Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 13.djvu/79

 78 Southern Historical Society Papers.

and the superior officers at the head with mystic symbols, had a rare fascination for them. By such means the ne^ro presented a solid phalanx of Radicalism, bound by superstition and fanaticism to the service of the party, and it is not wonderful that when the bonds of the League began to break that the Republican party suspected that only violence on the part of the whites could have estranged them from their allegiance to that party which had claimed them so long as their bounden servants.

Bad as all this was, even this might be borne had the Republican party contained the average number of good and honest men as in other parts of the country. With Republicans who had a real love for the State, the negro, under their training might have developed into good and useful citizens. But it was otherwise ordered. The Constitutional Convention, which met in pursuance of the Act of Reconstruction, consisted principally of negroes, without any kind of training, and who necessarily were but tools in the hands of de- signing persons. The whites who were in it were either renegade Carolinians, or men whose war record had been good, and who now hoped to make themselves powerful by early joining the party in the ascendant; or Northern men who had come hither to make their fortunes out of the new order of things; many had been attached to the Freedman's Bureau ; many were men of infamous char- acter at home, and came like buzzards to prey upon the carcass of the ruined State; all were men upon whom dark suspicion hung, and these were the ruling spirits of the Convention.

The Convention made a tabula rasa of the whole State. All officers were displaced; the judiciary destroyed; the whole field cleared for the grand experiment which Republicanism was now going to make in the State.

At an election, which was held soon after the adjournment of the Convention, Scott of Ohio, the chief of the Freedman's Bureau, was raised to the office of Governor, and the satrap displaced Governor Orr to make way for him. Chamberlain was made Attorney-Gen- eral, and Parker, Treasurer. He had once been a bar- tender in Haverhill, N. H. His house was destroyed by fire, and the insurers refused to pay for the loss; but Parker did not deem it prudent to prosecute his claim. We have seen how he was indicted for em- bezzlement, and the farcical termination of that prosecution.

The Legislature was composed largely of negroes; but in almost every delegation were men, who having come to Carolina to carve