Miller later stated that he had refused to sign the report, because he thought that the Democratic contestees ought to have been heard. When he was beaten, he declared he had changed his mind, stating that it was their own fault, if they were not present, and announcing he was ready to sign the report. It was reported that Thomas had, upon this second utterance, made an inflammatory speech; but no part of it was published by the paper so declaring, which, upon the next day’s report, announced that in the midst of the stormy session, Thomas offered a prayer.[220]
Thomas was on the committee of Ways and Means and the Judiciary, and, until the collapse of the Republicans, seems to have been the individual most relied upon by the Speaker for all the serious work of the session.
Contemporaneously with the overthrow of the Negro governments of South Carolina and Louisiana, the report opposing admission of colored delegates to the Diocesan Convention was sustained.
In 1879 the question came up again in a shape harder to resist and resting upon the example of the diocese of Virginia. The law-making power of South Carolina had, however, meanwhile enacted a statute making it—
“Unlawful for any white man to intermarry with any Negro, mulatto, Indian or mestizo; or for any white woman to intermarry with any other than a white man.”[221]
Accordingly the lay delegates firmly opposed any union whatever, whether of clerical or lay members, with regard to the two races in the South.
Now if it is borne in mind that not only Calhoun, whose influence upon political thought in South Carolina had for many years been all pervasive; but also the profoundest student who has ever studied America, de Tocqueville, had condemned “all intermediate measures” and declared that unless the whites remained isolated from the colored race in the South, there must come either miscegenation or extirpation, at no time could the forecast of the future of that section have been as gloomy as that which appeared in the Census figures of 1880.
The white population of Louisiana, which even the war and its losses had only dropped a thousand or two below the colored, had increased by an addition of 92,189; but, in the same time, with Reconstruction, the colored had been swelled 119,445, giving a colored majority of something approximating 30,000. In Mississippi, where the ante bellum Negro majority of 84,000 had, by 1870, been reduced to 62,000, it had now risen to 206,090. But in South Carolina, with a smaller area and white population, the Negro majority had risen to 212,000. In the five Southern States, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi and Louisiana, the gain of the white population of only one, Alabama, had been greater than that of the blacks. Under such conditions discussion of that which was upon the minds of all was almost unavoidable, especially as Southern thought, freed from the shackles in which slavery had bound it, was free to move in whatever direction it saw fit and, from the pen of George W. Cable of New Orleans, there appeared “The Grandissimes,” published in 1880 and “Madam Delphine,” in 1881, of which the color question constitutes what might be called the motif.
The literary excellence of these works won the author a place in art and they were followed by other works of merit; but so strongly was the writer finally impressed with that which had first moved him to write, that in 1885 he dropped for a time the garb of fiction and voiced his belief in the necessity of a recognition of what he deemed a great wrong, through a brochure entitled “The Freedman’s Case in Equity.” To Cable, the portion of the race which was represented by the mulattoes and the quadroons made the strongest appeal; but he was not alone in the critical attitude he assumed toward the South. In the work of Judge Albion W. Tourgee, a Northern soldier, who had staked his all on Reconstruction, with criticism, was voiced, in “A Fool’s Errand” by “One of the Fools,” something very much like despair. Later brooding, however, drew from this author a more critical and decidedly pretentious study, entitled “An Appeal to Caesar,” a study of the Census of 1880, from which, with some reason, he prophesied a speedy Africanization of the South, and in which he called upon the inhabitants of that section to bring forth fruits meet for repentance while there was still time.
Certainly there was basis for the claim. At no time had the rate of increase of the blacks been so high as the Census disclosed in South Carolina, Mississippi and Louisiana in 1880. Yet the first named set herself resolutely against any relaxation of the rule of rigid separation of the races, and in 1888 brought to a conclusion the discussion concerning the admission of clerical delegates to the Protestant Episcopal Convention, by a resolution reciting the “absolute necessity for the separation of the races in the diocese,”[222] effected upon a basis, putting all subsequent decisions within the control of the lay delegates.[223]