“Federal troops were stationed at the door. What right had they there? It was our State House! Why could roughs and toughs and the motley crowd of earth go in, on a pass from Doorkeeper Dennis, a Northern rascal imported by way of New Orleans, while we, the State’s own sons and taxpayers, could not enter? We pressed forward. We were told not to. We did not heed. We were ready not to heed even the crossed bayonets of the guard. Things are very serious when they reach that pass. The guard in blue used the utmost patience. Federal soldiers were in sympathy with us. Colonel Bomford,[24] their officer, ran up the State House steps, shouting: ‘General Hampton! General Hampton! For God’s sake come down and send your men back!’ In an instant General Hampton was on the steps, calmly waving back the multitude: ‘All of you go back up the street. I told you not to come here. Do not come into collision with the Federal troops. I advise all, white and black, who care for the public welfare to go home quietly. You have elected me your Governor, and by the eternal God, I will be your Governor! Trust me for that! Now, go back!’ We obeyed like children. On the other side of the State House a man ran frantically waving his hat and shouting: ‘Go back! go back! General Hampton says go back!’ This man was ex-Governor Scott, who a few years before had raised a black army for the intimidation and subjugation of South Carolina!”
The Wallace House sat, until final adjournment, in South Carolina Hall, the Mackey House in the State House. Governor Chamberlain, with the town full of Rifle Clubs supposed to be thirsting for his gore, rode back and forth in his open carriage to the State House and occupied the executive offices there, refusing to resign them to General Hampton. He was inaugurated inside the “Bayonet House”; General Hampton in the open streets. General Hampton conducted the business of the State in two office-rooms furnished with Spartan simplicity. The Wallace House said to the people: “Pay to tax collectors appointed by Governor Hampton, ten per cent of the tax rate you have been paying Governor Chamberlain’s tax collectors, and we will run your Government on it.” So the people paid their tax to Hampton’s collectors and to no others. Without money, the Chamberlain Government fell to pieces.
Northern sentiment had undergone change. Tourists had spread far and wide the fame of Black and Tan Legislatures. Mr. Pike, of Maine, had written “The Prostrate State.” In tableaux before a great mass-meeting and torchlight procession in New York, South Carolina had appeared kneeling in chains before the Goddess of Liberty. The North was protesting against misuse of Federal power in the South. General Sherman said: “I have always tried to save our soldiers from the dirty work. I have always thought it wrong to bolster up weak State Governments by our troops.” “Let the South alone!” was the cry. One of Grant’s last messages reflected this temper. President Hayes was exhibiting a spirit the South had not counted on. He sent for Hampton and Chamberlain to confer with him in Washington. The old hero’s journey to the National Capital and back was an ovation. Soon after his return, Chamberlain resigned the keys and offices of the State House. Chamberlain was bitter and felt that the Federal Government had played him false.
With Governor Nicholls established in Louisiana and Governor Hampton in South Carolina, the battle between the carpet-baggers and the native Southerners for their State Houses was over. The Federal soldiers packed up joyfully, and the Southerners cheered their departure.
Louisiana had been engaged in a struggle very similar to South Carolina’s. For three months she had two governors, two legislatures, two Supreme Courts. Again and again was her Capitol in a state of siege. Once two Republican parties faced each other in battle array for its possession—as two Republican parties had faced each other in Little Rock contending for Arkansas’s Capitol. One morning, Louisianians woke to find the entrance commanded by United States Artillery posted on the “Midnight Order” of a drunken United States District Judge. Once a thousand negroes, impressed as soldiers, lived within the walls, eating, drinking, sleeping, until the place became unspeakably filthy and small-pox broke out. More than once for its possession there was warfare on the levees, bloodshed in barricaded streets. Once the citizens were marching joyfully to its occupation past the United States Custom House, and the United States soldiers crowded the windows, waved their caps and cheered. Once members were ejected by Federal force; Colonel de Trobriand regretting that he had the work to do and the Louisianans bearing him no grudge; it was, “Pardon me, gentlemen, I must put you out.” “Pardon us, that we give you the trouble.”
These corrupt governments had glamours. Officials had money to burn. New Orleans was like another Monte Carlo for one while. Gambling parlours stood open to women and minors. Then was its twenty-five-year charter granted the Louisiana State Lottery. At a garden party in Washington not long ago, a Justice of the Supreme Court said in response to some question I put: “It would take the pen of a Zola to describe reconstruction in Louisiana! It is so dark a chapter in our national history, I do not like to think of it.” A Zola might base a great novel on that life and death struggle between politicians and races in the land of cotton and sugar plantations, the swamps and bayous and the mighty Mississippi, where the Carpet-Bag Governments had a standing army, of blacks chiefly, with cavalry, infantry, artillery, and navy of warships going up and down waterways; where prominent citizens were arrested on blank warrants, carried long distances, held for months; where women and children listened for the tramp, tramp, of black soldiers on piazzas, the crash of a musket on the door, the demand for the master or son of the house!
Dixie after the war is a mine for the romancer, historian, ethnologist. Never before in any age or place did such conditions exist. The sudden investiture of the uncivilised slave with full-fledged citizenship wrought tragedy and comedy not ready to Homer’s, Shakespeare’s or Cervantes’s pen. The strange and curious race-madness of the American Republic will be a study for centuries to come. That madness took a child-race out of a warm cradle, threw it into the ocean of politics—the stormiest and most treacherous we have known—and bade it swim for its own life and the life of the nation!