It is recorded of the English statesman, Charles James Fox, that, after voting at a contested election, and finding his coachman, who had driven him to the polls, voting the other way, he protested pleasantly that the coachman should have told him in advance how he was to vote, that the two might have paired off and stayed at home. Here is Fox at the polls neutralized by his coachman. A similar incident is told of Judge Story, here in Cambridge. Both stories have been used to discredit suffrage by the people. They have not this effect on my mind. On the contrary, I find in them a beautiful illustration of that Equality before the Law which is the promise of republican institutions. At the ballot-box the humblest citizen is the equal of the great statesman or the great judge. If this seems unreasonable, it must not be forgotten that the eminent citizen exercises an influence which is not confined to his vote. It extends with his fame or position, so that, though he has only a single vote, there are many, perhaps multitudes, swayed by his example. This is the sufficient compensation for talent and education exerted for the public weal, without denying to anybody his vote. The common man may counterbalance the vote of the great statesman or great judge, but he cannot counterbalance this influence. The common man has nothing but his vote. Who would rob him of this?
Thus far I have shown the Reconstruction Acts to be constitutional, natural, and valid, in contradiction to the Rebel platform, asserting them to be “unconstitutional, revolutionary, and void.” But these Acts may be seen in other aspects. I have shown what they accomplish. See now what they prevent; and here is another series of questions, every one of which is an issue on which you are to vote.
Are you ready for the revival of Slavery? I put this question plainly; for this is involved in the irreversibility of the Reconstruction Acts. Let these be overthrown or abandoned, and I know no adequate safeguard against an outrageous oppression of the freedman, which will be Slavery under another name. The original type, as received from Africa and perpetuated here, might not appear; but this is not the only form of the hateful wrong. Not to speak of peonage, as it existed in Mexico, there is a denial of rights, with exclusion from all participation in the Government and subjection to oppressive restraints, which of itself is a most direful slavery, under which the wretched bondman smarts as beneath the lash. And such a slavery has been deliberately planned by the Rebels. It would be organized, if they again had power. Of this there can be no doubt. The evidence is explicit and authentic.
I have here a Congressional document, containing the cruel legislation of the Rebel States immediately after the close of the Rebellion, under the inspiration of the Johnson governments.[272] Here are its diabolical statutes, fashioned in the spirit of Slavery, with all that heartlessness which gave to Slavery its distinctive character. The emancipated African, shut out from all participation in the Government, despoiled of the ballot, was enmeshed in a web of laws which left him no better than a fly in the toils of a spider. If he moved away from his place of work, he was caught as a “vagrant”; if he sought work as a mechanic or by the job, he was constrained by the requirement of a “license”; if he complained of a white man, he was subjected to the most cunning impediments; if he bought arms for self-defence, he was a violator of law;—and thus, wherever he went, or whatever he attempted, he was a perpetual victim. In Mississippi he could not “rent or lease any lands or tenements except in incorporated towns or cities,” thus keeping him a serf attached to the soil of his master. Looking at these provisions critically, it appears, that, while pretending to regulate vagrants, apprentices, licenses, and civil rights, the freedman was degraded to the most abject condition; and then, under a pretence for the public peace, he was shut out from opportunities of knowledge, and also from keeping arms, while he was subjected to odious and exceptional punishments, as the pillory, the stocks, the whipping-post, and sale for fine and costs. Behind all these was violence, assassination, murder, with the Ku-Klux-Klan constituting the lawless police of this new system. The whole picture is too horrible; but it is true as horrible. In the face of this unanswerable evidence, who will say that it was not proposed to revive Slavery? To call such a condition Liberty is preposterous. If not a slave of the old type, the freedman was a slave of a new type, invented by his unrepentant master as the substitute for what he had surrendered to the power of the Nation. Beginning with a caste as offensive and irreligious as that of Hindostan, and adding to it the pretensions of an oligarchy in government, the representatives of the old system were preparing to trample upon an oppressed race. The soul sickens at the thought.
With all this indubitable record staring us in the eyes, with the daily report of inconceivable outrage darkening the air, with wrong in every form let loose upon the long-suffering freedman, General Lee breaks the respectable silence of his parole to deny that “the Southern people are hostile to the negroes, and would oppress them, if in their power to do it.” The report, he asserts, is “entirely unfounded,”—that is the phrase,—“entirely unfounded”; and then he dwells on the old patriarchal relation, with the habit from childhood of “looking upon them with kindness” (witness the history of Slavery in its authentic instances!); and then he insists that “the change in the relations of the two races has wrought no change in feelings towards them,” that “without their labor the land of the South would be comparatively unproductive, and therefore self-interest would prompt the whites of the South to extend to the negroes care and protection.” Here is the threadbare pretension with which we were so familiar through all the dreary days of the old Barbarism, now brought forward by the Generalissimo of the Rebellion to vindicate the new,—and all this with an unabashed effrontery, which shows, that, in surrendering his sword, he did not surrender that insensibility to justice and humanity which is the distinctive character of the slave-master. The freedman does not need the “care and protection” of any such person. He needs the rights of an American citizen; and you are to declare by your votes if he shall have them.
The opposition to the Reconstruction Acts manifests itself in an inconceivable brutality, kindred to that of Slavery, and fit prelude to the revival of this odious wrong. Shall this continue? Outrage in every form is directed against loyal persons, without distinction of color. It is enough that a man is a patriot for Rebels to make war upon him. Insulted, abused, and despoiled of everything, he is murdered on the highway, on the railway, or, it may be, in his own house. Nowhere is he safe. The terrible atrocity of these acts is aggravated by the rallying cries of the murderers. If the victim is black, then it is a “war of races”; if white, then he is nothing but a “carpet-bagger”; and so, whether black or white, he is a victim. History has few scenes of equal guilt. Persecution in all its untold cruelties, ending in martyrdom, rages over a wide-spread land.