The report of the superintendent of census showed:
| Assessed valuation of property in Alabama, including slaves, in 1860 | $432,198,762 |
| Assessed valuation in 1870 | 156,770,387 |
| State taxation in 1860 | 530,107 |
| State taxation in 1870 | 1,477,414 |
| County taxation in 1860 | 309,474 |
| County taxation in 1870 | 1,122,471 |
Now consider, as representing average conditions in the counties of the Black Belt, these facts derived from the report of Judge Hill, an expert, employed to investigate affairs in Marengo county.
Taxes in 1870 were threefold greater than in 1860. The value of subjects of taxation had diminished two-thirds; 22,000 slaves, of an average value of $500 each, had ceased to be enumerated as taxable property; lands had depreciated in value sixty per cent.; there was less than one-half as much live stock as formerly; two townships had been lopped off and given to the newly-created county of Hale.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Whites Aroused
The people of the Black Belt had borne with all possible patience the multiplied grievous wrongs recited in the foregoing pages. During the transition from master and slave to the new relations between them there was a strong disposition in both races to live in peace and harmony and make the best of their altered relations; the negroes were civil and confiding, scarcely realizing the change in their status, while the whites appreciated their good behavior during the war, when families of men in the army were unprotected, and were disposed to gratitude for it. But since the establishment of the league friendly intercourse between the races had been growing rarer, and now ceased altogether; the estrangement was complete.
With the imposition of the constitution began the reign of the carpetbagger—“demon of discord and anarchy”—and the negro, and the infliction of “the horrors of reconstruction”; a civil convulsion in which the foundations of society were broken up; “a vast sluice of ignorance and vice was opened; a race which never had evolved anything of its own motion was given the ballot, the highest right of American citizenship,” and never regarded it as more than a personal perquisite, while white men of the highest type were disqualified from voting by the constitution of their state; negroes were made eligible to all offices, while the federal Constitution deprived the people of the wisdom, knowledge and experience in office of former leaders at a time when they were most needed. A comment of the time was, that a proscribed white man could not have been bailiff to his former slave if that former slave was a justice of the peace, as he might well have been, if he was not in fact. Democrats had not opposed negro suffrage in order to oppress the negroes, but to prevent negroes from crushing them; and the situation produced by the imposition of the constitution attested the reasonableness of their fear of the effect of the endowment of the negro with the ballot. They realized that “in popular government where two races exist in mass who are from any cause so different that they cannot mingle in marriage and become one, the exercise of political power must be confined to one or the other of those races if there be a wish for security and peace.”