Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 1.djvu/421

Rh of a negro as a crime, assassination is permitted to stalk abroad with impunity in open daylight? Still I will waive this point, and say that the character of the majority shall be judged only by the majority's acts.

It was not by the crimes committed upon individual freedmen alone that the reaction against emancipation manifested itself. While murder affected only the individual, legislation affected the class; and it was by legislation enacted by the majority as represented in conventions and legislatures that the war against free labor was systematized. And what do we behold? Here is Mississippi declaring the penal and criminal laws formerly enacted against slaves in full force against freedmen, and by special acts depriving the freedmen of the right to acquire real property, and thus to own homes for themselves and their children. Here is Alabama, her legislation placing upon the freedmen similar disabilities. Here is South Carolina—the same South Carolina which the other day walked arm in arm with Massachusetts—with a black code, reëstablishing even the names of “master” and “servant,” only transferring the whipping business from the master to the town magistrate. Here is North Carolina, with her old black laws still unrepealed. Here is Louisiana, with a labor code which delivers the plantation laborer almost helpless into the hands of the planter. Here is Virginia, with a vagrant law calculated to make the freedman a vagrant, and the vagrant a slave again.

In my official report, I predicted that if the reactionary movement in the South be left unchecked, it would result in the introduction, by legislation, or, in the absence of laws, by practical appliances, of some system of labor intermediate between free labor and slavery, but having more of the attributes of the latter than of the former. Has not my prediction been verified by fact? To be sure, the President affects not to believe it, for it is a truth