Yet it specifically provided that:
“Corporal punishment is intended to include only such modes of punishment, not affecting life or limb, as are used in the army or navy of the United States, adapted in kind and degree to the nature of the offense.”[335]
Finally, not to prolong the discussion, when we note that the servant was not liable civilly or criminally for any act done by the command of the master, for any tort on the master’s premises[336] and that the former slave holder was not permitted to dispossess the non paying helpless former slave, for a year and a month from the occupancy of dwellings belonging to the former master, but occupied without any return by the former slave,[337] and what elaborate provisions in detail were made for the care of such in his or her helpless condition, we will find that we look in vain in England, old or New, for such humanitarian legislation, at this date. Why then were the Codes overthrown? Dr. DuBois is prejudiced and naturally so. He is not as well informed as he deems himself to be; but he desires to be fair and just; and so we have from this, the most cultured member of the colored race in the United States, the real reason for “Reconstruction and its Benefits.”
“The difficulties that stared Reconstruction politicians in the face were these: (a) They must act quickly. (b) Emancipation had increased the political power of the South by one sixth; could this increased political power be put in the hands of those, who in defense of slavery had disrupted the Union?”[338]
So, the terrific losses, which he himself itemizes were not enough. The beaten South was to be manacled. And how does he picture the victors in that dreadful hour?
“There might have been less stealing in the South during Reconstruction without negro suffrage but it is certainly highly instructive to remember that the mark of the thief which dragged its slime across nearly every great Northern state and almost up to the Presidential chair could not certainly in those cases be charged against the vote of black men. This was the day when a national secretary of war was caught stealing, a Vice President presumably took bribes, a private Secretary of the President, a chief clerk of the Treasury and eighty-six government officials stole millions in the whisky frauds, while the Credit Mobilier filched fifty millions and bribed the government to an extent never revealed; not to mention less distinguished thieves like Tweed.”[339]
Remember this is not a Southerner, black or white; but the most cultured of Northern colored men, who so describes the conquering East from which he sprang.
It is scarcely possible to state more comprehensively in less space than that in which Dr. DuBois describes the effects of Congressional Reconstruction:
“When incompetency gains political power in an extravagant age the result is widespread dishonesty.”[340]
But he palliates this with the following: