In general, the words of Judge Albion W. Tourgee, a white "carpet bagger," are true when he says of the Negro governments, "They obeyed the Constitution of the United States and annulled the bonds of states, counties, and cities which had been issued to carry on the War of Rebellion and maintain armies in the field against the Union. They instituted a public school system in a realm where public schools had been unknown. They opened the ballot box and the jury box to thousands of white men who had been debarred from them by a lack of earthly possessions. They introduced home rule into the South. They abolished the whipping post, the branding iron, the stocks, and other barbarous forms of punishment which had up to that time prevailed. They reduced capital felonies from about twenty to two or three. In an age of extravagance they were extravagant in the sums appropriated for public works. In all of that time no man's rights of persons were invaded under the forms of law. Every Democrat's life, home, fireside, and business were safe. No man obstructed any white man's way to the ballot box, interfered with his freedom of speech, or boycotted him on account of his political faith."[106]
A thorough study of the legislation accompanying these constitutions and its changes since shows the comparatively small amount of change in law and government which the overthrow of Negro rule brought about. There were sharp and often hurtful economies introduced, marking the return of property to power; there was a sweeping change of officials, but the main body of Reconstruction legislation stood. The Reconstruction democracy brought forth new leaders and definitely overthrew the old Southern aristocracy. Among these new men were Negroes of worth and ability. John R. Lynch, when Speaker of the Mississippi House of Representatives, was given a public testimonial by Republicans and Democrats, and the leading white paper said, "His bearing in office had been so proper, and his rulings in such marked contrasts to the partisan conduct of the ignoble whites of his party who have aspired to be leaders of the blacks, that the conservatives cheerfully joined in the testimonial."[107]
Of the colored treasurer of South Carolina the white Governor Chamberlain said, "I have never heard one word or seen one act of Mr. Cardoza's which did not confirm my confidence in his personal integrity and his political honor and zeal for the honest administration of the state government. On every occasion, and under all circumstances, he has been against fraud and robbery and in favor of good measures and good men."[108]
Jonathan C. Gibbs, a colored man and the first state superintendent of instruction in Florida, was a graduate of Dartmouth. He established the system and brought it to success, dying in harness in 1874. Such men—and there were others—ought not to be forgotten or confounded with other types of colored and white Reconstruction leaders.
There is no doubt that the thirst of the black man for knowledge, a thirst which has been too persistent and durable to be mere curiosity or whim, gave birth to the public school system of the South. It was the question upon which black voters and legislators insisted more than anything else, and while it is possible to find some vestiges of free schools in some of the Southern States before the war, yet a universal, well-established system dates from the day that the black man got political power.
Finally, in legislation covering property, the wider functions of the state, the punishment of crime and the like, it is sufficient to say that the laws on these points established by Reconstruction legislatures were not only different from and even revolutionary to the laws in the older South, but they were so wise and so well suited to the needs of the new South that, in spite of a retrogressive movement following the overthrow of the Negro governments, the mass of this legislation, with elaborations and development, still stands on the statute books of the South.[109]
The triumph of reaction in the South inaugurated a new era in which we may distinguish three phases: the renewed attempt to reduce the Negroes to serfdom, the rise of the Negro metayer, and the economic disfranchisement of the Southern working class.
The attempt to replace individual slavery had been frustrated by the Freedmen's Bureau and the Fifteenth Amendment. The disfranchisement of 1876 was followed by the widespread rise of "crime" peonage. Stringent laws on vagrancy, guardianship, and labor contracts were enacted and large discretion given judge and jury in cases of petty crime. As a result Negroes were systematically arrested on the slightest pretext and the labor of convicts leased to private parties. This "convict lease system" was almost universal in the South until about 1890, when its outrageous abuses and cruelties aroused the whole country. It still survives over wide areas, and is not only responsible for the impression that the Negro is a natural criminal, but also for the inability of the Southern courts to perform their normal functions after so long a prostitution to ends far removed from justice.
In more normal economic lines the employers began with the labor contract system. Before the war they owned labor, land, and subsistence. After the war they still held the land and subsistence. The laborer was hired and the subsistence "advanced" to him while the crop was growing. The fall of the Freedmen's Bureau hindered the transmutation of this system into a modern wage system, and allowed the laborers to be cheated by high interest charges on the subsistence advanced and actual cheating often in book accounts.
The black laborers became deeply dissatisfied under this system and began to migrate from the country to the cities, where there was an increasing demand for labor. The employing farmers complained bitterly of the scarcity of labor and of Negro "laziness," and secured the enactment of harsher vagrancy and labor contract laws, and statutes against the "enticement" of laborers. So severe were these laws that it was often impossible for a laborer to stop work without committing a felony. Nevertheless competition compelled the landholders to offer more inducements to the farm hand. The result was the rise of the black share tenant: the laborer securing better wages saved a little capital and began to hire land in parcels of forty to eighty acres, furnishing his own tools and seed and practically raising his own subsistence. In this way the whole face of the labor contract in the South was, in the decade 1880-90, in process of change from a nominal wage contract to a system of tenantry. The great plantations were apparently broken up into forty and eighty acre farms with black farmers. To many it seemed that emancipation was accomplished, and the black folk were especially filled with joy and hope.