Anonymous

“ They have succeeded so well in befooling the government, and have found out by experience that it is much easier and more profitable to fool than to fight, that they will try the same game with the freedmen, as soon as they begin to emigrate. But don't be deceived by them. You had experience enough, both during slavery and since emancipation, of their perfidy, faithlessness, and treachery. In our forty years' contest with the slave power, we never knew its votaries to make a promise, involving human rights, and redeem it, when it was against their pecuniary interest to do so. ”

“ I feel it my especial duty to say that as long as the menace of the solid South threatens the peace of the country, it is the duty of the North to be united against it. I am desirous as any man can be that we shall get away from sectional politics, but I cannot close my eyes to the danger of a solid South. ”

“ I see signs of a realization of this hope, especially in the States of Tennessee, North Carolina, and Texas, but in less permanent form than I had hoped. The President's policy has lost him the sympathy of the great mass of his party. That he has conscientiously done his duty as he saw it, there can be no question. No matter whether the conventions indorse him or not, no man will rejoice more than he over Republican success—North and South. While he was beslavered with praise from the Southern Democracy, they seemed to be laying broad and deep the foundations for a solid South. ”

“ We would crucify our extreme modesty and suggest to the above writer the reason why "there is not to-day the power within the American people to protect the life or avenge the murder of an American citizen." Is it not because we, "the people," put their political power into the hands of the commander-in-chief of our army, in trust for four years, who betrayed that trust by the transfer of that power into the hands of a contemptible knot of armed and defiant rebels, thus constituting a solid South with which to rule the nation? ”

“ Their graves—the graves of the victims of Democratic outrage—are scattered throughout the South. There are comparatively few of the living to tell the tale. A large proportion of these, even, have been maimed and crippled in the fight.
"They are to-day, as a rule, none the less true to the Republican faith. The Southern Republican leaders have nothing to offer by way of palliation or excuse. They have fallen one by one in the enemy's front. The Republican masses have been massacred by wholesale; have been murdered and outraged upon every occasion and in every manner. ”

“ It is, pure and simple, whether the government of the United States can and will protect its citizens in their constitutional rights, when those are rights which it is authorized and required to conserve and defend. ”

“ Alarmed because the Republicans threatened to exercise their right to talk politics and vote, the organ says: "Seceders and malcontents will be treated as public enemies, and made political outcasts. The Democratic party will not lay down the sceptre of authority in South Carolina, nor shall the sceptre be wrested from the strong hands by which it is grasped." That is, Wade Hampton says, in substance, "I am for conciliating those who vote for me, but death to all who oppose!" ”

“ By the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment, the political power of the South in the Electoral College and the House of Representatives, was increased about forty per cent. The Republican party to-day can poll, if permitted to do so, forty per cent. of the vote of the South. Yet, in the coming elections, I do not believe that we can carry one in five of the districts that we know to be reliably Republican. By force and fraud the political power of forty per cent. of their people is exercised solely by the sixty per cent., thus making a solid Democratic South. ”

“ For obvious reasons, we pray the freedmen, in Christ's stead, to be reconciled to the last proposition, and in every county and town where their political rights are ignored by a rebel Democracy, let them form colonies under a chosen leader and emigrate West. If they cannot go without assistance, let that fact be communicated to us, and we will appeal to the people of the North to furnish them the means to do so. ”

“ The negro is not permitted to vote unless he is frightened into voting the Democratic ticket. He has practically 'no rights which a white man is bound to respect.' In some of these States a sort of peonage has been established, which differs from slavery mainly in the exemption of the master from the care of the slave in sickness and old age, and in all of them disqualifying laws, and still more disqualifying practices under the laws, prevail. ”

“ The colored people of the South are physically and socially in a worse condition to-day than when held in the bonds of slavery, and as citizens their badge of citizenship is a mockery, and far more galling than the chains which bound them in involuntary servitude. ”

“ It will be readily perceived that the converse of all this will be, that the landed aristocracy of the South must pay their laborers honest wages, recognize their constitutional rights as citizens of this Republic, acknowledge the ownership of their capital, which means the fruits of their labor (land and labor being co-operative capital, neither being available or profitable without the other) , or, otherwise, the land-owners must submit to the loss of their laborers by emigration, perform their own labor, or employ foreign emigrants. ”

“ The first-named wishes to secure the supremacy of a race by preventing the negroes from voting, while the "News" thinks it a better policy to adopt measures for the control of their votes. The "News" is no more friendly to the colored men than its contemporary, and the policy it proposes is as dangerous to their rights, as that of those who, in an outspoken manner, tell the negroes they are entitled to no political privileges. ”

“ The Charleston "News," taking a different view of the case, says:—
"If colored people are willing to become Democrats in good faith, it will require grave deliberation to determine whether it is not wiser to let them in, and give them a voice in the party, than to leave them outside as a bait [Pg 19] for Independent Democrats. The Independent, not the colored Democrat, is the rock ahead in South Carolina politics."
The "News" is willing to allow negroes to act in the Democratic party, it seems, solely because the colored vote may thereby be controlled. ”

“ The whole question of emigration, as it now stands, lies in three propositions, one of which every freedman must choose.
1. He must remain, as he is, under the political trinity of despotism; be denied the free ballot, conferred upon him by the amendments to the United States Constitution; be forced to vote for the despotism that crushes him, already deserted by the government he fought to save, and which is constitutionally bound to protect him in his political rights and Christian privileges ”

“ And where, pray, is that new Independent party; where are the old Whigs, the administration Democrats, not to say anything about the resuscitated Republicans, who were to arise from the policy of conciliation? Alabama is pretty solid.
To deprive man of the fruit of his labors is to cut the sinews of industry. Who will care to labor if another is to appropriate the results of his toil? He is deprived of an inalienable right, the enjoyment of which alone can induce him to exercise the self-denial implied in labor and economy. ”

“ When emancipation took place, in 1863, it was not thought, by the noble army of philanthropists who had labored more than a quarter of a century for its accomplishment, that it would ever be necessary for the freedmen to flee their native States, in order to enjoy their civil and political rights and privileges under the Constitution. ”

“ I had hoped that his policy of kindness and conciliation would result in the formation of a public sentiment South that would permit Republicans to exercise fully all of the political rights guaranteed to them by the Constitution and the amendments thereto. Knowing that there are a large number of the people South who are tired of the Bourbon Democracy, I hoped that the President's course would permit them the more easily to assert themselves in some form in opposition to the Democracy. ”

“ Rebels who claim that this is "a white man's country," and that "negroes have no rights that white men are bound to respect," are not to be trusted. The thirty-five members of Congress to which the freedmen are entitled, should be chosen by their votes, and, in every locality where the freedmen are in a majority, and are fraudulently deprived of their vote, the representative from that district should be denied a seat in Congress. This would dispose of the Democratic majority of bull-dozers at once. ”

“ Unfortunately there are too many who, thinking they can manipulate the negro vote, wish to bring it into the Democratic party. If this is done it will not only destroy the controlling influences of the white man and endanger his institutions and civilization, but will put the up country of South Carolina under the control of the low country, where the great negro vote lies. ”

“ Every freedman who can pay for his own farm may have his deed at once, and enjoy the privileges granted to and by this association, by the payment of five dollars towards the general expenses.
By the above plan it will be seen that any person investing fifty dollars for a quarter section, one hundred dollars for a half section, or two hundred dollars for a section, and so on, will hold the land as security at $1.25 per acre, while the alternate sections which have been sold by the Pacific railroads have averaged much more, or about five dollars an acre (some have sold for fifteen dollars) . ”

“ A good, able-bodied, healthy corpse, or even a slightly damaged one, dangling from the limb of a tree on a public highway, strikes more terror into the heart of a criminal, and creates more respect for the fiat of justice, than the inside of a thousand jails, or the presence of an army of judges and jurymen. ”

“ The work of both of these societies will be greatly facilitated by taking the freedmen from the clutches of the old slave oligarchy, and placing them in an independent civil position on our boundless prairies, and in cities and villages where they can care for themselves, their families, and their country, with none to molest nor make them afraid; a work which neither of the above societies can do, under their present constitutions. ”

“ These are what we cannot get in the South, where the landed aristocrat refuses to sell and divide his land among the blacks. He opposes our education, so as to be able to control our political rights, and make us only "hewers of wood and drawers of water." ”

“ It does not concede their right to vote, and to vote as they may choose, but it realizes that some of them will vote, notwithstanding the opposition of the Spartan school of Democracy, and seeking to have that vote controlled in the interests of the party, it is willing to have it understood by the negroes that they will find no obstacles in the way of their voting, if they unite with the Democratic party. ”

“ Justice to the freedmen, after the treatment they have received, requires that the United States government should transport them free of charge, together with their families, household goods, farming implements, &c., to unpre-empted lands in the Western States and Territories, giving to each family land sufficient for their maintenance, with due diligence and care, and a reasonable time to pay for it. ”

“ There is an appalling grandeur, a horrifying sublimity in the spectacle of a ghastly, half-devoured human form suspended in mid-air, receiving alike unconsciously the refreshing drops of the nocturnal dew that gives life to the violets, or the glowing rays of the morning sun as it ascends the eastern horizon and beams smilingly down on a busy world. ”

“ If those named, and others, ever dare to inaugurate political schemes in Edgefield again, let us hang them. Not only our own self-respect, but our safety demands it, and that without masks or disguise. ”

“ He has secured Democratic ascendency in every Southern State. He has wiped out the Republican party of the South. He has rewarded bull-dozers instead of punishing them for their crimes. He has emasculated the United States flag so that it is no longer the symbol of protection to the newly enfranchised race. But the one thing which would compensate in some degree for these acts, he has not been able to do; viz., make loyal men of the unreconstructed ex-rebels. ”

“ Constitutionalist" insists that the Democrats of South Carolina shall defy the lawful direction of the Attorney-General of the United States in regard to conspiracies against the political rights of the citizens, and shall continue to disturb, and, if need be, break up Republican meetings. The advice is equally plain and peremptory. Republicans are not to be allowed to hold meetings without the presence and participation of Democrats. What that participation is, is well understood. It is the attendance of armed men who will not allow a word said which does not meet with their approbation ”

“ Since our "open letter to the freedmen of the South," dated Aug. 13, 1878, and published in the Boston "Traveller," a few days after, announcing our plan of emigration, we have received letters of endorsement from leading freedmen, which show the feeling in the South in favor of this plan, and their opposition to the Liberia scheme of emigration. One of them writes us: "I prefer going West, and many hundreds here would join me. I am opposed to emigration to Liberia. We cannot live in the South and enjoy our political rights. We need wealth and education. ”