ing. Of this one hundred and one, ninety-four are colored, and seven are their white allies. Thus the blacks outnumber the whole body of whites in the House more than three to one. . . . As things stand, the body is almost literally a Black Parliament, and it is the only one on the face of the earth which is the representative of a white constituency and the professed exponent of an advanced type of modern civilization. But the reader will find almost any portraiture inadequate to give a vivid idea of the body, and enable him to comprehend the complete metamorphosis of the South Carolina Legislature, without observing its details. The Speaker is black, the Clerk is black, the door-keepers are black, the little pages are black, the chairman of the Ways and Means is black, and the chaplain is coal-black. At some of the desks sit colored men whose types it would be hard to find outside of Congo; whose costume, visages, attitudes, and expression, only befit the forecastle of a buccaneer. It must be remembered, also, that these men, with not more than half a dozen exceptions, have been themselves slaves, and that their ancestors were slaves for generations. . . .

...

The corruption of the State government of South Carolina is a topic that has grown threadbare in the handling. The last administration stole right hand and left with a recklessness and audacity without parallel. The robbers under it embraced all grades of people. The thieves had to combine to aid one another. It took a combination of the principal authorities to get at the Treasury, and they had to share the plunder alike. All the smaller fry had their proportions, the legislators and lobbymen included. The principal men of the Scott administration are living in Columbia, and nobody undertakes to call them to account. They do not attempt even to conceal their plunder. If everybody was not implicated in the robberies of the Treasury, some way would be found to bring them to light. All that people know is, that the State bonded debt has been increased from five to fifteen millions, and that, besides this, there are all sorts of current obligations to pay afloat, issued by State officers who had authority to bind the Treasury. They are all tinctured with fraud, and some of them are such scandalous swindles that the courts have been able temporarily to stop their payment.

The whole of the late administration, which terminated its existence in November, 1872, was a morass of rottenness, and the present administration was born of the corruptions of that; but for the exhaustion of the State, there is no good reason to believe it would steal less than its predecessor. There seems to be no hope, therefore, that the villainies of

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. . .

. . . 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. The 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 23d, 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 flood. 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.

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.

Taxes

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