Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 12.djvu/369

Rh outraged female, it arouses a fierceness and revengeful spirit uncontrollable at times. It should be borne in mind, too, that a most abnormal state of society had preceded the advent of this crime of rape, for which the Southern people were not alone responsible and which they tried to prevent. What is now regarded as a great political mistake was committed in the sudden enfranchisement and investment of the negro race with all the privileges of citizenship, including suffrage, lawmaking, and governing at the point of the bayonet a superior race, who had always been aggressive in the assertion of every political right. This race was under a ban as a punishment for so-called rebellion and insurrection. Their hands were tied when this great political and social reversion of the races was put in operation and upheld by the military government of the United States from 1867 to 1880 (almost). When the military power of the government in this period stood aside, apparently to see what the new State governments would do alone, those governments inaugurated a similar system only worse, in that negro militia, armed to the teeth, took the place of the white United States troops, and most offensively flaunted their newly-invested rights in the faces of the white people of the South, a proud, sensitive race. The conventions and legislatures, called to inaugurate new State governments, were divested of every essence of the theory and tradition of local self-government, composed mainly of designing men called carpet-baggers, who could not succeed at their former homes, with not a particle of sympathy for the people who had always governed. They were their avowed enemies, using a large number of the most ignorant of the negro race to assist them. To illustrate : In the convention in Alabama, out of ninety-seven members of the one hundred and thirty-one, thirty-one were from Vermont, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Maine, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Canada, and Scotland; bearing in mind, too,