The Black Proletariat in South Carolina

How in the years from 1868-1876, in a state where blacks out-numbered whites, the will of the mass of black labor, modified by their own and other leaders and dimmed by ignorance, inexperience and uncertainty, dictated the form and methods of government.¹

A great political scientist in one of the oldest and largest of American universities wrote and taught thousands of youths and readers that

There is no question, now, that Congress did a monstrous thing, and committed a great political error, if not a sin, in the creation of this new electorate. It was a great wrong to civilization to put the white race of the South under the domination of the Negro race. The claim that there is nothing in the color of the skin from the point of view of political ethics is a great sophism. A black skin means membership in a race of men which has never of itself succeeded in subjecting passion to reason; has never, therefore, created any civilization of any kind.²

Here is the crux of all national discussion and study of Reconstruction. The problem is incontinently put beyond investigation and historic proof by the dictum of Judge Taney, Andrew Johnson, John Burgess and their confreres, that Negroes are not men and cannot be regarded and treated as such.

The student who would test this dictum by facts is faced by this set barrier. The whole history of Reconstruction has with few exceptions been written by passionate believers in the inferiority of the Negro. The whole body of facts concerning what the Negro actually said and did, how he worked, what he wanted, for whom he voted, is masked in such a cloud of charges, exaggeration and biased testimony, that most students have given up all attempt at new material or new evaluation of the old, and simply repeated perfunctorily all the current legends of black buffoons in legislature, golden spittoons for fieldhands, bribery and extravagance on an unheard-of scale, and the collapse of civilization until an outraged nation rose in wrath and ended the ridiculous travesty.

And yet there are certain quite well-known facts that are irreconcilable with this theory of history. Civilization did not collapse in the South in 1868-1876. The charge of industrial anarchy is faced by the fact that the cotton crop had recovered by 1870, five years after the war, and by 1876 the agricultural and even commercial and industrial rebirth of the South was in sight. The public debt was large; but measured in depreciated currency and estimated with regard to war losses, and the enlarged functions of a new society, it was not excessive. The legislation of this period was not bad, as is proven by the fact that it was retained for long periods after 1876, and much of it still stands.

One must admit that generalizations of this sort are liable to wide error, but surely they can justifiably be balanced against the extreme charges of a history written for purposes of propaganda. And above all, no history is accurate and no “political science” scientific that starts with the gratuitous assumption that the Negro race has been proven incapable of modern civilization. Such a dogma is simply the modern and American residue of a universal belief that most men are sub-normal and that civilization is the gift of the Chosen Few.

Since the beginning of time, most thinkers have believed that the vast majority of human beings are incorrigibly stupid and evil. The proportion of thinkers who believed this has naturally changed with historical evolution. In earliest times all men but the Chosen Few were impossible. Before the middle class of France revolted, only the Aristocracy of birth and knowledge could know and do. After the American experiment a considerable number of thinkers conceived that possibly most men had capabilities, except, of course, Negroes. Possibly never in human history before or since have so many men believed in the manhood of so many men as after the Battle of Port Hudson, when Negroes fought for Freedom.

All men know that by sheer weight of physical force, the mass of men must in the last resort become the arbiters of human action. But reason, skill, wealth, machines and power may for long periods enable the few to control the many. But to what end? The current theory of democracy is that dictatorship is a stopgap pending the work of universal education, equitable income, and strong character. But always the temptation is to use the stopgap for narrower ends, because intelligence, thrift and goodness seem so impossibly distant for most men. We rule by junta; we turn Fascist, because we do not believe in men; yet the basis of fact in this disbelief is incredibly narrow.

We know perfectly well that most human beings have never had a decent human chance to be full men. Most of us may be convinced that even with opportunity the number of utter human failures would be vast; and yet remember that this assumption kept the ancestors of present white America long in slavery and degradation.

It is then one’s moral duty to see that every human being, to the extent of his capacity, escapes ignorance, poverty and crime. With this high ideal held unswervingly in view, monarchy, oligarchy, dictatorships may rule; but the end will be the rule of All, if mayhap All or Most qualify. The only unforgivable sin is dictatorship for the benefit of Fools, Voluptuaries, gilded Satraps, Prostitutes and Idiots. The rule of the famished, unlettered, stinking mob is better than this and the only inevitable, logical and justifiable return. To escape from ultimate democracy is as impossible as it is for ignorant poverty and crime to rule forever.

The opportunity to study a great human experiment was present in Reconstruction, and its careful scientific investigation would have thrown a world of light on human development and democratic government. The material today, however, is unfortunately difficult to find. Little effort has been made to preserve the records of Negro effort and speeches, actions, work and wages, homes and families. Nearly all this has gone down beneath a mass of ridicule and caricature, deliberate omission and misstatement. No institution of learning has made any effort to explore or probe Reconstruction from the point of view of the laborer and most men have written to explain and excuse the former slaveholder, the planter, the landholder, and the capitalist. The loss today is irreparable, and this present study limps and gropes in darkness, lacking most essentials to a complete picture; and yet the writer is convinced that this is the story of a normal working class movement, successful to an unusual degree, despite all disappointment and failure.

South Carolina has always been pointed to as the typical Reconstruction state. It had, in 1860, 412,320 Negroes and 291,300 whites. Even at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the 200,000 whites were matched by 150,000 Negroes, and the influx from the Border and the direct African slave trade brought a mass of black slaves to support the new Cotton Kingdom. There had always been small numbers of free Negroes, a little over 3,000 at the beginning of the century, and nearly 10,000 in 1860.

Slavery was the driving force of the state’s industrial and social life; it was the institution which made South Carolina different from the states of the North; it was the principal reason why the white manhood of the state had fought so desperately.³

The economic loss which came through war was great, but not nearly as influential as the psychological change, the change in habit and thought. Imagine the 54th Massachusetts Colored Regiment, heading the Union troops which entered Charleston, and singing “John Brown’s Body.” A nun writes from that city concerning the changes which have come, and which seem to her unspeakable:

“Could you but see these delicate ladies in houses void of furniture, reduced to the wash-tub and the cook-pot, your heart would bleed.” There were other Carolina women—not, to be sure, “ladies”—to whom the chance to wash and cook for themselves spelled heaven in these days.

The hatred of the Yankee was increased. The defeated Southern leaders were popular heroes. Numbers of Southerners planned to leave the country, and go to South America or Mexico. And yet, the slaveholders had not lost all by any means. There were 638 persons in South Carolina who were later pardoned by President Johnson because they had taxable property worth more than $20,000. They had their land, their tools, and while certain cities had been wrecked and pillaged, the great mass of the plantations had not been touched. The railroads had been injured but not destroyed. Most of the eighteen cotton factories were not touched.

The labor situation, the prospect of free Negroes, caused great apprehension. It was accepted as absolutely true by most planters that the Negro could not and would not work without a white master.

The nigger, sir, is a savage whom the Almighty Maker appointed to be a slave. A savage! With him free, the South is ruined, sir, ruined… .

On the other hand, these apprehensions were not fulfilled. William Henry Trescot said:

When Negroes heard that freedom was coming, there was no impatience, no insubordination, no violence. They have received their freedom quietly and soberly. They remained pretty steadily on the farms of their masters, a very general disposition being manifest to adjust the terms of compensation on a reasonable basis.

One great and real loss which the state suffered was the 12,922 men killed in battle, and dead of wounds. “Perhaps it can be concluded that the lack of distinctive achievements by South Carolinians since the war is in no small measure due to this loss.”

It was estimated by the census that land values declined 60% between 1860-1867, and that all farm property, between 1860-1870, decreased from $169,738,630 to $47,628,175. In May, 1865, a meeting was held in Charleston, and a committee was sent to talk with President Johnson. He asked them to submit a list of names from which he might select a Provisional Governor, and he finally selected Benjamin F. Perry. This was, on the whole, an unfortunate selection. Perry was a devoted follower of Johnson, and believed that Johnson had the power and backing to put his policies through. He immediately succeeded in having all Negro troops withdrawn, and he was certain that the North was with him and Johnson in standing for a purely white man’s government.

1. The Johnson convention met and took some advance steps. By a small majority, they did away with property qualifications for members of the legislature, but refused to count Negroes as basis of apportionment. This was a blow at the former slaveholders, and a step toward democracy so far as the whites were concerned, but it was coupled with absolute refusal to recognize the Negroes. Perry insisted on letting property retain its right of representation in the legislature, despite the opposition of President Johnson.

The convention wanted to abolish slavery only on condition that Negroes be confined to manual labor, and that slave owners be compensated. They were given to understand, however, that Johnson would not accept this, and they finally declared that since the slaves had been emancipated by the United States, slavery should not be reëstablished. In the elections for this convention, there was little interest. Only about one-third of the normal vote was cast on the coast, and inland, there were, in many cases, no elections at all.

In the election which followed again only 19,000 votes were cast. Ex-Governor Orr received a small majority and would have been beaten by Wade Hampton, if Hampton had not refused the use of his name. Orr was a man of striking personality, and had once been Speaker of the United States House of Representatives.

The legislature which met after this election passed one of the most vicious of the Black Codes. It provided for corporal punishment, vagrancy and apprenticeship laws, openly made the Negro an inferior caste, and provided special laws for his governing.

Neither humanity nor expediency demanded such sharp distinctions between the races in imposing punishments. The restriction of Negro testimony to cases in which the race was involved was not common sense. The free admission of such testimony in all cases would not have involved the surrender of power by the whites since they were to be the judges and jury. The occupational restrictions, instead of tending to restore order, created the impression that the dominant race desired to exclude the blacks from useful employment. It was impractical for a poverty-stricken commonwealth to have projected such elaborate schemes of judicial and military reorganization.⁴

There was increased difficulty in the economic situation. The war had ended late in the spring of 1865, so that the crops of that year were short, and there were crop failures for the next two years. All this complicated matters. In addition to this, the splendid start which the Negroes had on the lands of Port Royal, and on the Sea Islands, was interrupted. Johnson’s proclamation and orders of 1865 provided for the early restoration of all property except property in slaves and such of the Port Royal lands as had been sold for taxes. The landlords hurried to get their pardons and to take back their lands. The Negroes resisted sometimes with physical force. When some of the landlords visited Edisto Island, the Negroes told them: “You had better go back to Charleston, and go to work there, and if you can do nothing else, you can pick oysters and earn your living.”

But these white men were not used to earning their own living. They were used to having Negroes do that for them, and now they had the Federal Government back of their claims. General Howard came down to facilitate the transfer and explain the condition to the Negroes. Still the black folk were dissatisfied. They drew up a petition to President Johnson, asking for at least an acre and a half of land. The planters became overbearing and the Negroes angry. Saxton, who had placed them on the land, was dismissed, and Howard deprived of his power. So that finally, by Federal force, Negroes were compelled to leave most of the lands and to make contracts as common laborers. The third Freedmen’s Bureau Bill gave this the force of law. Thousands of Negroes migrated to Florida during 1866-1867, because of the land difficulties, the labor contracts, and the crop failures. Two thousand five hundred migrated to Liberia.

Landholders used force, fraud and boycott against farm labor. It was declared in 1868 that in South Carolina:

The whites do not think it wrong to shoot, stab or knock down Negroes on slight provocation. It is actually thought a great point among certain classes to be able to boast that one has killed or beaten a Negro.⁵

The following resolutions were passed at public meetings of planters in South Carolina:

Resolved, That if inconsistent with views of the authorities to remove the military, we express the opinion that the plan of the military to compel the freedman to contract with his former owner, when desired by the latter, is wise, prudent, and absolutely necessary.

Resolved, That we, the planters of the district, pledge ourselves not to contract with any freedmen unless he can produce a certificate of regular discharge from his former owner.

Resolved, That under no circumstances whatsoever will we rent land to any freedmen, nor will we permit them to live on our premises as employees.⁶

In the Abbeville district of South Carolina it was said:

Here a planter worked nearly one hundred (100) hands near Cokesburg, ten (10) of them on the South Carolina railroad for six (6) months (the planter receiving their wages), and the remainder on his plantation, raising a crop of corn, wheat, rice, cotton, etc. After the crop was harvested the laborers were brought to Charleston, where, being destitute, they had to be rationed by the government. After their arrival in this city the planter distributed fifty dollars ($50) among them. The largest amount any one received was one dollar and twenty-five cents ($1.25) and from that down to fifty cents (50¢), some receiving nothing. One peck of dry corn a week was the only ration furnished the farm hands.⁷

Meantime, the growth of sentiment in favor of Negro suffrage was quickened because of the action of South Carolina and other states. Chief Justice Chase visited the state and spoke to the Negroes. He said, “I believe there is not a member of the Government who would not be pleased to see universal suffrage.”

The Negroes were already bestirring themselves. In May, 1864, at Port Royal, they held a meeting which elected delegates to the National Union Convention, which was to be held in Baltimore in June. In November, 1865, the colored people met at Zion Church, Charleston, and protested against the work of the convention and of the legislature. The legislature refused to receive this petition, and determined to ignore the matter of Negro suffrage entirely. Orr attended the National Union Convention in Philadelphia in 1866, and advised the legislature to reject the Fourteenth Amendment. This the legislature did with only one negative vote in both Houses.

The military commanders, under the Reconstruction legislation, did much to abolish discrimination. One captain of a vessel was fined who refused to allow a colored woman to ride as a first-class passenger, and General Canby, a Kentuckian, whom Johnson appointed in March, 1867, ordered that Negroes serve on juries. This led to excitement and protests.

Northern capitalists began to appear in the state. They were, at first, welcomed:

Men of capital are coming from the North by every steamer in view of investing in cotton and rice. We are glad to see such a lively trade in South Carolina; it benefits everyone.

Later, and especially when they began to take part in politics, they were loaded with every accusation. Some of them were army officers; others, employees of the Freedmen’s Bureau; some were farmers, and some religious and educational leaders. The Negroes, naturally, turned to them for leadership and received it. They helped organize the Negroes in Union Leagues in order to teach them citizenship and united action. Northern visitors continued to come. Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts spoke at Charleston:

After four bloody years, Liberty triumphed and slavery has died to rise no more… . The creed of equal rights, equal privileges and equal immunities for all men in America is hereafter to be the practical policy of the Republic… . Never vote unless you vote for the country which made you free. Register your names. Vote for a united country. Vote for the old flag. Vote for a change in the constitution of the state that your liberties may be consummated.

Under the Reconstruction law of 1867, 46,882 whites and 80,550 blacks voted; the planter class refrained from participation in hope that the scheme would fail.

In ten of the thirty-one counties there were white majorities, and in the remaining twenty-one counties, black majorities.

Party conventions began to meet. The first one was that of the Union Republican Party, which met in Charleston with nine county representatives. It adjourned to Columbia, where nineteen counties were represented. It was attended by colored and white men, including some Southern men like Thomas J. Robertson, a wealthy native.

The reaction among the whites led to three parties. Governor Orr and his party accepted the Reconstruction acts, and planned to work with the Negroes. Wade Hampton proposed to accept the acts, but only with the idea of finally dominating the Negro vote and having Negroes follow the lead of their former masters. Hampton owned large plantations in South Carolina and Mississippi.

The New York Herald summarized his views as follows: “He appeals to the blacks, lately his slaves, as his political superiors, to try the political experiment of harmonizing with their late white masters before going into the political service of strangers… . The broad fact that the two races in the South must henceforth harmonize on a political basis to avoid a bloody conflict is the ground covered by Wade Hampton.”

A third party was led by former Governor Perry and Thomas W. Woodward.

“Strange to say,” wrote Perry, “there are many persons in the Southern States whose high sense of honor would not let them adopt the Fourteenth Amendment, who are now urging the people to swallow voluntarily the Military Bill, regardless of honor, principle, or consistency.” If the state were forced to acquiesce in the tyranny of Congress, he added, “she need not embrace the hideous thing… . If we are to wear manacles, let them be put on by our tyrants, not ourselves.” He argued the folly of attempting to control the Negro vote. “General Hampton and his friends,” he asserted, “had just as well try to control a herd of wild buffaloes as the Negro vote.” Woodward was violent in denouncing the compromisers. “Why, oh, why, my Southern nigger worshippers,” he cried, “will you grope your way through this worse than Egyptian darkness? Why not cease this crawling on your bellies and assume the upright form of men? . . . Stop, I pray you, your efforts at harmony, your advice about conventions, your pusillanimous insinuations about confiscations, etc., or you will goad these people by flattery to destruction, before they have a chance to pick out the cotton crop.”⁸

Perry proposed to appeal to the courts, and advised the whites to register and vote against the constitutional convention. The convention of whites was held a week before the constitutional convention, with twenty-one of the thirty-one districts represented. This convention made cooperation on the part of Negroes of any intelligence utterly impossible. It declared:

The fact is patent to all… that the Negro is utterly unfitted to exercise the highest function of a citizen… . We protest against this subversion of the social order, whereby an ignorant and depraved race is placed in power and influence above the virtuous, the educated, and the refined.

The nation was informed that the white people of South Carolina “would never acquiesce in Negro Equality or supremacy.” The president of the convention complained that the declarations were filled with adjectives and epithets, which put a weapon in the hands of the enemies of the movement.

The state convention, when it met, had Negro members for the first time in the history of the state. Seventy-six of the one hundred and twenty-four delegates were colored. As in Mississippi and elsewhere, a number of the planter class had early contemplated an effort to control the Negro vote, and thus quickly to get rid of military rule. On the other hand, the Negroes, because of the educated free Negro element, some considerable talent among the slaves, and the influx of Negroes from the North, showed unusual foresight and modesty. The convention was earnest, and on the whole, well-conducted. Of the seventy-six colored men, it is said, fifty-seven had been slaves.

“The native whites felt,” said the correspondent of the New York Times, “that the destinies of the state were safer in the hands of the unlettered Ethiopians than in those of the whites of the body.” “Beyond all question,” was the effusive comment of the Charleston Daily News,

the best men in the convention are the colored members. Considering the influences under which they were called together, and their imperfect acquaintance with parliamentary law, they have displayed, for the most part, remarkable moderation and dignity… . They have assembled neither to pull wires like some, nor to make money like others; but to legislate for the welfare of the race to which they belong.

There were twenty-seven Southern white members of the convention, some of them honest and earnest, and some of them with questionable antecedents. One of them had made up a purse to buy a cane for Brooks, after he had assaulted Sumner; another had assisted in hauling down the Union flag from Fort Sumter; a third had been a slave trader. Among the Northerners were colored and white men of education and character, as well as some adventurers.

To the chagrin of many white onlookers, the convention was not a disorderly group;

the delegates did not create “the Negro bedlam” which tradition has associated with them. President Mackey said that he had “no unpleasant reminiscences of those acrimonious bickerings which, in all deliberative assemblies, are often incidental to the excitement of debate and the attrition of antagonistic minds.”⁹

There was no tendency to insult the white South, and even deference was paid to the defeated Confederate soldiers.

This was in striking contrast to the wild and unscrupulous attacks made by the press upon this convention. Some called the experiment “the maddest, most unscrupulous, and infamous revolution in history,” and said that it was snatching power from the hands of the race that settled the country and transferring it to its former slaves, an “ignorant and feeble race.”

The representative of one paper was expelled from the floor for sneering at the “ringed, striped, and streaked convention.” Other papers received all possible courtesies.

The real basis of opposition to the new régime was economic. Nothing showed this clearer than one fact, and that is that the chief and repeated accusations against the convention and succeeding legislatures was that they were composed of poor men, white and black. The white 47 delegates were said to have paid altogether $761 in annual taxes, of which one conservative paid $508. The total taxes paid by the 74 Negroes were $117, of which a Charleston Negro paid $85. Twenty-three of the whites and fifty-nine of the colored paid no taxes whatever.¹⁰

In a day when property was sacred no matter how secured, and in a state where it had been politically supreme, this attitude was understandable. Yet one wonders just what was expected. Since the great majority of the white people of the state had been kept in ignorance and poverty, and practically all of the Negroes were slaves, whose education was a penal offense, one would hardly expect universal suffrage to put rich men in the legislature. It was singularly to the credit of these voters that poverty was so well represented; it showed certain tendencies toward a dictatorship of the proletariat. The taxpayers’ convention of 1871 frankly proposed to restore the power of property by giving 60,000 taxpayers voting power equal to 90,000 non-taxpayers!

What was the black man thinking and saying in these days? There was abundant evidence of clear and logical thought among his leaders. The South Carolina Negroes approached their new responsibilities with a due sense of difficulty and responsibility.

Beverly Nash, a black ex-slave and member of the constitutional conventin, born in slavery, said:

I believe, my friends and fellow-citizens, we are not prepared for this suffrage. But we can learn. Give a man tools and let him commence to use them, and in time he will learn a trade. So it is with voting. We may not understand it at the start, but in time we shall learn to do our duty… . We recognize the Southern white man as the true friend of the black man. You see upon that banner the words, “United we stand, divided we fall,” and if you could see the scroll of the society that banner represents, you would see the white man and the black man standing with their arms locked together, as the type of friendship and the union which we desire.

It is not our desire to be a discordant element in the community, or to unite the poor against the rich… . The white man has the land, the black man has the labor, and labor is worth nothing without capital. We must help to create that capital by restoring confidence, and we can only secure confidence by electing proper men to fill our public offices.

In these public affairs we must unite with our white fellow-citizens. They tell us that they have been disfranchised, yet we tell the North that we shall never let the halls of Congress be silent until we remove that disability. Can we afford to lose from the councils of state, our first men? Can we spare judges from the bench? Can we put fools or strangers in their positions? No, fellow-citizens, no! gloomy, indeed, would be that day. We want in charge of our interest only our best and ablest men. And then with a strong pull, and a long pull and a pull together, up goes South Carolina.¹¹

Both Sumner and Stevens had encouraged the Negroes of South Carolina to seek sympathetic Southern whites as their leaders, but neither they nor others suggested any plans of union with white labor. White Carolina labor was dumb with absolutely no intelligent leadership except the planters and carpetbaggers.¹²

When the convention opened, ex-Governor Orr was invited to address them. In his speech he stressed the fact that the freedmen needed education, and that they did not represent the intelligence nor wealth of the state, and he recommended limited suffrage, a homestead law and education.

The plight of debtors after the losses and changes of war brought much debate in the constitutional convention. A white delegate advocated a three months’ moratorium on debt collections, and a colored member supported the proposal. But Cardozo, a colored man, and later the Treasurer of the State, said:

I am opposed to the passage of this resolution. The convention should be certain of the constitutionality of their acts. The law of the United States does not allow a state to pass a law impairing the obligations of contracts. This, I think, is therefore a proper subject for the judiciary. I am heartily in favor of relief, but I wish the convention to have nothing to do with the matter.

R. G. DeLarge, a colored delegate, afterward Land Commissioner, said:

It has been said in opposition to this measure, that the proposed legislation was for a certain class; however, no gentlemen can rise and argue that the proposed measure is for the benefit of any specific class. I hold in my hands letters from almost every section of the state addressed to members of the convention, crying out for relief. These letters depict in strong language the impoverished condition of the people, and demand that something should be done to relieve them. I deny in toto that this is a piece of class legislation, and I believe nothing but the zeal of the members who spoke yesterday induced them to speak of it as such. It is simply a request to General Canby to relieve the necessities of a large part of the people of the state. Some members have gone farther, and said it was a shame to keep the freedmen from becoming purchasers and owners of land… .

It has been argued that the execution of the laws compelling the sale of the lands will benefit the poor man by affording him an opportunity to get possession of the lands. That argument, I am confident, cannot be sustained. If they are sold, they will be sold at public sale, and sold in immense tracts, just as they are at present. They will pass into the hands of the merciless speculators, who will never allow the poor man to get an inch without first drawing his life’s blood in payment. The poor freedmen are the poorest of poor and unprepared to purchase lands. The poor whites are not in condition to purchase lands. The facts are, the poor class are clamoring, and their voices have been voiced far beyond the limits of South Carolina, away to the seat of the government, appealing for assistance and relief from actual starvation.

The problem of the land came in for early consideration. The landless, it was felt, should be aided in the acquirement of property and the landed aristocracy discriminated against. It was proposed that congress be petitioned to lend the state one million dollars to be used in the purchase of land for the colored people; that the legislature be required to appoint a land commission; and that homesteads up to a certain value be exempt from the levy of processes.

One must view this action in light of what had taken place with regard to land in South Carolina. When Northern forces captured Port Royal in November, 1861, the Federal authorities took over 195 plantations and employed over 10,000 former slaves in raising cotton. Early in 1862, they imported labor superintendents from the North, and organized the enterprise. In July, 1862, Congress laid a direct tax on the land of the states in rebellion. When the absentee land-holders of Port Royal failed to pay, their plantations were sold at public auction to satisfy a part of the debt of $363,570 which had been imposed upon South Carolina. Considerable other property, which was regarded as abandoned, was seized in Charleston. The lands that were auctioned off were bought largely by Northerners, although a few Negroes who had got hold of a little money from their labor bought certain plantations.

On January 16, 1868, General Sherman issued his celebrated Field Order, Number 15. All the Sea Islands, from Charleston to Port Royal, and adjoining lands to the distance of thirty miles inland, were set aside for the use of the Negroes who had followed his army. General Saxton executed this order, and divided 485,000 acres of land among 40,000 Negroes. They were given, however, only possessory titles, and in the end, the government broke its implied promise and drove them off the land.

In the convention, the whole matter of land for the landless came up for considerable debate. Cardozo said that he did not believe in the confiscation of property, but since slavery was gone, the plantation system must go with it. Whipper, another colored man, was more inclined to protect the interests of the planters, and reminded the members that they were representatives of all classes in the community and not simply of a particular class.

This debate on the economic situation was prolonged. All contracts and liabilities for the purchase of slaves, where the money had not yet been paid, were annulled. J. J. Wright, colored, and later a state Supreme Court judge, said of this measure: “I know it is said by our opponents that we are an unlawful assembly, and that we are an unconstitutional body. I know we are here under the laws of Congress, lawfully called together for the discharge of certain duties, and the repudiation of debts contracted for slaves… .

It is the duty of the convention to do what? It is our duty to destroy all elements of the institution of slavery. If we do not, we recognize the right of property in man.

A homestead law to the value of $1,000 in real estate and $500 in personal property was passed. Rainey declared that Congress would probably never pass an act confiscating the land, but the other colored members, including Ransier, wanted to petition Congress for a loan of a million dollars to purchase land.

A colored delegate said on this matter:

My colleague presented a petition asking the Congress of the United States to appropriate one million dollars for a specific purpose—to purchase homesteads for the people of South Carolina; not the colored people, as the gentleman from Barnwell has attempted to prove, but to all, irrespective of color. He has also attempted to prove that the money cannot be obtained, but has failed to carry conviction to the minds of any of the members. There is plenty of land in the state that can be purchased for two dollars an acre, and one million will buy us five hundred thousand acres; cut this into small farms of twenty acres and we have twenty-five thousand farms. Averaging seven persons to a family that twenty acres can sustain, and we have one hundred and seventy-five thousand persons, men, women and children, who for a million dollars will be furnished means of support; that is, one-fourth of the entire people of the state.

Mr. R. C. DeLarge, colored, continued on the same subject:

There are over one thousand freedmen in this state who, within the last year, purchased lands from the native whites on the same terms. We propose that the government should aid us in the purchase of more lands, to be divided into small tracts and given on the abovementioned credit to homeless families to cultivate for their support. It is well-known that in every district the freedmen are roaming from one side to the other, not because they expect to get land, but because the large landholders are not able to employ them, and will not sell their lands unless the freedmen have the cash to pay for them. These are facts that cannot be contradicted by the gentleman from Barnwell. I know one large landholder in Colleton District who had twenty-one freedmen working for him upon his plantation the entire year. He raised a good crop but the laborers have not succeeded in getting any reimbursement for their labor. They are now roaming to Charleston and back, trying to get remuneration for their services. We propose to give them lands, and to place them in a position by which they will be enabled to sustain themselves.

In doing this, we will add to the depleted treasury of the state, and the large plantation system of the country will be broken up. The large plantation will be divided into small farms, giving support to more people and yielding more taxes to the state. It will bring out the whole resources of the state. I desire it to be distinctly understood that I do not advocate this measure simply for the benefit of my own race.

After much discussion by various white members on the same subject, Mr. F. L. Cardozo, colored, voiced the thought of colored men who demanded that the government furnish land for the freedmen:

The poor freedmen were induced, by many Congressmen even, to expect confiscation. They held out the hope of confiscation. General Sherman did confiscate; gave the lands to the freedmen; and if it were not for President Johnson, they would have them now. The hopes of the freedmen have not been realized, and I do not think that asking for a loan of one million, to be paid by a mortgage upon the land, will be half as bad as has been supposed. I have been told by the Assistant Commissioner that he has been doing on a private scale what this petition proposes. I say every opportunity of helping the colored people should be seized upon. I think the adoption of this measure should be seized upon. We should certainly vote for some measure of relief for the colored men, as we have to the white men who mortgaged their property to perpetuate slavery, and whom they have liberated from their bonds.

Mr. W. J. Whipper, colored, was more conservative, and only wanted protection from immediate monopoly:

The present owners will be compelled before long to sell portions of their land, and sell them to freedmen or whoever can pay for them. But if sold now, they will be sold in large bodies, or large tracts, so that nobody but a capitalist will be able to buy.

This demand for land was characterized as demagoguery by the property holders, but land was, as many speakers suggested, the economic means of raising the level of the electorate. A petition was passed by a great majority, asking Congress to appropriate funds for buying land. But Senator Wilson replied that this was impractical, and the convention, thereupon, created a state commission for buying lands and selling them to the freedmen.

The convention attacked race discrimination squarely. A colored man, Dr. B. F. Randolph, offered the following amendment: “Distinction on account of race or color in any case whatever shall be prohibited, and all classes of citizens, irrespective of race and color, shall enjoy all common, equal, and political privileges.” He said:

It is, doubtless, the impression of the members of the convention that the Bill of Rights as it stands secures perfect political and legal equality to all the people of South Carolina. It is a fact, however, that nowhere is it laid down in the instrument, emphatically and definitely, that all the people of the state, irrespective of race and color, shall enjoy equal privileges. Our forefathers were no doubt antislavery men, and they intended that slavery should die out. Consequently, the word color is not to be found in the Constitution or Declaration of Independence. On the contrary, it stated “all men are created free and equal.” In our Bill of Rights, I want to settle the question forever by making the meaning so plain that a wayfaring man, though a fool, cannot misunderstand it. The majority of the people of South Carolina, who are rapidly becoming property-holders, are colored citizens—the descendants of the African race—who have been ground down by three hundred years of degradation, and now that the opportunity is afforded, let them be protected by their political rights. The words proposed as an amendment were not calculated to create distinction, but to destroy distinction, and since the Bill of Rights did not declare equality, irrespective of race or color, it was important that they should be inserted.

Thus, discriminations of race and color were abolished by the constitution, and practical application was attempted in the case of the public schools, and the militia.

The convention framed the most liberal provisions for the right of suffrage that any of the Southern constitutions provided. They did not attempt, as in Virginia, Alabama, and Mississippi, to restrict the voting of whites further than was provided by the Reconstruction acts. Indeed, Whipper, a colored delegate, wished to petition Congress to remove all political disabilities from the white citizens. In this Cardozo and Nash agreed, and the motion was passed.

Of course, they made no distinction in race and color. The rights of women were enlarged. The property of married women could not be sold for their husbands’ debts, and for the first time in its history, the state was given a divorce law.

Education was discussed at length, and a free common school system voted for.

It is sufficient to say here that for the first time the fundamental law of the state carried the obligation of universal education and demanded the creation of a school system like that of Northern states.¹³

Nothing that the convention did aroused more opposition among property-holding whites. In the first place, as a white woman told a Northern teacher:

“I do assure you that you might as well try to teach your horse or mule to read as to teach these niggers.”¹⁴

In the second place, the whites calculated that the school system would cost $900,000 a year, and that the new taxation would fall upon them.

In the debate on the school system, there was not a moment’s hesitation, but there was considerable difference of opinion as to whether education should be made compulsory or not.

R. C. DeLarge, colored, said in the debate,

The schools may be open to all, but to declare that parents shall send their children to them whether they are willing or not is, in my judgment, going a step beyond the bounds of prudence. Is there any logic or reason in inserting in the constitution a provision which cannot be enforced?

Mr. A. J. Ransier, colored, said,

I am sorry to differ with my colleague from Charleston on this question. I contend that in proportion to the education of the people so is their progress in civilization. Believing this, I believe that the committee has properly provided for the compulsory education of all children in this state between the ages named in the section.

Mr. J. A. Chesnut, colored, spoke on separation in schools:

Has not this convention the right to establish a free school system for the poorer classes? Then if there be a hostile disposition among the whites, an unwillingness to send their children to school, the fault is their own, not ours. Look at the idle youth around us. Is the sight not enough to invigorate every man with a desire to do something to remove this vast weight of ignorance that presses the masses down? I have no desire to curtail the privileges of freedmen, but when we look at the opportunities neglected, even by the whites of South Carolina, I must confess that I am more than ever disposed to compel parents, especially of my own race, to send their children to school. If the whites object to it, let it be so.

Mr. F. L. Cardozo said,

It was argued by some yesterday with some considerable weight that we should do everything in our power to incorporate in the constitution all possible measures that will conciliate those opposed to us. No one would go further in conciliating others than I would. But we should be careful of what we do to conciliate.

In the first place, there is an element that is opposed to us no matter what we do, which will never be conciliated. It is not that they are opposed so much to the constitution we may frame, but they are opposed to us sitting in the convention. Their objection is of such a radical and fundamental nature, that any attempt to frame a constitution to please them would be abortive.

In the next place, there are those who are doubtful; and gentlemen here say if we frame a constitution to suit these parties, they will come over to our side. They are only waiting to see whether or not it will be successful.

Then there is the third class who honestly question our capacity to frame a constitution. I respect that class, and believe if we do justice to them, laying our corner-stone on a sure foundation of republican government and liberal principles, the intelligence of that class will be conciliated, and they are worthy of conciliation.

Before I proceed to discuss the question, I want to divest it of all false issue of the imaginary consequences that some gentlemen have illogically thought will result from the adoption of this section with the word “compulsory.” They affirm that it compels the attendance of both white and colored children in the same schools. There is nothing of the kind in the section. It simply says that all the children shall be educated; but how, it is left with the parents to decide. It is left to the parent to say whether the child should be sent to a public or private school. There can be separate schools for white and colored. It is left so that if any colored child wishes to go to a white school, it shall have the privilege of doing so. I have no doubt, in most localities colored people will prefer separate schools, particularly until some of the present prejudice against their race is removed.

The committee proposed that persons coming of age after 1875 must be able to read and write before voting, but Cardozo opposed it because he said it would take more than ten years and a great deal of money to complete the system, and he wanted to extend the time to 1890. Three other colored members spoke against any qualification, and it was, therefore, stricken out.

To bridge over the interval before the state school system could be installed, Mr. B. F. Randolph, colored, presented the following petition, which was referred to the Committee on Miscellaneous Provisions of the Constitution:We, the undersigned, people of South Carolina, in convention assembled, do hereby recommend that the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands be continued until the restoration of civil authority; that then a Bureau of Education be established, in order that an efficient system of schools be established.

Perhaps the convention’s achievement of greatest permanent importance was the reform of local and judicial administration.¹⁵

Judicial circuits were to be called counties, and some new counties were arranged. A Court of Probate was established in each county, and justices of the peace were given wider jurisdiction. Judges were to be elected, instead of appointed, and in spite of much criticism, the new system worked well. From 1870 to 1877 the Supreme Court was composed of a Negro, a native Southerner, and a Northerner. Its administration was fair and its decisions just. Most of the circuit judges were native whites and honest men. Mixed juries were the rule, and no fault was found with them. They did not hesitate to convict colored prisoners. The trial judges came in for the greatest criticism. Among them were numbers of ignorant and unqualified persons, and there were a good deal of misappropriation of fees and costs. On the other hand, it was difficult to get proper trial judges, because so many qualified whites refused to serve.

Wright, the Negro who was on the Supreme Court, was the first colored man admitted to the bar in Pennsylvania. He had been connected with the Freedmen’s Bureau; then became a member of the constitutional convention, and a state senator. He was elected to the bench in February, 1870, to fill out an unexpired term, and was reelected in December, 1870, for the full term. He resigned under Hampton in August, 1877.

Although he lisped, Wright was a good speaker, decidedly intelligent, and generally said to be the best fitted colored man in the state for the position.

Some reforms were made in the county government. Most of the officers were to be elected by popular vote, and boards of commissioners were ppointed for the highways, and for collection and disbursement of taxes.

Some of the delegates wanted to legislate concerning wages, which caused great indignation among the planters. It was suggested, for instance, that planters be required to pay back wages from the time of the issue of the Emancipation Proclamation, and that the division of one-half of the crop for tenant farmers be made compulsory. Such legislation was inherently just and reasonable but fifty years too early for public opinion in any modern country.

Among other things, the constitution abolished imprisonment for debt, and dueling, and did away with property qualifications, for voting or holding office. The colored members, despite their inexperience, gave evidence, here and there, of care and thrift. For instance, when the question of the pay of members of the convention came up, a discussion arose. Mr. L. S. Langley moved that the pay per diem of $12 in bills receivable be laid on the table. J. J. Wright moved that $10 be inserted. N. G. Parker, white, moved to fix the pay at $11. C. P. Leslie, colored, demurred:

I desire to say a word before that resolution be passed, and be put right on record. I am perfectly willing to receive $3 per day in greenbacks for my services. I think that sum all they are worth, and further, if I got any more, it would be so much more than I have been in the habit of receiving, I might possibly go on a spree and lose the whole of it. Now I ask any of the delegates in this body if they were called upon to pay a similar body of men out of their pockets, how much they would be willing to pay each member. I will stake my existence on it they would not pay more than $1.50 per day to each member. I want to be recorded as always being opposed to a high tariff, but not against any reasonable compensation. But this eight or nine dollars a day, when we consider all the surroundings and conditions of the people, looks too much like a fraud.

The new constitution for South Carolina was adopted by the Convention in April, 1868. It was eventually adopted by the people—70,000 voting for it, 27,000 against it, and 35,000 abstaining.

The constitution was written in good English and was an excellent document,

embodying some of the best legal principles of the age. In letter it was as good as any other constitution the state has ever had, or as most American states had at that time. This assertion is supported by the practical endorsement which a subsequent generation of South Carolinians gave it; the conservative whites were content to live under it for eighteen years after they recovered control of the state government, and when in 1895 they met to make a new constitution, the document they produced had many of the features of the constitution of 1868.¹⁶

It was not, of course, an original document, either in form or wording, but copied largely from Northern state models. But colored men discussed it, amended it, and voted for its adoption. They shared in the capacity and thought that made it.

A convention of whites held in Columbia April 2, condemned the constitution, as

“the work of sixty-odd Negroes, many of them ignorant and depraved, together with fifty white men, outcasts of Northern society, and Southern renegades, betrayers of their race and country.” Its franchise provisions were declared to be designed to further the ambitions of “mean whites”; its judicial system “repugnant to our customs and habits of thought”; the homestead provision “a snare and deceit”; and “the stupendous school arrangement” “a fruitful source of peculant corruption.”

Here spoke Capital, Land and Privilege against white and black labor.

In the spring of 1868, the Fairfield Herald declared the Revolution “the maddest, most unscrupulous and infamous revolution in history,” which “has snatched the power from the hands of the race which settled the country… and transferred it to its former slaves, an ignorant and feeble race.”¹⁷

Indeed, the criticism here was just as boundless and intemperate as that directed later toward the expenditures of the legislature, only in this case, we have the evidence of the constitution itself to show how excellent a document it was.

The economic revolution which Reconstruction involved overshadowed and guided all thought and action. Usury laws had been repealed by the planters in 1866, and rates of interest rose to 25 and 30 per cent. Banks commonly charged from 18 to 24 per cent. The owners of land and property, the persons of intelligence and social prestige, despite their partial impoverishment of the war, were strong and well-organized. They put the whole blame on abolition of slavery, enfranchisement of labor, and refusal of black men to work under essentially the same conditions as formerly. But colored Congressman Rainey of South Carolina well said in the 42nd Congress:

If the country there is impoverished, it has certainly not been caused by the fault of those who love the Union, but it is simply the result of a disastrous war madly waged against the best Government known to the world. The murder of unarmed men and the maltreating of helpless women can never make restitution for the losses which are the simple inevitable consequence of the rebellion. The faithfulness of my race during the entire war, in supporting and protecting the families of their masters, speaks volumes in their behalf as to the real kindliness of their feelings toward the white people of the South.¹⁸

South Carolina property had been valued in 1860 at $489,319,218. All the capital in slaves was lost, but the remainder was $278,116,128. This shrank to $90,888,436 in 1866. In 1870, the property of South Carolina was assessed at $183,913,337. Besides this, millions were lost in bank stocks, endowments, and investments. One newspaper estimated that the gross property values shrank from $400,000,000 in 1860 to $50,000,000 in 1865. Of course, much of this was guesswork. The values of 1860 were inflated; the values of 1865-1870, perhaps unduly depressed. The builders of the new state wanted to make taxes uniform and, therefore, provided for a revaluation of lands and improvements. A committee was appointed to investigate the financial status, and the new school system, which was expected to be the largest item of expense (a splendid commentary upon the new spirit which had arisen in the state), was guaranteed an annual levy on all property and a poll tax. The property holders wanted to limit state indebtedness and prevent the legislature from extending credit to private corporations, but these suggestions were not approved of. The convention had a vision of prosperity, and they wanted railroads, schools, and poorhouses, and a distribution of land.

“In a progressive age,” said Judge Wright, “the legislature must do its part, and the responsibility of that body to the people was sufficient check against extravagance.”¹⁹

A committee of property holders was alarmed, and estimated that it would cost $2,230,950 annually to run the state, instead of $350,000, which had sufficed before the war. This was true, but when later the expenditure of the state reached this sum, these same people complained that the expenditure must on its face be fraudulent.

Singularly enough, it is conveniently forgotten that a good proportion of the white officials of South Carolina during Reconstruction were not Northerners, but Southerners, and several of them had served in the Confederate army. Moses, who became Governor; Robertson, United States Senator; and Neagle, Comptroller and former Confederate officer, were Southern white men. Bowen, a Congressman, while born in the North, had lived in Georgia before the war, and served as captain in the Confederate army. Of the white Northerners, Chamberlain, shrewd and able, but not over-scrupulous, was the leader. Among the others were Scott, well-meaning but not a strong governor; the pliable Parker, inefficient State Treasurer; and Patterson, who bribed his way to defeat a Negro for the United States Senate.

The first governor, under the new régime, was Robert K. Scott, born in Pennsylvania, a colonel of Union troops during the war, and assistant commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Scott faced great difficulties, and is generally conceded to have been a well-meaning man. A well-born native Southern white was Franklin J. Moses, Jr. His father had been a prominent South Carolinian, Senator before the war, and was respected by all people. Moses married the daughter of a distinguished Southerner; was private secretary to one of the former Governors, and became a lawyer and an editor in favor of Johnson’s Reconstruction. When the Reconstruction acts were passed he went over to the side of the carpetbaggers and Negroes; he took a prominent part in the constitutional convention, and afterward became Speaker of the House, and in 1872, Governor. He was denounced as unscrupulous and dishonest, and extravagant in his manner of living.

The colored leaders formed a very interesting group. Francis L. Cardozo was free-born of Negro, Jewish and Indian descent. He was educated at the University of Glasgow, and in London, and went to New Haven, where he served as a Presbyterian minister. After the war, he came to Charleston and was Principal of Avery Institute. He was secretary of state during 1868-1872, and treasurer of the state during 1872-1876. He was a handsome, well-groomed man, with cultivated manners, and honest in official life. He was accused in several instances, but no dishonest act was ever proven against him.

Joseph H. Rainey was the first Negro to represent South Carolina in the House of Representatives. Robert Brown Elliott, born in Massachusetts, was educated at Eton College, in England. He was a firstrate lawyer; served in the legislature, and was twice elected to Congress. He had a commanding presence, and a fine gift of oratory. Richard A. Cain was a leader, and afterward bishop in the A. M. E. Church. His paper, The Missionary Record, was the most influential Negro paper in South Carolina. He served in the Senate and two terms in Congress. Robert C. DeLarge was a tailor from Charleston, and had been an agent in the Freedmen’s Bureau. He served in the legislature, and while his education was limited, he had large influence. Beverly Nash had been a slave before the war, and afterward a waiter. When grown he learned to read and write, and became an earnest and hard-working leader.

Alonzo J. Ransier was elected lieutenant-governor in 1870. He was a free Negro, and became a member of the constitutional convention of the legislature, and auditor of Charleston County. In 1872, he went to Congress. He made a good presiding officer of the state senate, being dignified and alert. Richard H. Gleaves was lieutenant-governor in 1872-1876. He was from Pennsylvania, and had acted as probate judge. He was intelligent and knew parliamentary law. Samuel J. Lee was a Negro Speaker of the House, in 1872-1874. He was born in the state, worked as a farmer and laborer in lumber mills, and was self-educated. He was polished and a good lawyer. Stephen A. Swailes, a colored man of Pennsylvania, was a Union soldier, and school-teacher. He became a senator, and was known for his integrity and ability as a speaker. Robert Smalls was the one who stole the Confederate ship Planter and delivered it to the Union authorities. He was self-educated and popular. He was a member of Congress until after Reconstruction. These men were all poor and doubtless some of them accepted bribes and shared in graft. But very few of them were thoroughly venal or purchasable against their convictions. When it came to personal favors or sharing in gifts and gains which followed legislation of which they honestly approved, some of them were certainly approachable.

Negroes were conspicuous members of the legislatures.

There was a large proportion of former slaves, and at first perhaps two-thirds of them could not write, but by 1871, most of them had learned at least to read and write. Many of them were speakers of force and eloquence, while others were silent or crude. In the Senate, it was said that some of the colored members spoke exceedingly well, with great ease and grace of manners. Others, were awkward and coarse.²⁰

One observer recorded that

The President of the Senate and the Speaker of the House, both colored, were elegant and accomplished men, highly educated, who would have creditably presided over any commonwealth’s legislative assembly.

The majority of the voters of the state were Negroes, and in every session but one that race had a majority in the legislature. They out-numbered, and in many cases outshone, their carpetbag and scalawag contemporaries.²¹

In the first legislature there were 127 members, of whom 87 were colored, and 40 white. According to the available figures, the composition of Reconstruction legislatures in South Carolina seems to have been as follows²²:

It will be seen from these figures that the white members of the legislature, from their control of the Senate, were always able to block Negro legislators; and that Negro control of the legislature was only possible because most of the white Senators voted with the Negroes. In the legislature of 1874, the whites had a majority in both Houses. It can hardly be said, therefore, that the Negroes of South Carolina had absolute control of the state at any time.

The economic status of the legislature of 1870-1871 is shown by their given occupations: 10 lawyers, 31 farmers, 9 physicians, 17 clergymen, 12 teachers, 16 planters, 13 merchants, 3 merchant tailors, 3 clerks, 2 masons, 8 builders, 1 engineer, 1 marble dealer, 8 carpenters, 2 hotel keepers, 1 druggist, 1 bookkeeper, 1 wheelwright, 4 coachmakers, 1 tanner, 2 mechanics, 1 chemist, 1 auditor, 1 hatter, 1 blacksmith, 1 tailor.

The state sent seven Negroes to Congress; made two of them lieutenant-governors; and for four years, two of them were speakers of the House. One was secretary of state and treasurer of the state. Another was adjutant and inspector general. These men were of various colors and mixtures of blood, and there was a good deal of difference of opinion, as to whether the mulattoes or the full-blooded blacks were superior. But one observer asserted that “the colored men generally were superior in decency and ability to the majority of the native white Radical legislators.”²³ And another said that “the quadroons and octoroons of the Senate are infinitely superior in personal appearance to their white Yankee and native compeers.”²⁴

Most of these men had been slaves, although a few of them were well-educated. They had ability, and in some cases, more than ordinary ability. But above all, they were in the midst of a mighty social and economic change, and were swayed by the social and political revolution around them. “The bottom rail was on the top,” and the former ruling oligarchy was now displaced by those who represented neither the wealth nor the traditions of the state.

The bitterness of this campaign against the Reconstruction governments was almost inconceivable.

One unfamiliar with the situation would think the editors and their correspondents had gone crazy with anger or were obsessed with some fearful mania, so great was the ridicule, contempt, and obloquy showered upon the representatives of the state. With the deepest scorn for a scalawag, with all the Southern hatred for an adventuring Yankee, and with either sympathy or shame for the ignorant, misled Negro, the press, the aristocracy, the poor whites, the up-country, the low-country—all with one voice protested against the “unlawful assembly” in Columbia maintained in power, they said, by the Federal bayonet. The Fairfield Herald battled against the hell-born policy which has trampled the fairest and noblest States of our great sisterhood beneath the unholy hoofs of African savages and shoulder-strapped brigands—the policy which has given up millions of our free-born, high-souled brethren and sisters, countrymen and country-women of Washington, Rutledge, Marion, and Lee, to the rule of gibbering, louse-eaten, devil-worshiping barbarians, from the jungles of Dahomey, and peripatetic buccaneers from Cape Cod, Memphremagog, Hell, and Boston.²⁵

A new system of taxation came in with the Reconstruction government. It provided for a uniform rate of assessment on all property at its full value. This was a departure from the system previous to the war, which put a low valuation on land and slaves and heavy taxation on merchants, professions and banking. The merchant before the war paid five or six times as great a rate of taxation as the planter. In 1859, the total tax value of lands in the state was $10,257,000, while lots and buildings in Charleston were valued at $22,274,000. The tax on all the land of the state averaged less than five cents an acre in 1860. When the new system came in, it was difficult to find persons to administer it and every landholder objected to it.

The new system met all sorts of opposition from unsympathetic administrators and the newspapers of the state. Governor Scott expected $300,000,000 worth of property as a basis of taxation, but less than $115,000,000 were returned. This the Board of Equalization raised to $180,000,000. As the assessments decreased, the rate of taxation increased.

The total assessment in 1869 was $181,000,000, and in 1877, under Hampton, $101,000,000. As the average rate of taxes rose, the property holders said that the Negro government wanted to raise taxes so as to confiscate the land.

The new government could not collect the tax levied. It met an organized and bitter boycott of property. In 1868, $175,688 of assessed tax was uncollected; in 1869, $248,165, and in 1870, $524,026—a total of nearly a million dollars in three years. Part of this delinquency was due to real poverty; but part was due to deliberate obstruction on the part of property holders. Taxation had to be increased to cover delinquency and to meet new expenses. In 1860, taxation on a half billion of property was $1,280,383; in 1870, $2,767,675 was assessed on $183,000,000. The increase of taxation was partly accounted for by gradually increased expenditures for education, construction, and charitable institutions.

At the same time, the inflation of the currency makes comparison with conditions previous to the war difficult. More money was certainly raised by the state during Reconstruction. But, on the other hand, a much larger proportion of the expenditures was designed to aid the laboring poor, and did aid them largely. Indeed, it might have changed the whole economic position of the proletariat if it had been efficiently and honestly expended.

In the legislature in 1868, the free common school system was organized temporarily, and permanently in 1870. Relief was extended to various classes of citizens, especially poor laborers. In 1868 and 1869, an act was passed providing for a land commissioner, who was to act under a board. Land was to be purchased in various parts of the state, and was to be sold in plots of not less than twenty-five and not more than one hundred acres to actual settlers. Two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of bonds were provided to finance this proposal, and later this was increased to $500,000. The land commissioner was to hold office at the pleasure of an Advisory Board, consisting of chief state officers.

One of the chief sources of corruption in nearly all the reconstructed states was railroad building. And the reasons for this are easily misconceived because of the changed economic status of railroads today. It must be remembered that at the beginning throughout the country and the world, the railroad was a public highway, and for this reason a public enterprise toward whose building and maintenance the public rightly contributed. It was only after the railroad was built and established by public funds, that private interests monopolized it and sequestered its income to make individual millionaires.

In the South, the railroads had lagged. The planters would not submit to public taxation, and they would not divert funds from their private luxury consumption, in order to furnish capital. South Carolina was particularly a case in point. Charleston, by all rules of commerce, should have been one of the great ports of the United States. It was a gateway to the West; it should have at least connected its own uplands with the coast, and it might have tapped the West through Cincinnati, and the great cotton belt through the Southern South. But efforts toward this end before the war had but small success.

It was perfectly natural that the first thought of those who were reconstructing the state should turn toward railroad building as a means of economic rehabilitation. The usual method was the old one of loaning credit of the state. It meant, not that the state invested money, but simply that the state permitted the issue of bonds and guaranteed the payment of interest and principal. On a sound economic proposition, conducted by honest men, this was simply a way of securing private capital for a semi-public enterprise, which would greatly increase the prosperity of the state.

Railway mileage in South Carolina had increased from 289 to 973, between 1850-1860. By 1865, there were 1,007 miles. Then construction practically stopped, and effort was turned toward rebuilding the railroads and giving them new equipment.

The difficulty was that a flock of cormorants whose business was cheating and manipulation in the issue and sale of bonds and other certificates of enterprise, moved first West and then South, and took charge of railroad promotion. They were largely Northern financiers, in some cases already discredited in the centers of finance and driven out of the overworked investment fields North and West. They came South with an address and a technique which only trained, experienced, and honest administrators could have withstood. They flaunted the chances of quick and easy money before the faces of ruined planters, small Northern investors, and the few Negroes who had some little capital. The result was widespread graft, debt and corruption in South Carolina and North Carolina, in Florida and Georgia, in Louisiana, and in other states.

There was, however, in the reorganization, for instance, of the Greenville and Columbia Railroad, nothing worse than the ordinary stock-jobbing enterprise common all over the nation; and prominent Southerners, like ex-Governor Orr and J. P. Reed, were concerned in it. Instead of concentrating efforts on the rebuilding of the railroad and its equipment, most of the time and energy was spent in seeking to market stock in New York. This failed and the road was bankrupt by the end of the Reconstruction era, just as it was at the beginning.

In the same way, the Blue Ridge road, backed not only by carpetbaggers but by leading white Southerners, was prostrate after the war and sued for state aid. The legislature authorized aid in 1868, but the contract for rebuilding demanded much more money than the bonds provided for. Eventually the road was sold to a private company composed as usual not only of carpetbaggers but of planters. Matters were so manipulated that a state contingent liability of $4,000,000 of bonds was transmuted into an actual state indebtedness of $1,800,000. Again little was done actually to restore the road, and the company went into bankruptcy.

Thus in most cases, bankrupt corporations bequeathed to the Reconstruction régime by ante-bellum organizers, came before the Legislature to secure capital for rebuilding, and then fell into the hands of speculators who tried to make money out of the stock, rather than out of the rebuilding of the road; and these speculators were largely men trained in shady finance in Wall Street, and helped by much of the best element of the Southerners in South Carolina, as well as by the new carpetbag capitalists.

This was a difficult situation, calling for blame and criticism, but to place the blame of it mainly upon the Negro voter and the Negro laborer is a fantastic distortion of the truth. The money misused went primarily to Northern promoters and Southern white administrators. And while, of course, a poverty-stricken electorate was gripped and bribed by such organized thieves, the remedy for this was not the disfranchisement of labor but its education, and such an increased share of the product of industry as to make life livable, without theft or sale of soul.

The appropriations to meet the new expenses had to grow. The fact is that South Carolina had been a state absolutely dominated by landed property. It is said that the ante-bellum state was ruled by 180 great landlords. They had made the functions of the state just as few as possible, and did by private law and on private plantations most of the things which in other states were carried on by the local and state governments. The economic revolution, therefore, which universal suffrage envisaged for this state, was perhaps greater than in any other Southern state. It was for this reason that the right of the masses to vote was so bitterly assailed, and expenditures for the new functions of the state denounced as waste and extravagance.

The result of all this had to be increased taxation. The rate of taxation in 1868-1872 was 9 mills; in 1872-1876 over 11 mills. Yet this was excessive only by comparison with the past and because of recent severe losses. In Northern states, like Illinois, Massachusetts, New York and Pennsylvania, the average was 21½ mills on the dollar.

The grip of poverty was on the South and poverty always is felt most poignantly by those to whom poverty has been unknown. The planters, used to ease and a certain degree of luxury, were the ones that felt the new poverty as a terrible, heaven-shattering thing. They looked upon any action as justifiable if it restored to them the income which they had lost.

On the other hand, both the poor whites and the Negroes were not only poverty-stricken, but, for that reason, peculiarly susceptible to petty graft and bribery. Economically, they had always been stripped bare; a little cash was a curiosity, and a few dollars a fortune. The sale of their votes and political influence was therefore, from the first, simply a matter of their knowledge and conception of what the vote was for and what it could procure. With experience, their conception of its value rose until some of them conceived the idea of making the ballot a power by which they could change their social and economic status, and live like human beings. But before most of them rose to this conception, there were thousands to whom their vote and petty office-holding were simply a means of adding to their small incomes. And when one considers that this was a day when the line between using political power for personal advantage and using it for social uplift was dim and difficult to follow throughout the whole nation, the wonder is that the labor vote of South Carolina so easily ranged itself behind the new school system, the orphanages, the land distribution, and the movements toward reform in public efficiency.

The ascendancy of property over labor and the suffrage was in this day openly maintained by bribery, and if this had been uncommon in the pre-war South, it was simply because universal suffrage had not been established and capital ruled by social sanction rather than by money. In the new situation, property began systematically to attack labor in two ways: First, it deliberately encouraged extravagance, graft and bribery, so as to hasten the downfall of the labor régime. And secondly, it utterly upset the credit of the state, so as to prevent the new state from importing capital.

The failure of taxation to raise the required revenue compelled the state to borrow, and here it fell into the hands of Northern money sharks and Southern repudiators. The state debt October 1, 1867, was $8,378,255. The Constitutional Convention of 1868 repudiated $3,000,000 of this as a Confederate debt, and made the total debt $5,407,306. From this beginning, the state debt increased to $10,665,908 in 1871, while committees claimed that there was evidence of total liabilities outstanding to the amount of 15 or even 30 millions.

The exact amount of the debt was not known; the figures from the reports of the treasurer, comptroller-general, and financial agent did not agree; and it was claimed by the opposition press and even by some of the state officials that there were large issues of fraudulent bonds on the market, and that certain of the state officials had profited thereby.

While the Conservative press continually reviled the Radical government, on no topic was it so prolific or bitter as that of finances and taxation.²⁶

The total debt, bonded and contingent, seems to have been:

In this case, the total indebtedness in 1871 is not clear. The Governor’s report makes it a little less than twelve million, but the investigation committee insists that because the state government had printed and issued certain bonds, the amount of which was not definitely known, it was possible that the state might eventually be liable for thirty million dollars.

This did not mean, as many assume, that the state officials received or squandered any such sums. The methods by which small amounts of actual cash received became a paper debt of huge amounts is explained in the Governor’s special message of January 9, 1865.

In the fall of 1868, I visited New York City for the purpose of borrowing money on the credit of the state on coupon bonds, under the provisions of the acts of August 26, 1868. I had the assistance of Mr. H. H. Kimpton, United States Senator F. A. Sawyer, and Mr. George S. Cameron. I called at several of the most prominent banking houses to effect the negotiation of the required loan, and they refused to advance any money upon our state securities, for those securities had been already branded with the threat of a speedy repudiation by the political opponents of the administration, who have ever since howled the same cry against the state credit. As the persons who made this threat controlled the press of the state, they were enabled to impress capitalists abroad with the false idea of a speedy reaction that would soon place them again in authority.

As the capitalists well knew that these persons when in power in 1862 did repudiate their debts due Northern creditors, their distrust of our bonds was very natural and apparently well-founded. It soon became evident to every man familiar with our financial standing in New York that to negotiate the loan authorized, the question was not what we would take for the bonds, but what we could get for them. After much effort, and the most judicious management, I succeeded in borrowing money, through Mr. Cameron, at the rate of four dollars in bonds for one dollar in currency, the bonds being rated at 75 per cent below their par value, or at 25 cents on the dollar. This loan, however, was only effected at the extravagant rate of 1½ per cent per month, or 18 per cent a year—a rate only demanded on the most doubtful paper, to cover what is deemed a great risk—for the money loaned.

Subsequent loans were effected at a higher valuation of the bonds, but at the rates of interest varying from 15 to 20 per cent, in addition to commissions necessarily to be paid the financial agent. If, then, $3,200,000 in money has cost the state $9,514,000 in bonds, it does not, therefore, follow that the financial board has criminally conspired against the credit of the state, and still less, that any one member of the board can justly be held up to public execration or stigmatized by an accusation of “high crimes and misdemeanors” for the assumed results of its action. It is proper that I should add that the armed violence which has prevailed in this state for the past three years has had upon our bonds the same effect as actual war in lessening their purchasing-value, as money is dearer in war than in peace. Ku-Kluxism made capitalists shrink from touching the bonds of this state, as a man would shrink from touching a pestilential body.²⁷

If there were outstanding in 1874 twenty or even thirty millions of evidences of debt, it is unlikely that this represented more than ten millions in actual cash delivered, and all monies collected and paid beyond that were not the stealing necessarily of South Carolinians, white or black, but the financial graft of Wall Street and its agents, made possible by the slander and reaction of the planters.

The rise of a group of a people is not a simultaneous shift of the whole mass; it is a continuous differentiation of individuals with inner strife and differences of opinion, so that individuals, groups and classes begin to appear seeking higher levels, groping for better ways, uniting with other like-minded bodies and movements. Every indication of this was present among Negroes during Reconstruction times. There was not a single reform movement, a single step toward protest, a single experiment for betterment in which Negroes were not found in varying numbers. The protest against corruption and inefficiency in South Carolina had in every case Negro adherents and in many cases Negro leaders.

The responsibility of Negroes for the government of South Carolina in Reconstruction was necessarily limited. They helped choose the elected officials and furnished a large number of the members of the legislature. But most of the administrative power was in the hands of the whites, and these were either Northerners, who had come South as officers or officials or to invest money, or native Southerners, both aristocrats and poor whites, who had undertaken to guide the Negro vote.

As a majority of the electorate, Negroes were responsible for the officials elected, but their choice was limited. They had among themselves a few notable leaders, some educated in the North, a few educated Southern Negroes, and other Southern Negroes with little formal education, but much hard sense.

Three groups gradually formed themselves among the whites, those like General Orr, who represented the planters and who were willing to accept Negro suffrage as a fact; others, like Wade Hampton, proposed to control the Negro vote, but to control it in the interest of the planters, and eventually to limit it in various ways. Then, there was a third party led by men like B. F. Perry, who wanted to exclude the Negro entirely from the ballot and do this as soon as possible, frankly on lines of race and color.

Perry feared a union of poor whites and Negroes, and saw in this a menace of proletarian revolution and an attack on property.

I greatly fear there are many white persons in South Carolina who will vote for a convention under the hope of its repudiating the indebtedness of the state. This class may influence the Negro vote to unite with them, and then, in return, they can unite with the Negro in parceling out the lands of the state. One step leads to another: stay-law first—repudiation next; and then follows a division of lands and an equal appropriation of property amongst all persons. And last of all, the honest, hardworking, industrious, and prudent class must support the idle, dissipated, extravagant and roguish class.²⁸

It was this last group that eventually dominated and transported to South Carolina the “Mississippi plan” of overthrowing the Negro vote by brute force.

The path of black leaders under these circumstances was exceedingly difficult. Many Negroes of importance, such as Rainey, Lomax and King, openly attacked the course of Republican administration. R. H. King formed a Negro reform movement and said: “We would favor to send to the legislature honest mechanics and farmers whose minds are not biased by chicanery, at any rate, have honest men who are identified with prosperity and the people’s interest.” But on the other hand, most Negroes were afraid of combination with the white planters, who clearly would disfranchise them if they had the chance.

As the state debt increased, a taxpayers’ convention met in Columbia in May, 1871, with thirty counties represented and a few Negro delegates. It protested against the increase in the public debt and the high taxation, and attacked the financial legislation. It warned persons not to buy bonds or obligations issued by the present state government because the property holders were not adequately represented in the legislature. Several Negroes were members of this convention, and the same year leading Negroes, including DeLarge, Nash and Robert Smalls, tried to form a new political party. It was admitted that there were abuses which needed reformation, but, on the whole, the Republican party was gratified at the result of the taxpayers’ convention. A Joint Committee of the legislature made an examination of the financial condition of the state in 1871. This extended over several months. It declared that the total bonded debt of the state was $15,767,908.

This Joint Committee denounced the state officials, the Land Commission and the Financial Agent. An attempt was made to impeach Scott and Parker, the treasurer, and it was charged that they bribed members of the legislature to stop the proceedings. In this way, doubt was spread upon the validity of much of the bonded debt, and the credit of the state was almost entirely destroyed. There was no money in the Treasury and no way of meeting expenses. Northern capitalists were warned repeatedly about taking the bonds.

With all this went undoubted efforts to improve the state; an orphan asylum was authorized in 1869, the poor of the state were provided for in 1870; and this system was kept after the whites came into power. An institution for the deaf, dumb and blind was started in 1871. It lasted until 1873, and then the faculty resigned because they were ordered to accept colored students. A lunatic asylum was provided and colored patients admitted.

Casting aside all questions of race and forgetting temporarily its setting among a severely defeated and hostile people, but bearing in mind the uniqueness of this new experiment, an experiment of universal education among persons unaccustomed to such, this free public school system, and this relief for unfortunates, transformed the rôle of the poor whites in the educational and political history of South Carolina, and inculcated in the hearts of the blacks a vision which the citizenry of the world must admire.²⁹

In 1872, the Republican party split; Moses ran for Governor, while the reform Republicans nominated Chamberlain. Negroes were on both tickets. Moses, a white Southerner with aristocratic connections, won and his administration was the most corrupt of the Reconstruction period. Negroes were alarmed and despite the risk to their status, turned toward reform. They saw that it was not enough to vote, they must exercise greater control over administration of affairs.

Moses was eventually criminally indicted while in office, but he escaped conviction on a technical point.

Since his retirement from executive cares, ex-Governor Moses’ adventures and financial exploits in Northern cities have furnished the local reporters of police courts with not a few disgraceful items. Had it not been for the Southern men of this and the Swepson type—men of high social standing (and they were in every reconstructed state), the Northern adventurers would have been far less successful in their spoliations.³⁰

A second taxpayers’ convention met in February, 1874. The legislature replied to its charges, that the cost of government had increased only 38 cents per capita. It said that appropriations for schools, lunatic asylums, penitentiaries and orphan asylums had been increased, while the public debt had been increased only about $5,000,000; and that the taxpayers’ convention was composed of the former ruling class which wanted to regain power.

The effort of Negroes at reform was severely and definitely handicapped by the attitude of the whites. If they joined with the whites in reform, they joined a party which was more and more determined to disfranchise them and eliminate them from public life, and impoverish them in economic life. It was this consideration that kept leaders like Elliott and Cardozo fighting within their own party, because they saw only in the Republican party any protection for their rights, and they believed that the matter of Negro suffrage and economic progress was more important than even the driving out of the grafters and inefficient politicians.

It was a difficult and desperate alternative, but they saw no way out. Even when reform movements under Chamberlain began, Negroes were apprehensive. Reform was in sight. In 1874, progressive and intelligent leaders of the party, including many of the colored leaders, elected D. H. Chamberlain as Governor, and the reforms which he inaugurated and carried through were attested by the white people of the state. The Charleston News and Courier said: “He stands like a wall of granite between an obstinate people and those who seek by a foul move to rob them.” The Charlotte Observer called him “a model Governor.” The Grange, 1875, declares: “He was fulfilling the pledges made alike to Conservative and Republican.” The Barnwell Sentinel said that “the Governor will support no measure or policy that does not tend to advance the interest of South Carolina.” A public meeting in Charleston gave him thanks “for the bold and statesmanlike struggle he has made in the cause of reform and the economic administration of the government.” The News and Courier in June says: “By supporting Mr. Chamberlain, the whole country will secure without revolution a government in every way satisfactory.”³¹

The Chamberlain reforms consisted in retrenchment of the annual expenses of the state by nearly $2,000,000, and in an attempt to drive out the grafters who had been robbing the state. Many leading Negroes supported him, but others did not. Those who would not, like Elliott, had no confidence in the white Southerners behind him.

Here was a chance for white Carolina to unite with the progressive Northerners and Negroes, and usher in honest and efficient government, without disturbing the right of black men to vote, and the right of labor to strive through universal suffrage for its interests. When some Negro leaders refused to follow Chamberlain, this was from no opposition to reform. It was because they saw Chamberlain surrendering in many respects to those white elements in the state who were pledged to degrade Negroes, and who were using reform as a stepping stone and an excuse for disfranchisement. It was a cruel dilemma, but their fears and suspicions proved true.

The colored Speaker of the House in 1874 said of the colored voters:

We, as a people, are blameless of misgovernment. It is owing to bad men, adventurers, persons who, after having reaped millions almost from our party, turn traitors and stab us in the dark. Ingratitude is the worst of crimes, and yet the men we have fostered, the men we have elevated and made rich, now speak of our corruption and venality, and charge us with every conceivable crime.³²

Independent Radicals met October 2, 1874, and nominated John T. Green and Martin R. Delany as Governor and Lieutenant-Governor. They said:

We cordially invite the whole people of the State to support the nominees of the Convention as the only means of preserving their common interests—especially requesting the Conservatives that have persistently declared that their desire was only for good government without regard to partisan politics, to support the independents.³³

Colored Congressman Ransier of South Carolina said in his speech at Charleston, March 9, 1871:

I am no apologist for thieves; for if I were, I do not think I would have occupied for so long a time a place in your confidence. On the contrary, I am in favor of a most thorough investigation of the official conduct of any and every public officer in connection with the discharge of whose duties there is anything like well-grounded suspicion; and to this effect have I spoken time and again. Nor am I lukewarm on the subject of better government in South Carolina than that which seems to be bearing heavily on all classes and conditions of society today. Still, recognizing that which I believe to be true, that such is the determined opposition to the Republican Party and its doctrines by our opponents that no administration of our affairs, however honest, just and economical, would satisfy any considerable portion of the Democratic masses in the State of South Carolina, and satisfied that the principles and policy of the great Republican Party to which I belong are best adapted for the promotion of good government to all classes of men, our party leaders should be judicious in dealing with the situation… .

And, again, when you are called upon in your primary meetings in your county and State nominating conventions, let each man act as if, by his individual vote, he could wipe out the odium resting upon our party, and help to remove the evils that afflict us at present. Let him feel, black or white, that the country holds him responsible for the shortcomings of his party, and that it demands of him the elevation to public positions of men who are above suspicion. Let each man feel that upon him individually rests the work of reform; let each man feel that he is responsible for every dollar of the public money fraudulently used; for every schoolhouse closed against his children; for every dollar of taxation in excess of the reasonable and legitimate expenses of the State; in short, let every man feel that society at large will hold him and the party accountable for every misdeed in the administration of government, and will credit him with every honest effort in the interest of the people, and in the interest of good government, whereby the community as a whole is best protected and the equal rights of all guaranteed and made safe… .³⁴

The curious charge is often made that Negroes devoted all their energies to politics. Had this been true their labor could never have restored the cotton crop, the naval stores industry and the whole economic fabric in the state. In their fight they sought to use not only political but other economic weapons. The pressure for land and the taxation of landholders gradually yielded results.

By 1880 the 33,000 plantations of 1860 were divided among 93,000 small farmers.³⁵

In 1866, the Charleston branch of the Freedmen’s Bank had deposits of $18,000; in 1870, $165,000, and in 1873, $350,000 belonged to 5,500 depositors, showing that this was the savings of the poor and not the capital of the petty bourgeois. Only about 200 of the depositors were white. The colored people had accounts ranging from 5 cents to $1,000. When the bank failed in 1874, the Charleston branch owed 5,296 depositors a total of $253,168. The Beaufort branch owed 1,200 depositors $77,216.

A Negro labor movement began. In November, 1869, a state labor convention met in Columbia, with Robert B. Elliott as President. They asked for one-half share of the crop for farm laborers, or a stated wage of seventy cents to one dollar a day. They demanded a commissioner to supervise labor contracts, reduce rates, and stop the postponement of suits to recover portions of crops due for services. They tried to secure laws to prevent the discharge of laborers before they were paid, or the removal of crops before satisfactory settlement. They objected to the working of plantations by gangs, and wished to lease farms.

There were serious labor difficulties in 1876, through a strike of farm laborers in Colleton County; they threatened to destroy the crops of the planters. Another strike occurred in the rice fields of Buford County, where 200 Negroes at harvest time demanded an advance of 50 per cent in wages. They imprisoned scabs in the out-houses, and overpowered a sheriff and his posse; but the Governor sent the colored leader, Robert Smalls, with a company of militia, and the mob was dispersed.

I inquired whether the black laborers have shown any disposition to violent outbreaks such as have occurred in several West Indies islands, but I could only hear of one such case, when the hired laborers in some of the rice-plantations of South Carolina struck for wages, and used much violence toward non-strikers, hunting them about with whips. The whites attempting to apprehend the rioters were mobbed, and the affair at one time looked very serious; but, by the aid of influential black politicians, the matter was accommodated, and the laborers have since worked well and quietly. I am told that though in their immediate demands the blacks were in the wrong, they had much ground of complaint, owing to the practice of some of the employers, who not being able to pay the wages earned and due, put the laborers off with checks upon stores kept on the truck principle.³⁶

One of the best Negro unions was the Longshoremen’s Protective Association of Charleston. In 1875 it was described as “the most powerful organization of the colored laboring class in South Carolina.” Five hundred of its eight hundred members held an “exceedingly creditable” parade, with members well-dressed and good-looking. It had successfully conducted a number of strikes, and it was the most successful labor union among Negroes.

Under exceedingly difficult circumstances, and handicapped by their necessary ignorance and lack of experience, often deliberately misled, both by Northerners and Southerners, planters and poor whites, the Negroes, in legislation and in self-control, had made an excellent record. The group control exercised by the South Carolina Negroes was remarkable. Their leadership distinctly showed more ability and character than that of either the carpetbaggers or the scalawags.

It is interesting to remember that the Negro officials repeatedly were commended by various papers and persons in South Carolina. Charles M. Wilder, postmaster of Columbia, was commended in the Daily News, April 13, 1869, as a man “well-known” and “universally respected.” The Courier said January 25, 1869, that R. C. DeLarge spoke “ably and logically,” and that Elliott spoke “ably.” December 2, 1869, the Courier gave prominence to the opinion of Judge Woodland of Pennsylvania, a member of Congress, who received a very favorable impression of Robert Brown Elliott, and regarded him “as the ablest man in the legislature.” The Daily News, November 30, 1869, called Whipper “an intelligent man and very popular in the party.” The Chesterfield Democrat, 1870, called Henry L. Shrewsbury “an opponent of corruption,” and declared that “he sustained a good reputation which he has kept intact under great temptations” and that “he has exerted himself zealously and courageously to guard his people from compulsion and vengeance, and establish their claim to decency and respectability.” The Courier, in 1870, spoke of W. H. Jones, and said that “he speaks well and to the point.” It said also that Jamison had sound, practical sense. Later, it called Dr. Boseman an “intelligent educated man.” The Abbeyville Press commended Cardozo for trying to prevent waste of money and said, “The treasurer is an able officer of undoubted integrity.” The News and Courier, September 4, 1874, called Samuel Lee “tolerably well educated,” and said that he spoke “fearlessly and forcibly.” Some visitors, like F. Barham Zinkle, found Negro members of the Assembly superior to white members. James S. Pike, a violent hater of Negroes, said that “all of the best speakers in the House are quite black” and added that Senator Beverly Nash “has more native ability than half the white men in the Senate.”³⁷

It is asserted beyond all question that the best men of the legislature were colored men. They knew more about parliamentary law and carried themselves with moderation. On the other hand, among the white members, were some strange bedfellows. Rutland was the one who gave a cane to Brooks after he had beaten Sumner. Moses helped pull down the flag at Fort Sumter. There were, of course, illiterate and ignorant men among the Negro speakers, but, on the other hand, there were some of poise and eloquence, who spoke with ease and grace.

These were the men and this the effort which have been endlessly blamed and reviled. There is that celebrated tirade by Pike:

The members of the Assembly issued forth from the State House. About three-quarters of the crowd belonged to the African race. They were such a looking body of men as might pour out of a market-house or a courthouse at random in any Southern state. Every Negro type and physiognomy was here to be seen, from the genteel serving-man, to the rough-hewn customer from the rice or cotton field. Their dress was as varied as their countenances. There was the second-hand, black frockcoat of infirm gentility, glossy and threadbare. There was the stovepipe hat of many ironings and departed styles. There was also to be seen a total disregard of the proprieties of costume in the coarse and dirty garments of the field.

This is, of course, the jibe of property and gentility at poverty and ignorance. Most men always have been poor and unkempt.

Then comes the real attack.

The Speaker is black, the Clerk is black, the doorkeepers 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 the Congo.

Then comes this acknowledgment:

It is not all sham, nor all burlesque. They have a genuine interest and a genuine earnestness in the business of the assembly which we are bound to recognize and respect… . They have an earnest purpose, born of conviction that their conditions are not fully assured, which lends a sort of dignity to their proceedings.³⁸

It is surely not all “sham” and “burlesque”—indeed was any of it sham and burlesque, save in minds like Pike’s?

Take out the accusation of being black, which is still a crime in the United States, and there remains in such tirades as this only a protest against ignorance and poverty presuming to rule intelligence and wealth; and yet, under the circumstances, how else was the necessary economic and social revolution to be effected?

The charge against the Negro legislators manifestly could not be simply the charge of being black. The question was, how did they govern? Sir George Campbell, a member of Parliament, says that whatever violence and disturbance there was, was not on the part of the black majority, but on the side of the white minority, who instead of trying constitutional methods to gain power, preferred Ku Klux organizations and such violent methods. He continues,

Before I went South, I certainly expected to find that the Southern states had been for a time a sort of Pandemonium in which a white man could hardly live, yet it was certainly not so… . “Well, then,” I had gone on to ask, “did the black Legislatures make bad laws?” My informants could not say that they did… . What, then, is the practical evil of which complaint is made? The answer is summed up in the one word, “corruption.” . . . I believe that there can be no doubt at all that a great deal of corruption did prevail—much more than the ordinary measure of American corruption. It was inevitable that it should be so under the circumstances; but to what degree it was so, it was very difficult to tell.³⁹

His conclusion is that the carpetbag rule did no permanent injury to the state; that the black men used their victory with moderation.

This brings us to the center of the corruption charge, which was in fact that poor men were ruling and taxing rich men. And this was the chief reason that ridicule and scorn and crazy anger were poured upon the government. There was after the war a severe economic strain upon the former wealthy ruling class, and if South Carolina had been ruled by angels during 1868-1876, the protest of wealth and property would have been shrill and angry, and it would have had all the justification that the war-ridden always have.

On the other hand, great as was the stress upon the former owners of wealth, the condition of the Negroes was infinitely worse. The Negro was disperately poor. Outside of the three or four thousand free Negroes, he inherited no property, no tools, no land. His chance to make a decent labor contract was about as small as could be imagined. A number worked for the army and bought land; some earned a living on land furnished them. But the vast majority remained poor, landless laborers.

The people best qualified to help and advise in the reconstruction of the state refused even when there was no legal barrier. The attitude of most of the whites was childish. They complained then and afterward that they were not asked to lead the Negroes; that they were not chosen to be leaders, when it was their clear duty to place themselves at the head of Negro groups and white groups and lead them aright. In fact, they wanted labor government to fail. Nothing would have disgusted most of them more than to have a government, in which Negro slaves and Northern interlopers and poor whites participated, succeed. They had there, therefore, every motive for making progress difficult, and for using charges of failure for propaganda in the North.

The wilder charges have all the stigmata of propaganda and are in some respects intrinsically unbelievable. It is impossible to be convinced that the people who gave South Carolina so excellent a constitution, who founded good social legislation, a new system of public schools, and who were orderly and earnest in their general demeanor, could at the same time in all cases be stealing, carousing and breaking every law of decency. Yet the accusers in the case of South Carolina reconstruction attacked everybody, and when one Reynolds runs out of accusations in attacking the character of a leading Negro statesman, he turns around and without adducing a single line of proof, calls his wife a “strumpet.” Scarcely a single person, white or black, Northern or Southern, connected with the government of South Carolina during 1868-1876 has escaped being called a “scoundrel,” a “rascal,” and a “thief.” This does not sound reasonable. As two of the younger and later and more honest students of the situation frankly admit, the accusations do not sound true.

However, many believe that the main charges were substantiated. This report was made by the investigating committee appointed in 1877 by the Democratic legislature, and it was an attempt to justify everything that had been done in South Carolina to overthrow the rule of labor and its allies. If this report is to be believed in its entirety, then the people of South Carolina were the most extraordinary set of thieves in the United States; and this applied mainly to the native white South Carolinians, belonging both to the old aristocracy and the poor whites; next to the carpetbaggers, necessarily limited in numbers, but large in influence; and least to the Negroes—to the Negroes in small measure as actual recipients of money, but in larger responsibility as dupes and victims of their white leaders.

The interpretation that has grown out of this report has tended to identify the scalawags with the carpetbaggers; to say comparatively little concerning the part which white native Carolinians played, and to transfer the main guilt of dishonesty almost entirely to the Negroes. This is not only a falsification of history; it is not even a fair interpretation of the Fraud Report.

But the Fraud Report, moreover, in itself is not convincing.

Sir George Campbell said:

In South Carolina I was given the report of the committee of Investigation disclosing terrible things, and said to be most impartial and conclusive. The general result was to leave on one’s mind the belief that undoubtedly a very great deal of pilfering and corruption had gone on, but the tone of the report was far too much that of an indictment, rather than of a judgment, to satisfy me that it could be safely accepted in block.⁴⁰

The report was made by a committee of the Democratic legislature of South Carolina, just after their party, by force and fraud, had driven the Negroes and the Republicans out of power. It was the bounden duty of this legislature to prove that their action was justified. No considerations of human life, character or desert, had deterred them from this bloody revolution, and it is not conceivable that any considerations of exact truth or fidelity to fact would deter them from defending it to such an extent that the Federal government should not interfere.

The men who made the report had in their hands all of the governmental records and documents to use or suppress as they wished. They gave accused persons no real or safe opportunity to reply. They could call as witnesses persons upon whom they were able to put the severest pressure. The unsupported testimony of these witnesses, so long as it was against the overturned government, was received as final authority. Some of these witnesses were acknowledged thieves. Yet their testimony was given full credence, with the curious assumption that such thieves would not lie, when it was to their distinct advantage to deceive. Why, for instance, should A. O. Jones, the colored clerk of the House, acknowledge systematic bribery, unless it was made distinctly to his interest to do so? And if it was to his interest to give this testimony, how can we know that the testimony was absolutely true?

The report piled charge upon charge; it grouped together sworn testimony, gossip and suspicion. It put down as facts the statements of men who were incriminated by the facts. It accepted as proof of articles and supplies furnished, the lists and statements of those who sold them, and who profited by the sale and bribed the purchasers. This committee, as a matter of fact, constituted itself judge and jury in an indictment which nobody since has had opportunity to scrutinize and criticize carefully. No court in Christendom would, without further data, receive the fraud report of South Carolina as the exact truth.

There was nothing in their general conduct during this time to leave any doubt that men would go to any limit of deception in order to prove that Negroes were not fit to vote and that all Northern men in the state were thieves. The whole story of this era has not been revealed nor studied with impartial and scientific accuracy. Perhaps at this late day it never can be.

In South Carolina, the charges of stealing were primarily sixty thousand dollars in bribery to pass the phosphate bill; forty thousand dollars to elect John J. Patterson to the United States Senate; $200,000 in four years for furnishing the capital; $200,000 as appropriations for state printing; large sums for supplies; the issue of fraudulent and excessive pay certificates to members of the legislature; the increase of needless clerks; a saloon in the State House and fraud in the sale of land to the state.

In none of these charges do colored men appear as principals accused except, possibly, in the case of Jones, a member of the printing ring, upon whose own testimony some of the charges are based. In the case of the phosphate bill, there was, doubtless, general bribery of both colored and white members of the legislature, but it was to establish an industry which the state sorely needed, and which it seemed able to get only by granting a monopoly to Southern white men. In the case of the Patterson election, the graft was dispensed by a white man in order to defeat his colored opponent, Eliott, who refused a $10,000 bribe to withdraw.

White Northerners who owned the two leading dailies got contracts for the public printing, but, later, clerks of the two Houses, one of whom was colored, got in on this graft and shared at least a part of it. In the case of the land commission, an excellent and needed movement to furnish small farmers land at reasonable prices was turned into a theft by which white land-holders were the chief gainers.

Whatever stealing of land funds was done cannot be charged to Robert D. DeLarge, the colored Land Commissioner. He says in his first report:

It will be seen that I have never been in possession of the bonds as contemplated in the Act, and that I am consequently in no wise responsible for any disposition that may have been made of them. The lands I have purchased have been paid for, through orders of the State treasurer, approved by the chairman of the advisory board.⁴¹

He reported February 23, 1871, that nearly two thousand small farms were occupied or ready to be settled, and that settlers would have eight years to make payments. The greater portion of the farms bought were already occupied, and numbers of thrifty and industrious farmers, white and black, were eagerly securing homes. Over three hundred certificates of purchase had been issued.

It was said that the legislative sessions were unduly prolonged; that unnecessary clerks were employed; that a liquor saloon was maintained, and that under the head of supplies, all sorts of personal things were furnished individual members of the legislature, and charged to the state. But it is not usually added that merchants got the contracts for these furnishings, some Northern, some Southern. They furnished the money to bribe committees and members of the legislature in order to secure for themselves the right to charge taxpayers outrageous prices for shoddy materials. They were doing no more in this case than business men of New York and Philadelphia; but, also, it is perfectly clear, they were doing no less. The state got a capitol decked out in the flamboyant taste of the day, but we must not forget that for the first time in their drab life, representatives of black and white labor, toiling in the fields and swamps and living in the unpaved slums of the towns, saw something that meant to them beauty and luxury—saw it and touched it, and owned it. And somehow, I have more respect for the golden spittoons of freed Negro lawmakers in 1872, than for the chaste elegance of the colonial mansions of slave-drivers in 1860.

Graft and bribery spread in the state, but the

worst feature of corruption in South Carolina is that members of both parties and men of all classes are involved in it, and that public abhorrence of corruption, which is the safeguard of popular government, seems wanting or dormant. Even the old aristocratic class, to whom we had been taught to attribute sentiments of chivalric honor, have not scrupled to bribe officials.

Dr. R. M. Smith of Spartanburg County, an old citizen and Democratic member of the legislature, testified that he could see no wrong in bribing a public officer, and compared the transaction to the purchase of a mule. In the taxpayers’ convention, held at Columbia, South Carolina, Mr. F. F. Warley of Darlington County, an old citizen of high standing, spoke as follows:

As I said on yesterday, public frauds would not exist were it not for private individuals who act the part of corruptors. Were none of these engaged in bribing members of the legislature, we would hear nothing of such frauds, as the one I have endeavored to expose.

Mr. President, one prominent feature in this transaction is the part which native Carolinians have played in it; and it is to this feature that I ask to be allowed to address myself in closing. I say, sir, and I say it in sorrow, that some of our own household, men whom the state in the past has delighted to honor, but whose honors have been withered by the atmosphere of corruption that they breathe, are involved in this swindle.

A legislature, composed chiefly of our former slaves, has been bribed by these men—to do what? To give them the privilege, by law, of plundering the property holders of the state, now almost bankrupt by reason of the burden of taxation under which they labor.

It is difficult for citizens of other States to realize such prevalent corruption, affecting all classes of society, bringing to the same level, patriot and rebel, white and black, the old citizens and the new. Probably one cause contributing to produce this result is the condition of civil war which has prevailed in the state, in which the power has been almost exclusively in the hands of one class, and the property in the hands of the other. While open hostilities have not generally and continually existed, there has been mutual enmity more bitter than usually accompanies flagrant warfare. Hence, some of the men in office may have regarded what was taken from the treasury as taken from the property holders, enemies of the Government, and therefore spoils of war; and, on the other hand, some property holders have come to consider what they procure by bribery and corruption as a right of which they are wrongfully deprived, and which they are justified in recovering by any means. Another cause seems to be the contempt which the old property-holding class manifest and feel for freedmen and all who coöperate with them politically. This gives to bribery of such persons, in the eyes of the old native class, the semblance of the purchase of a slave.⁴²

Many other Southern white speakers of the day were clear and frank in assessing blame. C. W. Dudley said in 1871:

The colored population must give us their assistance in any reforms which are contemplated. This they will do just as soon as they discover that their former owners are completely reconciled to their new condition. If they have turned from us heretofore, from a suspicion that their newly-acquired rights had been grudgingly granted, and were not safe in the hands of those who had never recognized them as equals, this was but natural; and we are compelled to admit that under similar circumstances we would have done so ourselves. They have looked for protection to others, because they were afraid to trust their all to those who might have a motive to betray that trust.⁴³

Major F. F. Warley said the same year:

I scorn the idea that the rich man in his glory, and the mighty man in his power, may indulge in crime with impunity and be passed by the world with a smile of recognition; while the poor tool he uses is consigned to prison and made the associate of felons. If I have displayed zeal and ardor in this exposure of fraud and vice, it is because I would save the State, not from ignorant and corrupt legislators so much as from rich, aspiring, and unprincipled men, some of them imported, it is true, but many of them degenerate and unworthy sons of that noble, though now impoverished, mother whom they rob.⁴⁴

There was, then, without doubt, theft and incompetence in the government of South Carolina during Reconstruction times. But there is good ground for saying that this was no more due to Northern white men than to native Southerners; and least of all was it the guilt of Negroes. Moreover, in method and amount, it was no worse than the same kind of stealing in Northern states, and even in the United States government itself.

If we allow for depreciated currency, and for the monies which the state did not actually receive and did not spend, but for which it may have been legally responsible, South Carolina doubled its debt between 1865 and 1871. But it more than doubled its social responsibilities. That the proceeds of debt thus accumulated were not spent wholly to meet these social demands, is undoubtedly true; but it is also true that every cent which South Carolina raised in Reconstruction times, and much more, was needed for the uplift of its laboring classes.

It is interesting to note that $17,500,000 of the South Carolina debt, or almost the exact amount of its probable increase over 1865, was eventually repudiated by the state, and the property of the state thus put itself on record as refusing to recognize its obligation to pay the expense even of necessary Reconstruction, and at the same time, it had the satisfaction of spoiling the Egyptians in the Northern money market.

Two sorts of reform faced the state: first the elimination of theft and waste in the handling of the public funds; and secondly the continuation of the efforts for social uplift in land distribution, institutions for social reform, educational equipment and modern labor legislation. With the last category the reformers would have nothing to do. What they meant by reform was lower taxes, and this, Chamberlain gave them.

It is easy to prove that this part of the effort to reform the situation in South Carolina had the earnest effort of both white men and black men, and resulted in distinct advance. It was overthrown at just the time when there was every reason to think that reform would be triumphant, not simply in honest government but in more efficient social uplift.

No one has expressed this more convincingly than a Negro who was himself a member of the Reconstruction legislature of South Carolina and who spoke at the convention which disfranchised him in 1895, against one of the onslaughts of Tillman:

The gentleman from Edgefield [Mr. Tillman] speaks of the piling up of the state debt; of jobbery and peculation during the period between 1869 and 1873 in South Carolina, but he has not found voice eloquent enough, nor pen exact enough to mention those imperishable gifts bestowed upon South Carolina between 1873 and 1876 by Negro legislators—the laws relative to finance, the building of penal and charitable institutions, and, greatest of all, the establishment of the public school system. Starting as infants in legislation in 1869, many wise measures were not thought of, many injudicious acts were passed. But in the administration of affairs for the next four years, having learned by experience the result of bad acts, we immediately passed reformatory laws touching every department of state, county, municipal and town governments. These enactments are today upon the statute books of South Carolina. They stand as living witnesses of the Negro’s fitness to vote and legislate upon the rights of mankind.

When we came into power, town governments could lend the credit of their respective towns to secure funds at any rate of interest that the council saw fit to pay. Some of the towns paid as high as twenty per cent. We passed an act prohibiting town governments from pledging the credit of their hamlets for money bearing a greater rate of interest than five per cent.

Up to 1874, inclusive, the State Treasurer had the power to pay out State funds as he pleased. He could elect whether he would pay out the funds on appropriations that would place the money in the hands of the speculators, or would apply them to appropriations that were honest and necessary. We saw the evil of this, and passed an act making specific levies and collections of taxes for specific appropriations.

Another source of profligacy in the expenditure of funds was the law that provided for and empowered the levying and collecting of special taxes by school districts, in the name of the schools. We saw its evil and by a constitutional amendment provided that there should only be levied and collected annually a tax of two mills for school purposes, and took away from the school districts the power to levy and to collect taxes of any kind. By this act we cured the evils that had been inflicted upon us in the name of the schools, settled the public school question for all time to come, and established the system upon an honest, financial basis.

Next, we learned during the period from 1869 to 1874, inclusive, that what was denominated the floating indebtedness, covering the printing schemes and other indefinite expenditures, amounted to nearly $2,000,000. A conference was called of the leading Negro representatives in the two Houses together with the State Treasurer, also a Negro. After this conference, we passed an act for the purpose of ascertaining the bona fide floating debt and found that it did not amount to more than $250,000 for the four years; we created a commission to sift that indebtedness and to scale it. Hence when the Democratic Party came into power they found the floating debt covering the legislative and all other expenditures fixed at the certain sum of $250,000. This same class of Negro legislators, led by the State Treasurer, Mr. F. L. Cardozo, knowing that there were millions of fraudulent bonds charged against the credit of the State, passed another act to ascertain the true bonded indebtedness, and to provide for its settlement. Under this law, at one sweep, those entrusted with the power to do so, through Negro legislators, stamped six millions of bonds, denominated as conversion bonds, “fraudulent.” The commission did not finish its work. There were still to be examined into and settled under the terms of the act passed by us providing for the legitimate bonded indebtedness of the state, a little over two and a half million dollars’ worth of bonds and coupons which had not been passed upon.

Governor Hampton, General Hagood, Judge Simonton, Judge Wallace, and in fact, all of the conservative thinking Democrats, all aligned themselves under the provision enacted by us for the certain and final settlement of the bonded indebtedness and appealed to their Democratic legislators to stand by the Republican legislation on the subject and to conform to it. A faction in the Democratic Party obtained a majority of the Democrats in the legislature against settling the question, and they endeavored to open up anew the whole subject of the state debt. We had a little over thirty members in the House, and enough Republican Senators to sustain the Hampton conservative faction, and to stand up for honest finance; or by our votes, place the debt question of the old state into the hands of the plunderers and speculators. We were appealed to by General Hagood, through me, and my answer to him was in these words: “General, our people have learned the difference between profligate and honest legislation. We have passed acts of financial reform, and with the assistance of God when the vote shall have been taken, you will be able to record for the thirty odd Negroes, slandered though they have been through the press, that they voted solidly with you all for the honest legislation and the preservation of the credit of the state.” The thirty odd Negroes in the legislature and their senators by their votes did settle the debt question and saved the state $13,000,000.

We were eight years in power. We had built schoolhouses, established charitable institutions, built and maintained the penitentiary system, provided for the education of the deaf and dumb, rebuilt the jails and courthouses, rebuilt the bridges and reëstablished the ferries. In short, we had reconstructed the State and placed it upon the road to prosperity and, at the same time, by our acts of financial reform, transmitted to the Hampton Government an indebtedness not greater by more than $2,500,000 than was the bonded debt of the state in 1868, before the Republican Negroes and their white allies came into power.⁴⁵

It seemed fairly clear that what South Carolina wanted was not reform even in its narrower sense; that what it was attacking was not even stealing and corruption. If there was one thing that South Carolina feared more than bad Negro government, it was good Negro government.

In fine, dishonesty in South Carolina was not racial. It was not even a matter of the lower economic classes, white or black. It was the child of an age of extravagance and characteristic of a state where the mass of the voters were poverty-stricken, and the property holders angry and ruthless in their methods.

The fact that the best men of the South (unlike the Abolitionists of John Brown’s time) were unwilling to strike openly and trust that the end and the future would justify the means, is very good evidence that the methods by which Negro rule was overthrown had not as yet been proved to be necessary, and, therefore, were unjustifiable. Goldwin Smith has said that statesmanship is the art of avoiding revolution. Of the Democrats of Mississippi and South Carolina in 1875 and 1876 one might well say, “Their revolution was the art of avoiding statesmanship.”⁴⁶

Beneath the race issue, and unconsciously of more fundamental weight, was the economic issue. Men were seeking again to reëstablish the domination of property in Southern politics. By getting rid of the black labor vote, they would take their first and substantial step. By raising the race issue, they would secure domination over the white labor vote, and thus the oligarchy that ruled the South before the war would be in part restored to power. It would, of course, lack capital. But the North stood ready to furnish capital if profit could be obtained, and it was being made more and more clear that this furnishing of capital, far from being contingent upon universal suffrage in the South, could be made more available even if the black labor vote was disfranchised completely, and white labor directed in the South by the same methods that were dominating it in the North.

“Tis not in the high stars alone,
Nor in the cups of budding flowers;
Nor in the redbreast’s mellow tone,
Nor in the bow that smiles in showers,
But in the mud and scum of things
There alway, alway something sings.

Ralph Waldo Emerson