The treaty which it drafted was necessarily a compromise. Canada thought the British commissioners had yielded too much; many in the United States believed our commissioners to have done the same. The document, approved by the President, went to the Senate, where, after long debate, it was refused ratification, August 21st.
The commission had agreed upon a modus vivendi, to hold good, unless revoked by the Governor-General and Council of Canada, till February, 1890, under which our fishermen might obtain in Canadian ports, on payment of a license, the privileges of merchantmen. Many such licenses were taken out during the season of 1888, showing the advantages which they conveyed. Most of the fishing-masters, however, did not seek licenses and were averse to the new treaty, preferring the terms of 1818 to granting their rivals any further rights in our markets. Fresh fish, including frozen and slack-salted, was already free in our ports, competing sharply with our own catch. No one longer cared to fish inside, or, except in emergencies, to provision at Canadian towns. Convenient as would be the power to obtain bait near the fishing-grounds and to trans-ship fish home in bond, neither was indispensable. Cod are still caught with trawls and baited hooks. The best bait is squid, whose abundance upon the Banks is what causes the cod so to frequent them. The squid can be had freshest as well as cheapest from the peasantry of the Newfoundland and Nova Scotia coasts; but clams carried from home were found to do nearly as well. They would remain fresh better than squid, but got off the hooks more easily. Accordingly, few collisions occurred in 1888, and as the season of that year closed there was prospect that, even without a new convention, no necessity for American retaliation would arise.
This chapter shall close with a word touching the Alaska fisheries question, which, fortunately, had advanced a good step. In 1870 the United States leased the Pribylov, or Seal Islands off Alaska, to the Alaska Commercial Co. Pressed by this company, which naturally wished the completest possible monopoly of seal-fishing, our Government foolishly affected to treat the entire Behring Sea as a mare clausum, belonging to the United States. Several British craft engaged in taking seals were seized by United States vessels considerably more than three miles from land. Great Britain of course protesting, a treaty, ratified in March, 1892, submitted to arbitration the question between the two governments. Seven arbitrators sat, two from the United States, Justice Harlan and Senator Morgan, and one each from Canada, Great Britain, Sweden, France, and Italy. This Board decided against the American contention, denying the right of the United States to assume the protection of seals or any property in them outside the ordinary three-mile limit. Happy provisions were, however, made for a joint police of Behring Sea by the two nations, for an open and a closed fishing season, and for the careful licensing of sealing vessels.
CHAPTER IV.
THE SOUTH
It cannot be denied that the radical method of reconstruction resorted to by Congress occasioned dreadful evils. Among other things it ignored the natural prejudices of the whites, many of whom were as loyal as any citizens in the land. The South, subjected to a second conquest after having laid down its arms, felt outraged and grew sullen. To most people in that section, as well as to very many at the North, this dictation by Congress to acknowledged States in time of peace seemed high-handed and guilty usurpation. Northern Congressmen incessantly called slavery barbarism, and yet combined to transmute to-day into electors and law-makers those who but yesterday had been slaves. Black legislatures inevitably abused their power, becoming the instruments of base carpetbag leaders and rings in robbing white property-holders.
A Facsimile put in Evidence before the Congressional Committee.
[From the Independent Monitor, Tuscaloosa, Alabama, September 1, 1868.]
A PROSPECTIVE SCENE IN THE CITY OF OAKS, 4TH OF MARCH, 1869.
“Hang, curs, hang! * * * * * Their complexion is perfect gallows, Stand fast, good fate, to their hanging! * * * * * If they be not born to be hanged, our case is miserable.”
The above cut represents the fate in store for those great pests of Southern society—the carpet-bagger and scalawag—if found in Dixie’s land after the break of day on the 4th of March next.
Nor could any except doctrinaires or the stupid have expected that the whites would long submit to such a régime. If the South was to become again genuine part and parcel of this Union, it could not, nor would the North consent that it should, be permanently under bayonet rule; and so soon as bayonets were gone, fair means or foul would speedily remove the sceptre from colored hands. Precisely this happened. In State after State, the whites, without the slightest formal change of constitution or law, recovered their ancient ascendency. Where their aims could not be realized by persuasion or other mild means, resort was had to merciless intimidation and violence.
The Ku-Klux Klan, a great secret society, was organized for this rough business, numbering at first, among either its members or its abettors, citizens of the highest respectability. Its local lodges were called “dens,” its members “ghouls.” “Giants,” “goblins,” “titans,” “furies,” “dragons,” and “hydras,” were names of different classes among its officers. Usually the very existence of a “den” in the vicinity was sufficient to render every negro docile. If more was required, a half-dozen ghouls, making their nocturnal rounds in their hideous masks and uniforms, frightened all but the most hardy. Any who showed fight were whipped, maimed, or killed, treatment which extended on occasion to their “carpet-bag” and “scalawag” friends—these titles denoting respectively northern and southern men bold enough to take the negroes’ side. The very violence of the order, which it at last turned against the old Southrons themselves, brought it into disrepute with its original instigators, who were not sorry when federal marshals, put up to it by President Grant, hunted den after den of the law-breakers to the death.
Yet, after all, one cannot see how the giant problem of resuscitating the South could, under the circumstances, have been solved more successfully. The plan proposed by President Johnson had sufficient trial to show that it must have led to ills worse than those actually experienced. A qualified colored suffrage would, as things then were, have been abused. It must be remembered that the war left in the South much less of white loyalty than it found, and Congress was certainly justified in insisting that the revived States should be placed on the most loyal basis possible.