The first prominent cause of public disturbance of which the carpet-baggers were the authors was a most thorough and secret organization of the negroes in all the counties into Loyal Leagues; in many instances armed and adopting all the formula of signs, pass-words and grips of an oath bound secret organization. When the negro is asked why he votes the Republican ticket his simple answer always is, "Why Lor bress your soul Marsa, we swo to do dat in de League." That simple answer by this new suffragist, this new automaton of the ballot, is a full explanation of the political solidity of the negro vote: With such an element to work upon, ignorant and degraded, the carpet-baggers, fierce and rapacious, have found themselves in Mahomet's seventh heaven in the South.
It is a subject of interest and maybe of admonition to the people North and South, how political institutions, in an age of the highest civilization and under the most explicit constitutional forms, may be changed or abolished by a process of partisan policy, when inaugurated in a spirit of hate, revenge or avarice. Pseudo-philanthropists may talk never so eloquently about an "equality before the law" when equality is not found in the great natural law of race ordained by the Creator. That cannot be changed by statute which has been irrevocably fixed by the fiat of the Almighty. The result of this mongrel combination of carpet-bagger, scalawag and negro; this composition of vice and ignorance and rapacity, was plainly seen everywhere. Robbery and public plunder were rampant in the State capital. The expenses of government were at once increased five hundred per cent. Verily the pregnant suggestion of the carpet-bagger that the only way to bring down the white people of the South to the level of the negro was to tax them down, was carried out with a sweeping vengeance. These thieves and robbers, who had fastened themselves like vampires upon the public treasury, and unlike the leach, did not let go their hold when full, were still gorging themselves by new methods of plunder. No such rate of taxation upon the same basis of property valuation has ever occurred in the history of the world. A tithe of this rate of taxation lost to the crown of England her thirteen American colonies. All the county auditors, county treasurers, trial justices in the courts of record were utterly incompetent and utterly corrupt. The juries in the courts of records were mostly negroes, summoned by negro sheriffs, and the pardoning power in the hands of venal and truculent governors was shamefully prostituted. The most unblushing villainies and crimes were either officially condoned or remitted and forgiven.
The people were taxed by millions; millions were paid out, and no vouchers were ever taken or found.
In the face of such universal misrule, speculation and tyranny, there could be no greater misrepresentation of the truth than is contained in the oft-reiterated accusation, that the white people of the South are fierce, aggressive and defiant in their conduct towards those placed in authority over them by the Federal or State law. Aggressive and defiant! How vain and worse than useless would such conduct be against the overwhelming power of the tyrants who oppose them. It is against all the instincts of life, when despair has taken the place of hope.
Defiant? Does the poor unresisting hare, when trembling with frenzied apprehension under the feet and wide open jaws of the hound exhibit much defiance, or much hope of victory in a death struggle with its cruel and merciless foe? It makes no resistance—no motion or attitude of battle for life except that involuntary and spasmodic action produced by pain and suffering.
