THE NEGRO QUESTION. 181 



Under the Reconstruction Acts there was a deliberate, prede- 

 termined attempt and purpose to put the freedmen in control of the 

 Southern States. The late slaves were enfranchised; the best class 

 of white men were disfranchised. The law presumes that a man or 

 a State intends the logical consequence of acts done. In South Caro- 

 lina, Mississippi, and Louisiana a majority of the voters, under the 

 coerced policy, were negroes. In other States they were so numerous 

 that a combination with a small fraction of white voters would give 

 the ascendency. In Virginia, a coalition between non-taxpaying 

 white people and negroes, under skilled and bold leadership, accom- 

 plished partial repudiation of the State debt. Superadd to this un- 

 disguised Federal intent the hungry adventurers who, as governors, 

 judges, marshals, district attorneys, etc., flocked like vultures around 

 the carcass, the horde of persons whose object was to pilfer and plun- 

 der, who played upon the ignorance, the superstitions, and gratitude 

 of the negro and made the credulous victims believe that their former 

 masters were not to be trusted in elections, and you have a picture 

 which imagination fails to realize. The negroes, neither by appren- 

 ticeship, nor political education, not intellectual culture, were pre- 

 pared for the boon, and their unscrupulous friends organized them, 

 into secret societies and inflamed hopes and expectations of wealth 

 and dominancy. Casper Hauser transferred from a dungeon to a 

 throne would be a fit illustration of this defiance of all the teachings 

 of the past. Suffrage was a wrong to the nation, to the States, to 

 the white and black races, and especially to the negro. Negro suf- 

 frage is a farce, a burlesque on elections, and only evil. The negroes 

 generally vote as puppets, as machines, and have not the remotest 

 conception of the character or effect of the act they are ignorantly 

 performing, or of the issues involved in the contest, or of the func- 

 tions or duties of the officers voted for. Huxley says, " Voting power 

 as a means of giving effect to opinion is more likely to prove a curse 

 than a blessing to the voter, unless that opinion is the result of a 

 sound judgment operating upon sound knowledge." This premature 

 investiture of the negro with suffrage reciprocally provoked aliena- 

 tion, bitterness, strife, and a resolute purpose on the part of the 

 white people not to submit to the misrule and tyranny of ignorance 

 and pauperism, but to resort to all necessary methods to defeat such 

 a result. 



It is needless to recapitulate the facts of many thousand years 

 in order to raise the inference of racial difference between the Cau- 

 casian and the negro. The immigration to our country is the proof 

 of antagonism of races. The foreigner stays away from the South; 

 so in a large degree does the Northern man. Notwithstanding the 

 unsurpassed climate, the rivers and gulf and mountains, the fertile 



