“If the whites succeed at the polls, they will put you back into slavery. If we succeed, we will have the lands of the whites confiscated and give every one of you forty acres and a mule.” This scare and bribe was used in every Southern State; used over and over; negroes only ceased to give credence when after Cleveland’s inauguration they found themselves still free. On announcement of Cleveland’s election, many negroes, prompt to choose masters, hurried to former owners. The butler of Dr. J. L. M. Curry (administrator of the Peabody Education Fund), appeared in distress before Dr. Curry, pleading that, as he now must belong to some one, Dr. Curry would claim him. An old “mammy” in Mayor Ellyson’s family, distracted lest she might be torn from her own white folks and assigned to strangers, put up piteous appeal to her ex-owners.
From the political debauchery of the day, men of the old order shrank appalled. Even when the test-oath qualification was no longer exacted and disabilities were removed, many Southerners would not for a time touch the unclean thing; then they voted as with averted faces, not because they had faith in or respect for the process, but because younger men told them the country’s salvation demanded thus much of them. If a respectable man was sent to the Legislature or Congress, he felt called upon to explain or apologise to a stranger who might not understand the circumstances. His relatives hastened to make excuse. “Uncle Ambrose is in the Legislature, but he is honest,” Uncle Ambrose’s nieces and nephews hurried to tell before the suspicious “Honourable” prefixed to his name brought judgment on a good old man who had intended no harm, but had got into the Legislature by accident rather than by design—who was there, in fact, by reason of circumstances over which he had no control. The few representative men who got into these mixed assemblies had difficulty in making themselves felt. Judge Simonton, of the United States Circuit Court (once President of the Charleston Library Association, Chairman of the Board of School Commissioners, bearer of many civic dignities besides), was member of a reconstruction legislature. He has said: “To get a bill passed, I would have to persuade a negro to present it. It would receive no attention presented by me.”
Negroes were carried by droves from one county to another, one State to another, and voted over and over wherever white plurality was feared. Other tricks were to change polling-places suddenly, informing the negroes and not the whites; to scratch names from registration lists and substitute others. Whites would walk miles to a registration place to find it closed; negroes, privately advised, would have registered and gone. When men had little time to give to politics, patriotism was robust if it could devote days to the siege of a Registration Board, trying to catch it in place in spite of itself.
The Southerner’s loathing for politics, his despair, his inertia, increased evils. “Let the Yankees have all the niggers they want,” he was prone to say. “Let them fill Congress with niggers. The only cure is a good dose!” But with absolute ruin staring him in the face, he woke with a mighty awakening. Taxpayers’ Conventions issued “Prayers” to the public, to State Governments, to the Central Government; they raised out of the poverty of the people small sums to send committees to Washington; and these committees were forestalled by Radical State Governments who, with open State Treasuries to draw upon, sent committees ahead, prejudicing the executive ear and closing it to appeal.
The most lasting wrong reconstruction inflicted upon the South was in the inevitable political demoralisation of the white man. No one could regard the ballot-box as the voice of the people, as a sacred thing. It was a plaything, a jack-in-the-box for the darkeys, a conjurer’s trick that brought drinks, tips and picnics. It was the carpet-bagger’s stepping-stone to power. The votes of a multitude were for sale. The votes of a multitude were to be had by trickery. It was a poor patriot who would not save his State by pay or play. Taxation without representation, again; the tissue ballot—a tiny silken thing—was one of the instruments used for heaving tea—negro plurality—into the deep sea.
“As for me,” says a patriot of the period, “I bless the distinguished Virginian who invented the tissue ballot. It was of more practical utility than his glorious sword. I am free to say I used many tissue ballots. My old pastor (he was eighty and as true and simple a soul as ever lived) voted I don’t know how many at one time, didn’t know he was doing it, just took the folded ballot I handed him and dropped it in, didn’t want to vote at all.” Others besides this speaker assume that General Mahone invented the tissue ballot, but General Mahone’s intimates say he did not, and that to ask who invented the tissue ballot is to ask who struck Billy Patterson. Democrats waive the honour in favor of Republicans, Republicans in favor of Democrats; nobody wants to wear it as a decoration. For my part, I think it did hard work and much good work, and quietly what else might have cost shedding of blood.
“We had a trying time,” one citizen relates, “when negroes gained possession of the polls and officered us. Things got simply unendurable; we determined to take our town from under negro rule. One means to that end was the tissue ballot. Dishonest? Will you tell me what honesty there was, what reverence for the ballot-box, in standing idly by and seeing a horde of negroes who could not read the tickets they voted, cram our ballot-boxes with pieces of paper ruinous to us and them? We had to save ourselves by our wits. Some funny things happened. I was down at the precinct on Bolingbrook Street when the count was announced, and heard an old darkey exclaim: ‘I knows dat one hunderd an’ ninety-seben niggers voted in dis distric’, an’ dar ain’ but th’ee Radicule ballots in de box! I dunno huccum dat. I reckon de Radicule man gin out de wrong ones. I knows he gin me two an’ I put bofe uv ’em in de box.’”
Tissue ballots were introduced into South Carolina by a Republican named Butts, who used them against Mackey, another Republican, his rival for Congressional honours; there was no Democratic candidate. Next election Democrats said: “Republicans are using tissue ballots; we must fight the devil with fire.” A package arrived one night at a precinct whereof I know. The local Democratic leader said: “I don’t like this business.” He was told: “The Committee sent them up from the city; they say the other side will use them and that we’ve got to use them.”
According to election law, when ballots polled exceeded registration lists, a blindfolded elector would put his hand in the box and withdraw until ballots and lists tallied. Many tissue ballots could be folded into one and voted as a single ballot; a little judicious agitation after they were in the box would shake them apart. A tissue ballot could be told by its feel; an elector would withdraw as sympathy or purchase ran. Voting over at the precinct mentioned, the box was taken according to regulations into a closed room and opened. Democrats and Republicans had each a manager. The Republican ran his hand into the box and gave it a stir; straightway it became so full it couldn’t be shut, ballots falling apart and multiplying themselves. The Republican laughed: “I have heard of self-raising flour. These are self-raising ballots! Butts’ own game!” That precinct went Democratic.
So went other precincts. Republicans had failed on tissues. A Congressional Committee, composed of Senators McDonald of Indiana, Randolph of New Jersey, and Teller of Colorado, came down to inquire into elections. Republicans charged tissue ballots on Democrats. But, alas! one of the printers put on the stand testified that the Republicans had ordered many thousand tissue ballots of him, but he had failed to have them on time!