fur de white man und none fur de nigger."
When Sambo stole from the store to increase the joint stock-in-trade,
the plunder was checked off in the invoice and Sambo was checked off in
the penitentiary; if the firm went into liquidation it was because its
active and suffering partner went into jail. If the poor negro died with
assets the carpet-bagger "sot upon de state" like a carrion-crow upon a
putrid body. These human harpies were natural sons of the commune.
* * * * *
The dirty co-partners opened up business in the south, as soon as
Sherman's army had crossed the border, under the attractive firm name
and style of "The Devil broke loose in Dixie." The iron-hoof of war had
so cruelly scathed the bosom of the south that it was like an over-ripe
carbuncle; it required a little scarifying and savage hands might
squeeze and sponge at will.
Credit was prostrate; society was disorganized, treasuries empty; debt
like a huge fragment of ice slipping away from the glacier upon the
mountain, was gathering volume and momentum as it rolled on and on, and
the poor old tottering, reeling country was still struggling on like a
bewildered traveller, followed by wolves, and overshadowed by vultures.
Corruption and ignorance were the only passports to power. No modern
instance of wrong and oppression can approach this Fructidor of the
sixties in the South. Human ghouls not so black as these vomited out,
the Carbonari of Italy, the Free Companions of France and the Moss
Troopers of England.
This condition of things, we dare assert, is without a parallel in the
history of any people, in any civilization. Even when Rome was swayed by
the keenest lust for conquest and dominion, their legions conquered the
barbaric states, not to degrade or destroy, but to attach them to her
invincible arms. Savage vengeance never went so far as to place the
slave above the master by way of retribution. This was the exciting
cause that brought into fullest display the natural law of reprisals and
retaliations upon the part of the Southern people.
The first prominent cause of public disturbance of which the
carpet-baggers were the authors was a most thorough and secret
organization of the negroes in all the counties into Loyal Leagues; in
many instances armed and adopting all the formula of signs, pass-words
and grips of an oath bound secret organization. When the negro is asked
why he votes the Republican ticket his simple answer always is, "Why Lor
bress your soul Marsa, we swo to do dat in de League." That simple
answer by this new suffragist, this new automaton of the ballot, is a
full explanation of the political solidity of the negro vote: With such
an element to work upon, ignorant and degraded, the carpet-baggers,
fierce and rapacious, have found themselves in Mahomet's seventh heaven
in the South.
It is a subject of interest and maybe of admonition to the people North
and South, how political institutions, in an age of the highest
civilization and under the most explicit constitutional forms, may be
changed or abolished by a process of partisan policy, when inaugurated
in a spirit of hate, revenge or avarice. Pseudo-philanthropists may talk
never so eloquently about an "equality before the law" when equality is
not found in the great natural law of race ordained by the Creator. That
cannot be changed by statute which has been irrevocably fixed by the
fiat of the Almighty. The result of this mongrel combination of
carpet-bagger, scalawag and negro; this composition of vice and
ignorance and rapacity, was plainly seen everywhere. Robbery and public
plunder were rampant in the State capital. The expenses of government
were at once increased five hundred per cent. Verily the pregnant
suggestion of the carpet-bagger that the only way to bring down the
white people of the South to the level of the negro was to tax them
down, was carried out with a sweeping vengeance. These thieves and
robbers, who had fastened themselves like vampires upon the public
treasury, and unlike the leach, did not let go their hold when full,
were still gorging themselves by new methods of plunder. No such rate of
taxation upon the same basis of property valuation has ever occurred in
the history of the world. A tithe of this rate of taxation lost to the
crown of England her thirteen American colonies. All the county
auditors, county treasurers, trial justices in the courts of record
were utterly incompetent and utterly corrupt. The juries in the courts
of records were mostly negroes, summoned by negro sheriffs, and the
pardoning power in the hands of venal and truculent governors was
shamefully prostituted. The most unblushing villainies and crimes were
either officially condoned or remitted and forgiven.
The people were taxed by millions; millions were paid out, and no
vouchers were ever taken or found.
In the face of such universal misrule, speculation and tyranny, there
could be no greater misrepresentation of the truth than is contained in
the oft-reiterated accusation, that the white people of the South are
fierce, aggressive and defiant in their conduct towards those placed in
authority over them by the Federal or State law. Aggressive and defiant!
How vain and worse than useless would such conduct be against the
overwhelming power of the tyrants who oppose them. It is against all the
instincts of life, when despair has taken the place of hope.
Defiant? Does the poor unresisting hare, when trembling with frenzied
apprehension under the feet and wide open jaws of the hound exhibit much
defiance, or much hope of victory in a death struggle with its cruel and
merciless foe? It makes no resistance--no motion or attitude of battle
for life except that involuntary and spasmodic action produced by pain
and suffering.
[Illustration: "Ef yu wus to brake loose und drap, yu'd bust up ebery
scallyhorg in de Souf."]