Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 12.djvu/204

 194 Southern Historical Society Papers.

Moses. It is a paper which might have been written by a Carolina Democrat writhing under the humiliation which the wretched state of the country caused him. It was written in the interest of Cham- berlain, if not by himself, then under his direction and supervision. Its object was to expose all the evils of Radical misrule, and by this showing they were enormous. It was to be inferred that they came to an end with his election, and that he was the prophet and leader who was to solve the difficult problem of harmonizing the races and evolv- ing order out of chaos, and that the opposition to his administration was the outbreak of the spirit of rebellion and mischief which was ever rankling in the Southern heart. The essay is able, artful and plausi- ble ; but it ignores some facts which would give a very different color to the case, and put him to a very serious examination. One of these is that the want of harmony between the races was in great part the work of the Radicals, who for their own selfish ends had carefully, industriously and ceaselessly fomented the spirit of dissat- isfaction among the blacks, and the paper does not tell how far Chamberlain was responsible for the Radical misrule, which he so ably describes and denounces.

The Legislature with apparent wisdom had entrusted all the great interests of the State to commissions, each of which was to be super- vised and directed by an advisory board. Of each of these advi- sory boards the Attorney-General was a member, either ex-qfficio or by special appointment. Now all of these commissions were steeped in corruption, and it could not be but that the Attorney-General must have known of this corruption, had sanctioned, had perhaps profited by it. First of these swindling jobs was the Land Commis- sion, whose specious object was to provide lands for the landless, but whose actual performance was the robbing of the State to the amount of nearly a million of dollars. This precious job was managed by a philanthropist from New York by the name of Leslie. This swin- dler, encouraged by his success, grew bold enough, w^hen attacked for his corruption in the Legislature, to defy his adversaries, and to threaten so to unmask their frauds as to send them to the peniten- tiary. Another charge was that as Attorney-General he had ad- vised the misapplication and consented to a disadvantageous sale of the agricultural land scrip granted to the State by Congress, whereby the State lost a very large sum of money. A third charge was that as a member of the advisory board he was responsible for the action of the Commissioners of the Sinking Fund by which more than a hundred thousand dollars were expended without any benefit to the