Footnote 198: [(return)]
DuBois: The Souls of Black Folk, 32-37.
Footnote 199: [(return)]
George W. Cable: The Southern Struggle for Pure Government: An Address. Boston, 1890, included in The Negro Question, New York, 1890.
Footnote 200: [(return)]
Fleming, in his latest and most mature account of reconstruction, The Sequel of Appomattox, has not one word to say about the matter. Dunning, in Reconstruction Political and Economic (306), speaks as follows: "July 6, 1876, an armed collision between whites and blacks at Hamburg, Aiken County, resulted in the usual slaughter of the blacks. Whether the original cause of the trouble was the insolence and threats of a Negro militia company, or the aggressiveness and violence of some young white men, was much discussed throughout the state, and, indeed, the country at large. Chamberlain took frankly and strongly the ground that the whites were at fault." Such a statement we believe simply does not do justice to the facts. The account given herewith is based upon the report of the matter in a letter published in a Washington paper and submitted in connection with the debate in the United States House of Representatives, July 15th and 18th, 1876, on the Massacre of Six Colored Citizens at Hamburg, S.C., July 4, 1876; and on "An Address to the People of the United States, adopted at a Conference of Colored Citizens, held at Columbia, S.C., July 20th and 21st, 1876" (Republican Printing Co., Columbia, S.C., 1876). The Address, a document most important for the Negro's side of the story, was signed by no less than sixty representative men, among them R.B. Elliott, R.H. Gleaves, F.L. Cardozo, D.A. Straker, T. McC. Stewart, and H.N. Bouey.
Footnote 201: [(return)]
Emmett J. Scott: Negro Migration during the War (in Preliminary Economic Studies of the War—Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: Division of Economics and History). Oxford University Press, American Branch, New York, 1920.
Footnote 202: [(return)]
See Negro Exodus (Report of Colonel Frank H. Fletcher).
CHAPTER XIV
THE NEGRO IN THE NEW SOUTH
1. [Political Life: Disfranchisement]
By 1876 the reconstruction governments had all but passed. A few days after his inauguration in 1877 President Hayes sent to Louisiana a commission to investigate the claims of rival governments there. The decision was in favor of the Democrats. On April 9 the President ordered the removal of Federal troops from public buildings in the South; and in Columbia, S.C., within a few days the Democratic administration of Governor Wade Hampton was formally recognized. The new governments at once set about the abrogation of the election laws that had protected the Negro in the exercise of suffrage, and, having by 1877 obtained a majority in the national House of Representatives, the Democrats resorted to the practice of attaching their repeal measures to appropriation bills in the hope of compelling the President to sign them. Men who had been prominently connected with the Confederacy were being returned to Congress in increasing numbers, but in general the Democrats were not able to carry their measures over the President's veto. From the Supreme Court, however, they received practical assistance, for while this body did not formally grant that the states had full powers over elections, it nevertheless nullified many of the most objectionable sections of the laws. Before the close of the decade, by intimidation, the theft, suppression or exchange of the ballot boxes, the removal of the polls to unknown places, false certifications, and illegal arrests on the day before an election, the Negro vote had been rendered ineffectual in every state of the South.
When Cleveland was elected in 1884 the Negroes of the South naturally felt that the darkest hour of their political fortunes had come. It had, for among many other things this election said that after twenty years of discussion and tumult the Negro question was to be relegated to the rear, and that the country was now to give main attention to other problems. For the Negro the new era was signalized by one of the most effective speeches ever delivered in this or any other country, all the more forceful because the orator was a man of unusual nobility of spirit. In 1886 Henry W. Grady, of Georgia, addressed the New England Club in New York on "The New South." He spoke to practical men and he knew his ground. He asked his hearers to bring their "full faith in American fairness and frankness" to judgment upon what he had to say. He pictured in brilliant language the Confederate soldier, "ragged, half-starved, heavy-hearted, who wended his way homeward to find his house in ruins and his farm devastated." He also spoke kindly of the Negro: "Whenever he struck a blow for his own liberty he fought in open battle, and when at last he raised his black and humble hands that the shackles might be struck off, those hands were innocent of wrong against his helpless charges." But Grady also implied that the Negro had received too much attention and sympathy from the North. Said he: "To liberty and enfranchisement is as far as law can carry the Negro. The rest must be left to conscience and common sense." Hence on this occasion and others he asked that the South be left alone in the handling of her grave problem. The North, a little tired of the Negro question, a little uncertain also as to the wisdom of the reconstruction policy that it had forced on the South, and if concerned with this section at all, interested primarily in such investments as it had there, assented to this request; and in general the South now felt that it might order its political life in its own way.