Читать книгу The Broken Sword; Or, A Pictorial Page in Reconstruction - D. Worthington - Страница 10

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To the people of the South the infliction of the carpet-bag government was an outrage that "smelled to heaven." The changed character—the degradation of the South was a deplorable consequence—it was the inoculating of a virus into the circulation of the body politic that it will take a century to cleanse.

The power of attainting and confiscating, forbidden by the law from a full knowledge of its lamentable use by the factious parliaments of Great Britain, was shamelessly exercised by local jurisdictions of the South until nothing was left to the most virtuous of patriots but their name, their character, and the fragrance of their great and illustrious actions, to go down to posterity. A stranger coming to any legislature would have taken it at one time for a disorderly club-room, where ignorant and vicious partisans, white and black, were assembled to lay plans for their own aggrandizement and the prostration of the country. At another time he would suppose it to be a hustings for the delivery of electioneering harangues; at another, an areopagus for the condemnation of all virtuous men; then a theatre, for the entertainment of a most diverted auditory; always a laboratory for the compounding of alarms, conspiracies and panics. In the deliberations of the members there was no check to the license of debate, or the prodigal expenditure of money; no voice to control their judgments of outlawry and sequestration. Radamanthus himself, in some stage of his infernal process, would at least listen to his victim; "First he punisheth, then he listeneth, and lastly he compelleth to confess." The inventors of mythology could not conceive of a Tartarus so regardless of the forms of justice as not to allow the souls of the condemned to speak for themselves; but reconstruction, trampling upon all laws, denied to the long-suffering people of the South the right to plead their innocence in the face of the concentrated accumulation of frightful accusations,all founded upon the "baseless fabric of a vision."

Centuries ago the last saurian died in the ooze of the bad lands in Kansas, but by an unnatural law of reproduction the carpet bagger and scalawag, with the same destructive instincts, with the same malodorous presence, found its bed of slime in the heart of the South and disported with a devilish energy. Monsters of malice, spawning evil gendering fanaticism, focussed their evil eye upon the millions of freedmen, whose destiny and happiness were closely interwoven with their old masters; with masters who had yielded their swords but not their honor; who were "discouraged, yet erect; perplexed, yet not unto despair; pursued, yet not forsaken; smitten down, yet not conquered." The poor negro, under the seductive charms of these human serpents, languished, and languishing, did die.

The carpet-baggers preached to the negroes an anti-slavery God, from the gospel of hate, of revenge. Slavery was the tempest of their poor souls, and revenge must assuage the swollen floods. "The thronged cities—the marks of Southern prosperity and the monuments of Southern civilization," said they, "are yours, yours to enjoy, to alienate, to transmit to posterity. Your empire is established indestructibly throughout the new South. This land shall not be permitted to remain as a lair for the wild beasts that have clutched at the throat of this republic to destroy it. We have heard the cries of our Israel in bondage, and we have come to give you the land that flows with milk and honey." Poor black souls! What a delusion! The day will surely come when the curtain shall be drawn and the deceivers, active and dormant, in this dark tragedy, shall be dragged before the footlights to receive the curse of an indignant reprobation. Poor negro! He is starving for bread and they give him the elective franchise. He begs to be emancipated from hunger, and they decree that he shall be a freedman.

Who will dare assert that the pride, the patriotism, the spirit of the South was not alarmingly compromised by the issues of the Civil War?—a war that was the exercise of both violence and discipline by sovereign authority. We are told that wars are an evil, come when they may; they are just or unjust, moral or immoral, civilized or savage, as the ingredients of violated rights—demand of reparation and refusal—shall be observed, neglected or abused. Perhaps the prostrated South should have been advertent to this fact before she delivered the first blow. But whether right or wrong, when the armies were disbanded, when it yielded its organic being—its sovereignty—to overwhelming resources and numbers, the law of nations laid upon the paramount sovereignty obligations which have never been performed, either in letter or spirit. The government that re-instated its authority was bound by a circle of morals, including the obligations of justice and mercy, reciprocally acting and reacting.

The emancipation of five million slaves was a supplemental act of war; a renewed declaration that the tramp of embattled armies should echo and re-echo from the Potomac to the Rio Grande, until the foot of a slave should not press its "polluted" soil. Their enfranchisement was neither an act of war or of exasperation, but an act of diplomacy, extra-hazardous as results have shown, with the effect of humiliating the conquered South. It introduced throughout the South a sacrilegious arm against the fairest superstructure of Christian manhood the world has ever known; stamped the history of the nation with dishonor, and betrayed the proudest experiment in favor of the rights of man. It taught the freedmen, through the vicious counsel of intriguing, designing demagogues, that their liberty was still insecure; that to accomplish it in its ultimate triumph and blessing, the savage axe must be laid at the root of the social institutions; that they must lay violent hands upon the men, women and children who had made their emancipation an accomplished fact. Hence a war whose horrors should be accentuated by the lighted torch was inaugurated, and an inglorious campaign of reprisals by placable tools, whose zeal to preserve what they now purposed in their blind fanaticism to destroy, was a few years before as ardent and persevering.

Poor, pitiable, deluded human beings, who as chattels real—impedimenta of Southern plantations—had guarded the peace of the home, and many of whom were faithful unto death!

Reconstruction superimposed an artificial citizenship—a citizenship essentially lacking in every resource of intellectual strength—it was without ideals or examples for the government of the freedmen of the proud Southern commonwealths. The allegiance of the negroes was as friable as a rope of sand; they were without a definite conception of the responsibilities of sovereignty—without a fixed principle to guide them in governmental policy—with impulses of brutish suggestion, and under masters more inexorable, more exacting than those they had deserted upon the abandoned plantations. How painful was such a crisis that split up the old South into disgraced and bleeding fragments!

We come to speak for a moment of the microbes that ate their way into the hearts of the seceded commonwealths, while the ruins of southern homes were still smoking; and before the blood of chivalrous southrons had dried upon our battle-fields. I commend the chalice to the lips of those who will deny the truth of what is herein written and desire that such a man might realize a bare modicum of what was suffered and endured. The elective franchise was the panacea for every evil; an antispasmodic, when there were occasional exacerbations in the public mind; our fathers valued the elective franchise because in its patriotic expression was the covenant of freemen.

When our hopes were feeblest, and our horizon darkest, the scalawag fled like a hound to the sheltering woods whence he sallied forth like an outlaw. The reddened disc of the sun that went down at Appomattox gave him an inspiration for his hellish work, and he went out in the gloom of the starless night, declaring with a more vicious temper than did Henry of Agincourt "the fewer the men the greater the honor" or in its appropriate paraphrase "the deeper the pockets the greater the spoil." His philanthropy and selfish interests never clash. He claimed always to be rigidly righteous, and was seen in the camp-meeting and the church sanctified and demure to a proverb. He spoke of the poor negro in paroxysms of charity—a most rare benevolence which employed its means in theft and crime; a charity which performs its vows and gives its alms with money plundered from the freedmen. The scalawag like other unclassified vermin was without respectable antecedents; with an acute sense of smell like the "lap-heavy" scout of the Andes, he sought his prey when there was no fear of the approach of man. As an Irish barrister once wrote upon the door of a plebians' carriage, "Why do you laugh?" so the humorist of the sixties could have written upon the shirt-front of the scalawag "Why do people hold their noses?" He was never mentioned by naturalists, unless under some other name he was paired off with the vulture. In reconstruction days the transformation of this abortion of nature from vulture to serpent was made without the break of a feather or the splitting of a talon. With a seductive grimace he whispered into the open ear of the freedmen "In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt not surely die." He was as much an augury of evil as the brood of ravens that once alighted upon Vespasian's pillar. Had he been seen plying his vocation in the first empire Napoleon would have said to Fouche, "Shoot the accursed beast on the spot." The carpet bagger when not fighting the pestiferous vermin in the Chickahominy swamps was pilfering. He went into the army conscripted like a gentleman; he came out of the army at night when the back of the sentry was turned and without a furlough, like a patriot. These twain were the autocrats of the new south, which had its christening in the blood of heroes; they were the furies that rode the red harlot around the circle, when her flanks were still wet with human slaughter, and her speed was increased by the jeering negroes. When Sister Charity in an occasional fit would fall unconsciously into the receptive bosom of her black lover in the prayer-meeting, with the wild exclamation "Bress Gord I sees de hosses und de charyut er cumin!" they would clap their hands in joy and shout, "Persevere in the good cause my sister." When old deacon Johnson upon some happy suggestion from the "sliding elder" would turn up the white of one eye, they would turn up the whites of the others; and when deacon Thompson came around for alms for the heathen, they would slip under the pennies a brass-button and inwardly thank God they were not like the poor publican or the hypocritical pharisee. Their first meeting with the freedmen was flattering and agreeable; it was an expression of frail vows of love, sweet but not permanent, which bore but the perfume and dalliance of a moment; it was the fusing of units of power for the purpose of spoil, and plunder. Sambo had prayed ardently for this revelation, and it had come. The scalawag, carpet-bagger, and freedman were parties of the first part, second part and third part in the tripartite agreement, until the negro became the party of no part or the worst part, and he began to mutter to himself in vulgar doggerel:

"Ort is er ort und figger is er figger,

All fur de white man und none fur de nigger."

When Sambo stole from the store to increase the joint stock-in-trade, the plunder was checked off in the invoice and Sambo was checked off in the penitentiary; if the firm went into liquidation it was because its active and suffering partner went into jail. If the poor negro died with assets the carpet-bagger "sot upon de state" like a carrion-crow upon a putrid body. These human harpies were natural sons of the commune.

The dirty co-partners opened up business in the south, as soon as Sherman's army had crossed the border, under the attractive firm name and style of "The Devil broke loose in Dixie." The iron-hoof of war had so cruelly scathed the bosom of the south that it was like an overripe carbuncle; it required a little scarifying and savage hands might squeeze and sponge at will.

Credit was prostrate; society was disorganized, treasuries empty; debt like a huge fragment of ice slipping away from the glacier upon the mountain, was gathering volume and momentum as it rolled on and on, and the poor old tottering, reeling country was still struggling on like a bewildered traveller, followed by wolves, and overshadowed by vultures. Corruption and ignorance were the only passports to power. No modern instance of wrong and oppression can approach this Fructidor of the sixties in the South. Human ghouls not so black as these vomited out, the Carbonari of Italy, the Free Companions of France and the Moss Troopers of England.

This condition of things, we dare assert, is without a parallel in the history of any people, in any civilization. Even when Rome was swayed by the keenest lust for conquest and dominion, their legions conquered the barbaric states, not to degrade or destroy, but to attach them to her invincible arms. Savage vengeance never went so far as to place the slave above the master by way of retribution. This was the exciting cause that brought into fullest display the natural law of reprisals and retaliations upon the part of the Southern people.

The first prominent cause of public disturbance of which the carpet-baggers were the authors was a most thorough and secret organization of the negroes in all the counties into Loyal Leagues; in many instances armed and adopting all the formula of signs, pass-words and grips of an oath bound secret organization. When the negro is asked why he votes the Republican ticket his simple answer always is, "Why Lor bress your soul Marsa, we swo to do dat in de League." That simple answer by this new suffragist, this new automaton of the ballot, is a full explanation of the political solidity of the negro vote: With such an element to work upon, ignorant and degraded, the carpet-baggers, fierce and rapacious, have found themselves in Mahomet's seventh heaven in the South.

It is a subject of interest and maybe of admonition to the people North and South, how political institutions, in an age of the highest civilization and under the most explicit constitutional forms, may be changed or abolished by a process of partisan policy, when inaugurated in a spirit of hate, revenge or avarice. Pseudo-philanthropists may talk never so eloquently about an "equality before the law" when equality is not found in the great natural law of race ordained by the Creator. That cannot be changed by statute which has been irrevocably fixed by the fiat of the Almighty. The result of this mongrel combination of carpet-bagger, scalawag and negro; this composition of vice and ignorance and rapacity, was plainly seen everywhere. Robbery and public plunder were rampant in the State capital. The expenses of government were at once increased five hundred per cent. Verily the pregnant suggestion of the carpet-bagger that the only way to bring down the white people of the South to the level of the negro was to tax them down, was carried out with a sweeping vengeance. These thieves and robbers, who had fastened themselves like vampires upon the public treasury, and unlike the leach, did not let go their hold when full, were still gorging themselves by new methods of plunder. No such rate of taxation upon the same basis of property valuation has ever occurred in the history of the world. A tithe of this rate of taxation lost to the crown of England her thirteen American colonies. All the county auditors, county treasurers, trial justices in the courts of record were utterly incompetent and utterly corrupt. The juries in the courts of records were mostly negroes, summoned by negro sheriffs, and the pardoning power in the hands of venal and truculent governors was shamefully prostituted. The most unblushing villainies and crimes were either officially condoned or remitted and forgiven.

The people were taxed by millions; millions were paid out, and no vouchers were ever taken or found.

In the face of such universal misrule, speculation and tyranny, there could be no greater misrepresentation of the truth than is contained in the oft-reiterated accusation, that the white people of the South are fierce, aggressive and defiant in their conduct towards those placed in authority over them by the Federal or State law. Aggressive and defiant! How vain and worse than useless would such conduct be against the overwhelming power of the tyrants who oppose them. It is against all the instincts of life, when despair has taken the place of hope.

Defiant? Does the poor unresisting hare, when trembling with frenzied apprehension under the feet and wide open jaws of the hound exhibit much defiance, or much hope of victory in a death struggle with its cruel and merciless foe? It makes no resistance—no motion or attitude of battle for life except that involuntary and spasmodic action produced by pain and suffering.