The hindered hand

by Sutton E. Griggs

"What can that be, pray?" said young Maul.

"Mr. Maul, excuse me for not stating at once. Cast your eye back over the history of our country and take note of the woes that have been heaped upon the South and upon the nation by the radicals among you.

"There was a strong anti-war party in the South prior to the breaking out of the civil war, but the radicals overwhelmed them and brought on that disastrous conflict.

"Immediately after the war the radicals got control of some of your state legislatures and began to pass laws that would have practically re-enslaved the Negroes. The radical policy of the nation, as revealed in reconstruction measures was the child of radicalism in the South, so charge the burdens and woes of that period to your radicals.

"'Carpet-baggers' and 'scalawags' mismanaged affairs in the South, and some of your good people, you state, resorted to lawless methods to displace them. The radicals took charge of this lawless organization, you claim, prostituted it, and made a record of crime and villainy in the South so great that eleven large volumes in the records of Congress are required to merely hint at the atrocities. The nation grew quiet for a period, to catch your point of view and reason with you, and your radicals misread its attitude and thought that it had undergone a change of heart. They led the South to its recent crushing defeat.

"The radicals who have oppressed the Negroes of the South and sent them North, sent them forth with heart burnings, and through the pivotal states of the North they are ever on guard to turn the tide of battle against your section. Radicalism, then, is building up a political power in the North that will be a potent factor in continuing the isolation and impotence of your section, and will render the wish of a Negro ward politician of the North of more consequence than the combined pleadings of all your congressional delegation from the South.

"In the South to-day radicalism is widening the breach between the races and that old kindly feeling is fast disappearing, being succeeded by suspicion and hate.

"The bonds of personal friendship which have served to keep things quiet in the South when circumstances seemed most forbidding are being snapped asunder. The sullen hatred of the Negroes engendered by the rabid utterances and violent conduct of the radicals among the whites is pregnant with harm to the South, and tends to summon to a resurrection the entombed savagery of some members of the race, and to dishearten others in their upward strivings. On and on I could go, showing the awful wreckage in the pathway of the Southern radical.

"If the nation would ever heal this sore the radicals must be suppressed. If the Negroes attempt their undoing a feeling of racial solidarity among the whites greets them. If the North attempts it a sectional feeling is stimulated.

"I come now to the one thing that will gladden the hearts of the Negroes and the nation and make secure the glory of the South. We would have you good white people of the South to assert yourselves—that class of you who have not been carried away with that false doctrine that the problem can be solved with the Negro shorn of political power. In short, the one missing factor now needed is aggressiveness on the part of the right thinking white people of the South," said Ensal, who now ceased and awaited with anxious heart young Maul's reply.