Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 12.djvu/324

308 dollars. The legislature also authorized cities, towns, and counties to issue bonds to railroad builders, and many were fleeced, as these same organizations were controlled by the same element elected in the same way as was the legislature."

"The North Carolina legislature authorized the governor to proclaim martial law in every county, to arrest and try all accused persons by court-martial … to raise two regiments to execute his will … one regiment of negroes and the other of renegades … and proceeded to arrest honorable citizens to be tried by court-martial in time of peace. With rare patience, the people of North Carolina restrained their indignation and resolved to await the election of 1870." This procedure was general in all the States under the reconstruction law.

The Republican party accomplished its object, in preserving its power, but only for a time. In the Forty-first Congress, beginning March 5, 1871, the twelve Southern States were represented as follows: Twenty-two Republican senators, 2 Democratic senators, 48 Republican representatives, and 13 Democratic representatives. Most of the members of Congress were from the North. President Lincoln had made a supposed case of this kind in 1862, and thus criticised it: "To send a parcel of Northern men here as representatives, elected as it would be understood and perhaps really so, at the point of the bayonet, would be disgraceful and outrageous." (Noted Men of the Solid South.) Under the iron hand of military government, both Federal and State, the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments were ratified and the credit of every State exhausted, but at the sacrifice of every principle of local self-government.

South Carolina is a sample of the other States (in 1873). "But the treasury of South Carolina has been so thoroughly gutted by the thieves who have hitherto had possession of the State government, there is nothing to steal. The note of any negro in the State is worth as