THE POLITICAL CRIMES OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
[By J. L. Underwood.]
The first of the great crimes of the last century was the great rebellion of the Northern States against the Federal constitutional Union, “the best government the world ever saw.” Nine of these States in solemn legislative action, in the fifties, utterly repudiated their contract in the Federal Constitution. They nullified the acts of Congress and repudiated and defied the decisions of the Supreme Court.
This rebellion at the North broke up “the glorious Union of our fathers,” and drove the South, like poor Hagar, into the wilderness to look out for herself, without a charge from any quarter that a Southern State had committed one single act in violation of Federal law or in hostility to the Constitution. Then came the second great crime, the crime so vigorously denounced at the time by William Lloyd Garrison, the most consistent and the most heroic of the Northern Abolitionists, Horace Greeley and Wendell Phillips, the crime of coercion of the weaker by the stronger States, the military invasion of the South under the prostituted flag of the Union, and 277 the final subjugation of her people by fire and sword. O tempora! O mores!
The acts of congress for years after the Southern army had honorably laid down its arms and gone home to plow and plant the fields make the blackest pages in the history of modern times. The writer dreads to put in print his estimate of such a political monster as Thad Stevens, the misanthropic genius of reconstruction, the Robespierre of America. Robespierre’s guillotine cut off the heads of its victims. Thad Stevens’s guillotine cut off all hopes from Southern hearts. He avowed it his purpose to exterminate the Southern white people, to confiscate their property into the hands of the negroes, and with these negroes to keep the country forever under the dominion of his party. According to him and his followers to this day this party of (so-called) high moral ideas must be kept in power no matter what crimes are committed in securing the ascendency. This is political Jesuitism run mad.
The saddest, strangest part of the history is that it was twenty years before the Northern people came to their reason and put a check on this ruinous fratricidal policy. If the writer shall go to his grave with a holy horror of the bald malignity, the reckless folly, the cowardly spite, the sweeping curse of the reconstruction measures of Thad. Stevens and his Congress, he will find himself in good company. He once heard the great and good Dr. John A. Broadus, of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, say, “I can easily forgive and forget the war. It was war, and all the wrongs done in it died away with the cannon’s roar. But I find it so hard to forgive the excuseless wrongs done to the Southern people since the war.”
Dr. Broadus was a Southern man, but Rev. Dr. H. M. Field, the fair-minded and patriotic author of “Bright Skies and Dark Shadows,” is not a Southern man. Hear what he says in his book:
In South Carolina and the Gulf States negro government had a clean sweep, and if we are to believe the records of the times, it was a period of corruption such as had never been known in the 278 history of the country. The blacks having nothing to lose, were ready to vote to impose any tax, or to issue any bonds of town, country or State provided they had a share in the booty; and this negro government manipulated by the carpet baggers, ran riot over the South. It was chaos come again. The former masters were governed by their servants, while the latter were governed by a set of adventurers and plunderers. The history of these days is one which we cannot recall without indignation and shame. After a time the moral sense of the North was so shocked by their performances that a Republican administration had to withdraw its proconsuls, when things resumed their former condition and the management of affairs came back into the old hands.
These national crimes which so woefully afflicted the people of the South after peace was made were:
1. The refusal to carry out Mr. Lincoln’s cherished plan of reconstruction by immediate readmission of seceding States after an orderly and legal abolition of slavery.
2. The sudden emancipation of millions of African slaves. Gradual emancipation would have been so much better for their interests and for the welfare of the country.
3. The conferring of civil rights so early upon the freedmen. If they had not been made citizens they could have been colonized in due time and provided for, as the Indians have been, with land and homes.
4. Enfranchisement of these grossly ignorant Africans.
5. Disfranchisement of the best people of the South.
6. Arming the blacks and disarming the white people.
7. The un-American crime of uniting church and state and the employment of a religious society to carry out directly the schemes of a political faction. Jesus Christ never authorized any such work. He never gave the least authorization of any church machinery through which such a union could be effected. God wants the good lives of men, and not compact and imposing church organizations. They can be so easily perverted to unholy purposes and made so effective in destroying human liberty and crushing human rights. The union of church and state was the curse of the middle ages and the blight of modern Europe.
It was an ominous day for America and a woeful day for the South, when, upon the enfranchisement of the negroes, the politicians in power and the fanatical Northern Methodist Episcopal Church organized and transplanted in the South the African Methodist Episcopal Church and employed it directly in manipulating the votes of the ignorant negroes. The great iron wheel controlling the whole machine was put into the hands of a political boss committee in Washington. Just within this was the wheel turned by an absolute bishop in each State. The most malignant of all the Southern negro politicians, Bishop H. M. Turner, had the control of the Georgia wheel and turns it to this day. Then came the smaller wheels, turned by the presiding elder in each Congressional district, enclosing the little wheels in the hands of the preachers and circuit riders and stewards. The ignorant negroes were wound tightly by the ropes into a solid mass, and voted like slaves by the officers of the new imported Northern church and the strikers of the Union League. It was enough to make a patriot despair of the country and a Christian to despair of religion to witness these scenes. It made the white people of the South get together in self-defence. It inevitably set race against race in politics. This slimy trail of this union of church and state has done sad work for the South and dangerous work for the whole country. The church iron wheel organized a solid mass of ignorant negro voters on one side of the Southern ballot box. This necessitated a “solid South” of white voters on the other side.
8. Demoralizing the negroes for generations by making them believe themselves to be special wards of the nation and holding out to them the delusive promise of “forty acres and a mule” as a pension for slavery and a reward for party loyalty.
9. Taking away by act of Congress, without a dollar of compensation, the slave property of orphans, widows and Union men, the property recognized by the Constitution of the government.
10. By force of bayonets keeping in the Southern high 280 places of power the carpet-bag adventurer from the North and the irresponsible, unprincipled scalawag who had for the sake of office turned his back upon his native South.
11. Unlawful confiscation of Southern lands, much of it belonging to orphans and widows.
12. Enormous and unjust tax on cotton, at that time the only marketable product of the Southern farms.
These were the woes which the “Reconstruction” measures of the Federal Congress made for our Southern people, a burden mountain-high, Ossa on Pelion, Pelion upon Ossa. But grimly, patiently, bravely did our men bear up under it. Political crimes always hurt the women more than the men. Our women stood by and cheered and comforted and helped as only such women can help through all the toil, the gloom and wrongs of those dark days. God bless their memories!