The Broken Sword; Or, A Pictorial Page in Reconstruction

This work is respectfully inscribed to the Daughters of the Confederacy By the Author, Who followed, as their fathers did, the Southern Cross.


ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

I have considered the oppressions that are done under the sun, and on the side of the oppressor there is power.
In the enforcement of the policy of Reconstruction in the South, the evidences were from day to day becoming so cumulative and decisive, that nothing but the discipline of an enraged party, coupled with the spoils principle, prevented the whole mass of the community from a universal expression of its desire to have it abandoned. Reasoning men everywhere felt that it must continue to multiply its mischiefs. But, said its authors, treason must be made odious, and the late insurrectionary States must feel that there is a higher law than that promulgated by their ordinances of secession.
The Spanish inquisition, now the abhorrence of all enlightened minds, was long sustained in many centuries by the tyrants' plea of necessity. In the burning of a thousand heretics the religious zealot saw the hand of God; in the destruction of a thousand sorcerers, the fanatic discerned the commonweal of the people; so in the whipcords with which the people of the South were so mercilessly scourged, there was found an antiseptic for the gangrenous wounds inflicted by the civil war. All these cruelties were legalized, while bleeding humanity was sinking under the burden of oppression. In the collision of exasperated passions, it is the temper of aggression that always strikes the first blow. The government of the South by carpet-baggers was essentially oppressive and inquisitorial. It was, in its practical operation, a pure and unadulterated despotism, superseding the protection guaranteed by the Federal Constitution to each and every State. It was under the dominion of an organized anarchy, with legislatures and courts of justice, subordinated to a lawless assemblage of unprincipled men calling themselves the representatives and judges of the people. Among its necessarily implied powers was that of confiscation; and numbered in its enumeration of brutalities, was a nameless crime that shocked the moral sense of mankind. Reconstruction came upon the South with fearful impulse.