Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 6.djvu/354

330 public interest would have been to accompany the introduction of negro suffrage with a general amnesty admitting to political activity and position that element which no doubt represented the best intelligence of the South, and at that time, also, the most conciliatory impulses. It is doubtful whether excessive party spirit has ever in our history played a more mischievous part than it did in this instance.

When, in 1877, the Hayes Administration came into power, the controlling influence of that party spirit was at an end. The Administration called some of the most prominent and highly respected Southern leaders into conference to secure their influence for the protection of the emancipated negroes in the enjoyment of their rights, while the countenance of the National authority was with drawn from the carpet-bag governments. The Southern leaders, thus consulted, promised their best endeavors, whereupon the Federal troops were removed from the South and the carpet-bag governments quickly disappeared one after another. I have no doubt the Southern leaders in question had given their promise in perfect good faith, and have honestly exerted themselves to stem in their respective States the movements hostile to the rights of the freedmen. But their influence was not strong enough to resist the prevailing current. Indeed, the bloody outrages ceased in a great measure. But the efforts to overcome or nullify the negro vote by illegitimate means did not cease. The rudest form of force was supplanted by artifice. Tissue ballots, puzzling arrangements of the ballot boxes and all possible devices human ingenuity can invent were resorted to for this purpose, and with great success.

Early in 1885, after the election of Mr. Cleveland to the Presidency, I visited the South again. The negroes had been told, and very many of them had believed it, that