"It must be borne in mind that the Republicans were urged and hastened to measures of amelioration for the Negro by very dangerous developments in the Southern States looking to his re-enslavement in fact, if not in form. The year that followed the accession of Andrew Johnson to the presidency was full of anxiety and warning to all the lovers of justice, to all who hoped for 'a more perfect union' of the States. In nearly every one of the Confederate States the white inhabitants assumed that they were to be restored to the Union with their State governments precisely as they were when they seceded in 1861, and that the organic change created by the Thirteenth Amendment might be practically set aside by State legislation. In this belief they exhibited their policy towards the Negro. Considering all the circumstances, it would be hard to find in history a more causeless and cruel oppression of a whole race than was embodied in the legislation of those revived and reconstructed State governments. Their membership was composed wholly of the 'ruling class,' as they termed it, and, in no small degree, of Confederate officers below the rank of brigadier-general, who sat in the legislature in the very uniforms which had distinguished them as enemies of the Union upon the battlefield. Limited space forbids my transcribing the black code wherewith they loaded their statute books. In Mr. Lamar's State the Negroes were forbidden, under very severe penalties, to keep firearms of any kind; they were apprenticed, if minors, to labor, preference being given by the statute to their 'former owners;' grown men and women were compelled to let their labor by contract, the decision of whose terms was wholly in the hands of the whites; and those who failed to contract were to be seized as 'vagrants,' heavily fined, and their labor sold by the sheriff at public outcry to the highest bidder. The terms 'master' and 'mistress' continually recur in the statutes, and the slavery that was thus instituted was a far more degrading, merciless and mercenary than that which was blotted out by the Thirteenth Amendment.
"South Carolina, whose moderation and justice are so highly prized by Governor Hampton, enacted a code still more cruel than that I have quoted from Mississippi. Firearms were forbidden to the Negro, and any violation of the statute was punished by 'fine equal to twice the value of the weapon so unlawfully kept,' and 'if that be not immediately paid, by corporal punishment.' It was further provided that 'no person of color shall pursue or practice the art, trade, or business of an artisan, mechanic, or shopkeeper, or any other trade or employment (besides that of husbandry or that of a servant under contract for labor), until he shall have obtained a license from the judge of the district court, which license shall be good for one year only.' If the license was granted to the Negro to be a shopkeeper or peddler he was compelled to pay $100 per annum for it, and if he pursued the rudest mechanical calling he could do so only by the payment of a license fee of $10 per annum. No such fees were exacted of the whites, and no such fee of free blacks during the era of slavery. The Negro was thus hedged in on all sides; he was down, and he was to be kept down, and the chivalric race that denied him a fair and honest competition in the humblest mechanical pursuit was loud in its assertions of his inferiority and his incompetency.
"But it was reserved for Louisiana to outdo both South Carolina and Mississippi in this horrible legislation. In that State all agricultural laborers were compelled to make labor contracts during the first ten days of January for the next year. The contract was made, the laborer was not to be allowed to leave his place of employment during the year except upon conditions not likely to happen and easily prevented. The master was allowed to make deductions from the servants' wages for injuries done to 'animals and agricultural implements committed to his care,' thus making the Negro responsible for wear and tear. Deductions were to be made for 'bad or negligent work,' the master being the judge. For every act of 'disobedience' a fine of $1 was imposed on the offender, disobedience being a technical term made to include, besides 'neglect of duty' and 'leaving home without permission,' such fearful offenses as 'impudence,' 'swearing,' 'indecent language in the presence of the employer, his family, or agent,' or 'quarreling or fighting with one another.' The master or his agent might assail every ear with profaneness aimed at the Negro man and outrage every sentiment of decency in the foul language addressed to the Negro women; 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 restore indecency, he did so at the cost to himself of $1 for every outburst. The 'agent' referred to in the statute is the well-known overseer of the cotton region, and the care with which the lawmaker of Louisiana provided that his delicate ears and sensitive nerves should not be offended with an oath or an indecent word from a Negro will be appreciated by all who have heard the crack of the whip on a southern plantation.
"It is impossible to quote all the hideous provisions of these statutes under whose operation the Negro would have been relapsed gradually and surely into actual and admitted slavery. Kindred legislation was attempted in a large majority of the Confederate States, and it is not uncharitable or illogical to assume that the ultimate re-enslavement of the race was the fixed design of those who framed the law and of those who attempted to enforce them.
"I am not speculating as to what would have been done or might have been done in the Southern States if the National Government had not intervened. I have quoted what actually was done by legislatures under the control of Southern Democrats, and I am only recalling history when I say that those outrages against human nature were upheld by the Democratic party of the country. All Democrats whose articles I am reviewing were in various degrees, active or passive, principal or endorser, parties to this legislation; and the fixed determination of the Republican party to thwart and destroy it called down upon its head all the anathemas of Democratic wrath. But it was just at this point in our history when the Republican party was compelled to decide whether the emancipated slave should be protected by national power or handed over to his late master to be dealt with in the spirit of the enactments I have quoted.
"To restore the Union on a safe foundation, and to re-establish law and promote order, to insure justice and equal rights to all, the Republican party was forced to its reconstruction policy. To hesitate in its adoption was to invite and confirm the statute of wrong and cruelty to which I have referred. The first step taken was to submit the Fourteenth Amendment, giving citizenship and civil rights to the Negro and forbidding that he be counted in the basis of representation unless he should be reckoned among the voters. The Southern States could have been readily readmitted to all their power and privileges in the Union by accepting the Fourteenth Amendment, and Negro suffrage would not have been forced upon them. The gradual and conservative method of training the Negro for franchise, as suggested and approved by Governor Hampton, had many advocates among the Republicans in the North; and though in my judgment it would have proved delusive and impracticable, it was quite within the power of the South to secure its adoption or at least its trial.
"But the States lately in insurrection rejected the Fourteenth Amendment with apparent scorn and defiance. In the legislatures of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Florida it did not receive a single vote; in South Carolina, only one vote; in Virginia, only one; in Texas, five votes; in Arkansas, two votes; in Alabama, ten; in North Carolina, eleven, and in Georgia, where Mr. Stephens boasts that they gave the Negro suffrage in advance of the Fifteenth Amendment, only two votes could be found in favor of making the Negro even a citizen. It would have been more candid in Mr. Stephens if he had stated that it was the legislature assembled under the reconstruction act that gave suffrage to the Negro in Georgia, and that the unreconstructed legislature, which has his endorsement and sympathies and which elected him to the United States Senate, not only refused suffrage to the Negro but loaded him with grievous disabilities and passed a criminal code of barbarous severity for his punishment.
"It is necessary to a clear apprehension of the needful facts in this discussion to remember events in the proper order of time. The Fourteenth Amendment was submitted to the States June 13, 1866. In the autumn of that year, or very early in 1867, the legislatures of all the insurrectionary States, except Tennessee, had rejected it. Thus and then the question was forced upon us, whether the Congress of the United States, composed wholly of men who had been loyal to the Government, or the legislatures of the rebel states, composed wholly of men who had been disloyal to the Government, should determine the basis on which their relation to the Union should be resumed. In such a crisis the Republican party could not hesitate; to halt, indeed, would have been an abandonment of the principles on which the war had been fought; to surrender to the rebel legislatures would have been cowardly desertion of its loyal friends and a base betrayal of the Union cause.
"And thus, in March, 1867, after and because of the rejection of the Fourteenth Amendment by Southern legislatures, Congress passed the reconstruction act. This was the origin of Negro suffrage. The southern whites knowingly and willfully brought it upon themselves. The reconstruction act would have never been demanded had the Southern States accepted the Fourteenth Amendment in good faith. But that amendment contained so many provisions demanded by considerations of great national policy that its adoption became an absolute necessity. Those who controlled the Federal Government would have been recreant to their plainest duty had they permitted the power of these States to be wielded by disloyal hands against the measures deemed essential to the security of the Union. To have destroyed the rebellion on the battlefield and then permit it to seize the power of eleven States and put a check on all changes in the organic law necessary to prevent future rebellion would have been a weak and wicked conclusion to the grandest contest ever waged for human rights and for constitutional liberty.
"Negro suffrage being thus made a necessity by the obduracy of those who were in control of the South, it became a subsequent necessity to adopt the Fifteenth Amendment. Nothing could have been more despicable than to use the Negro to secure the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment and then to leave them exposed to the hazard of losing suffrage whenever those who had attempted to re-enslave them should regain political power in their State. Hence the Fifteenth Amendment, which never pretended to guarantee universal suffrage, but simply forbade that any man should lose his vote because he had once been a slave, or because his face might be black, or because his remote ancestors came from Africa."
Thus is scattered to the four winds, we feel, Mr. Dixon's claim that the Negro suffrage was born of the spirit of revenge.
MR. DIXON'S WIDE HEARING.
If Mr. Dixon is so wholly false as we have set forth in this paper, the question naturally arises as to how he could have obtained such a hearing as has been accorded him. Of the many factors which perhaps operated to secure this hearing we shall mention a few that commend themselves to us as possible causes.
In the first place, there is that great American spirit of fair play. The Negro through Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Tourgee novels had his day in court, and it was felt to be only just that the South be heard in all fullness.
Another factor in Mr. Dixon's success in obtaining his hearing we believe to be his choice of the hour in the world's history in which to demand a hearing. Queen Victoria, who had reigned so long and honorably, had just summoned by her death all of Anglo-Saxondom to her bier, where in a common sorrow over the departure of a great and good woman they learned anew how that, fundamentally, they were all about alike.
About this time, too, a poet had arisen, with voice to reach, for the time being, at least, the whole English speaking world, furnishing another scrap of evidence that differing forms of government, wide seas and varying problems had not affected their spiritual unity.
Anglo-Saxon lads, peacefully sleeping in the harbor of a Latin nation, had been treacherously blown up, and at the sight of that which was thicker than water in the hold of the Maine, the Anglo-Saxons of the world got still closer together.
In the war that followed, the South had its first opportunity of attesting with its blood its professions of love for the Union flag which it had sought to lower in four years of bloody strife. As a result of that war the Northern and controlling section of the country felt impelled by the logic of the situation to force an unaccepted relation upon an alien race, thereby providing the one outstanding section of the Anglo-Saxon race with some form of a race problem.
These various happenings brought the English speaking people wondrously close together and bridged the chasms made by internecine wars and conflicting ideas of government.