“Then followed, under the protection of the Northern bayonets, a grotesque parody of government, a hideous orgy of anarchy, violence, unrestrained corruption, undisguised, ostentatious, insulting robbery, such as the world had scarcely ever seen. The State debts were profusely piled up. Legislation was openly put up for sale. The “Bosses” were all in their glory, and they were abundantly rewarded, while the crushed, ruined, plundered whites combined in secret societies for their defense, and retaliated on their oppressors by innumerable acts of savage vengeance.” (Democracy and Liberty, Vol. I, p. 94.)
Senator Tillman of South Carolina, who lived in the midst of it, described the result as a “government of carpet-baggers and thieves and scalawags and scoundrels who had stolen everything in sight and mortgaged posterity; who had run their felonious paws into the pockets of posterity by issuing bonds.”
From another writer:
“When installed in power the negroes and their white mentors indulged in an unprecedented robbery of the public purse. They made the legislatures issue bonds on the state to provide for public works which were never taken in hand, and shared the proceeds among themselves, leaving the taxpayers to submit to fresh taxation; they openly passed fraudulent disbursements or swelled the expenses incurred for furnishing offices, etc., in the wildest fashion, fitting them up, for instance, with clocks at $480 apiece, with chandeliers at $650. The official positions were distributed among illiterates; in one state there were more than two hundred negro magistrates unable to read or write; justice was openly bought and sold.” (Ostrogorski on Democracy, p. 56.)
A few of the details are as follows: In Mississippi the yearly expenditures trebled; the state debt was greatly increased, the actual figures have been disputed; the tax levy was multiplied by fourteen. In 1866 the State Treasurer embezzled $61,962. The state librarian is believed to have stolen books from the state library. In South Carolina upon the inauguration of manhood suffrage, there followed, says the Encyclopedia Britannica, “an orgy of crime and corruption.” A bar and restaurant was annexed to the legislative chambers, free to the members and their friends; in place of the plain furniture placed there by the South Carolina aristocracy, consisting of $5 clocks and $10 benches, there were installed by the representatives of the working people of the state sofas at $200 each on which the black and white legislators might loll and repose, and clocks at $600 each, for those capable of reading time. In one session $95,000 and in four years $200,000 was appropriated for State House furniture. When the orgy was over a few years later, the whole lot was valued at less than $18,000. In eight years the printing ring stole or squandered over $150,000 of state money. Enormous sums were obtained by means of fraudulent pay certificates issued under legislative authority. In the four years from 1868 to 1872 the state debt increased from less than $7,000.000 to an unknown sum, of which over $18,000,000 was actual and evidenced by written obligations, to which might be added about $10,000,000 more, clearly fraudulent and contingent on the continuance in power of the plunderers. It may be said that all of this increase beyond the original $7,000,000 represented waste and theft. A large part of this debt was afterwards repudiated. In Florida $600,000 in taxes was collected and embezzled by the collectors and the treasury was swept absolutely bare. Legislative expenses were quadrupled, state taxes increased eight-fold; in the four years from 1868 to 1872 the state debt mounted from $4,000,000 to $12,000,000. In Tennessee the state debt rose from $16,000,000 to $42,000,000. In Arkansas land taxes were increased ten-fold and state expenses twelve-fold in eight years. Of over $7,000,000 expended by the state in six years, the greater part was squandered; only $100,000 was spent for public improvements. A bonded debt of $10,000,000 was fraudulently created and the money wasted on pretence of paying for buildings and railroads which were never constructed. In Georgia the state debt was increased from $6,000,000 to $18,000,000 in three years without any benefit whatever. In Alabama members publicly boasted of receiving large sums for passing measures. The state debt increased from $8,000,000 to $25,000,000 in two years. The value of land fell from $50 an acre to between $3 and $15 an acre. In Louisiana two hundred new offices were created; the public debt in two years jumped from $7,000,000 to $41,000,000. In four years state and city government expenses increased to ten times their normal volume; taxation was enormously increased, and about $54,000,000 of debt created with nothing to show for it. “In North Carolina,” says the Encyclopedia Britannica, “the government established in accordance with the views of Congress in 1868 was corrupt, inefficient and tyrannical.” The state debt was increased in a few years from $16,000,000 to $42,000,000 and the proceeds wasted. In Texas the extravagance of the reconstruction period caused a debt of $4,700,000. In all these states salaries and miscellaneous expenses were enormously increased during this episode. Crime was unpunished, pardons were bought and sold and bribery of public officials was notorious. At the close of the manhood suffrage rule nine southern states were unable to pay their debts, amounting in all to about $170,000,000 and had to repudiate them. This is not extraordinary when we consider that these states had been stripped by the war of all property but land, and that in seven of them the increase of state debts ranged from $35 to $94 per capita inhabitant. A New York state debt of $940,000,000 in 1918 would correspond in figures with what was saddled on poor Louisiana in 1872; but in order to express its relative weight, considering the date and the value of money and the wealth of the state, it would have to be multiplied at least five times. Imagine a New York state debt of $4,700,000,000. It seems an impossible misfortune, but granted an illiterate population and we might reasonably expect such a result in about ten years’ time, under a system of universal suffrage.
The attempt to establish manhood suffrage in the South by means of the Fifteenth Amendment was a crime. The amendment itself is founded upon a palpably false conception. In effect it provides that the right of colored citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by any state. It amounts to a solemn declaration that there are no inferior races and that a voter does not need intelligence. It proposes to establish a government to be called civilized where the ignorant shall govern the intelligent; the inferior shall govern the superior; poverty shall rule wealth; the pyramid shall stand on its apex. It turns the democratic movement into a backward march; assuming to speak for democracy, it declares it an enemy of civilization; it flouts the wisdom of science; it overrules the Creator, who created five races of men fundamentally different in capacity. To attempt this was a crime and not the less but the more so because done through a sham legality. As already shown in these pages, a law passed in contravention of civilization, in opposition to the canons of Society is no law, and therefore the old statutes authorizing the tortures of the Inquisition, the execution of witches and the rendition by free peoples of fugitive slaves to their masters were illegal and void, and disobedience thereto was a virtue. The Abolitionists were fond of denouncing the Constitution as a covenant with hell; the Fifteenth Amendment was a compact with rascality, entered into at the command of passion and party advantage rather than of cool reason and patriotism. It was possible because the long régime of political corruption had demoralized the best of the party leaders; they had grown accustomed to quackery and demagogism and a corrupt use of the spoils of office to control elections and government, and they found it easy to apply these means to the problem of the government of the conquered Southern States, with the object of party gain. But they never would have dared to do the deed had the way not been first prepared by the spread of the false doctrine that every man has a natural right to a vote. Thus once more we have the lesson of the ultimate costliness of lying and false logic.
Nor has the evil passed away with the practical nullification of the amendment. One of the most mischievous of all shams is a sham law. The Fifteenth Amendment, which our manhood suffrage politicians are too cowardly to repeal, has still a place in the Constitution, a sham law, a dead carcass, breeding disease and pestilence. This is plain to the student of American politics, though millions of American voters are too ignorant to recognize it and too irresponsible to care. For over forty-three years this amendment has been by eleven southern states openly flouted and defied because its enforcement would mean negro domination and a relapse into barbarism. The nullification of any existing law, and above all of a constitutional provision, is demoralizing to the nation; but in this case not only the fact of its nullification has been demoralizing, but the manner in which it was done; by methods admittedly evil in themselves, by violence, electoral trickery, theft of and tampering with ballot boxes, falsification and the use of fraudulent, technical and tricky law and procedure. There were probably 850,000 adult negro citizens in the southern states in 1870, of whom all but about 50,000 were ultimately disfranchised by these means, and by methods still in effectual operation. It is difficult to say which has been more scandalous, the enactment of the amendment by its friends, or the method of its nullification by its enemies. Nor is this the whole story of this shameful business. The net result has been and is to deprive a dozen southern states, say one-quarter of the Union, of all proper share and interest in Federal politics. This comes about because while the Fifteenth Amendment stands the South feels that there is danger of its enforcement by the Republican party; a fear encouraged by the weak hypocrisy of the blatant northern Republican politicians who pretend to believe in manhood suffrage and by the warnings of the blatant southern Democratic politicians who also pretend to believe in its imminence. The southern whites, therefore, have for over forty years voted, and still vote, en masse, the Democratic ticket for Congress and the president irrespective of all questions of Federal statesmanship. It is a most deplorable state of things, tending to corruption in one party, to partisanship in the other, and to confusion all around. Hence the “Solid South.” Be the question one of war or peace, high or low tariff, colonial expansion, internal improvement, civil service betterment or any other important question, the vote of the “Solid South,” instead of expressing the opinion of the southern people merely voices a negative to the Fifteenth Amendment.
The result is practical disfranchisement, north and south. The total vote in Louisiana, Mississippi and South Carolina fell from 492,357 in 1876 to 177,822 in 1900. Allowing for the increase in population, it should have been about 690,000, evidencing an extinguishment of three-fourths, by fraud, terror, or discouragement. In South Carolina the Republican vote, mostly colored, fell from 91,780 in 1876, to 3,963 in 1908. In 1910 the vote for congressmen in proportion to the population was in Massachusetts one to eight; in South Carolina one to fifty; in Mississippi one to seventy-five. A population equal to that which provided a hundred votes in Massachusetts, provided no more than sixteen in South Carolina and eleven in Mississippi. Allowing the negroes as a rough estimate half the population, we find that thirty-four white men in one hundred refrained from voting in Mississippi. These whites were not actually forbidden to vote, but they were practically disfranchised by a system of solid Democratic representation which made voting a useless ceremony. The menace of the Fifteenth Amendment is such that only one party can exist in the Southern States. In the present Congress every single member in both the Senate and the House from the States of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina and Texas, is a Democrat and from Virginia there is but one Republican member. And so it comes about that a constitutional measure pretended to be enacted to enfranchise the blacks not only completely fails of that intent, but results in partly disfranchising the whites both north and south. The southern white voter is disfranchised because he is practically prevented from making a free choice between candidates; the northern white voter is practically disfranchised wherever a Republican measure which he favors is defeated without consideration of its merits by southern votes cast against him under this arbitrary pressure. There are about twenty million white people in eleven southern states who are thus misrepresented and held in political bondage owing to the enactment of the Fifteenth Amendment by manhood suffrage fanaticism and stupidity. Assuming that these people, if liberated from the fear of the brutal régime of manhood suffrage with which they are threatened, would divide about equally in politics like their northern fellow citizens, and we have say ten millions of northern people, and about two millions of male northern voters who are practically disfranchised; their votes being nullified by the blind vote of these eleven southern states. The existence of this condition of affairs is well recognized by lawyers and statesmen. Says one writer, “The indifference to political interests and responsibilities which such conditions produce is a serious menace to the progress of the south and to that of the country as well.” (Appleton’s Cyclopedia; American Government, Suffrage.)
Such in brief is the story of the results and reactions of the attempt made a generation ago with great power and with all the seriousness of fanaticism, to put into actual effect in our Southern States the silly doctrine of the political equality of all men. The lesson and the conclusion are alike plain and undeniable. No sensible white man is now heard to urge that the pauper southern negroes be once more invited to take part in our political life. And yet, if there be truth in the theory that every man is entitled to a vote, no matter how humble, then the disfranchisement of the southern negro is a foul injustice, for which the whole American people are responsible, since they all acquiesce in it. But there is no truth in it. The mass of negroes are properly excluded from voting in the South, because as a class they lack the training, experience and temperament necessary to a proper exercise of the suffrage. All this seemed perfectly plain from the beginning; and yet it was only after a long and severe political agitation, accompanied by violence and bloodshed, that the South got rid of its rotten manhood suffrage governments; and it will take time and much talk to bring the American people to the point where they will feel compelled to apply to the ignorant and shiftless whites the principle then so fully illustrated, tried out and verified, that the suffrage is a function of government and cannot safely or justly be conferred on any class which is morally or mentally incompetent to perform it.