District. Total Vote, 1898. District. Total Vote, 1898.
I 2,468 I 4,559
II 3,175 II 4,138
III 2,661 III 4,361
IV 4,551 IV 4,632
V 5,105 V 4,230
VI 6,071 VI 4,916
VII 3,605 VII 4,938
----- -----
Average 3,948 Average 4,539
The total congressional vote of Louisiana which elected six members to
Congress is less by nearly 500 votes than the average for one district
in Iowa. _One elector in Louisiana exercises about seven times as much
power in Congress as one in Ohio._ The average congressional vote of
Mississippi for seven districts is nearly 35,000 votes less than the
average for twenty-one districts in Ohio, while the total congressional
vote of South Carolina for seven Congressmen is more than seven thousand
below the total vote of a single congressional district in North
Carolina. The total vote cast in the twenty congressional districts of
South Carolina, Louisiana, and Mississippi in the election of 1898 was
91,184; while that polled in the ten congressional districts of
Wisconsin was 332,204. Thus, although these states cast nearly two
hundred and fifty thousand votes less than the state of Wisconsin, they
control twice as much power as that state in the national legislature.
The southern people themselves can not permit these violent
infringements of the principles of republican government to continue
without irrevocable detriment to their best and highest interests. In
the degree that they stand by in silence and see the Negro stripped of
his civil and political rights by a band of unscrupulous men who seek
no higher end than their personal aggrandizement, they compromise their
own civil and political freedom, and put in jeopardy the industrial
progress of the south. The bane of the South today is her selfish and
misguided political leadership, the men who will not scruple to
sacrifice upon the altars of their insatiable ambition for power every
interest linked with her economic prosperity and all consideration for
civic virtue by which alone the greatness of a people is measured.
Her misfortune lies not in any danger from Negro domination, for of all
the classes of her population the Negro is the least capable of working
her injury and the least disposed to do so. Her real danger lies in the
pernicious activity of her dominant political leaders who perpetuate
their control by overriding local and national authority to the
diminution of both public and private security. Law has been dethroned
and the respectable and industrious portion of the people must witness
the spectacle and endure the humiliation of riot, bloodshed, and
assassination with impunity of innocent and unoffending citizens by the
beneficiaries under these disfranchising constitutions.
The leading paper of the state of Louisiana, which threw the weight of
its influence in favor of the constitutional convention which was held
for the sole and avowed purpose of disfranchising the Negro, has
recently made the following important confession:
"Assassination is still the order of the day and night in
Tangipahoa Parish. William McGee, a white man, employed at a saw
mill was the victim. He was waylaid yesterday morning and fired
upon, with the result that he was badly hurt. A posse turned out
with dogs to find the murderers, but to no purpose, although the
posse was fired on several times out of ambush. The authorities in
that parish seem incapable of making arrests of the perpetrators of
these numerous assassinations that occur among them, but when by
some chance an arrest is made, no jury is found that will convict.
The result is that outlaws have everything their own way, while the
peaceable people have no assurance that at any moment they will not
be murdered by cowardly assassins."[20]
Thus it is that the southern white people, by permitting a few desperate
politicians to outlaw the Negro, find themselves at the mercy of an
oligarchy which has everything its own way.
According to the census of 1890, there are 102,657 white male citizens
of voting age in South Carolina and 132,947 colored male citizens of
voting age, making a total of 253,604 male citizens who were entitled to
vote in that year. The election returns from that state for November
1898 show that the highest total vote polled for any office was only
28,258, averaging less than eight hundred votes to each county, thus
showing that less than one eighth of the male citizens have it in their
power to control the administration and policies of the state.
If by a mere technicality one class of citizens can be deprived of the
rights and immunities guaranteed by the organic law of the nation, what
is to prevent any other class from sharing the same fate? If less than
one fourth of the male citizens of Mississippi can usurp the right to
exclusively manage the local government, what is to prevent a smaller
proportion from doing the same? If it is possible for a minority of the
people of Alabama to disfranchise one class of citizens on account of
race without the consent of the majority, what is to prevent the
disfranchisement of any other class on account of _political_ views?
Southern white men who view with apprehension these untoward political
tendencies, who are alarmed at the passing away of the last vestiges of
a republican form of government from that section of our Union, and who
silently condemn and deplore the outrageous and inexcusable manner in
which the black man is being divested of his political and civil rights
for mere party advantage, must seriously and actively face the
situation, if they would save the south from the shame and the
humiliation with which she is threatened, and which she has already too
keenly experienced at the hands of a profligate leadership.
There is a dormant statesmanship in the south that must and will exert
itself mightily, "a moral and intellectual intelligence which is not
going to be much longer beguiled out of its moral right of way by
questions of political punctilio, but will seek that plane of universal
justice and equity which it is every people's duty before God to seek."
But the question is not a sectional one. The whole American people are
deeply concerned in it. Nullification in South Carolina is as great a
national menace today as it proved to be half a century ago. Republican
institutions and the national welfare can have no guarantee or
protection against the evil consequences threatened by defiant trampling
upon constitutional authority. Not in its most palmy days did the slave
system possess such power as is aimed at by these latter day nullifiers.
Having shorn the Negro of his political rights and brought him into
industrial subjection, thereby usurping power both in state and national
government, they now threaten to dominate the economic and industrial
policies of the nation.
This government can not long continue half republican in form and half
oligarchic.