Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 55.djvu/193

Rh Under the Reconstruction Acts there was a deliberate, predetermined 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 Carolina, 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, accomplished partial repudiation of the State debt. Superadd to this undisguised 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 plunder, 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 apprenticeship, nor political education, not intellectual culture, were prepared 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 suffrage 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 functions 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 alienation, 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 Caucasian 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. Not withstanding the unsurpassed climate, the rivers and gulf and mountains, the fertile