Читать книгу K. K. K. Sketches, Humorous and Didactic - James Melville Beard - Страница 8

Table of Contents

Situation Produced by the War—Discontented Partisans—The War District in the South—Words of a Northern Tourist—Widespread Destitution—The Curse of Slavery—How its sudden Abolition affected Community Wealth in the Southern States—The Political Situation even more Distressing—President Johnson—How the Work of Reconstruction was Inaugurated—The Law-making Power vested in Dummy Legislatures—Disfranchisement—Enfranchisement—The Color Issue which these Measures brought—A Singular Peace Policy—The War of the Conservatives in the South against Radicalism did not Revive Issues concluded by the late Civil Struggle, as the latter Boasted—Loyal Epithets—“Traitor,” “Guerilla,” “Southern Bandit,” etc.—Radical Rule in the South—The Shamelessness of the State Officials—The Uneducated Negro a Law-giver—Organization of the Loyal League—Carpet-Bag Administration thereof—Negro Draft—Some of its Peculiarities—The K. K. K. Movement as an Offset to the League.

When the clouds of passion and prejudice that brooded over the American States in the beginning of the latter half of the present century had dropped into the ocean of carnage, which during four years of severe revolutionary penance deluged all their borders, the return to those opposite tempers that beget in men a desire to renew the pledges of ancient covenants, and practise the ultima thule of the Messianic idea, as delivered to us by the teachers of the Cross (forgiveness), was pronounced in degree; but while it exceeded the bare tendency looked for by men, as an outgrowth of the changed order of things, this moral rehabilitation of the body politic was effected by slow and painful stages.

Legions of men might have been found on either side of the sectional dead-line who cherished animosities which no philosophy born of the emotions could preach down, and before which even those ministers of red havoc that had invaded their homes were content to lower their weapons and view in forbearance a virtue.

It cannot be denied that while the widespread diffusion of the war burden and general travail had a tendency to equalize the feeling of the masses, and awaken a desire to return to the arts of peace, that in not uncommon instances inhumanities had been practised, and bloody reprisals sought, whose issues were wounds, for which the angel of peace brought no healing on his wings. Those more dignified passions which, in the outset of hostilities, had swayed the common breast in the rush to arms, where they had not become wholly extinct in a desire for reunion and renewed fraternity, as we have shown, had thus degenerated into the more human instincts of individual hate and revenge which, if sometimes less blameworthy, are far more implacable. Those who cherished the latter, however, were discounted in all their efforts to discourage peace proposals by the feeling of distrust which their former actions had inspired, and, very soon after the Grant and Sherman dictation of peace terms, were left to those weaker subterfuges that might not hope for organized support. Many of this discontented class were domiciled on Southern soil, and it may be surmised that the genius of desolation that walked forth to meet them on their homeward passage from Appomattox and Gainesville inspired them with yet warmer resentments against the authors of the ignominious defeat under which they suffered.

The war district of the South, in the year of grace which brought about military amnesty, furnished one of those pictures of “crownless desolation” in the history of the world’s wars for which the art that decorated St. Peter’s with the images of purgatorial griefs could have possessed no adequate coloring, and in the attempt to portray which talents and scholarship less consummate than those of the divine Angelo must have issued in utter failure.

Cities destroyed; towns and villages laid waste; churches, schools, and public buildings rotting under the hospital plague, or, more fortunate, sleeping in the ashes of licensed incendiarism; wealthy plantations stripped of their agricultural paraphernalia, and relegated to the domain whence they had been lately redeemed by the good offices of the pioneer; and in room of these—landscape horrors; vast cemeteries, whose enforced tribute reached unto all kindreds; flame-scarred wastes memorializing a past civilization, and extending from the Alleghany hills to the Georgian forests, and from the rivers to the sea; and brooding over all, sole relic of the conqueror’s power, that grim sentinelcy that looked down from dismantled ruins, and bleak, wind-shaken towers, upon the burial-place of the domestic arts.

A Northern tourist, who, soon after the close of hostilities, followed the trail of Sherman’s army half across the State of Georgia, and explored the Shenandoah Valley from the mountains at its source to the mountains at its foot, thus comments upon the scenes which beguiled the earlier and later moments of his journey: “And this lovely heritage, interspersed by hills and valleys, lakes and rivers, which but as yesterday, under the transforming hand of wealth and art combined, blossomed as the rose, and was lighted by the torch of America’s best civilization, now, and under these severe conditions—alas! that we should be driven to concede it—has sunk back into aboriginal unsightliness, and many portions thereof become the fitting abode of those monsters who, warned by an instinct of their nature, shun the haunts of human progress.”

But not only did this ghost of desolation hold its solemn rounds where wealth and its monumental insignia had erst been set up—more practical subjects were included in the fearful summing up of Federal conquest. The grain crop of four years had been consumed by the requirements of both armies, or ruthlessly committed to the flames through the weak policy of military commanders; export products were sacrificed to confiscation needs; the agricultural districts were bereft of all labor aids, and stood tenantless and barren; nothing of practical value—not even the currency of the country, which had been demonetized months before the events of which we particularly write—greeted the impoverished inhabitant, who, standing in this presence, could scarce look back upon four years of bootless strife with regret unmingled with repining.

Slavery, which was undoubtedly a great evil, and is at this period conceded to have been such by its most clamorous apologists of ante bellum times, was nevertheless the great prop of community wealth in those States where it had been recognized by the government; and when (keeping in view the wide-spread destitution to which we have called attention) this pet institution was wrecked on the breakers of war, property affairs in all their borders reached an ebb beyond which, it would have seemed, they could not have been impelled by even a retribution born of that highest example of social evil—State treason. The male inhabitants of the South thus found themselves, at the close of the war, not only stripped of fortune, and all that pertained to a farmer’s inheritance, in the strictly agricultural communities to which they belonged, but without business capacity or business employ, had the former been supplied, and under the explicit disfavor of the government administration, in all its branches, with all that that implied.

But while the physical straits to which the inhabitants of these States were driven almost exceeded belief, and challenged the sympathies of Christendom, they were met at this time with a yet more incorrigible evil, as we have already prevised, and one from which all attempts at escape seemed likely to plunge them into deeper miseries. Despite the generous policy inaugurated by the commanders of the Federal forces at the close of the civil conflict, and the good intentions of President Johnson, who had lately succeeded to the chief magistracy, the Congress of the United States at this time resolved upon a system of oppressions towards this people whose parallel is not to be found in modern history. This work was inaugurated by the passage of laws whose effect was a virtual dismemberment of the Union; all the efforts of these States to participate in the administration of the affairs of the general government being in pursuance thereof promptly discountenanced.

The movement which followed was in keeping therewith, and involved the withdrawal from the State governments of all their prerogatives as such. The civil power was vested in military satraps, who were commissioned to govern these provinces (for such they had become); or where the work of reconstructing or radicalizing the populace was more advanced, and it was necessary to preserve the form of the civil machine, State elections were improvised and conducted under the shadow of overawing bayonets. The administration of justice was as summarily withdrawn from the legal functionaries, and given over to the Federal judicatories; or, what was far worse, placed in the hands of that most ignorant and despotic of all judiciary systems—military courts-martial. The law-making power, in its turn, was farmed out to dummy legislatures, which in their constitution, if not in the modus of their creation, were fac-similes of the great “rump” model which had made laws before them, and which, with its two-thirds majority and grand faculty for caucusing, was quite equal to all the devices of vetoing chief magistrates. The provision disfranchising the white men of the South had been contemporaneously declared, and was a part of that remarkable series which had empanoplied the negro race with all the political belongings of freedom.

The policy adopted by the Southern people in concerting resistance to the attacks of these modern Sejanus was the only one which could have succeeded, and, whatever else may be said regarding its morality, was just to themselves and disinterested mankind. They did not as a class, nor as individuals, conceive for a moment that their allegiance to the constitution and laws of their country was involved in the issues of the political war which they waged against Radicalism, though constantly reminded to that intent by their enemies, whose vocabulary of loyal epithets included such choice terms as “rebel,” “traitor,” “guerilla,” “Southern bandit,” etc., and their integrity as citizens of the United States government they never ceased to insist upon, though their leaders foretold (and it has since been verified) that they would never succeed in establishing it until the movement, which they had inaugurated under so many difficulties, had accomplished the disestablishment of Radicalism at the national capitol.

The details of the political strife of those years are unimportant to our narrative; but the intelligent reader will perceive nothing occult in our purpose if we call attention to the long imprisonments to which many of the leaders of the Southern movement were subjected, the causeless sequestration of public and private properties, the numberless criminal prosecutions inaugurated in obedience to the whims of the “trooly loil,” the immense peculations chargeable to the State governments under Radical rule, and, lastly, the open robberies perpetrated under the name and with the sanction of the national legislature.

The governments in the South—State, district, and municipal—were negro governments, and if, in a few exceptions, this characterization was but partial, it was where the negro alternated with that pestiferous nomad—the carpet-bagger—in administering government for his late master.

Favored by this condition of public affairs, that remarkable secret order—the Loyal League—found its way into the Southern country, and was recommended to the negro by its politics, its dark lantern, its facilities for the transaction of evil deeds, its avenues of escape afforded to the criminal, and, finally, its picturesque ceremonial, in which latter we can see no cause to dispute his taste or judgment. Some description of this singular body, which was, we believe, in a measure unknown to the great mass of the people of the Northern States, will not be deemed digressive at this point.

The order was subdivided into neighborhood organizations, and the heads of these were white men, while their vertebral force was recruited from the voting population above described; the chéf being as completely en rapport with his African brother as if he had been in truth his congener, and not simply dependent on him for patronage. Their locus in quo was nowhere and everywhere—each city and town numbering its lodges and sub-lodges, and the diffusion thereof, throughout the agricultural districts, being in the somewhat extravagant ratio of one to the square mile. Their object was plunder. Their raids, directed against the white trash, contemplated everything that might be classed under the term commissaries, and ranged from the pig-pen to the poultry-yard, and from an ear of corn to a well-grown tuber. The “wee sma’ hours ayont the twal” was the festive time of night selected by the “loil” Moses and his dusky Israel for their exodus from forest or cavern, and, as they marched, the flesh-pots of the enemy disgorged their treasure, and animated nature held its breath. The goods and chattels of the unreconstructed were, by act of Congress, their lawful prey, and if their foraging expeditions were conducted by moonlight, it was from constitutional considerations, and not through any well-grounded fear of resistance on the part of the intimidated whites.

The conclaves of the society were held nightly, and during the election campaigns, which progressed with tolerable regularity during eight months of the year, their en masse assemblages, or political rallies, occupied each alternate day of the week (the off day being devoted to itinerant duty among neighboring lodges). A weak solution of the Christian religion involved in the superstitions which they everywhere practised, aided them in their delusions concerning politics; and it is not exaggeration to state that the remaining four months of the year, under the above estimate, were devoted to their so-called revival meetings, which never failed to prove an insufferable burden to the pork- and vegetable-raising communities on which they were billeted. Their religion was, in truth, a part of their politics, and, on occasion, their ministry their most serviceable performers on the hustings.

These twin ideas of religion and politics having been introduced into the League, dominated the order so completely that its secular business was often arrested by a call to prayers, and more frequently than otherwise its order of business terminated by a twilight homily on the total cussedness and final unreliability of all who anchored their faith to the Conservative idea in politics.

This new element, however, was far from benefiting the League; its morals grew infinitely worse; its larcenies became more frequent, and were prosecuted on a larger scale; it became more arrogant in its assumption of exclusive political right on unreconstructed territory; and, finally, assayed, through the medium of politics, to accomplish a social reform that would elevate the ignorant and semi-savage race which it represented to family equality with a class of beings who recognized no title to such a claim, but that of honorable ancestry and a spotless name. Beyond the attempt, however, which was warmly seconded by the national Congress, it is needless to say that nothing was ever done; and this extreme of rash legislation, undertaken, it would seem at this date, with no other object in view than the humiliation of a proud and constitutionally sensitive enemy, proved in the end the downfall of the League. From this moment, it was met by a counter movement, which, while possessing an organization in many respects superior to its own, covered its movements with the same veil of secrecy; caucused with the same regularity; foraged on its enemies with equal pertinacity and greed; and, finally, proceeded on its mission with the same fell purpose of triumphing by fair means or foul.