Poor, pitiable, deluded human beings, who as chattels real—impedimenta of Southern plantations—had guarded the peace of the home, and many of whom were faithful unto death!
Reconstruction superimposed an artificial citizenship—a citizenship essentially lacking in every resource of intellectual strength—it was without ideals or examples for the government of the freedmen of the proud Southern commonwealths. The allegiance of the negroes was as friable as a rope of sand; they were without a definite conception of the responsibilities of sovereignty—without a fixed principle to guide them in governmental policy—with impulses of brutish suggestion, and under masters more inexorable, more exacting than those they had deserted upon the abandoned plantations. How painful was such a crisis that split up the old South into disgraced and bleeding fragments!
We come to speak for a moment of the microbes that ate their way into the hearts of the seceded commonwealths, while the ruins of southern homes were still smoking; and before the blood of chivalrous southrons had dried upon our battle-fields. I commend the chalice to the lips of those who will deny the truth of what is herein written and desire that such a man might realize a bare modicum of what was suffered and endured. The elective franchise was the panacea for every evil; an antispasmodic, when there were occasional exacerbations in the public mind; our fathers valued the elective franchise because in its patriotic expression was the covenant of freemen.
When our hopes were feeblest, and our horizon darkest, the scalawag fled like a hound to the sheltering woods whence he sallied forth like an outlaw. The reddened disc of the sun that went down at Appomattox gave him an inspiration for his hellish work, and he went out in the gloom of the starless night, declaring with a more vicious temper than did Henry of Agincourt "the fewer the men the greater the honor" or in its appropriate paraphrase "the deeper the pockets the greater the spoil." His philanthropy and selfish interests never clash. He claimed always to be rigidly righteous, and was seen in the camp-meeting and the church sanctified and demure to a proverb. He spoke of the poor negro in paroxysms of charity—a most rare benevolence which employed its means in theft and crime; a charity which performs its vows and gives its alms with money plundered from the freedmen. The scalawag like other unclassified vermin was without respectable antecedents; with an acute sense of smell like the "lap-heavy" scout of the Andes, he sought his prey when there was no fear of the approach of man. As an Irish barrister once wrote upon the door of a plebians' carriage, "Why do you laugh?" so the humorist of the sixties could have written upon the shirt-front of the scalawag "Why do people hold their noses?" He was never mentioned by naturalists, unless under some other name he was paired off with the vulture. In reconstruction days the transformation of this abortion of nature from vulture to serpent was made without the break of a feather or the splitting of a talon. With a seductive grimace he whispered into the open ear of the freedmen "In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt not surely die." He was as much an augury of evil as the brood of ravens that once alighted upon Vespasian's pillar. Had he been seen plying his vocation in the first empire Napoleon would have said to Fouche, "Shoot the accursed beast on the spot." The carpet bagger when not fighting the pestiferous vermin in the Chickahominy swamps was pilfering. He went into the army conscripted like a gentleman; he came out of the army at night when the back of the sentry was turned and without a furlough, like a patriot. These twain were the autocrats of the new south, which had its christening in the blood of heroes; they were the furies that rode the red harlot around the circle, when her flanks were still wet with human slaughter, and her speed was increased by the jeering negroes. When Sister Charity in an occasional fit would fall unconsciously into the receptive bosom of her black lover in the prayer-meeting, with the wild exclamation "Bress Gord I sees de hosses und de charyut er cumin!" they would clap their hands in joy and shout, "Persevere in the good cause my sister." When old deacon Johnson upon some happy suggestion from the "sliding elder" would turn up the white of one eye, they would turn up the whites of the others; and when deacon Thompson came around for alms for the heathen, they would slip under the pennies a brass-button and inwardly thank God they were not like the poor publican or the hypocritical pharisee. Their first meeting with the freedmen was flattering and agreeable; it was an expression of frail vows of love, sweet but not permanent, which bore but the perfume and dalliance of a moment; it was the fusing of units of power for the purpose of spoil, and plunder. Sambo had prayed ardently for this revelation, and it had come. The scalawag, carpet-bagger, and freedman were parties of the first part, second part and third part in the tripartite agreement, until the negro became the party of no part or the worst part, and he began to mutter to himself in vulgar doggerel:
"Ort is er ort und figger is er figger,
All fur de white man und none fur de nigger."
When Sambo stole from the store to increase the joint stock-in-trade, the plunder was checked off in the invoice and Sambo was checked off in the penitentiary; if the firm went into liquidation it was because its active and suffering partner went into jail. If the poor negro died with assets the carpet-bagger "sot upon de state" like a carrion-crow upon a putrid body. These human harpies were natural sons of the commune.
The dirty co-partners opened up business in the south, as soon as Sherman's army had crossed the border, under the attractive firm name and style of "The Devil broke loose in Dixie." The iron-hoof of war had so cruelly scathed the bosom of the south that it was like an overripe carbuncle; it required a little scarifying and savage hands might squeeze and sponge at will.
Credit was prostrate; society was disorganized, treasuries empty; debt like a huge fragment of ice slipping away from the glacier upon the mountain, was gathering volume and momentum as it rolled on and on, and the poor old tottering, reeling country was still struggling on like a bewildered traveller, followed by wolves, and overshadowed by vultures. Corruption and ignorance were the only passports to power. No modern instance of wrong and oppression can approach this Fructidor of the sixties in the South. Human ghouls not so black as these vomited out, the Carbonari of Italy, the Free Companions of France and the Moss Troopers of England.
This condition of things, we dare assert, is without a parallel in the history of any people, in any civilization. Even when Rome was swayed by the keenest lust for conquest and dominion, their legions conquered the barbaric states, not to degrade or destroy, but to attach them to her invincible arms. Savage vengeance never went so far as to place the slave above the master by way of retribution. This was the exciting cause that brought into fullest display the natural law of reprisals and retaliations upon the part of the Southern people.