The acts of congress for years after the Southern army had honorably laid down its arms and gone home to plow and plant the fields make the blackest pages in the history of modern times. The writer dreads to put in print his estimate of such a political monster as Thad Stevens, the misanthropic genius of reconstruction, the Robespierre of America. Robespierre’s guillotine cut off the heads of its victims. Thad Stevens’s guillotine cut off all hopes from Southern hearts. He avowed it his purpose to exterminate the Southern white people, to confiscate their property into the hands of the negroes, and with these negroes to keep the country forever under the dominion of his party. According to him and his followers to this day this party of (so-called) high moral ideas must be kept in power no matter what crimes are committed in securing the ascendency. This is political Jesuitism run mad.
The saddest, strangest part of the history is that it was twenty years before the Northern people came to their reason and put a check on this ruinous fratricidal policy. If the writer shall go to his grave with a holy horror of the bald malignity, the reckless folly, the cowardly spite, the sweeping curse of the reconstruction measures of Thad. Stevens and his Congress, he will find himself in good company. He once heard the great and good Dr. John A. Broadus, of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, say, “I can easily forgive and forget the war. It was war, and all the wrongs done in it died away with the cannon’s roar. But I find it so hard to forgive the excuseless wrongs done to the Southern people since the war.”
Dr. Broadus was a Southern man, but Rev. Dr. H. M. Field, the fair-minded and patriotic author of “Bright Skies and Dark Shadows,” is not a Southern man. Hear what he says in his book:
In South Carolina and the Gulf States negro government had a clean sweep, and if we are to believe the records of the times, it was a period of corruption such as had never been known in the 278 history of the country. The blacks having nothing to lose, were ready to vote to impose any tax, or to issue any bonds of town, country or State provided they had a share in the booty; and this negro government manipulated by the carpet baggers, ran riot over the South. It was chaos come again. The former masters were governed by their servants, while the latter were governed by a set of adventurers and plunderers. The history of these days is one which we cannot recall without indignation and shame. After a time the moral sense of the North was so shocked by their performances that a Republican administration had to withdraw its proconsuls, when things resumed their former condition and the management of affairs came back into the old hands.
These national crimes which so woefully afflicted the people of the South after peace was made were:
1. The refusal to carry out Mr. Lincoln’s cherished plan of reconstruction by immediate readmission of seceding States after an orderly and legal abolition of slavery.
2. The sudden emancipation of millions of African slaves. Gradual emancipation would have been so much better for their interests and for the welfare of the country.
3. The conferring of civil rights so early upon the freedmen. If they had not been made citizens they could have been colonized in due time and provided for, as the Indians have been, with land and homes.
4. Enfranchisement of these grossly ignorant Africans.
5. Disfranchisement of the best people of the South.