REVOLUTION AND WAR.
During the ten years intervening between the precipitate appearance
of the runaway slave at the Schofield home and the coming to Edisto
Island, South Carolina, of Miss Martha Schofield for the purpose of
founding an industrial school for the colored race, the new form of
liberty conceived by our fore-fathers and dedicated to the principle
that all men are born free and equal, had been put to a severe test as
to whether this new form of government could be put into practice. The
great Civil War predicted by Martha as inevitable in the settlement of
the problem of slavery broke out in all its fury in 1860-61 and was
not only attended by the loss of hundreds of thousands of priceless
lives, whose bodies filled countless hospitals of pain, and made gory
the prairies and furrows of old fields, as they on the side of the
South as well as they on the side of the North bled and died for the
eternal right as each saw what was their duty; but the demoralization
precipitated by this gigantic conflict, followed by the assassination
of President Lincoln, the idol of the whole free-civilized world, was
even more staggering in its influence on the lives and fortunes of
those left to solve the problems created by the great revolution.
The waste of inconceivable sums of money through the awarding of
contracts involving millions and millions of dollars by which fortunes,
through little or no effort at all, were made in a single night was
openly countenanced at Washington.
Superfluous wealth chocked the nation at the North with its mighty grip
and the riot of speculation, corruption and debauchery which followed,
in the voting away of the public lands free of any charge to private
corporations and the granting of subsidies of millions of dollars
without any compensation whatever, laid such burdens upon the people
that many of them until this day (1916) remain undischarged.
The paralysis experienced by the business interests as a result of
this whirlwind of corruption resulted in the decline of the credit
of the country to such an extent that the six per cent. bonds of the
Republic dropped to about seventy-three cents on the dollar in the open
market. But the disastrous financial calamity which the war produced is
of no consequence in comparison with the moral degradation into which
the country sank.
A few years before the panic of 1873 nearly everybody in the North and
West, where conditions were prosperous in spite of the war, wanted to
go to the cities where fortunes were waiting for them, and almost every
farmer’s son took an oath that he would never cultivate the soil. At
the age of twenty-one they left the dreary and desolate farms in droves
and rushed to the cities to become bookkeepers, doctors, lawyers,
merchants and sewing machine agents, anything to escape the heavy work
of the farm. Those with capital wanted to engage in something promising
huge and quick returns and so these built railroads, established banks
and insurance companies. Some speculated in stocks of Wall Street,
while others gambled in grain in Chicago with the result that the
riches of the whole country flowed to their coffers in immense volume,
and in their carriages and palaces the pitied their poor brothers on
the farm, who as earnestly envied them.
But the lap of luxury in which these citizens were being nursed was
doomed to become thread-bare as, indeed, it did do, and always will
do, when the world’s advance is checked by the want of assistance and
co-operation of all classes of laborers. The railroad and insurance
presidents became bankrupts and their companies went into the hands of
receivers by the score. Large numbers of young men who imagined they
had entirely too much education to be wasted on the farm and flocked
to the cities in incredible numbers became in time, either absconders
and fugitives from justice, or plain tramps and hobos, a demonstrative
force to prove the saying, that the only really solvent people, the
only independent people, are the tillers of the soil.
At the South which had been reduced to the most degraded type of
poverty there were no such opportunities for the accumulation of
wealth as existed at the North and in the West. The few railroads
that before the war intersected this section had been torn up by the
necessities of war and needed rebuilding, but there was no money to be
had anywhere with which to do the work. All the strongest blood and
brain had been either slain in battle or rendered incapacitated for the
tasks which the new order of conditions had forced upon the country.
Aside from the loss of millions and millions of dollars as a result of
the Emancipation Proclamation freeing the slaves the South was forced
also to bear the burden of an exorbitant tax on all crops produced,
especially the cotton tax.
The agitation set up by many of the acts of Reconstruction, impeachment
proceedings against President Johnson and the foment and strife
engendered by the rule of the military authorities opposed by the Ku
Klux Klan, all served, to keep for years longer than necessary, the
bleeding and prostrate South securely on its back, a helpless beggar at
the mercy, in many instances of an army of unscrupulous and grafting
office-seekers. Under such conditions it was impossible to obtain
credit anywhere for the most necessary things of life and as there
was almost nothing of any value produced, the greatest hardships and
suffering, if not actual misery, was endured by the people of the South.
Scores of persons gave up in despair and died. Cow peas, corn bread and
molasses of such quality as only a few years before would have been
considered unfit food for the slaves formed the sole diet, for the
first few years after the war, of delicate and cultured women. Little
children often went to bed crying from hunger. An element of the Negro
population, rendered conspicuously brutal and vicious by service in the
army, stole and threatened even blacker crimes, just as the game of war
has affected the morality of all races of men throughout the history of
recorded warfare.