Page:The leopard's spots - a romance of the white man's burden-1865-1900 (IA leopardsspotsrom00dixo).pdf/478

 "His Excellency, the Governor of North Carolina!" she softly exclaimed with a dreamy look into his face. "My lover!"

"Don't make me vain. I may be the Governor, but I shall always be the slave of a beautiful woman who came one day to a jail and made it a palace with the glory of her love!"

"I'm glad I didn't wait for your success."

The campaign which followed was the most remarkable ever conducted in the history of an American commonwealth. In the dawn of the twentieth century, a resistless movement was inaugurated to destroy the party in control of a state, and affiliated with the most powerful National Administration since Andrew Jackson's, on the open declaration of their intention to nullify the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the Republic.

There was no violence except the calm demonstration in open daylight of omnipotent racial power, and the defiance of any foe to lift a hand in protest.

When Gaston spoke at Independence, five thousand white men dressed in scarlet shirts rode silently through the streets in solemn parade, and six thousand negroes watched them with fear. There was no cheering or demonstration of any kind. The silence of the procession gave it the import of a religious rite. A thousand picked men were in line from Hambright and Campbell county and they formed the guard of honour for their candidate for Governor.

Like scenes were enacted everywhere. Again the Anglo-Saxon race was fused into a solid mass. The result was a foregone conclusion.