Wealth is power, and the wealth of a nation is its labor, its abundant control of all the great agencies of nature employed in production. The products of human labor, its food and clothing, like the fruits of the earth are annual, and God in his wisdom has adjusted human wants to their power of production. Like the bread from heaven the dews of every night produce the crops, and the labors of every day gather the harvest. What, but an almost boundless power of consumption and reproduction has given to the South its athletic vigor, and yet the enfranchisement of the negroes has been a fatal blow to every industrial interest. It has left our plows to rot in the furrow, and our plantations to grow up in briers and brambles.
That liberty, which ranks in our organic law next to life, is subjected to the caprice of those who happen in the ever varying conditions of human affairs to be placed over us as masters. The South believed that the theory of the government derived its chiefest captivation from its regard to the equal rights of all its citizens and from its pledge to maintain and preserve those rights. It assumed to proclaim the happiness of the people to have been the object of its institution, and to guarantee to each and to all without limitation the enjoyment of life, liberty, and property.
It has been reserved for the power of oppression, in its active and diffused state, to give effect to the unhallowed innovation upon the rights of the South.
Reconstruction is the Gethsemane of southern life. God's law is higher than man's law. Man's feeble statutes cannot annul the immutable ordinances of the Almighty. Those whom God has put asunder, let no man join together.
Who could have foreseen that in the first century of our existence African freedmen would rule sovereign commonwealths, and become the judges of the rights and property of a race who had ruled the destinies of the world since governments—patriarchal, monarchical or constitutional—was known to man?
The true, sincere and rational humanitarian looks with sorrow upon the future state of the misguided negroes; for when this institutional age shall have passed away, he sees the exodus or extirpation of this disturbing element in the social and political conditions of the more powerful sovereign race. The authors of the infamous policy have written their hic jacet against our civilization.
No where can there be found in the history of any country where the civil and military policy have been so basely prostituted, or where the safeguards of liberty, life and property were ever entrusted to freed slaves—human chattels; slaves who never for a moment have been in a state of pupilage. It is an epoch that marks the decadence of the manhood and civilization of a great nation—homogeneous, prosperous, enlightened and happy. The nearest approximation to this era of ruin—of social degradation—was when the slaves in Rome were enfranchised by order of the emperor, and conditions there were totally dissimilar. Whilst they enjoyed certain rights and prerogatives of manumission, they were still held to duties of obedience and gratitude. Whatever were the fruits of their toil and industry, their patrons shared or inherited the third part, or even the whole of their acquisitions. In the decline of this great empire, the proud mistress of the world, we are told that hereditary distinctions were gradually abolished, and the reason or instinct of Justinian completed the simple form of an absolute monarchy. In the eye of the law all Romans were equal and all subjects were citizens. The inestimable character was degraded to an obsolete and empty name. The voice of a Roman could no longer enact laws or create the annual ministers of his power.
"It may take many generations perhaps, for moral changes are slow, to put out all our lights of knowledge that are now beaming from every cottage in the South; but one after another they will be extinguished, and with them the beacon torch of liberty. When the white men of the South shall come to see how things are, and to realize the downward tendency, physical, intellectual manhood will make a throe to regain the height it has lost, and if it fails, a storm will arise from the elements they are compounding, that will break somewhere and spend itself with desolating fury. They cannot degrade a people who have been enlightened and free, prosperous and happy, without igniting a mass which they can no more control, than they can the central fires of Vesuvius.
"Up to the commencement of hostilities between the North and the South, there were in the South millions of people employed directly or indirectly in the honest and wholesome avocation of agriculture, and by its great encouraging system, sustained in a condition of existence, both moral and physical, equally as prosperous and independent as any other agricultural people in any other region of the earth. They were white men who piece by piece built up the whole superstructure, and thereby reinforced the country with so much labor and skill; furnished so much mutual employment for that skill and labor, aided as they were by so many instrumentalities of toil and agents of production. What a country it was—supplied by this system from the labor of our own hands and workshops, with all the machinery, fruits of the earth, and all the needful fabrics of human skill. This great system comprehended every class and every source of material wealth. Under this system our people prospered. The white population of the South came by descent from a parent stock, that from the foundation of society had governed in wisdom and moderation the most enlightened countries of the world; who had written every constitution, fought every battle, endowed every charity, established every government, introduced every reform that has given to the world its christian development and progress.