If at any popular election to fill any office the person elected is ineligible, ... the person having the next highest number of votes, who is eligible, whenever a plurality elects, shall be declared elected.[168]
But this clause is found under the title “Of the Executive Department,” and under the sub-head “Regulations as to All Executive Offices and Officers.” Under the next title “Of the Legislative Department,” there is no such provision.
For a legislature to unseat some of the elected members because on not untenable legal grounds it finds them ineligible, is not unusual. But the act of the Georgia legislature could not, under the circumstances, be regarded in the ordinary way. It showed strong racial prejudice. It was a startling breach of the system which reconstruction had been designed to institute, committed the very moment after the federal government withdrew its hand. It fixed on Georgia at once the earnest and unfavorable attention of northern public opinion. This fact enabled the Georgia Republicans to bring the federal government again to their assistance.
Their leader, Governor Bullock, at the next session of Congress (December, 1868), presented a letter to the Senate, saying that Georgia had not yet been admitted to the Union. She had not been admitted by the Omnibus Act, for that act provided that she should be admitted when certain things had been done, and those things had not been done. By the Reconstruction Act of July 19, 1867, all persons elected in Georgia were required to take the Test Oath. The members of the present legislature had never taken it. Therefore the action which that body had taken on July 21st, regarding the Fourteenth Amendment, was not a ratification by a legislature formed according to the Reconstruction Acts; it was simply a ratification by a body which called itself the legislature. Hence the Omnibus Act had not yet gone into effect as to Georgia, and Georgia was not yet entitled to representation in Congress.[169]
If this argument was valid in the winter of 1868, it must also have been valid in the preceding summer. Yet in July Bullock had made no objection to being inaugurated as governor of Georgia, on the ground that Georgia had not become a state. He had not refused on that ground to issue on September 10th a commission to Joshua Hill, reciting that he had been regularly elected to the Senate of the United States by the legislature of the state, and signed “Rufus B. Bullock, governor.”[170] The argument was an afterthought, not advanced until the expulsion of the negroes created a favorable opportunity for a hearing. It conflicted with the declarations and acts of the military authorities, and of the House of Representatives, but the sentiment aroused by the expulsion of the negroes was considered strong enough to sustain a repudiation of those declarations and acts.
Direct appeal to this sentiment was the auxiliary to the above argument. Bullock’s letter to the Senate was accompanied by a memorial from a convention of colored men held at Macon in October. It said that there existed in Georgia a spirit of hatred toward the negroes and their friends, which resulted in the persecution, political repression, terrorizing, outrage and murder of the negroes, in the burning of their schools, and in the slander, ostracism and abuse of their teachers and political friends. Of this the act of the legislature was an instance and an evidence. The aid of the federal government was implored.[171]
Similar charges had been made, it will be remembered, in the debates of 1866 and 1867. Now, however, they began to be urged with an earnestness and persistence altogether new. So conspicuous is this fact in the debates in Congress that a southern writer ironically remarks: “From this time forth the entire white race of the South devoted itself to the killing of negroes.”[172] The rest of this chapter will be devoted to considering how much truth there was in the reported abuse of negroes and “loyal” persons.
We stated in Chapter II. that after the war a bitter jealousy and animosity toward the negroes arose among the lower class of the white population, and in Chapter IV. that the restless conduct of the negroes under the influences of reconstruction filled the upper class with such alarm that they formed secret organizations in self-defence. This practice, at first supported and led by good men of the higher class, simply for defence, soon fell into the hands of the poor white class, the criminal class, and the turbulent and discontented young men of all classes, and became an instrument of revenge, crime and oppression. The change, however, was not a complete transformation. A great deal of the whipping inflicted upon negroes was bona fide chastisement for actual misdemeanors. This mode of punishment was the natural product of the transition from the old social conditions, when the negroes were disciplined by their masters, to the new conditions.[173] But besides these acts of correction many outrages were committed upon negroes, and also upon white men, simply from malice or vengeance, or other private motive.[174] These outrages included some homicides.[175] The testimony of credible contemporaries belonging to both political parties agrees that the Ku Klux Klan and similar organizations were used only to a very small extent for political purposes.[176]
How many of these corrective or purely vicious acts were perpetrated upon negroes? Democrats of that time commonly said that the number was insignificant, that the peace was as well kept in Georgia as in any northern state, and that statements to the contrary were invented for political purposes.[177] The number was, indeed, greatly exaggerated by Republicans, as some of the Republicans themselves admitted.[178] Making allowance for the warping of the truth in both directions, and considering the statements of the moderate Republicans,[179] and the admissions of some of the Democrats,[180] remembering also the recent disbandment of the army and the disturbed conditions of society, we must conclude that the attacks on negroes, made by disguised bands and otherwise, were very numerous.
The friends of the negroes also fared badly. Philanthropic women who came from the North to teach in the negro schools were almost invariably treated with contempt and avoided by the white people.[181] This was due partly to the lingering bitterness of the war and partly to the connection of the negro schools with the Freedmen’s Bureau. This institution, the office of which was to set up strangers, from a recently hostile country, to instruct the southern people in their private affairs, was in itself odious. It was rendered more odious by the want of intelligence and tact, and even of honesty, which is said to have frequently characterized its officers. That the hatred thus aroused should be visited upon true philanthropists who were connected with the Bureau was unfortunate, but inevitable. As for the political friends of the negroes, the “loyal” men, or in other words the white men who supported reconstruction, they were habitually treated by the Conservative press and by Conservative speakers with violent invective. Conservative editors and orators neither engaged in nor recommended the slaughter or outrage of Radicals, but by continually voicing furious sentiments, they furnished encouragement to action of that sort by men of less intelligence and self-control.[182]