Eugene Lawrence

“ The voters are driven from the polls by terror; or if they succeed in electing Republican officials, the successful candidate is warned that if he accepts the office to which he is entitled his life will not be safe. He is surrounded by desperate and unsparing foes: he resigns and flies from the country. In one of the southern counties of Missouri, we are told by the Democrat, when the colored people had collected money from their own small earnings to build a school-house, they were forbidden by their Democratic neighbors to use it. ”

“ He went courageously to the pools, and conquered his foes. It is only by a similar heroic courage that the farmers and mechanics, the working-men and the colored population of every Southern State can achieve their own deliverance. ”

“ He never ventures out unarmed. His family tremble for their lives in their own home, and are shut out from the society of their Southern or Democratic neighbors. But if the condition of the white Republicans is made so unendurable under the rule of that faction which has nominated Greeley and Brown, and which is under the patronage of Senator Sumner, still more painful is that of the colored population. ”

“ The Democratic rulers are reviving in many of the interior counties that severe oppression by which they once held in political subjection both the white and the colored laborer. Upon the latter they exercise all the arts of intimidation and of tyranny. Great colored constituencies are prevented from sharing in the local elections. ”

“ Bands of men, disguised and armed, we are told by the Missouri Democrat, wander over the country under the cover of night, visit the homes of peaceful citizens whose only crime is that they are Republicans, drag them out, whip the, drive them from the country, or shoot them down before their own doors. Many instances are given, with the names of the victims. Charles White, a farmer living near Bloomfield, was recently taken from his house and whipped by a band of men with blackened faces ”

“ In that remarkable victory which the small farmers, the laboring classes, and the colored population have recently won in North Carolina over their former tyrants few of us in the North can understand the courage, and even the heroic daring, which which they went to the polls. Here, too, the farmer had been dragged from his homestead and whipped by the agents of the rebellious faction until he abjured Republicanism ”