Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 12.djvu/330

314 In Florida, property decreased in value 45 per cent in eight years of Republican rule, from 1867 to 1875.

In Mississippi, 6,400,000 acres of land were forfeited to the State in payment of excessive taxation, and large amounts were collected as taxes and squandered.

In Louisiana, during Republican rule, New Orleans city property decreased in value $58,104,864 in eight years. County property decreased more than one-half, or from $99,266,839 to $47,141,690. One hundred and forty millions of dollars were squandered with nothing to show for it; State debt increased more than $40,000,000; city property depreciated 40 per cent, county property 50 per cent.

The terrible ordeal of reconstruction may be said to have lasted from 1865 to 1876, twelve years, before the whites got hold of the States again. No people had to undergo so dark a period with such complications, having 4,000,000 of slaves suddenly enfranchised, with no preliminary training to fit them for the great responsibility of the ballot. "Our ancestors placed suffrage upon the broad common-sense principle that it should be lodged in and exercised by those who could use it most wisely and most safely and most efficiently, to serve the ends for which government was instituted . . . not upon any abstract or transcendent notion of human rights, which ignored the existing facts of social life. ... I shall not vote to degrade suffrage. I shall not vote to pollute and corrupt the foundation of political power in this country, either in my own State or in any other State." (Senator Buckalew, of Pennsylvania.) It seems strange now that statesmen of the Republican party in control of the government, even after so terrible a war, and mad with absolute power, could have gone so far in error as to place those who had been slaves but a few years before, and were now led by corrupt and reckless adven-