“No, ser, dey calls me de boss daddy in dis part of de State.”
Having satisfied my curiosity, I bade Mr. Budge “good-day.”
CHAPTER XIX.
Spending part of the winter of 1880 in Tennessee, I began the study of the character of the people and their institutions. I soon learned that there existed an intense hatred on the part of the whites, toward the colored population. Looking at the past, this was easily accounted for. The older whites, brought up in the lap of luxury, educated to believe themselves superior to the race under them, self-willed, arrogant, determined, skilled in the use of side-arms, wealthy—possessing the entire political control of the State—feeling themselves superior also to the citizens of the free States,—this people was called upon to subjugate themselves to an ignorant, superstitious, and poverty-stricken, race—a race without homes, or the means of obtaining them; to see the offices of State filled by men selected from this servile set made these whites feel themselves deeply degraded in the eyes of the world. Their power was gone, but their pride still remained. They submitted in silence, but “bided their time,” and said: “Never mind; we’ll yet make your hell a hot one.”
The blacks felt their importance, saw their own power in national politics, were interviewed by obsequious and cringing white men from the North—men, many of them, far inferior, morally, to the negro. Two-faced, second-class white men of the South, few in number, it is true, hung like leeches upon the blacks. Among the latter was a respectable proportion of free men—free before the Rebellion; these were comparatively well educated; to these and to the better class of freedmen the country was to look for solid work. In the different State Legislatures, the great battle was to be fought, and to these the interest of the South centred. All of the Legislatures were composed mainly of colored men. The few whites that were there were not only no help to the blacks, but it would have been better for the character of the latter, and for the country at large, if most of them had been in some State prison.
Colored men went into the Legislatures somewhat as children go for the first time to a Sabbath school. They sat and waited to see “the show.” Many had been elected by constituencies, of which not more than ten in a hundred could read the ballots they deposited; and a large number of these Representatives could not write their own names.
This was not their fault. Their want of education was attributable to the system of slavery through which they had passed, and the absence of the educated intelligent whites of the South, was not the fault of the colored men. This was a trying position for the recently-enfranchised blacks, but nobly did they rise above the circumstances. The speeches made by some of these men exhibited a depth of thought, flights of eloquence, and civilized statesmanship, that throw their former masters far in the back-ground. Yet, amongst the good done, bills were introduced and passed, giving State aid to unworthy objects, old, worn-out corporations re-galvanized, bills for outrageous new frauds drawn up by white men, and presented by blacks; votes of both colors bought up, bills passed, money granted, and these ignorant men congratulated as “Statesmen.”
While this “Comedy of Errors” was being performed at the South, and loudly applauded at the North, these very Northern men, who had yelled their throats sore, would have fainted at the idea of a negro being elected a member of their own Legislature.
By and by came the reaction. The disfranchised whites of the South submitted, but complained. Northern men and women, the latter, always the most influential, sympathized with the dog underneath. As the tide was turning, the white adventurers returned from the South with piles of greenbacks, and said that they had been speculating in cotton; but their neighbors knew that it was stolen, for they had been members of Southern Legislatures.