Avoidance of bloodshed was not attained at all public meetings, as students of reconstruction history know too well. “And all sorts of lies went North about us,” says the Captain, “the Radicals and their paid allies sending them; and sometimes, good people writing about things they did not understand or knew by hearsay only. I stopped reading Northern papers for a long time—they made me mad. The ‘Tribune’s’ false accounts of the Ellenton Riot exasperated me beyond endurance. It got its story from a Yankee schoolmarm who got it from a negro woman. I was so aggravated that I sat down and wrote Whitelaw Reid my mind. I told him I had subscribed to the ‘Tribune’ for years, but now it was so partisan it could not tell the truth; its reports were not to be trusted and I could not stand it any longer; and he would oblige me by never sending me another copy; he could give the balance of my subscription to some charity. I directed his attention to the account of the Ellenton Riot in the ‘New York Herald’ and reminded him that the truth was as accessible to one paper as the other. Reid did not answer my letter except through an editorial dealing with mine and similar epistles.” He said in part, to the best of the Captain’s memory:
“We have received indignant letters from the South in regard to recent articles in this paper. A prominent South Carolinian writes: ‘I can’t stand the “Tribune” any longer!’ One party from Texas says: ‘Stop that d—d paper!’ Now, all this for reasons which can be explained in a few words. When the ‘Tribune’ is exposing Republican rascalities, the Southerners read it with pleasure. But when it exposes Democratic rascalities, they write: ‘Stop that d—d paper!’”
BATTLE FOR THE STATE HOUSE
CHAPTER XXX
Battle for the State-House
South Carolina’s first Governor under her second reconstruction was General R. K. Scott, of Ohio, ex-Freedmen’s Bureau Chief. His successor was Franklin J. Moses, Jr., scalawag, licentiate and débauché, four years Speaker of the House, the “Robber Governor.” Moses’ successor was D. H. Chamberlain, a cultivated New Englander, who began his public career as Governor Scott’s Attorney General. A feature of the Scott-Moses administration was a black army 96,000 strong, enrollment and equipment alone costing over a half-million dollars, $10,000 of which, on Moses’ admission, went into his own pocket as commission on purchases. The State’s few white companies were ordered to surrender arms and disband.