The negro: the southerner's problem

by Thomas Nelson Page

In Virginia, where the Negroes were in a numerical minority and where the prowess of the Whites had been but now displayed before their eyes in an impressive manner which they could not forget, we escaped the inconveniences of carpet-baggism, and the Hunnycuts, Underwoods, and such vultures kept the carcass for their own picking, and were soon gorged and put to flight. But it was not so where the Negroes were in a large majority. In South Carolina, in Louisiana, in Mississippi, and in other Southern States there was a very carnival of riot and rapine.

Space will not permit the going into detail. Reference can only be made to one or two facts, from which the whole dreadful story may be gathered. Louisiana will be first cited.

Warmouthism and Kelloggism, in Louisiana, and carpet-baggism generally, with all their environments of chicanery and venality, and all their train of poverty and profligacy, cannot be done justice to in a paper of this character.[84] Such a relation of theft, debauchery, and crime has not been found outside of those countries in which carpet-baggism has ruled, with the Negro as its facile and ignorant instrument.

In Louisiana, soon after Warmouth came into office, he stated in his message of 4th January, 1868, to his legislature: “Our debt is smaller than that of almost any State in the Union, with a tax-roll of $251,000,000, and a bonded debt that can at will be reduced to $6,000,000. There is no reason that our credit should not be at par.” This was too good a field for Warmouth and his associates to lose. Says Mr. Sage: “The census of 1870 showed the debt of the State to have increased to $25,021,734, and that of the parishes and municipalities to $28,065,707. Within a year the State debt was increased fourfold, and the local indebtedness had doubled. Louisiana, according to the census, stood, in the matter of debt, at the head of the Union.”[85]

This was but the beginning. The total cost of four years and five months of Republican rule amounted to $106,020,337, or $24,040,089 per year. “To this,” says Mr. Sage, “must be added the privileges and franchises given away and the State property stolen.”[86] Taxation went up in proportion—in some places to 7 or 8 per cent.;[87] in others as high as 16 per cent.[88] This was confiscation.

The public printing of the State had, in previous years, cost about $37,000 per year. During the first two years of Warmouth’s régime the New Orleans Republican, in which he was a principal stockholder, received $1,140,881.77 for public printing.[89]

When Warmouth ran for governor, he was so poor that a mite chest was placed beside the ballot-box to receive contributions to pay his expenses to Washington. When he had been in office only a year, it was estimated that he was worth $225,000, and when he retired he was said to have had one of the largest fortunes in Louisiana.

The Louisiana State Lottery, with all the debauchery of morals and sentiment which it has occasioned, was chartered by Warmouth and his gang, and is a legacy which they have left to the people of that State, an octopus which they have vainly striven to shake off.[90] Time fails to tell of the rapine, the vice, the profligacy in which the government—State and municipal—was the prize which was tossed about like a shuttle-cock, from one faction to the other; of the midnight orders to seize the government, the carnival of corruption and crime, until the Whites were forced to band themselves into a league to prevent absolute anarchy. It suffices to say that it was in Louisiana under Negro rule that troops were marched into the State House, and drove out the assembled representatives of the State, at the point of the bayonet, a thing which has happened during peace only twice before in the history of modern civilization, once under Cromwell and once under Napoleon.

“The vampire Warmouthism had reduced the wealth of New Orleans from $146,718,790 at Warmouth’s advent, to $88,613,930 at Kellogg’s exit—a net decline of $58,104,860 in eight years; while real estate in the country parishes had shrunk in value from $99,266,839.85 to $47,141,696, or about one-half. During this period the Republican leaders had squandered nearly $150,000,000, giving the State little or nothing to show therefor.”[91]

In Mississippi the corruption was almost as great, and the result almost as disastrous. The State levy for 1871 was four times what it was in 1869; for 1872 it was four times as great; for 1873 it was eight and a half times as great; for 1874 it was fourteen times as great. Six million four hundred thousand acres of land, comprising 20 per cent. of all the lands in the State, had been forfeited for non-payment of taxes.