Reconstruction

by Brooks D. Simpson

  Let it not be forgotten that the Southern dispatches to the Associated Press, concerning such thronging horrors, are sent over the wires by rebel hands or rebel instigation. In ninety-nine cases out of one hundred they are malignant fabrications; and the single exceptional case is enormously exaggerated. The object is to hoodwink the people of the North, and paralyze any patriotic action against rebel perfidy and oppression. And that object is measurably obtained by the readiness of Northern Democratic journals to accept these lying telegrams as entirely trustworthy, and to treat reliable statements of rebel outrages as Republican canards, started for electioneering purposes. It may be safely assumed that not one of them will venture to denounce any of those outrages, however undeniable or revolting; for the party of which they are the organs is still bitterly anti-negro and essentially Southern in all its leadings and aspirations. Its history is pre-eminently one of abject subserviency to the old slave oligarchy, and it is just as ready to sacrifice every principle of justice and every claim of humanity to secure their affiliation as in other days. Hence, in proportion to its success will be the chance of slaughtering loyal whites and blacks with impunity at the South, and subjecting the whole country to rebel domination.

  One of our Boston dailies says: “The reports of outrages in the Southern States have a suspicious look. Is it not a little queer that these reports of outrages always come a little before the autumn elections?” It is just because of these elections that the whites “begin to form themselves into bands to persecute and intimidate the negroes,” so that they may take forcible and absolute possession of the polls. This is the citadel they are bound to capture, and having done so, they will become masters of the situation. Union men and colored freemen, except protected by the presence of United States troops, will find themselves driven to the wall, and the ballots in their hands to be thrown at the peril of their lives!

  This is a part of the dreadful inheritance bequeathed to us by chattel slavery—a part of the penalty we are to pay for having been accomplices in the crime of making man the property of man. And the end is not yet!

  The real truth is that the South is still rebel in heart and purpose, devoid of all patriotic feeling, charged with deadly malignity toward all Northern residents on her soil who will not wear a padlock upon their lips, utterly anti-American, covered with gross ignorance and brutal demoralization like a pall, and closely allied to barbarism. That in Georgia alone, forty-eight militia companies refuse to carry the United States flag, while bearing United States arms drawn from the arsenals of the General Government, is symptomatic of her rotten condition generally. In vain has her bloody rebellion been more than magnanimously condoned by that Government, and not a single traitor executed for treason; in vain has the North charitably contributed millions of dollars to save the Southern people from the horrors of starvation, and millions more to spread the light of education among them; in vain have Northern capital, enterprise and industry sought to develop the locked-up resources of that thriftless and inert section of our land; in vain has every effort been made to “conciliate our Southern brethren” by divers ways and means not always commendable. Darkness has as much fellowship with light and Belial with Christ, as the South has with the North. All her sufferings are by her own infliction, and she is her one implacable enemy—besotted, desperate, insane.

  Here is the venomous hiss of the Old Serpent of slavery and sedition, as aspirated by the Iuka (Miss.) Herald:

  “We must act speedily and decidedly, no matter what it costs. Better lose the lives of half our citizens than see the whole outrageously trampled upon by an ignorant and savage negro mob. We suggest to our brethren the formation of White Leagues in every civil district in every county in the State. Let them meet in secret and be bound by the most solemn oaths, and let death be the penalty of any violations of the Order. Already, we have good reason to believe, such leagues have been formed in many counties, and the thing is becoming more and more popular every day of its existence. This land is ours, by right and by inheritance, and we must, we will control it, even at the expense of oceans of blood and millions of lives. The constant cry all over the South is, the negroes are threatening to burn this town and that; to murder the women and children in this place or the other. Let the hellish barbarian brutes go on; we will take a score of lives for every woman or child murdered; and when once we start, in fact not a damnable negro savage assassin will be left in the South. We accept the gauge.”

  With such a demoniacal spirit as this pervading the South, when it comes to the question of equal rights for whites and blacks alike, what but the most terrible scenes may be expected? “We tell you, now,” says the Natchitoches Vindicator, menacingly addressing the colored voters, “and let it be distinctly remembered that you have fair warning, that we intend to carry the State of Louisiana in November next, or she will be a military territory.”

  See how divine retribution is meted out to such evil-doers!

  Of Missouri the St. Louis Globe says—“A little more of the present rule of ignorance, brutality and outlawry, [not by ‘Northern carpet-baggers,’ but by those to the ‘manner born,’] now witnessed in many of the counties of this State, and Missouri will be set back twenty years in her material prosperity.”

  Of the present condition of Kentucky, the Louisville Courier-J­ournal says:

  “The law against the carrying of concealed weapons is a dead letter. There has scarcely been the conviction of a respectable, well-to-do man for murder or homicide the last twenty years. Every coward and bully goes armed. Every case of manslaughter goes unpunished. Every case of shooting with intent to kill passes by as an amusing episode, provided there be no funeral. Even the most atrocious, cold-blooded, deliberate, malignant, dastardly assassinations have left no mark on the statute books except the mark of acquittals purchased by money or intimidation. Red-handed murderers roam at large among respectable people. Red-handed murderers occupy places of responsibility and trust. The rule is that you may kill your man with impunity. There is no danger of the gallows or the prison for the assassin who has money and friends. A drink too many—a word too much—a pull at the trigger of a six-shooter, and a funeral, and a mock trial, and no thought for the widow and the orphan, no thought for the public peace, so the murderer be a good-natured fellow, who is sorry, and has enough to pay the piper. That’s the way the law wags in Kentucky.”

  The same paper alleges that there are at this moment fifty cases of homicide on the criminal dockets of the State which ought to be recorded as murder cases, where the defendants are on bail with the least possible danger of an adverse result, and that there are five hundred cases of shooting with intent to kill, which will never come to trial.

  Of the condition to which Virginia is reduced, the Richmond Whig makes a doleful recital; but it consolingly and maliciously tells the impecunious Virginians that “they must remember that their woes could have been, and would have been, a hundred-fold worse under the curses of Radicalism that have fallen upon those unfortunate Commonwealths where the negro (Banquo’s ghost!) and the political allies of the negro are supreme.” Whistling to keep its courage up, it declares that “there is a splendid day somewhere in the future for Virginia;” but that day no living person shall see, unless there be a radical change in the spirit and policy of the Old Dominion. “Ephraim is joined to his idols; let him alone. He feedeth on wind, and followeth after the east wind; the balances of deceit are in his hand; he loveth to oppress. He shall be desolate in the day of rebuke. . . . . . Ye have ploughed wickedness, ye have reaped iniquity; ye have eaten the fruit of lies. Sow to yourselves in righteousness, reap in mercy; break up your fallow ground; for it is time to seek the Lord, till he come and rain righteousness upon you.”

  In vain does the Whig boast of the advantages and attractions Virginia presents in her fertile soil, her fine forests, her rivers and roadsteads, her manufacturing facilities, her mineral riches, her healthful and charming climate! Has she not always been in poss
ession of these? And with what beggarly results! What she and the entire South need are a new heart and a right spirit; then it will go well with them—and not till then. At present, “their works are works of iniquity, and the act of violence is in their hands. Their feet run to evil, and they make haste to shed innocent blood; wasting and destruction are in their paths; the way of peace they know not, and there is no judgment in their goings. They hatch cockatrice’ eggs, and weave the spider’s web; he that eateth of their eggs dieth, and that which is crushed breaketh out into a viper.”

  But the serious question is: What does the General Government intend to do for the protection of the loyal men of the South against a dominating band of assassins?

  Yours for equal rights,

  WM. LLOYD GARRISON.

  P.S. Just as I am sealing this communication, an answer to my interrogation is found in the letter of President Grant to General Belknap, showing that he is not unmindful of his constitutional duties at such an alarming crisis.

  Boston, Sept. 3, 1874.

  Boston Journal, September 5, 1874

  “A WAR OF INTIMIDATION”:

  LOUISIANA, OCTOBER 1874

  Eugene Lawrence to Harper’s Weekly

  NINE YEARS have passed since Louisiana, wasted, ruined, and depraved by slavery and by rebellion, came out from a contest in which, had only the guilty suffered, it had been punished not half so severely as it deserved. Its slave-traders had forced it among the earliest into revolt. The very thought of a limitation upon their dreadful traffic filled them with unreflecting rage. The election of LINCOLN seemed to menace the slave-trade on the Mississippi; the auction-blocks of New Orleans might no longer be supplied from Kentucky and Tennessee with human chattels; and the desperate leaders of the violent faction forced the small yet wealthy community to rise in arms against the government. With a population of perhaps seven hundred thousand, more than half of whom were colored, all Unionists in life and death, while of the whites it is not probable that a majority were ready for the mad measures of the slave-traders, the State soon felt the results of its folly, and fell again into the hands of the government. At the close of the rebellion Louisiana was impoverished with an excess of poverty to which not even South Carolina had reached. A large proportion of its white population were paupers, maintained by the alms of the national government. Its lucrative slave-trade was stopped forever; its colored people were free. There was no money to pay its taxes, no resources to maintain its levees; no hope of rescue from its fallen condition except the aid of the national government and the Northern capitalists. Of this, so generously offered, the State freely availed itself, and commerce once more began to revisit the deserted wharves of New Orleans. So fertile is its land, and so favorable the site of its metropolis, that a few years of peace would soon impart to Louisiana new elements of progress; and, as the centre of Western trade, and the home of Western merchants, New Orleans might rise to a high rank among the sea-ports of the world.

  But this the fallen rebels were resolved to prevent. Malice ruled in their counsels of such a depth of depravity as could only be born of the poisonous remnants of slavery. They formed secret associations, not, as one might suppose, to restore agriculture, to enlarge trade, to preserve good order, and invite the commerce and emigration of the West, but to insult and terrify honest negro laborers, to drive off white settlers who were Republicans, and at last murder both; to hold the State in miserable poverty and force the people to live still on the alms of the government. The reports of the Ku-Klux Committee for 1871–72 show how successfully the White Leaguers of four or five years ago overawed or ill-treated their miserable fellow-citizens; how in 1868 scarcely a Republican ventured to vote in many parishes, and what perpetual bankruptcy and poverty ruled in the small community. Two thousand persons were murdered by the White Leaguers in a population not much larger than that of Brooklyn.

  The fact that the Ku-Klux or the White League began its reign of terror in Louisiana immediately after the war, and has continued it ever since, until it rose into the recent rebellion, or that the Democratic leaders, M‘ENERY and PENN, owe all their political strength to its prevalence, is what the chiefs of the lawless faction in the State would now willingly conceal. Having spread a deadly terror through all the Republican population, they are now satisfied, and they labor to hide from the Northern press and people by all their arts the means by which they hope to control all future elections. Yet it is plain to the whole Northern public that it is not any misgovernment on the part of the KELLOGG rule that brought the White League into existence, since it appeared at once upon the close of the rebellion; nor is it the fault of the Federal officials that the assassins have ravaged the State under the names of Knights of the White Camellia or of a White Man’s Party for the past nine years. It is not the State but the Federal government against which the outrages have been aimed. It was the lingering fires of rebellion that blazed up anew in unlucky Louisiana; and it is certain that no government favorable to the Union would satisfy these supporters of M‘ENERY and PENN. They will have nothing but an ascendency of the rebel interests.

  Our White Leaguers who were only a few days ago urging that every one who opposed their rule in New Orleans should be “shot down like a dog,” are now complaining of “misrepresentation” and of the harsh construction put upon their actions by the more observant part of the Northern press. We think their actions are not unworthy of their words, and that they are not unknown to the history of the times. Never did so small a community as Louisiana in so few years exhibit such a succession of horrors. In 1868 we have the raids on the negro voters detailed in the Ku-Klux reports, when the White Camellias dominated in the streets of New Orleans. In 1869–71 fear kept them in tolerable quiet. In 1872 they re-appear. In 1873 they burned or shot down sixty or seventy negroes at Grant Parish, and attempted an insurrection in New Orleans. In 1874 they have murdered the United States officials at Coushatta and a large number of negroes; they have risen in rebellion in New Orleans and shot thirty or forty Unionists in a deadly contest. They are still importing large quantities of arms, and are evidently preparing for further massacres whenever the eye of the law is withdrawn. That such men should complain that they are “misrepresented” is an excess of effrontery; that they should find any portion of the Northern Democracy willing to believe any thing they choose to affirm against the Republican government is not a little remarkable. It is ridiculous to suppose that the murderers and revolutionists of 1874 are in any way to be disconnected from those of 1868 or 1873, or that M‘ENERY and PENN are not the chiefs of a band of assassins and outlaws of whom the white as well as the colored population of Louisiana would rejoice to be able to rid themselves.

  There is evidently a strong desire entertained by the people of the whole country to bring back peace and prosperity to all the Southern States that are still suffering from the terrors of the White Man’s League or the lingering penalties of the rebellion, and to lend aid to their merchants and farmers to rise from their temporary depression. They want capital and labor to extend their means of internal communication, and a large immigrant population to add to the value of their lands; they want public schools and churches, a free press, and liberty of speech and action to relieve them gradually from the influence of their dangerous classes, to diffuse knowledge, and increase the results of labor. But none of these can they hope to obtain in the midst of their civil convulsions. Insurrection is the most costly of political measures, and Louisiana is the most unlucky of all the States, because it has been tormented by a horde of traitors. While Charleston flourishes in peace and has become already an opulent sea-port, New Orleans is the scene of a lamentable decay. Galveston and Mobile draw away its commerce, and the Western merchants turn away in alarm from the home of the White Man’s League. Even Florida, where peace has been maintained and the Ku-Klux apparently suppressed forever, has made a rapid progress, while Savannah languishes and Georgia is losing its population. If, therefore, the Northern and
Western press are desirous of aiding in developing the natural advantages of the Southern States, it is plain that their first duty is to point out the causes that have led to their decay. Publicity and a perfect information of the real condition of the country are the earliest steps in its future advance. If there are outlaws in any of the States, or any reign of disorder, the truest friends of the South are those who expose and denounce them. Secrecy only increases the evil, and bad men hide their ill deeds in darkness.