Handbook of Home Rule | Page 9

business, are generally
detested and proscribed. Southern men who adhered to the Union are
bitterly hated and relentlessly persecuted. In some localities
prosecutions have been instituted in State courts against Union officers
for acts done in the line of official duty, and similar prosecutions are
threatened elsewhere as soon as the United States troops are removed.
All such demonstrations show a state of feeling against which it is
unmistakably necessary to guard.
"The testimony is conclusive that after the collapse of the Confederacy
the feeling of the people of the rebellious States was that of abject
submission. Having appealed to the tribunal of arms, they had no hope
except that by the magnanimity of their conquerors, their lives, and
possibly their property, might be preserved. Unfortunately the general
issue of pardons to persons who had been prominent in the rebellion,
and the feeling of kindliness and conciliation manifested by the
Executive, and very generally indicated through the Northern press, had
the effect to render whole communities forgetful of the crime they had
committed, defiant towards the Federal Government, and regardless of
their duties as citizens. The conciliatory measures of the Government
do not seem to have been met even half-way. The bitterness and
defiance exhibited towards the United States under such circumstances
is without a parallel in the history of the world. In return for our
leniency we receive only an insulting denial of our authority. In return
for our kind desire for the resumption of fraternal relations we receive
only an insolent assumption of rights and privileges long since forfeited.
The crime we have punished is paraded as a virtue, and the principles
of republican government which we have vindicated at so terrible a cost
are denounced as unjust and oppressive.
"If we add to this evidence the fact that, although peace has been
declared by the President, he has not, to this day, deemed it safe to
restore the writ of habeas corpus, to relieve the insurrectionary States
of martial law, nor to withdraw the troops from many localities, and
that the commanding general deems an increase of the army
indispensable to the preservation of order and the protection of loyal

and well-disposed people in the South, the proof of a condition of
feeling hostile to the Union and dangerous to the Government
throughout the insurrectionary States would seem to be overwhelming."
This Committee recommended a series of coercive measures, the first
of which was the adoption of the fourteenth amendment to the
Constitution, which disqualified for all office, either under the United
States or under any State, any person who having in any capacity taken
an oath of allegiance to the United States afterwards engaged in
rebellion or gave aid and comfort to the rebels. This denied the jus
honorum to all the leading men at the South who had survived the war.
In addition to it, an Act was passed in March, 1867, which put all the
rebel States under military rule until a constitution should have been
framed by a Convention elected by all males over twenty-one, except
such as would be excluded from office by the above-named
constitutional amendment if it were adopted, which at that time it had
not been. Another Act was passed three weeks later, prescribing, for
voters in the States lately in rebellion, what was known as the "ironclad
oath," which excluded from the franchise not only all who had borne
arms against the United States, but all who, having ever held any office
for which the taking an oath of allegiance to the United States was a
qualification, had afterwards ever given "aid or comfort to the enemies
thereof." This practically disfranchised all the white men of the South
over twenty-five years old.
On this legislation there grew up, as all the world now knows, what
was called the "carpet-bag" regime. Swarms of Northern adventurers
went down to the Southern States, organized the ignorant negro voters,
constructed State constitutions to suit themselves, got themselves
elected to all the chief offices, plundered the State treasuries, contracted
huge State debts, and stole the proceeds in connivance with legislatures
composed mainly of negroes, of whom the most intelligent and
instructed had been barbers and hotel-waiters. In some of the States,
such as South Carolina and Mississippi, in which the negro population
were in the majority, the government became a mere caricature. I was
in Columbia, the capital of South Carolina, in 1872, during the session
of the legislature, when you could obtain the passage of almost any

measure you pleased by a small payment--at that time seven hundred
dollars--to an old negro preacher who controlled the coloured majority.
Under the pretence of fitting up committee-rooms, the private
lodging-rooms at the boarding-houses of the negro members, in many
instances, were extravagantly furnished with Wilton and