[CHAPTER III.]
THE ASSASSINS OF THE PEACE OF THE SOUTH.
To the people of the South the infliction of the carpet-bag government was an outrage that "smelled to heaven." The changed character—the degradation of the South was a deplorable consequence—it was the inoculating of a virus into the circulation of the body politic that it will take a century to cleanse.
The power of attainting and confiscating, forbidden by the law from a full knowledge of its lamentable use by the factious parliaments of Great Britain, was shamelessly exercised by local jurisdictions of the South until nothing was left to the most virtuous of patriots but their name, their character, and the fragrance of their great and illustrious actions, to go down to posterity. A stranger coming to any legislature would have taken it at one time for a disorderly club-room, where ignorant and vicious partisans, white and black, were assembled to lay plans for their own aggrandizement and the prostration of the country. At another time he would suppose it to be a hustings for the delivery of electioneering harangues; at another, an areopagus for the condemnation of all virtuous men; then a theatre, for the entertainment of a most diverted auditory; always a laboratory for the compounding of alarms, conspiracies and panics. In the deliberations of the members there was no check to the license of debate, or the prodigal expenditure of money; no voice to control their judgments of outlawry and sequestration. Radamanthus himself, in some stage of his infernal process, would at least listen to his victim; "First he punisheth, then he listeneth, and lastly he compelleth to confess." The inventors of mythology could not conceive of a Tartarus so regardless of the forms of justice as not to allow the souls of the condemned to speak for themselves; but reconstruction, trampling upon all laws, denied to the long-suffering people of the South the right to plead their innocence in the face of the concentrated accumulation of frightful accusations,all founded upon the "baseless fabric of a vision."
Centuries ago the last saurian died in the ooze of the bad lands in Kansas, but by an unnatural law of reproduction the carpet bagger and scalawag, with the same destructive instincts, with the same malodorous presence, found its bed of slime in the heart of the South and disported with a devilish energy. Monsters of malice, spawning evil gendering fanaticism, focussed their evil eye upon the millions of freedmen, whose destiny and happiness were closely interwoven with their old masters; with masters who had yielded their swords but not their honor; who were "discouraged, yet erect; perplexed, yet not unto despair; pursued, yet not forsaken; smitten down, yet not conquered." The poor negro, under the seductive charms of these human serpents, languished, and languishing, did die.
The carpet-baggers preached to the negroes an anti-slavery God, from the gospel of hate, of revenge. Slavery was the tempest of their poor souls, and revenge must assuage the swollen floods. "The thronged cities—the marks of Southern prosperity and the monuments of Southern civilization," said they, "are yours, yours to enjoy, to alienate, to transmit to posterity. Your empire is established indestructibly throughout the new South. This land shall not be permitted to remain as a lair for the wild beasts that have clutched at the throat of this republic to destroy it. We have heard the cries of our Israel in bondage, and we have come to give you the land that flows with milk and honey." Poor black souls! What a delusion! The day will surely come when the curtain shall be drawn and the deceivers, active and dormant, in this dark tragedy, shall be dragged before the footlights to receive the curse of an indignant reprobation. Poor negro! He is starving for bread and they give him the elective franchise. He begs to be emancipated from hunger, and they decree that he shall be a freedman.
Who will dare assert that the pride, the patriotism, the spirit of the South was not alarmingly compromised by the issues of the Civil War?—a war that was the exercise of both violence and discipline by sovereign authority. We are told that wars are an evil, come when they may; they are just or unjust, moral or immoral, civilized or savage, as the ingredients of violated rights—demand of reparation and refusal—shall be observed, neglected or abused. Perhaps the prostrated South should have been advertent to this fact before she delivered the first blow. But whether right or wrong, when the armies were disbanded, when it yielded its organic being—its sovereignty—to overwhelming resources and numbers, the law of nations laid upon the paramount sovereignty obligations which have never been performed, either in letter or spirit. The government that re-instated its authority was bound by a circle of morals, including the obligations of justice and mercy, reciprocally acting and reacting.
The emancipation of five million slaves was a supplemental act of war; a renewed declaration that the tramp of embattled armies should echo and re-echo from the Potomac to the Rio Grande, until the foot of a slave should not press its "polluted" soil. Their enfranchisement was neither an act of war or of exasperation, but an act of diplomacy, extra-hazardous as results have shown, with the effect of humiliating the conquered South. It introduced throughout the South a sacrilegious arm against the fairest superstructure of Christian manhood the world has ever known; stamped the history of the nation with dishonor, and betrayed the proudest experiment in favor of the rights of man. It taught the freedmen, through the vicious counsel of intriguing, designing demagogues, that their liberty was still insecure; that to accomplish it in its ultimate triumph and blessing, the savage axe must be laid at the root of the social institutions; that they must lay violent hands upon the men, women and children who had made their emancipation an accomplished fact. Hence a war whose horrors should be accentuated by the lighted torch was inaugurated, and an inglorious campaign of reprisals by placable tools, whose zeal to preserve what they now purposed in their blind fanaticism to destroy, was a few years before as ardent and persevering.