_The Nation Surrenders_
The mind sickens in contemplating the mistakes of the "Reconstruction
policy;" and the revolting peculation and crime--which went hand in
hand from 1867-8 to 1876, bankrupting and terrorizing those
unfortunate States--plunging them into all but anarchy, pure and
simple.
A parallel to the terror which walked abroad in the South from 1866,
down to 1876, and which is largely dominant in that section even unto
the present hour, must be sought for in other lands than our own,
where the iron hand of the tyrant, seated upon a throne, cemented with
a thousand years of usurpation and the blood of millions of innocent
victims, presses hard upon the necks of the high and the backs of the
low; we must turn to the dynastic villanies of the house of Orleans or
of Stuart, or that prototype of all that is tyrannical, sordid and
inhuman, the Czar of all the Russias. The "Invisible Empire," with its
"Knights of the White Camelia," was as terrible as the "Empire" which
Marat, Danton and Robespierre made for themselves, with this
difference: the "Knights of the White Camelia" were assassins and
marauders who murdered and terrorized in defiance of all laws, human
or divine, though claiming allegiance to both; while the Frenchmen
regarded themselves as the lawful authority of the land and rejected
utterly the Divine or "higher law." The one murdered men as highwaymen
do, while the other murdered them under the cover of law and in the
name of _Liberty_, in whose name, as Madame Roland exclaimed on the
scaffold of revolutionary vengeance, so many crimes are perpetrated!
The one murdered kings and aristocrats to unshackle the limbs of the
proletariat of France; the other murdered the proletariat of the South
to re-rivet their chains upon the wretched survivors. And each class
of murders proclaimed that it was actuated by the motive of _justice
and humanity_. Liberty was the grand inspiration that steeled the arm
and hardened the heart of each of the avengers!
And thus it has been in all the history of murder and plunder.
Liberty! the People! these are the sacred objects with which tyrants
cloak their usurpations, and which assassins plead in extenuation of
their brazen disregard of life, of virtue, of all that is dear and
sacred to the race. The dagger of Brutus and the sword of Cromwell,
were they not drawn in the name of Liberty--the People? The guillotine
of the French Commune and the derringer of J. Wilkes Booth, were they
not inspired by Liberty--the People?
The innocent blood which has been spilt in the name of liberty and the
people, which has served the purposes of tyranny and riveted upon the
people most galling chains, "would float a navy."
By the side of the robbery, the embezzlement, the depletion of the
treasury of South Carolina, and the imposition of ruinous and
unnecessary taxation upon the people of that state by the Carpet-Bag
harpies, aided and abetted by the ignorant negroes whom our government
had not given time to shake the dust of the cornfield from their feet
before it invited them to seats in the chambers of legislature, we
must place the heartless butcheries of Hamburgh and Ellenton.
By the side of the misgovernment, the honeycomb of corruption in which
the Carpet-Bag government of Louisiana reveled, we must place the
universal lawlessness which that state witnessed from 1867 to 1876.
The whole gamut of states could be run with the same deplorable, the
same sickening conclusion.
The Federal authority had created the wildest confusion and retired to
watch the fire-brand. The "wise men" of the nation had made possible a
system of government in which robbery and murder were to contend for
the mastery, in which organized ignorance and organized brigandage
were to contend for the right to rule _and_ to ruin.
It is not complimentary to the white men of the South that their
organized brigandage proved to be more stubborn, more far-sighted than
was unorganized ignorance. In a warfare of this disreputable nature
very little honor can be accorded to the victorious party, be he
brigand or ignoramus. The warfare is absolutely devoid of principle,
and, therefore, victory, any way it is twisted, is supremely
dishonorable.
The South, therefore, although she rooted out the incubus of
_carpet-baggism_ (one of the most noxious plants that ever blossomed
in the garden of any nascent society), and stifled the liberties and
immunities of a whole people, turning their new-found joy into sadness
and mourning--although the South succeeded in accomplishing these
results, she lies prostrate to-day, feared by her fellow-citizens, who
will not trust her with power, and shunned by the industrious aliens
who seek our shores, because they will not become members of a society
in which individualism and absolutism are the supreme law--for was it
not to escape these parasites that they expatriated themselves from
the shores of the Volga, the Danube and the Rhine? Men will not make
their homes among people who, spurning the accepted canons of justice
and the courts of law, make themselves a community of _banditti_.
Thus, the South lies prostrate, staggering beneath a load of
illiteracy sufficient to paralyze the energies of any people; dwelling
in the midst of usurpation, where law is suspended and individual
license is the standard authority; where criminals and suspected
criminals are turned over to the rude mercy of mobs, masked and
irresponsible; where caste corrupts every rivulet that issues from the
fountain of aspiration or of chastity;[13] where no man is allowed to
think or act for himself who does not conform his thoughts and shape
his actions to suit the censorious and haughty _dictum_ of the
dominant class.
"You must think as we think and act as we act, or you must go!" This
is the law of the South.
In each of the late rebellious states the ballotbox has been closed
against the black man. To reach it he is compelled to brave the
muzzles of a thousand rifles in the hands of silent sentinels who
esteem a human life as no more sacred than the serpent that drags his
tortuous length among the grasses of the field, and whose head mankind
is enjoined to crush.
The thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth amendments to the Federal
constitution which grew out of the public sentiment created by thirty
long years of agitation of the abolitionists and of the "emancipation
proclamation"--issued as a war measure by President Lincoln--are no
longer regarded as fundamental by the South. The beneficiaries of
those amendments have failed in every instance to enjoy the benefits
that were, presumably, intended to be conferred.
These laws--having passed both branches of the Federal legislature,
having received the approval and signature of the Chief Executive of
the nation, and having been ratified by a majority of the states
composing the sisterhood of states--these laws are no longer binding
upon the people of the South, who fought long and desperately to
prevent the possibility of their enactment; and they no longer
benefit, if they ever did, the people in whose interest they were
incorporated in the _Magna Charta_ of American liberty; _while the
Central authority which originated them, has, through the Supreme
Court, declared nugatory, null and void all supplementary legislation
based upon those laws, as far as the government of the United States
is concerned!_ The whole question has been remanded to the
legislatures of the several states! The Federal Union has left to the
usurped governments of the South the adjudication of rights which the
South fought four years in honorable warfare to make impossible, and
which it has since the war exhausted the catalogue of infamy and
lawlessness to make of no force or effect. The fate of the lamb has
been left to the mercy of the lion and the tiger.
The "party of great moral ideas," having emancipated the slave, and
enfranchised disorganized ignorance and poverty, finally finished its
mission, relinquished its right to the respect and confidence of
mankind when, in 1876, it abandoned all effort to enforce the
provisions of the war amendments. That party stands today for
organized corruption, while its opponent stands for organized
brigandage. The black man, who was betrayed by his party and murdered
by the opponents of his party, is absolved from all allegiance which
_gratitude_ may have dictated, and is to-day free to make conditions
the best possible with any faction which will insure him in his right
to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness."
The black men of the United States are, today, free to form whatever
alliances wisdom dictates, to make sure their position in the social
and civil system of which, in the wise providence of a just God, they
are a factor, for better or for worse.
FOOTNOTES:
[13] "Southerners fire up terribly, as has been noted in these columns
again and again, when the subject of intermarriage between whites and
negroes is discussed. But the terrible state of immorality which
exists there, involving white men and colored women, is something upon
which the papers of that region are silent as a rule. Not so the grand
jury that met recently at Madison, Ga., which thus spoke out in its
presentment with all plainness of the Old Testament:
"After several days of laborious investigation we have found the moral
state of our country in a fair condition, and the freedom of our
community from any great criminal offenses is a subject for
congratulation to our people. But the open and shameless cohabitation
of white men with negro women in our community cries to heaven for
abatement. This crime in its nature has been such as to elude our
grasp owing to the limited time of our session. It is poisoning the
fountains of our social life; it is ruining and degrading our young
men, men who would scorn to have imputation put on them of
equalization with negroes, but who have, nevertheless, found the
lowest depths of moral depravity in this unnatural shame of their
lives."
"The despatch chronicling the presentment adds: 'The reading of this
presentment in court aroused a great feeling of indignation among men
who declare that the private affairs of the people should not be
intruded upon.' It strikes the Northern mind that until these 'private
affairs' do not need to be 'intruded upon,' Southern newspapers and
Southern clergymen would with better grace bottle up their indignation
upon the terrible evils likely to result from the legitimate
intermarriage of the two races."--_Newspaper waif._