CHAPTER III.
THE ASSASSINS OF THE PEACE OF THE SOUTH.
To the people of the South the infliction of the carpet-bag governmentwas an outrage that "smelled to heaven." The changed character--thedegradation of the South was a deplorable consequence--it was theinoculating of a virus into the circulation of the body politic that itwill take a century to cleanse.
The power of attainting and confiscating, forbidden by the law from afull knowledge of its lamentable use by the factious parliaments ofGreat Britain, was shamelessly exercised by local jurisdictions of theSouth until nothing was left to the most virtuous of patriots but theirname, their character, and the fragrance of their great and illustriousactions, to go down to posterity. A stranger coming to any legislaturewould have taken it at one time for a disorderly club-room, whereignorant and vicious partisans, white and black, were assembled to layplans for their own aggrandizement and the prostration of the country.At another time he would suppose it to be a hustings for the delivery ofelectioneering harangues; at another, an areopagus for the condemnationof all virtuous men; then a theatre, for the entertainment of a mostdiverted auditory; always a laboratory for the compounding of alarms,conspiracies and panics. In the deliberations of the members there wasno 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 atleast listen to his victim; "First he punisheth, then he listeneth, andlastly he compelleth to confess." The inventors of mythology could notconceive of a Tartarus so regardless of the forms of justice as not toallow the souls of the condemned to speak for themselves; butreconstruction, trampling upon all laws, denied to the long-sufferingpeople of the South the right to plead their innocence in the face ofthe concentrated accumulation of frightful accusations, all founded uponthe "baseless fabric of a vision."
Centuries ago the last saurian died in the ooze of the bad lands inKansas, but by an unnatural law of reproduction the carpet bagger andscalawag, with the same destructive instincts, with the same malodorouspresence, found its bed of slime in the heart of the South and disportedwith a devilish energy. Monsters of malice, spawning evil genderingfanaticism, focussed their evil eye upon the millions of freedmen, whosedestiny 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, yetnot forsaken; smitten down, yet not conquered." The poor negro, underthe seductive charms of these human serpents, languished, andlanguishing, did die.
The carpet-baggers preached to the negroes an anti-slavery God, from thegospel of hate, of revenge. Slavery was the tempest of their poor souls,and revenge must assuage the swollen floods. "The thronged cities--themarks of Southern prosperity and the monuments of Southerncivilization," said they, "are yours, yours to enjoy, to alienate, totransmit to posterity. Your empire is established indestructiblythroughout the new South. This land shall not be permitted to remain asa lair for the wild beasts that have clutched at the throat of thisrepublic to destroy it. We have heard the cries of our Israel inbondage, and we have come to give you the land that flows with milk andhoney." Poor black souls! What a delusion! The day will surely come whenthe curtain shall be drawn and the deceivers, active and dormant, inthis dark tragedy, shall be dragged before the footlights to receive thecurse of an indignant reprobation. Poor negro! He is starving for breadand they give him the elective franchise. He begs to be emancipated fromhunger, and they decree that he shall be a freedman.
Who will dare assert that the pride, the patriotism, the spirit of theSouth was not alarmingly compromised by the issues of the Civil War?--awar that was the exercise of both violence and discipline by sovereignauthority. We are told that wars are an evil, come when they may; theyare just or unjust, moral or immoral, civilized or savage, as theingredients of violated rights--demand of reparation and refusal--shallbe observed, neglected or abused. Perhaps the prostrated South shouldhave been advertent to this fact before she delivered the first blow.But whether right or wrong, when the armies were disbanded, when ityielded its organic being--its sovereignty--to overwhelming resourcesand numbers, the law of nations laid upon the paramount sovereigntyobligations which have never been performed, either in letter or spirit.The government that re-instated its authority was bound by a circle ofmorals, including the obligations of justice and mercy, reciprocallyacting and reacting.
The emancipation of five million slaves was a supplemental act of war; arenewed declaration that the tramp of embattled armies should echo andre-echo from the Potomac to the Rio Grande, until the foot of a slaveshould not press its "polluted" soil. Their enfranchisement was neitheran act of war or of exasperation, but an act of diplomacy,extra-hazardous as results have shown, with the effect of humiliatingthe conquered South. It introduced throughout the South a sacrilegiousarm against the fairest superstructure of Christian manhood the worldhas ever known; stamped the history of the nation with dishonor, andbetrayed the proudest experiment in favor of the rights of man. Ittaught the freedmen, through the vicious counsel of intriguing,designing demagogues, that their liberty was still insecure; that toaccomplish it in its ultimate triumph and blessing, the savage axe mustbe laid at the root of the social institutions; that they must layviolent hands upon the men, women and children who had made theiremancipation an accomplished fact. Hence a war whose horrors should beaccentuated by the lighted torch was inaugurated, and an ingloriouscampaign of reprisals by placable tools, whose zeal to preserve whatthey now purposed in their blind fanaticism to destroy, was a few yearsbefore as ardent and persevering.
Poor, pitiable, deluded human beings, who as chattels real--impedimentaof Southern plantations--had guarded the peace of the home, and many ofwhom were faithful unto death!
Reconstruction superimposed an artificial citizenship--a citizenshipessentially lacking in every resource of intellectual strength--it waswithout ideals or examples for the government of the freedmen of theproud Southern commonwealths. The allegiance of the negroes was asfriable as a rope of sand; they were without a definite conception ofthe responsibilities of sovereignty--without a fixed principle to guidethem in governmental policy--with impulses of brutish suggestion, andunder masters more inexorable, more exacting than those they haddeserted upon the abandoned plantations. How painful was such a crisisthat split up the old South into disgraced and bleeding fragments!
We come to speak for a moment of the microbes that ate their way intothe hearts of the seceded commonwealths, while the ruins of southernhomes were still smoking; and before the blood of chivalrous southronshad dried upon our battle-fields. I commend the chalice to the lips ofthose who will deny the truth of what is herein written and desire thatsuch a man might realize a bare modicum of what was suffered andendured. The elective franchise was the panacea for every evil; anantispasmodic, when there were occasional exacerbations in the publicmind; our fathers valued the elective franchise because in its patrioticexpression was the covenant of freemen.
When our hopes were feeblest, and our horizon darkest, the scalawag fledlike a hound to the sheltering woods whence he sallied forth like anoutlaw. The reddened disc of the sun that went down at Appomattox gavehim an inspiration for his hellish work, and he went out in the gloom ofthe starless night, declaring with a more vicious temper than did Henryof Agincourt "the fewer the men the greater the honor" or in itsappropriate paraphrase "the deeper the pockets the greater the spoil."His philanthropy and selfish interests never clash. He claimed always tobe rigidly righteous, and was seen in the camp-meeting and the churchsanctified and demure to a proverb. He spoke of the poor negro inparoxysms of charity--a most rare benevolence which employed its meansin theft and crime; a charity which performs its vows and gives its almswith money plundered from the freedmen. The scalawag like otherunclassified vermin was without respectable antecedents; with an acutesense of smell like the "lap-heavy" scout of the Andes
, he sought hisprey when there was no fear of the approach of man. As an Irishbarrister once wrote upon the door of a plebians' carriage, "Why do youlaugh?" so the humorist of the sixties could have written upon theshirt-front of the scalawag "Why do people hold their noses?" He wasnever mentioned by naturalists, unless under some other name he waspaired off with the vulture. In reconstruction days the transformationof this abortion of nature from vulture to serpent was made without thebreak of a feather or the splitting of a talon. With a seductive grimacehe whispered into the open ear of the freedmen "In the day that thoueatest thereof thou shalt not surely die." He was as much an augury ofevil as the brood of ravens that once alighted upon Vespasian's pillar.Had he been seen plying his vocation in the first empire Napoleon wouldhave said to Fouche, "Shoot the accursed beast on the spot." The carpetbagger when not fighting the pestiferous vermin in the Chickahominyswamps was pilfering. He went into the army conscripted like agentleman; he came out of the army at night when the back of the sentrywas turned and without a furlough, like a patriot. These twain were theautocrats of the new south, which had its christening in the blood ofheroes; they were the furies that rode the red harlot around the circle,when her flanks were still wet with human slaughter, and her speed wasincreased by the jeering negroes. When Sister Charity in an occasionalfit would fall unconsciously into the receptive bosom of her black loverin the prayer-meeting, with the wild exclamation "Bress Gord I sees dehosses und de charyut er cumin!" they would clap their hands in joy andshout, "Persevere in the good cause my sister." When old deacon Johnsonupon some happy suggestion from the "sliding elder" would turn up thewhite of one eye, they would turn up the whites of the others; and whendeacon Thompson came around for alms for the heathen, they would slipunder the pennies a brass-button and inwardly thank God they were notlike the poor publican or the hypocritical pharisee. Their first meetingwith the freedmen was flattering and agreeable; it was an expression offrail vows of love, sweet but not permanent, which bore but the perfumeand dalliance of a moment; it was the fusing of units of power for thepurpose of spoil, and plunder. Sambo had prayed ardently for thisrevelation, and it had come. The scalawag, carpet-bagger, and freedmanwere parties of the first part, second part and third part in thetripartite agreement, until the negro became the party of no part or theworst 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 inthe penitentiary; if the firm went into liquidation it was because itsactive and suffering partner went into jail. If the poor negro died withassets the carpet-bagger "sot upon de state" like a carrion-crow upon aputrid body. These human harpies were natural sons of the commune.
* * * * *
The dirty co-partners opened up business in the south, as soon asSherman's army had crossed the border, under the attractive firm nameand style of "The Devil broke loose in Dixie." The iron-hoof of war hadso cruelly scathed the bosom of the south that it was like an over-ripecarbuncle; it required a little scarifying and savage hands mightsqueeze and sponge at will.
Credit was prostrate; society was disorganized, treasuries empty; debtlike a huge fragment of ice slipping away from the glacier upon themountain, was gathering volume and momentum as it rolled on and on, andthe poor old tottering, reeling country was still struggling on like abewildered traveller, followed by wolves, and overshadowed by vultures.Corruption and ignorance were the only passports to power. No moderninstance of wrong and oppression can approach this Fructidor of thesixties in the South. Human ghouls not so black as these vomited out,the Carbonari of Italy, the Free Companions of France and the MossTroopers of England.
This condition of things, we dare assert, is without a parallel in thehistory of any people, in any civilization. Even when Rome was swayed bythe keenest lust for conquest and dominion, their legions conquered thebarbaric states, not to degrade or destroy, but to attach them to herinvincible arms. Savage vengeance never went so far as to place theslave above the master by way of retribution. This was the excitingcause that brought into fullest display the natural law of reprisals andretaliations upon the part of the Southern people.
The first prominent cause of public disturbance of which thecarpet-baggers were the authors was a most thorough and secretorganization of the negroes in all the counties into Loyal Leagues; inmany instances armed and adopting all the formula of signs, pass-wordsand grips of an oath bound secret organization. When the negro is askedwhy he votes the Republican ticket his simple answer always is, "Why Lorbress your soul Marsa, we swo to do dat in de League." That simpleanswer by this new suffragist, this new automaton of the ballot, is afull explanation of the political solidity of the negro vote: With suchan element to work upon, ignorant and degraded, the carpet-baggers,fierce and rapacious, have found themselves in Mahomet's seventh heavenin the South.
It is a subject of interest and maybe of admonition to the people Northand South, how political institutions, in an age of the highestcivilization and under the most explicit constitutional forms, may bechanged or abolished by a process of partisan policy, when inauguratedin a spirit of hate, revenge or avarice. Pseudo-philanthropists may talknever so eloquently about an "equality before the law" when equality isnot found in the great natural law of race ordained by the Creator. Thatcannot be changed by statute which has been irrevocably fixed by thefiat of the Almighty. The result of this mongrel combination ofcarpet-bagger, scalawag and negro; this composition of vice andignorance and rapacity, was plainly seen everywhere. Robbery and publicplunder were rampant in the State capital. The expenses of governmentwere at once increased five hundred per cent. Verily the pregnantsuggestion of the carpet-bagger that the only way to bring down thewhite people of the South to the level of the negro was to tax themdown, was carried out with a sweeping vengeance. These thieves androbbers, who had fastened themselves like vampires upon the publictreasury, and unlike the leach, did not let go their hold when full,were still gorging themselves by new methods of plunder. No such rate oftaxation upon the same basis of property valuation has ever occurred inthe history of the world. A tithe of this rate of taxation lost to thecrown of England her thirteen American colonies. All the countyauditors, county treasurers, trial justices in the courts of recordwere utterly incompetent and utterly corrupt. The juries in the courtsof records were mostly negroes, summoned by negro sheriffs, and thepardoning power in the hands of venal and truculent governors wasshamefully prostituted. The most unblushing villainies and crimes wereeither officially condoned or remitted and forgiven.
The people were taxed by millions; millions were paid out, and novouchers were ever taken or found.
In the face of such universal misrule, speculation and tyranny, therecould be no greater misrepresentation of the truth than is contained inthe oft-reiterated accusation, that the white people of the South arefierce, aggressive and defiant in their conduct towards those placed inauthority over them by the Federal or State law. Aggressive and defiant!How vain and worse than useless would such conduct be against theoverwhelming power of the tyrants who oppose them. It is against all theinstincts of life, when despair has taken the place of hope.
Defiant? Does the poor unresisting hare, when trembling with frenziedapprehension under the feet and wide open jaws of the hound exhibit muchdefiance, or much hope of victory in a death struggle with its cruel andmerciless foe? It makes no resistance--no motion or attitude of battlefor life except that involuntary and spasmodic action produced by painand suffering.
"Ef yu wus to brake loose und drap, yu'd bust up eberyscallyhorg in de Souf."]
The Broken Sword; Or, A Pictorial Page in Reconstruction Page 5
