Reconstruction

by Brooks D. Simpson

  Question. How old was your baby?

  Answer. Not quite three weeks old.

  Question. You were still in bed?

  Answer. Yes, sir; I never got up at all.

  Question. Did they interrupt your husband in any way?

  Answer. Yes, sir; they whipped him mightily; I do not know how much. They took him away up the road, over a quarter, I expect. I saw the blood running down when he came back. Old Uncle Charley was in there. They did not carry him back home. They said, “Old man, you don’t steal.” He said, “No.” They sat him down and said to him, “You just stay here.” Just as my husband got back to one door and stepped in, three men came in the other door. They left a man at John’s house while they were ripping around. As they came back by the house they said, “By God, goodbye, hallelujah!” I was scared nearly to death, and my husband tried to keep it hid from me. I asked him if he had been whipped much. He said, “No.” I saw his clothes were bloody, and the next morning they stuck to him, and his shoulder was almost like jelly.

  Question. Did you know this man who drew his gun on you?

  Answer. Yes, sir.

  Question. Who was he?

  Answer. Mr. Finch.

  Question. Where does he live?

  Answer. I reckon about three miles off. I was satisfied I knew him and Mr. Booker.

  Question. Were they considered men of standing and property in that country?

  Answer. Yes, sir; Mr. Finch is married into a pretty well-off family. He is a good liver, but he is not well off himself.

  Question. How is it with Mr. Booker?

  Answer. I do not know so much about him. He is not very well off.

  Question. How with the Monroes?

  Answer. They are pretty well-off folks, about as well off as there are in Haralson. They have a mill.

   By Mr. BAYARD:

  Question. You said they had been looking a long time for John Walthall?

  Answer. Yes, sir.

  Question. Had they been charging John with sleeping with white women?

  Answer. Yes, sir; and the people where he staid had charged him with it. He had been charged with it ever since the second year after I came to Haralson. I have been there four years this coming Christmas.

  Question. That was the cause of their going after him and making this disturbance?

  Answer. Yes, sir; that was it. We all knew he was warned to leave them long before he was married. His wife did not know anything about it. When he first came there he was staying among some white women down there.

  Question. Do you mean living with them and sleeping with them?

  Answer. He was staying in the house where they were.

  Question. White women?

  Answer. Yes, sir.

  Question. Were they women of bad character?

  Answer. Yes, sir; worst kind.

  Question. What were their names?

  Answer. They were named Keyes.

  Question. How many were there?

  Answer. There were four sisters of them, and one of them was old man Martin’s wife.

  Question. Were they low white people?

  Answer. Yes, sir.

  Question. Had John lived with them for a long while?

  Answer. Yes, sir. They had threatened him and been there after him. They had gone there several times to run them off. My house was not very far from them, and I heard them down there throwing rocks.

  Question. Was it well known among you that John had been living with these low white women?

  Answer. Yes, sir.

  Question. Did he keep it up after he was married?

  Answer. No, sir; he quit before he was married. I heard that a white woman said he came along there several times last year and said he could not get rid of them to save his life.

  Question. Did John go with any other white women?

  Answer: No, sir; not that I know of.

  Question. Was he accused by the Ku-Klux of going with any of them?

  Answer. They did not tell him write down their names. I heard them say, “Do you feel like sleeping with any more white women?” and I knew who they were.

   By the CHAIRMAN:

  Question. These women, you say, were a low-down class of persons?

  Answer. Yes, sir; not counted at all.

  Question. Did white men associate with them?

  Answer. It was said they did.

  Question. Did respectable white men go there?

  Answer. Some of them did. Mr. Stokes did before he went to Texas, and several of the others around there. I do not know many men in Georgia any way; I have not been about much. I have heard a heap of names of those who used to go there. I came by there one night, and I saw three men there myself.

  Question. You say John Walthall had been going there a good while?

  Answer. Yes, sir; that is what they say.

  Question. How long had he quit before they killed him?

  Answer. A year before last, a while before Christmas. He was still staying at old man Martin’s. I staid last year close to Carroll, and when I came back he had quit.

  Question. Did he go with them any more after he married?

  Answer. No, sir; he staid with his wife all the time. He lived next to me.

  Question. How long had he been married before he was killed?

  Answer. They married six weeks before Christmas, and he was killed on the 22d of April.

  Question. Did they charge your husband with going after any white women?

  Answer. No, sir; I never heard them say anything to him at all. The next morning I asked him what they whipped him for. He said they told him that he stole corn from old man Monroe. He staid at Monroe’s a year and a half—so I was told; I do not know. People said that Monroe never paid him anything.

  Question. How long before this was he living at old man Monroe’s?

  Answer. We have been married four years, and it was before we were married. I think it was the second year after he was free.

  Question. Were any of these men along that night who had been going to see these low women?

  Answer. I do not know; I heard that Mr. Murphy’s sister said that he was in the crowd that night—his little sister—and I know he used to go there.

  Question. Is he one of those who have gone to Texas?

  Answer. No, sir.

   By Mr. BAYARD:

  Question. You know that because somebody told you so?

  Answer. Yes, sir; that much. I do not know it myself; I heard some one else say it.

  ACCEPTING A NOMINATION:

  NEW YORK, MAY 1872

  Horace Greeley:

  Reply to Committee of the Liberal Republican Convention

  NEW YORK, May 20, 1872.

  Gentlemen: I have chosen not to acknowledge your letter of the 3d inst. until I could learn how the work of your Convention was received in all parts of our great country, and judge whether that work was approved and ratified by the mass of our fellow-citizens. Their response has from day to day reached me through telegrams, letters, and the comments of journalists independent of official patronage, and indifferent to the smiles or frowns of power. The number and character of these unconstrained, unpurchased, unsolicited utterances satisfy me that the movement which found expression at Cincinnati has received stamp of public approval, and been hailed by a majority of our countrymen as the harbinger of a better day for the Republic.

  I do not misinterpret this approval as especially complimentary to myself, nor even to the chivalrous and justly esteemed gentleman with whose name I thank your Convention for associating mine. I receive and welcome it as a spontaneous and deserved tribute to that admirable Platform of principles, wherein your Convention so tersely, so lucidly, so forcibly, set forth the convictions which impelled, and the purposes which guided its course—a Platform which, casting behind it the wreck and rubbish of worn-out contentions and by-gone feuds, embodies in fit and few words the needs and aspirations of To-Day. Though thousands stand ready
to condemn your every act, hardly a syllable of criticism or cavil has been aimed at your Platform, of which the substance may be fairly epitomized as follows:

  I. All the political rights and franchises which have been acquired through our late bloody convulsion must and shall be guaranteed, maintained, enjoyed, respected, evermore.

  II. All the political rights and franchises which have been lost through that convulsion should and must be promptly restored and reestablished, so that there shall be henceforth no proscribed class and no disfranchised caste within the limits of our Union, whose long estranged people shall reunite and fraternize upon the broad basis of Universal Amnesty with Impartial Suffrage.

  III. That, subject to our solemn constitutional obligation to maintain the equal rights of all citizens, our policy should aim at local self-government, and not at centralization; that the civil authority should be supreme over the military; that the writ of habeas corpus should be jealously upheld as the safeguard of personal freedom; that the individual citizen should enjoy the largest liberty consistent with public order; and that there shall be no Federal subversion of the internal polity of the several States and municipalities, but that each shall be left free to enforce the rights and promote the well-being of its inhabitants by such means as the judgment of its own people shall prescribe.

  IV. There shall be a real and not merely a simulated Reform in the Civil Service of the Republic; to which end it is indispensable that the chief dispenser of its vast official patronage shall be shielded from the main temptation to use his power selfishly by a rule inexorably forbidding and precluding his re-election.

  V. That the raising of Revenue, whether by Tariff or otherwise, shall be recognized and treated as the People’s immediate business, to be shaped and directed by them through their Representatives in Congress, whose action thereon the President must neither overrule by his veto, attempt to dictate, nor presume to punish, by bestowing office only on those who agree with him, or withdrawing it from those who do not.

  VI. That the Public Lands must be sacredly reserved for occupation and acquisition by cultivators, and not recklessly squandered on the projectors of Railroads for which our people have no present need, and the premature construction of which is annually plunging us into deeper and deeper abysses of foreign indebtedness.

  VII. That the achievement of these grand purposes of universal beneficence is expected and sought at the hands of all who approve them, irrespective of past affiliations.

  VIII. That the public faith must at all hazards be maintained, and the National credit preserved.

  IX. That the patriotic devotedness and inestimable services of our fellow-citizens who, as soldiers or sailors, upheld the flag and maintained the unity of the Republic shall ever be gratefully remembered and honorably requited.

  These propositions, so ably and forcibly presented in the Platform of your Convention, have already fixed the attention and commanded the assent of a large majority of our countrymen, who joyfully adopt them, as I do, as the bases of a true, beneficent National Reconstruction—of a New Departure from jealousies, strifes, and hates, which have no longer adequate motive or even plausible pretext, into an atmosphere of Peace, Fraternity, and Mutual Good Will. In vain do the drill-sergeants of decaying organizations flourish menacingly their truncheons and angrily insist that the files shall be closed and straightened; in vain do the whippers-in of parties once vital, because rooted in the vital needs of the hour, protest against straying and bolting, denounce men nowise their inferiors as traitors and renegades, and threaten them with infamy and ruin. I am confident that the American People have already made your cause their own, fully resolved that their brave hearts and strong arms shall bear it on to triumph. In this faith, and with the distinct understanding that, if elected, I shall be the President, not of a party, but of the whole People, I accept your nomination, in the confident trust that the masses of our countrymen, North and South, are eager to clasp hands across the bloody chasm which has too long divided them, forgetting that they have been enemies in the joyful consciousness that they are and must henceforth remain brethren.

  Yours, gratefully,

  HORACE GREELEY.

  GRANT OVER GREELEY:

  NEW YORK, SEPTEMBER 1872

  Frederick Douglass:

  Speech at New York City

  Frederick Douglass was next introduced, and spoke as follows:

  FELLOW-CITIZENS: For the first time in the history of this Republic, the whole body of colored citizens will have the right to vote for a President of the United States in November. They are not only men but freemen, not only freemen but citizens of the Republic and men among men.

  The people of this country are composed of different nations and races, but no race in the United States have as much at stake in the present election as we who have been so recently invested with the rights of manhood and citizenship. The rights of all others have been secured and confirmed by time and practice. No power in the country is tempted to interfere with or in any manner abridge such rights. With us the case is different. We are still a hated caste, and motives stand thick through all the land for compassing our degradation. The master class at the South is not yet reconciled, and there are many in the North who sympathize with them. Hence, though we are now free and legally enfranchised, though we are equal before the law with all other citizens, we have reasons for special vigilance and exertion in order to hold and exercise the rights so recently secured to us as a class.

  As a general rule, I deprecate all appeals to classes for political purposes. The time is not distant when all classes will be merged in a common citizenship, and when to be an American citizen will be sufficient to insure respect in every part of the country and among all classes of the American people; but that time has not yet come, and until it does come, we are almost compelled to act as a class to exert our proper influence. We are, in some measure, on trial before our country and the world, and thoughtful men are everywhere watching and studying our deportment in the exercise of the high trust with which we are now invested.

  It was once said that the negro does not know enough to vote, and this was the only decent ground upon which our right to vote was denied and withheld.

  I am sorry to say that some of our number—only a very few—men who have more learning than common sense, have been making concessions to this degrading idea. They have been writing to Mr. Sumner and sundry other white gentlemen in different parts of the country to tell them how to vote.

  Now, if we colored people are so destitute of sense and political sagacity as to ask the white people how we shall vote, it might be well to confine all voting to the white people, and thus save the trouble and expense of counting our votes at all.

  Now, gentlemen, if any of our people are confused and bewildered, and do not know how to vote in the approaching election, or if any class of the American people have doubts of our ability to form intelligent opinions of public men, parties, principles, and measures, I hope the proceedings of this meeting may be made useful to them. The colored citizens of New-England have already spoken in Faneuil Hall, and their word has gone over the whole country. The colored citizens of New-York will have a not less universal hearing, nor be less potent in point of right influence.

  Fellow-citizens, while we are deeply interested in maintaining the present financial and foreign policy of the Government which has given to our country credit, prosperity and peace; while we are touched by the humanity of the Administration toward the Indians, and commend its wisdom; while we, in common with other citizens, desire light taxation and an honest administration of the Government, the chief and all commanding interest which all feel in the contest, is found in its bearing upon the great questions of human liberty and equality. Here it touches us deeply, and is a matter of supreme concern. To the millions of our color at the South it is vastly more important than to us. It is, in effect, a thing of peace and war, of order and disorder, of life and death, if not of liberty and sl
avery. It, in fact, involves the maintenance of all the progress made during the last dozen years, and the inauguration of a process of reaction, which may land our race into a condition only a little better than the bondage and degradation of ages from which we have just begun to emerge.

  I know that this statement of the issues involved is stoutly denied by one party to this canvass, and no doubt honestly denied, but you and I know that there is such a thing as being honestly wrong. Hell is said to be paved with good intentions.

  The political canvass before us is indeed a very peculiar one. There is nothing like it in the past, and I hope there may never be anything like it in the future. To outward seeming we have two political parties seeking to possess the Government, while professing substantially the same principles and commending their candidates for the same noble qualities and dispositions. Two parties and one platform. It is this seeming agreement which leads to confusion, and would almost deceive the very elect. We have no longer an honest fight between armies under their own respective colors, battling for their own honestly-cherished objects, but a war under the same flags, between armies in the same uniforms, and professing the same objects.

  The best illustration of the political contest now proceeding is found in our late war for the Union. You will remember that neither party to that conflict was willing to declare its true object. The South said it was not fighting for slavery, and the North said it was not fighting against slavery; and yet they were fighting hard and everybody who had any brains knew at the time that the two were really fighting about slavery, and that one was for it and the other was against it.

  If we were left to find the path of duty simply by the light of professions and platforms, and by the men we find on the one side and on the other, we might possibly be misled; but happily we are dependent upon no such deceptive guides. There is such a thing as history, and the parties to this canvass have their respective histories. All the present rests upon all the past. You cannot divorce today from yesterday, nor this year from last year. In front of us today we have the same old enemy, the same old snake in a new skin, the same old Democratic Party, thinly veneered by a scale torn off the Republican Party. The wolf is all the more dangerous because of his white coat.