CHAPTER TEN
Ruinous Misgovernment
Only misrule could be expected from such officials. Nothing was sacred from their greedy grasp. The most cherished institutions were debased to their purposes. In time the university was avoided by all who were unwilling to forfeit public esteem. One of the early arrivals from fruitful Ohio was Rev. A. S. Lakin. He was commissioned by Bishop Clark, of the Cincinnati conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, to organize negro churches in Alabama. He was a fanatic of the extreme type, and his work of the politico-religious character. He regarded the Methodist Episcopal Church, south, as an aggregation of rebels, and aimed to array his negro proselytes against it by preaching political sermons, in which he reminded his audiences of their former bondage and alleged there was danger of its renewal. According to his own statements, he was the unterrified victim of a concatenation of Ku Klux attacks. In prosecuting his roving missions in the mountains of northern Alabama, Lakin’s morbid fancy distorted every lone hunter encountered on the roadside into a lurking assassin, and every innocent group of gossiping rustics into a band of Ku Klux. He organized a camp-meeting, and one night at an early hour during its progress a party of horsemen rode through. Lakin wrote for publication in one of the church organs a hair-raising story of the incident, magnifying it into a Ku Klux foray. His explanation of the cause of the intrusion was that the klansmen were offended because of a rumor circulating in the camp that an infant born in the neighborhood was “a Ku Klux child,” an exact image in miniature of a disguised Ku Klux, horns and hood included. Lakin solemnly affirmed the fact of the birth of the monstrosity, but ungenerously robbed it of distinction by adding that six other infants in that klan-infested region were similarly “Ku Klux marked.” The woods must have been full of human curios!
In 1868 the regents elected this superstitious and prejudiced emissary president of the University of Alabama! Accompanied by Dr. N. B. Cloud, state superintendent of education, Lakin journeyed to Tuscaloosa to assume the station which the people once hoped would be graced by the illustrious Henry Tutwiler. Professor Wyman was in charge of the institution and held the keys; the former president had withdrawn and appointed him custodian. On the ground that the board of regents was illegally constituted, Professor Wyman refused to yield to Lakin, and the latter, discerning signs of popular displeasure, lost the courage which had nerved him to assert his claim, mounted his horse and hurriedly rode away in the direction of Huntsville, while Dr. Cloud departed with equal celerity in the direction of Montgomery.
Some time afterward Lakin related a blood-curdling story of pursuit from Tuscaloosa by a band of Ku Klux and his almost miraculous escape from the horrible death to which the band had condemned him. This story provoked the publication of a counter charge,—that while Lakin was preaching somewhere in New York State he ill requited the hospitality of an entertainer by dishonoring the household.
And this man’s ultimate aspiration was to represent Alabama in the United States Senate!
One of the most scandalous chapters in the history of the Republican régime relates to railroad subsidies. The Lindsay administration favored encouragement to the building of railroads, as means for development of natural resources, and in 1867 the legislature passed, and the governor approved, an act which authorized the state to indorse bonds of new railroads to the extent of $12,000 per mile, with an additional endorsement for bridges; but indorsement was safeguarded carefully, and no wrongs were committed in connection with the execution of the law until the Radicals assumed control. Then there began a riot of bribery and corruption.
November 10, 1871, I. F. Grant, state treasurer, submitted to the congressional commission investigating affairs in the southern states a statement from which the following extracts are made:
“Bonded debt of the state January 11, 1861, $3,445,000.
“The state is and was bound to pay in perpetuity for annual interest on the school fund the sum of $134,367.80.