Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 / From Lincoln to Garfield, with a Review of the Events Which Led to the Political Revolution of 1860

by James Gillespie Blaine

Mississippi followed in the general line of penal enactments prescribed in South Carolina, though her code was possibly somewhat less severe in the deprivations to which the negro was subjected. It was, however, bad enough to stir the indignation of every lover of justice. The Legislature had enacted a law that "if the laborer shall quit the service of the employer before the expiration of his term of service without just cause, he shall forfeit his wages for the year up to the time of quitting." Practically the negro was himself never permitted to judge whether the cause which drove him to seek employment elsewhere was just, the white man being the sole arbiter in the premises. It was provided that "every civil officer shall, and every person may, arrest and carry back to his or her legal employer any freedman, free negro or mulatto, who shall have quit the service of his or her employer before the expiration of his term of service without good cause, and said officer shall be entitled to receive for arresting and carrying back every deserting employee aforesaid the sum of five dollars, and ten cents per mile from the place of arrest to the place of delivery, and these sums shall be held by the employer as a set-off for so much against the wages of said deserting employee; provided that said arrested party, after being so returned home, may appeal to a justice of the peace, or a member of the Board of Police, who shall summarily try whether said appellant is legally employed by the alleged employer."

It required little familiarity with Southern administration of justice between a white man and a negro to know that such appeal was always worse then fruitless, and that its only effect, if attempted, would be to secure even harsher treatment than if the appeal had not been made. The provisions for enticing a negro from his employer, included in this Act, were in the same spirit and almost in the same language as the provisions of the slave-code applicable to the negro before the era of emancipation. The person "giving or selling to any deserting freedman, free negro or mulatto, any food, raiment, or other things, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor," and might be punished by a fine of two hundred dollars and costs, or he might be put in prison, and be also sued by the employer for damages. For attempting to entice any freedman or free negro beyond the limits of the State, the person offending might be fined five hundred dollars; and if not immediately paid, the court could sentence the delinquent to imprisonment in the county jail for six months. The entire code of Mississippi for freedmen was in the spirit of the laws quoted. Justice was defied, and injustice incorporated as the very spirit of the laws. It was altogether a shameless proclamation of indecent wrong on the part of the Legislature of Mississippi.

Louisiana probably attained the worst eminence in this vicious legislation. At the very moment when the Thirty-ninth Congress was assembling to consider the condition of the Southern States and the whole subject of their reconstruction, it was found that a bill was pending in the Legislature of Louisiana providing that "every adult freed man or woman shall furnish themselves with a comfortable home and visible means of support within twenty days after the passage of this act," and that "any freed man or woman failing to obtain a home and support as thus provided shall be immediately arrested by any sheriff or constable in any parish, or by the police officer in any city or town in said parish where said freedman may be, and by them delivered to the Recorder of the parish, and by him hired out, by public advertisement, to some citizen, being the highest bidder, for the remainder of the year." And in case the laborer should leave his employer's service without his consent, "he shall be arrested and assigned to labor on some public works without compensation until his employer reclaims him." The laborers were not to be allowed to keep any live-stock, and all time spent from home without leave was to be charged against them at the rate of two dollars per day, and worked at that rate. Many more provisions of the same general character were contained within the bill, the whole character and scope of which were forcibly set before the Senate by Mr. Wilson of Massachusetts. It was not only a proof of cruelty enacted into law, but was such a defiance to the spirit of the Emancipation amendment that it subjected the Legislature which approved the amendment and enacted these laws, to a charge of inconsistency so grave as to make the former act appear in the light of both a legal and moral fraud. It was declaring the negro to be free by one statute, and immediately proceeding to re-enslave him by another.

By a previous law Louisiana had provided that all agricultural laborers should be compelled to "make contracts for labor during the first ten days of January for the entire year." With a demonstrative show of justice it was provided that "wages due shall be a lien on the crop, one-half to be paid at times agreed by the parties, the other half to be retained until the completion of the contract; but in case of sickness of the laborer, wages for the time shall be deducted, and where the sickness is supposed to be feigned for the purpose of idleness, double the amount shall be deducted; and should the refusal to work extend beyond three days, the negro shall be forced to labor on roads, levees, and public works without pay." The master was permitted to make deduction from the laborer's wages for "injuries done to animals or agricultural implements committed to his care, or for bad or negligent work," he, of course, being the judge. "For every act of disobedience a fine of one dollar shall be imposed upon the laborer;" and among the cases deemed to be disobedience were "impudence, swearing, or using indecent language in the presence of the employer, his family, or his agent, or quarreling or fighting among one another." It has been truthfully said of this provision that the master or his agent might assail the ear with profaneness aimed at the negro man, and outrage every sense of decency in foul language addressed to the negro woman; but if one of the helpless creatures, goaded to resistance and crazed under tyranny, should answer back with impudence, or should relieve his mind with an oath, or retort indecency upon indecency, he did so at the cost to himself of one dollar for every outburst. The agent referred to in the statute was the well-known overseer of the cotton region, who was always coarse and often brutal, sure to be profane, and scarcely knowing the border-line between ribaldry and decency. The care with which the law-makers of Louisiana provided that his delicate ears and sensitive nerves should not be offended with an oath or with an indelicate word from a negro, will be appreciated by all who have heard the crack of the whip on a Southern plantation.

The wrongs inflicted under the name of law, thus far recited, were still further aggravated in a majority of the rebellious States by the exaction of taxes from the colored man to an amount altogether disproportionate to their property. Indeed, of property they had none. Just emerging from a condition of slavery in which their labor had been constantly exacted without fee or reward of any kind, it was impossible that they could be the owners of any thing except their own bodies. Notwithstanding this fact, the negroes, en masse, were held to be subjects of taxation in the State Governments about to be re-organized. In Georgia, for example, a State tax of three hundred and fifty thousand dollars was levied in the first year of peace. The property of the State, even after all the ruin of the war, exceeded two hundred and fifty million dollars. This tax, therefore, amounted to less than one-seventh of one per cent upon the aggregate valuation of the State,—equal to the imposition of only a dollar and a half upon each thousand dollars of property. The Legislature of the State decreed, however, that a large proportion of this small levy should be raised by a poll-tax of a dollar per head upon every man in the State between the ages of twenty-one and sixty years. There were in Georgia at the time from eighty-five thousand to ninety thousand colored men subject to the tax: perhaps, indeed, the number reached one hundred thousand. It was thus ordained that the negroes, who had no property at all, should pay one-third as much as the white men, who had two hundred and fifty millions of property in possession. This odious and unjust tax was stringently exacted from the negro. To make sure that not one should escape, the tax was held as a lien upon his labor, and the employer was under distraint to pay it. In Alabama they devised for the same purpose two dollars on every person between the ages of eighteen and fifty, causing a still larger proportion of the total tax to fall on the negro than the Georgia law-makers deemed expedient.

Texas followed with a capitation tax of a dollar per head, while Florida levied upon every inhabitant between the ages of twenty-one and fifty-five years a capitation tax of three dollars, and upon failure or refusal to pay the same the tax-collector was "authorized and required to seize the body of the delinquent, and hire him out, after five days' public notice before the door of the Court House, to any person who will pay the said tax and the costs incident to the proceedings growing out of said arrest, for his services for the shortest period of time." As the costs as well as the capitation tax were to be worked out by the negro, it is presumable that, in the spirit of this tax-law, they were enlarged to the utmost limit that decency, according to the standard set up by this law, would permit. It is fair to presume that, in any event, the costs would not be less than the tax, and might, indeed, be double or treble that amount. As a negro could not, at that time, be hired out for more than seven dollars and a half per month, the plain inference is that for the support of the State of Florida the negro might be compelled to give one month's labor yearly. Even by the capitation tax alone, without the incident of the costs, every negro man was compelled to give the gains and profits of nearly two weeks' labor.

A poll-tax, though not necessarily limited in this manner, has usually accompanied the right of suffrage in the different States of the Union, but in the rebellious States it conferred no franchise. It might be supposed that ordinary generosity would have devoted it to the education of the ignorant class from which it was forcibly wrung, but no provision of the kind was even suggested. Indeed, in those States there was scarcely an attempt made to provide for the education of the freedmen, and the suggestions made in that direction carried with them another display of studied wrong. As an example of rank injustice the course of the Legislature of Florida may be profitably cited. That body passed an Act concerning schools for freedmen, in which the governor was authorized to appoint a superintendent of common schools for freedmen, and in each county the county commissioners were authorized to appoint assistant superintendents. These officers were directed to "establish schools for freedmen when the number of colored children in any county will warrant the same, provided" (and the proviso is one of great significance) "that the sums hereinafter authorized shall be sufficient to meet the expenses thereof." The funds provided for this seemingly philanthropic design were to be derived exclusively from a tax upon the colored man. The law directed that all colored men between the ages of twenty-one and fifty-five years should pay annually a dollar each, to be collected at the same time and in the same manner as the three-dollar poll-tax, which should be paid into the treasury of the State for the use of the freedmen, and should constitute a fund to be denominated "the common-school fund for the education of freedmen." It was further provided in this law, that "a tuition-fee shall be collected from each pupil, under such regulations as the superintendents shall prescribe, and paid into the treasury as a portion of the common-school fund for freedmen."

The salary of the superintendents of the schools for freedmen was fixed at a thousand dollars, and of the county superintendents at two hundred dollars. There were, at that time, about twelve thousand negro men subject to the capitation tax of three dollars, already referred to, and under that law they paid thirty-six thousand dollars annually into the State Treasury of Florida; but the school law forbade that the salary of superintendents and assistant superintendents should be paid from the fund derived from the poll-tax. They provided that it should be chargeable solely to the fund raised for common schools. As there were thirty-seven counties in Florida at that time, it is a fair presumption that twenty-five of them had assistant superintendents, whose aggregate salaries would amount to five thousand dollars. With the superintendent's salary, which was a thousand dollars, a draft of six thousand dollars for the salaries of white men was at once made upon the twelve thousand dollars which were to be collected from freedmen. Every teacher who was to teach in these schools was required to pay five dollars for his certificate, which also went into the school-fund; and the end of the whole matter was, that a bare pittance was left for the thirty thousand negro children in Florida of the school age. The whole scheme was a ghastly wrong, one which, if attempted upon that class of any population in the North which is able to pay only a poll-tax, would consign the party attempting it to defeat and disgrace, and, if its enforcement were attempted, would lead to riot and bloodshed.

These laws, with all their wrong (even a stronger word might be rightfully employed), were to become, and were, indeed, already an integral part of the reconstruction scheme which President Johnson had devised and proclaimed. Whoever assented to the President's plan of reconstruction assented to these laws, and, beyond that, assented to the full right of the rebellious States to continue legislation of this odious type. It was at once seen that if the party which had insisted upon the emancipation of the slave as a final condition of peace, should now abandon him to his fate, and turn him over to the anger and hate of the class from whose ownership he had been freed, it would countenance and commit an act of far greater wrong than was designed by the most malignant persecutor of the race in any one of the Southern States. When the Congress of the United States, acting independently of the Executive power of the Nation, decreed emancipation by amending the Constitution, it solemnly pledged itself, with all its power, to give protection to the emancipated at whatever cost and at whatever sacrifice. No man could read the laws which have been here briefly reviewed without seeing and realizing that, if the negro were to be deprived of the protecting power of the Nation that had set him free, he had better at once be remanded to slavery, and to that form of protection which cupidity, if not humanity, would always inspire.

The South had no excuse for its course, and the leaders of its public opinion at that time will always, and justly, be held to a strict accountability. Even the paltry pretext, afterwards so often advanced, that they were irritated and maddened by the interposition of carpet-bag power, does not avail in the least degree for the outrages in the era under consideration. When Mr. Johnson issued his proclamation of reconstruction, the hated carpet-bagger was an unknown element in the Southern states. What was done during the year immediately following the surrender of the rebel armies was done at Southern suggestion, done by Southern men, done under the belief that the President's policy would protect them in it, done with a fixed and merciless determination that the gracious act of emancipation should not bring amelioration to the colored race, and that the pseudo-philanthropy, as they regarded the anti-slavery feeling in the North, should be brought into contempt before the world. They deliberately resolved to prove to the public opinion of mankind that the negro was fit only to be a chattel, and that in his misery and degradation, sure to follow the iniquitous enactments for the new form of his subjection, it would be proved that he had lost and not gained by the conferment of freedom among a population where it was impossible for him to enjoy it. They resolved also to prove that slavery was the normal and natural state of the negro; that the Northern people, in taking any other ground, had been deceived by a sentiment and had been following a chimera; that the Southern people alone understood the question, and that interference with them by war or by law should end in establishing their justification before the public opinion of the world. The Southern men believed and boasted that they would subject to general reproach and expose to open shame that whole class of intermeddlers and fanatics (as they termed opponents of slavery) who had destroyed so many lives and wasted so much treasure in attempting the impossible and, even if possible, the undesirable.