the past will be speedily uncovered. The present Governor was Speaker of the last House, and he is credited with having issued during his term in office over $400,000 of pay "certificates" which are still unredeemed and for which there is no appropriation, but which must be saddled on the tax-payers sooner or later. . . .

The

. . . Then it has been found that some of the most unscrupulous white and black robbers who have, as members or lobbyists, long plied their nefarious trade at the capital, still disfigure and disgrace the present Assembly. So tainted is the atmosphere with corruption, so universally implicated is everybody about the government, of such a character are the ornaments of society at the capital, that there is no such thing as an influential local opinion to be brought against the scamps. They plunder, and glory in it. They steal, and defy you to prove it. The legalization of fraudulent scrip is regarded simply as a smart operation. purchase of a senatorship is considered only a profitable trade. Those who make the most out of the operation are the best fellows. "How did you get your money?" was asked of a prominent legislator and lobbyist. "I stole it," was the prompt reply. . . . As has been already said, it is believed that the lank impoverishment of the Treasury and the total abasement and destruction of the State credit alone prevent the continuance of robbery on the old scale. As it is, taxation is not in the least diminished, and nearly two millions per annum are raised for State expenses where $400,000 formerly sufficed. This affords succulent pasturage for a large crowd. For it must be remembered that not a dollar of it goes for interest on the State debt. The barter and sale of the offices in which the finances of the State are manipulated, which are divided among the numerous small counties under a system offering unusual facilities for the business, go on with as much activity as ever. The new Governor has the reputation of spending $30,000 or $40,000 a year on a salary of $3,500, but his financial operations are taken as a matter of course, and only referred to with a slight shrug of the shoulders.

. . . The narration I have given sufficiently shows how things have gone and are going in this State, but its effect would be much heightened if there were time and room for details. Here is one: The total amount . of the stationery bill of the House for the twenty years preceding 1861 averaged $400 per annum. Last year it was $16,000. The influence of a free press is well understood in South Carolina. It was understood and dreaded under the old régime, and was muzzled accordingly. Nearly all the newspapers in the State are now subsidized. . . . The

whole amount of the printing bills of the State last year, it is computed (for every thing here has to be in part guess-work), aggregated the immense sum of $600,000. . . .

...

The black men who led the colored forces the other day against a railroad charter, because their votes had not been purchased, were models of hardihood in legislative immorality. They were not so wily nor so expert, perhaps, as the one white man who was their ally in debate, but who dodged the vote from fear of his constituency; but they exhibited on that, as they have on other occasions, an entire want of moral tone, and a brazen effrontery in pursuing their venal purposes that could not be surpassed by the most accomplished " striker" of Tweed's old gang. I have before alluded to the fact that on this occasion the blacks voted alone, not one white man going with them in opposing the measure they had conspired to defeat in order to extort money from the corporators.

This mass of black representatives, however ignorant in other respects, were here seen to be well schooled in the arts of corruption. They knew precisely what they were about and just what they wanted, and they knew the same when they voted for Patterson for Senator.

This is the kind of moral education the ignorant blacks of the State are getting by being made legislators. The first lessons were, to be sure, given by whites from abroad. But the success of the carpet-baggers has stimulated the growth of knavish native demagogues, who bid fair to surpass their instructors. The imitative powers of the blacks and their destitution of morale put them already in the front ranks of the men who are robbing and disgracing the State, and cheating the gallows of its due.

James S. Pike, The Prostrate State: South Carolina under Negro Government (New York, D. Appleton & Co., 1874), 12-50 passim.

PART VIII

THE NEW UNITED STATES

CHAPTER XXVI-POLITICAL AFFAIRS

158. The Tidal Wave (1874)

BY REPRESENTATIVE HILARY ABNER HERBERT (1890) Herbert enlisted in the Confederate army from Alabama, and after the war practised law in that state. He entered Congress in 1877 and served until 1893, when he became secretary of the navy in Cleveland's cabinet, a position for which he had been eminently fitted by long service on the Committee on Naval Affairs. He is a representative statesman of the new South. The return to power of the Democrats in 1874 was general throughout the South, a condition which has continued to exist and has given rise to the term "solid South." This extract is from a symposium on reconstruction called "Why the Solid South?" written by prominent southern statesmen in 1890, when the bill for regulating national elections, known as the Force Bill, was before Congress. The book was intended to show "the consequences which once followed an interference in the domestic affairs of certain states.". Bibliography: Brookings and Ringwalt, Briefs for Debate, No. ii; and as in No. 145 above.

'HE year 1874, which was to mark another era in the history of Alabama, had now come. The government "born of the bayonet" had been in existence six years. A general election was to be held in November, and both parties began early to prepare for the conflict. The Republicans who represented the state in Congress had made their contributions at an early date. They had secured, in the Act of March 28th, 1874, authority for the President to issue army rations and clothing to the destitute along the Alabama, Tombigbee and Warrior Rivers, all in Alabama; and, to carry out this and a similar Act relating to the Mississippi, four hundred thousand dollars were appropriated by the Sundry Civil Act, approved June 23, 1874.

It may be as well here to give the history of this adventure, which was based on the pretense of a disastrous overflow. There had really been no unusual overflows anywhere in the state. The money sent to Ala

bama was distributed as an electioneering fund; some of it at points like Opelika, which had not been under water since the days of Noah's This open prostitution of public funds, became a most effective weapon in the hands of the Democrats. To crown the misadventure, the Republican Governor, Lewis, probably to stamp with the seal of his condemnation the folly of the superserviceable politicians, who had secured this hapless appropriation, in his message to the Legislature, just after the election, took occasion to say, pointedly, that the state had during the year been "free from floods."

The Republicans renominated Governor Lewis and the Democrats selected as their candidate George S. Houston. And now began the great struggle which was to redeem Alabama from Republican rule. The state was bankrupt― its credit gone.

Governor Lewis had reported to the Legislature, November 17th, 1873, that he was "unable to sell for money any of the state bonds." The debt, which had been at the beginning of Republican administration in the state $8,356,083.51, was now, as appears by the official report, September 30th, 1874, including straight and endorsed railroad bonds, $25,503,593-30.

City and county indebtedness had in many cases increased in like proportion, with no betterments to show for expenditures.

Taxes

The administration of public affairs in the state for many years preceding the Civil War had been notably simple and economical. had been low, honestly collected and faithfully applied.

To a people trained in such a school of government the extravagance and corruption now everywhere apparent, coupled with the higher rates of taxation and bankrupt condition of the treasury, were appalling.

More intolerable still were the turmoil and strife between whites and blacks, created and kept alive by those who, as the Republican Governor Smith had said, "would like to have a few colored men killed every week to furnish a semblance of truth to Spencer's libels upon the people of the state generally," as well as to make them more "certain of the vote of the negroes." Not only was immigration repelled by these causes, but good citizens were driven out of the state. It is absolutely safe to say that Alabama during the six years of Republican rule gained practically nothing by immigration, and at the same time lost more inhabitants by emigration than by that terrible war, which destroyed fully one-fifth of her people able to bear arms. Thousands more were now resolved to leave the state if, after another and supreme effort, they should fail to

rid themselves of a domination that was blighting all hope of the future. Few things are more difficult than to overcome political prejudices as bitter as those which had formerly divided the white people of Alabama, but six years of Republican misrule had been, in most cases, sufficient for the purpose. In 1874 the people seemed to forget that they had ever been Whigs and Democrats, Secessionists and Union men; and when this came about the days of the black man's party in Alabama were numbered. Although the whites had lost over twenty thousand men in the war who would now have been voting, they had in the state, by the census of 1870, a majority of 7,651 of those within the voting age. In 1880 this majority, as the census showed, was 23,038, and by the coming of age of boys too young to have been in the war, the white voters certainly outnumbered the blacks in 1874 by over ten thousand.

The Republicans had forced the color line upon an unwilling people. The first resolution of the Democratic platform of July, 1874, was that "the radical and dominant faction of the Republican party in this state persistently and by false and fraudulent representations have inflamed the passions and prejudices of the negroes, as a race, against the white people, and have thereby made it necessary for white people to unite and act together in self-defense and for the preservation of white civilization."

That the people of the state accepted this issue in this manner is the rock of offense against which partisan clamor in distant states has so often since that day lashed itself into fury.

The campaign of 1874 was not unattended by the usual efforts to inflame the public mind of the North and to intimidate Democratic voters at home by the display of Federal power, both civil and military. Troops were, of course, loudly called for.

There were, during the year 1874, conflicts between whites and blacks, in which both parties received injuries and losses. These were incited, Democrats claimed, by Republican leaders to invoke the aid of Federal authorities, civil and military, in the pending election. . . . The Republican press, however, claimed that the acts which were to bring United States troops into the state to superintend the elections always resulted from the folly of the Democrats, who did not desire the presence of troops, and that the troubles were never instigated by the Republicans, who were anxious to have the troops. The political training of the colored man had been such that it was perfectly natural for him to look upon United States soldiers, when he saw them come into the state, as sent to see that he voted the Republican ticket. . . .