Florida. In 1833 the Territory of Florida issued $3,000,000 bonds to the Union Bank, and in 1831 and 1835 $900,000 more to other banks. These obligations were definitely repudiated when Florida entered the Union in 1845. Under an Act passed in 1855, the state issued $4,000,000 bonds in aid of railroad construction; and these also have been repudiated, on the claim that the legislature lacked authority to authorize them.
Georgia. From 1868 to 1871 the State of Georgia issued about $8,000,000 of bonds in aid of railroad construction. In the years 1875, 1876 and 1877 all these bonds were repudiated by state legislation.
Louisiana. The debt of Louisiana at the outbreak of the Civil War was about $10,000,000. The Civil War debt was ignored. Reconstruction legislation brought up the state debt to about $50,000,000. This was scaled down by legislative enactment to $12,000,000 and the rest repudiated.
Mississippi. In June 1838 the State of Mississippi issued $5,000,000 of state bonds in payment of five thousand shares of stock in the Union Bank of Mississippi. Four years later these bonds, then held by innocent third parties, were repudiated by the state, although the highest court in Mississippi had declared that they were legally issued. A similar issue of $2,000,000 of state bonds issued to the Planters Bank was repudiated in 1852. The State of Mississippi has never redeemed its honor or paid the bonds.
North Carolina. In 1879 North Carolina passed a funding bill by which in settlement of a long controversy with its bond-holders it repudiated about $15,000,000 of State indebtedness. Bonds issued before the Civil War were redeemed at fifty cents on the dollar; bonds issued after the war to secure pre-war debts at twenty-five cents; and reconstruction bonds at fifteen cents on the dollar.
South Carolina. South Carolina was in debt about $3,800,000 at the time the Civil War began in 1861. The war debt was repudiated. The reconstruction debt amounted to nobody knows how much, say $20,000,000 and upwards. Nearly all of the state debt was practically repudiated in 1879 and prior thereto.
Tennessee. In 1852 the State of Tennessee authorized the issuance of state bonds in aid of turnpike and railroad companies. There were also state debts incurred in aid of state banks, for the building of the state capitol and other purposes; in all $21,000,000. About $14,000,000 more bonds were issued after the war in aid of railroads. In 1883 the state repudiated about one-half of this debt.
The various acts of repudiation took different shapes in different states, but in every instance the state government was a manhood suffrage institution; none of them have had any other system. It is perfectly fair to charge every dollar of these stolen and wasted millions and every repudiation spot and stain on the fame and record of these nine states to manhood suffrage. In fact the candid historian cannot, if he would, escape the damning record and the inevitable conclusion. Manhood suffrage has shamefully bankrupted and dishonored nine American states.
Oh, that some one with ability, money and patience would get together materials for a complete “History of Manhood Suffrage,” and with clear and burning pen, would give to the world the story of its iniquitous century career. Even if he omitted its record of blood and corruption in France, and confined himself to this country, the work might easily swell to many volumes. He could spend twenty busy years visiting one village, town and city after another, gathering up the facts and figures of the briberies, corruptions, frauds, cheatings, embezzlements, defalcations and thefts; the public riots, the drunkenness, the civil and criminal court proceedings, directly produced by manhood suffrage; the story of the rogues and incompetents whom it has put in public offices high and low, their follies and villainies. Its grotesque legislation, its wretched administration, its wastes, extravagances, blunders stupidities and misgovernments would fill an encyclopedia of human unwisdom. But no such work has ever been undertaken, and this volume only presents a hint of the direful totality. After all it is enough. The category of official crime in this one chapter contained is sufficiently convincing.
These fifty cases are not like fifty instances of peculation discovered by expert eyes under a watchful system, leaving it pretty certain that there was no more behind. Fifty individual thefts in eighty years would not make a shocking story as the world goes. But this collection is merely illustrative of an immense mass of similar material which cannot be produced to the home reader any more than an ore bed could; though the existence thereof any one may verify by proper investigation. The opportunities of public men for improper acquisition are limitless; there is no one over them to prevent them: they are themselves the watchmen; and if they work with outside rogues detection is ordinarily impossible. The discovery of each of these fifty instances was the result of a blunder on the part of these very careful and intelligent thieves; of a quarrel amongst themselves, a mere chance of some sort, and by the law of chances may be taken to represent fifty thousand similar undetected frauds. Consider too the character of many of these items; some represent a foul episode in the history of a state; others in that of a great city; in one case the fact that the politics of a rich commonwealth have been corrupt for half a century is compressed into a statement of a few lines which is capable of being expanded to a volume of separate accusations. Fifty years of spoliation of a great state: eighteen thousand days; say one hundred separate acts a day: one million eight hundred thousand large and petty frauds, thefts and peculations are crowded into this single chapter. Each of the fifty foregoing items affords a glimpse at rivers, seas, regions of official rascality. In one case it is a state legislature which goes wrong. This means that back of each of its tainted members there is a whole history of putridity, a rotten county, a score of rotten townships, years of local crookedness, trickery, intrigue, falsehood, bribery and corruption. The district and county which sells or traffics its honors; which sends an unworthy man to represent it in the councils of the nation, must itself first have undergone a process of degeneration the details whereof would alone require a volume. The instances in the foregoing list do not represent individual or sporadic cases of disease; they indicate a moral pestilence, the result of widespread filth and unsanitary conditions of long standing and the existence whereof is proven by the additional testimony of the array of intelligent, unbiased and high-minded men and women, statesmen, students, publicists, lawyers and teachers, already quoted. Taking the whole evidence together, the record and the witnesses, it amounts to a mass of absolutely convincing and even overwhelming proof of the thoroughly evil and corrupt character of this government which for the past eighty years has been imposed upon the American people by the political oligarchy directing the controllable vote.