The Negro in The American Rebellion

A Texas correspondent writes to “The New-York Evening Post” (he dare not allow his name and residence to be printed) as follows: —

“Every day I hear of murders of freedmen. Since five o’clock this afternoon, four new ones have been reported here. The disloyal press suppress the mention of such occurrences.

“Should there be another outbreak in Texas, very many Union men, as well as a large proportion of freedmen, would at once be massacred in order to bring about such another reign of terror as would make the South a unit…

“Three freedmen were murdered in or near the line of an adjoining county a few days ago. The wagon which one of them was driving was robbed of all the fine goods it contained. The other two freedmen were shot by the same man, who is believed to be their former owner. The head of one of them was cut off, and they were left unburied. No investigation has been, or probably will be, made into these murders. If any Union man were to move in the matter, it would be at the peril of his life.

“The brave and loyal man who told me of these murders was applied to by a freed man, a kinsman of one of the murdered, for advice. The freedman was told to go to Austin, and report the facts to the agent of the Freedmen’s Bureau: but he appears not to have arrived. Like the freedman despatched by the chief justice of Refugio County, with a letter setting forth the disorders in that county, he may have been shot on the road.

“My informant, seeing that I set about writing down the facts as to these murders just as he stated them, said to me, ‘Do not make my name public, for it is all I can do to hold my own in – county just now;’ and added, ‘Ikeep no money in my house but a few dollars for current expenses. I can take care of myself in the daytime, but I do not feel safe at night.’”

On the 2d of April, 1866, a Mr. Quisenbery was tried at the Circuit Court for the County of Louisa, Va., for the murder of Washington Green. Green was the former slave of Quisenbery, had worked for said Quisenbery from the fall of Richmond, about the 3d of April, 1865, until about the 1st of October, 1865, when Quiserinbery told him, the said Washington Green, that he had better go and get work somewhere else; that he would not pay him for any thing that he had done. Washington Green went to work for a lady to get some shingles for her, and Quisenbery made a contract with this lady, that she should pay him, for Green’s getting the shingles, by thrashing out his, Quisenbery’s, wheat. It did not satisfy Washington Green, that Quisenbery should not only refuse to pay him for the work which he had already done for him, but that he should also collect what he had earned by hard working for this lady. Green went to Quisenbery, and asked him for the amount of getting the shingles for this lady. Quisenbery said, “Washington, this is three times that you have been after me for that money; I am now going to my hog-pen, and I warn you not to follow me.” He repeated that warning three times. He then went to the hog-pen, got over the fence, stooped down to throw out some corn that the hogs had not eaten. He looked up, and saw Washington Green at or near the fence, and said, “I thought I warned you not to follow me,” and pulled out his knife, and stabbed Green in the throat, and killed him instantly. This is the evidence and confession of Quisenbery, who was tried, and the jury found a verdict of not guilty, without scarcely leaving the jury-box; and Quisenbery was declared guiltless of any crime amid the plaudits of the people.

At Jacksonville, Fla., on the 20th of June last, a freedman complained before Col. Hart, that his last employer would not pay him. The black man afterwards went to the pine-woods, chopping logs. While absent, the man of whom he had complained got a woman to go to the freedman’s wife, and get into a difficulty with her; whereupon the freedman’s wife was arrested, tried, found guilty, and fined fifty dollars, being unable to pay which, she was put up at auction, and sold to the person who would take her for the shortest time, and pay fine and costs. The shortest time was four years! Under another law of the State, the children were bound out till they should become of age!

A free colored man named Jordan opened, by permission of the commandant of the post at Columbia, Tenn., a school for the blacks. The school went on smoothly till Monday, the 11th instant, when two soldiers of the Eighth Tennessee Cavalry went into the school, and broke it up; but the teacher, being so advised, resumed his labor the next day. But, on the 14th, Messrs. Datty, Porter, White, and others, including soldiers of the Eighth Tennessee, the party headed by White the city constable, proceeded to the schoolroom, seized the teacher, and brought him under guard to the court-house, where he received a mock trial. When being asked for his authority for teaching a school, Mr. Jordan replied, that Lieut. – Col. Brown and Major Sawyer were his authority, and wished they would bring Major Sawyer in. One of the men went out, but was absent only for a moment, when he came in, stating that Major Sawyer could not be found; whereupon Mr. Andrews ordered that the teacher be given twenty-five lashes. And they were administered, the man receiving the scourge like a martyr, telling his persecutors that he was willing to suffer for the right; and that Christ had received the same punishment for the same purpose; and he thought, if he could teach the children to read the Bible so that they might learn of heaven, he was doing a good work. To this, a soldier of the Eighth Tennessee said, “If you want to go to heaven you must pray: you can’t get there by teaching the niggers. We can’t go to school, and I’ll be damned if niggers shall.”

Volumes might be written, recounting the shameful outrages committed at the South since the surrender of Lee. Not satisfied with murders of an individual character, the Southerners have, of late, gone into it more extensively. The first of these took place at Memphis, Tenn., May 4, 1866. A correspondent of Hon. W. D. Kelley, of Philadelphia, said, —

“I have been an eye-witness to such sights as should cause the age in which we live to blush. Negro men have been shot down in cold blood on the streets; barbers, at their chairs and in their own shops; draymen on their drays, while attempting to earn an honest living; hotel-waiters, while in the discharge of their duties; hackmen, while driving female teachers of negro children to their schools; laborers, while handling cotton on the wharves, &c. All the negro schoolhouses, and all the negro churches, and many of the houses of the negroes, have been burned, this too, under the immediate auspices of the city police and the mayor: in fact, most of these outrages were committed by the police themselves, —all Irish, and all rebels, and mostly drunk. This is not the half: I have no heart to recount the outrages I have seen. The most prominent citizens stand on the streets, and see negroes hunted down and shot, and laugh at it as a good joke. Attempts have been made to fire every Government building, and fire has been set to many of the abodes and business-places of Union people.

“There is no doubt but that there is a secret organization sworn to purge the city of all Northern men who are not rebels, all negro teachers, all Yankee enterprise, and return the city ‘to the good old days of Southern rule and chivalry.’

“When the miscreants had fired Collins’s chapel (a large frame church, corner of Washington and Orleans Streets, which would now cost fully ten thousand dollars, to rebuild), they stood around the fire which lighted the midnight sky, and made the night hideous with their hellish cheers for ‘Andy Johnson’ and a ‘white man’s government!’ And the supporters of the President, aside from being midnight burners of churches and schoolhouses, robbed women and children, and men, – sparing none on account of age, sex, physical disabilities, or innocence of crime, – even burning women and children alive.

“The board of aldermen had their usual meetings last night. Their proceedings show no reference to the riot. No rewards have been offered for the apprehension of the murderous assassins, thieves, and house-burners.”

Next came, on a still larger scale, the rebel riot at New Orleans. The Military Commission appointed to investigate the cause of the riot charge it upon Mayor Monroe, Lieut. – Gov. Voorhies, and the rebel press of the city. The Commission speak of the murders as follows: —

“They can only say that the work of massacre was pursued with a cowardly ferocity unsurpassed in the annals of crime. Escaping negroes were mercilessly pursued, shot, stabbed, and beaten to death by the mob and police. Wounded men on the ground begging for mercy were savagely despatched by mob, police, firemen, and, incredible as it may seem, in two instances by women; but, in two or three most honorable and exceptionable cases, white men and members of the Convention were protected by members of the police, both against the mob, and against other policemen. The chief of police, by great exertions, defended in this manner Gov. Hahn.

“After the attack had commenced, the police appeared to be under no control as such; but acted as and with the mob. Their cheers and waving of hats as they threw the mangled Dostie, then supposed a corpse, like a dead dog into the cart, sufficiently show their unison of feeling with their allies.”

Nothing, we take it, is more apparent from the array of evidence presented in this Report than that the New-Orleans riot was a preconcerted, deliberate, cold-blooded attempt to massacre the Unionists, white and black, of that city. The design can be traced like the development of a tragedy. Mayor Monroe is busy for a long time in advance in stirring up the passions of the mob by stigmatizing the members of the Convention as outlaws and revolutionists, threatening them with wholesale arrest, and preparing his police for action. He might have ascertained that the members had resolved to peacefully submit the legality of their course to the proper tribunals; but he had bloodier ends in view. He knew that the excitement he had fanned would surely lead to an outburst of violence, unless restrained by two forces alone, – his police and the United-States troops. To keep the latter away, Mayor Monroe suppresses all requisition for them until it is too late; and then tries to cover up his conduct with downright falsehood and perjury. His police, instead of being brought forward openly, so that they would have to take sides for the preservation of order, are concealed in hiding-places till the collision occurs; when they rush forth as allies of the mob, murdering negroes in cold blood; firing repeatedly into the Convention, even after a white flag is raised; shooting and barbarously maltreating the wounded; and perpetrating such feats of cowardly brutality and ferocity as were never before seen in this country, except in the congenial affairs of Memphis and Fort Pillow.

Nothing goes so far towards reconciling one to what is called the “total-depravity” theory, as the contemplation of those scenes of blood. They carry us back to the crimes and cruelty of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew. Mayor Monroe acts the part of the Duke of Guise; Lieut. – Gov. Voorhies, that of the Duke of Alva; while President Johnson acts the part of Charles IX., who, on approaching the burning corpse of Admiral Coligny, exclaimed, “The smell of a dead enemy is always good.”

During the mob, the appearance of rebel organizations on the ground with marks and badges, and scores of similar incidents, show that the plot was as deliberate as it was infernal.

Again: a dispassionate consideration of the facts detailed by the Commission will lead to the conclusion that the underlying cause of the New-Orleans massacre was the old virus of slavery, still existing in the passions of Southern society, and likely to issue forth in violence whenever it shall be favored by similar circumstances. The members of the Louisiana Convention were entirely harmless, no matter how obnoxious or how indiscreet they were. Even if they were not disposed to submit their pretensions to a legal test, – as they were, – there would have been no difficulty in making their peaceable arrest on the occurrence of their first overt act; but the mob of New Orleans, who, by the acquiescence of the better classes, or else in defiance of them through their great numerical preponderance, elect and control the city authorities, were determined to permit no such result of the controversy. The Convention claimed to exercise free speech; they would have none of that Northern innovation: it was composed of Union men; and they should be made to feel their place in “reconstructed” New Orleans: worse than all, they had for their allies and supporters colored Unionists; and they should be made such an example of as should deter any more such movements at the South. It was a bloody crusade against the men and the principles that had triumphed in the Government of this country. Well do this Commission say, that, but for martial law and the United-States troops, “fire and bloodshed would have raged throughout the night in all negro quarters of the city, and that the lives and property of Unionists and Northern men would have been at the mercy of the mob.” Finally: the Report throws an impressive light upon President Johnson’s connection with the New-Orleans massacre. He had already, in a manner, inculpated himself in his speech at St. Louis. He there suppresses all the facts found by the Commission, and stigmatizes the members of the Convention as “traitors,” engaged, under the instigation of Congress, in getting up a “rebellion,” and therefore responsible for all the bloodshed that occurred. That is precisely the pretence of Mayor Monroe and his mob. Well might the President, therefore, play into their hands. Gen. Baird, from official experience, has been taught not to interfere with Mayor Monroe. When he telegraphs to Washington for orders, he gets no answer: the other side telegraph, and receive replies that encourage them in their course. Gen. Sheridan, like a true soldier, telegraphs the facts, with indignant comments; and his despatches are garbled for public effect. Of all the murderers on that dreadful day, not one has been called to account; nor has any one of them received therefor the least censure of the Government at Washington.

The appointment, since the riot, of Adams, one of the most notorious of the rioters, as sergeant in the police force, by Mayor Monroe, confirms the fact of his guilt in the massacre. The blood of the martyrs Dostie and Horton cries to Heaven for justice for the Union men of the South, white and black. The mob, composed of ex-rebel soldiers and citizens, that broke up the colored campmeeting near Baltimore, Md., a few weeks after the New-Orleans riot, was only a part of the programme concocted by the men engaged in carrying out the reconstruction policy of Andrew Johnson.

CHAPTER XLIII – PROTECTION FOR THE COLORED PEOPLE

Protection for the Colored People South. – The Civil Rights Bill. – Liberty without the Ballot no Boon. – Impartial Suffrage. – Test Oaths not to be depended upon.

In attempting to form a Southern Confederacy, with slavery as its corner-stone, by breaking up the Union, and repudiating the Constitution, the people of the South compelled the National Government to abolish chattel slavery in self-defence. The protection, defence, and support which self-interest induced the master to extend to the slave have been taken away by the emancipation of the latter. This, taken in connection with the fact that the negroes, by assisting the Federal authorities to put down the Rebellion, gained the hatred of their old masters, placed the blacks throughout the South in a very bad position. Now, what shall be done to protect these people from the abuse of their former oppressors? The Civil Rights Bill passed by Congress is almost a dead letter, and many of the rebel judges declare it unconstitutional. The States having relapsed into the hands of the late slave-holders, and they becoming the executioners of the law, the blacks cannot look for justice at their hands. The negro must be placed in a position to protect himself. How shall that be done? We answer, the only thing to save him is the ballot. Liberty without equality is no boon. Talk not of civil without political emancipation! It is the technical pleading of the lawyer: it is not the enlarged view of the statesman. If a man has no vote for the men and the measures which tax himself, his family, and his property, and all which determine his reputation, that man is still a slave.

We are told – what seems to be the common idea – that the elective franchise is not a right, but a privilege. But is this true? We used to think so; that is, we assented to it before we gave the subject any special thought: but we do not think so now. We maintain, that in a government like ours, a republican government, or government of the people, the elective franchise, as it is called, is not a mere privilege, but an actual and absolute right, – a right belonging, of right, to every free man who has not forfeited that right by crime. We in this country enjoy what is properly called self-government, and self-government necessarily implies the right to vote, – the right to help to govern, and to make the laws; and this, in a government like ours, a government of the people, can only be done by or through the elective franchise. We maintain that in self-government, or government of the people, every man who is a free man and citizen has a right to assist and take part in that government. This right inheres and belongs to every man alike, to you and me, and every other man, – no matter what the color of his skin, – if he be a free man and citizen, and helps to support the government by paying taxes: it is one of the fundamental principles of self-government and of a democratic or republican government. But the elective franchise, the right to choose and elect the men who are to fill the offices, and make the laws and execute them, lies at the very bottom of such government. It is the first principle and starting-point, and is as much implied in the very name and idea of self-government, or government of the people, as any other principle, right, or idea pertaining to such a government. Does any one doubt this? Let him ask himself what constitutes a republican government, or government of the people, and what is implied by such a government, and he will soon see, that without the elective franchise, or right to choose rulers and law-makers, there can be no such government. It will not do, therefore, to call this right a privilege. If it is but a privilege, all may be deprived of its exercise. What sort of a republican or self government would that be in which none of the people were allowed to vote? But if it is but a privilege, and granted to but a class or part, it may be restricted to a still smaller part, and finally allowed to none!

Any proposal to submit the question of the political or civil rights of the negroes to the arbitrament of the whites is as unjust and as absurd as to submit the question of the political rights of the whites to the arbitrament of the negroes, with this difference, – that the negroes are loyal everywhere, and the great body of the whites disloyal everywhere.

A white loyalist of the South, one who remained loyal during the whole of the Rebellion, says, —

“To permit the whites to disfranchise the negroes is to permit those who have been our enemies to ostracize our friends. The negroes are the only persons in those States who have not been in arms against us. They have not been in arms against us. They have always and everywhere been friendly, and not hostile, to us. They alone have a deep interest in the continued supremacy of the United States; for their freedom depends on it. On them alone can we depend to suppress a new insurrection. They alone will be inclined to vote for the friends of the Government in all the Southern States. They alone have sheltered, fed, and pioneered our starved and hunted brethren through the swamps and woods of the South, in their flight from those who now aspire to rule them.

“The shame and folly of deserting the negroes are equalled by the wisdom of recognizing and protecting their power. They will form a clear and controlling majority against the united white vote in South Carolina. Mississippi, and Louisiana. With a very small accession from the loyal whites, they will form a majority in Alabama, Georgia, and Virginia. Unaided in all those States, they will be a majority in many congressional and legislative districts; and that alone suffices to break the terrible and menacing unity of the Southern vote in Congress.”

It is said that the slaves are too ignorant to exercise the elective franchise judiciously. To this we reply, they are as intelligent as the average of “poor whites,” and were intelligent enough to be Unionists during the great struggle, when the Federal Government needed friends. In a conflict with the spirit of rebellion, the blacks can always be depended upon, the whites cannot; and, for its own security against future outbreaks, the National Government should see that the negro is placed where he can help himself, and assist it.

The ballot will secure for the colored people respect; that respect will be a protection for their schools; and, through education and the elective franchise, the negro is to rise to a common level of humanity in the Southern States.

But little aid can be expected for the freedmen from the Freedmen’s Bureau; for its officers, if not Southern men, will soon become upon intimate terms with the former slave-holders, and the Bureau will be converted into a power of oppression, instead of a protection.

The anti-Union whites know full well the great influence of the ballot, and therefore are afraid to give it to the blacks. The franchise will be of more service to this despised race than a standing army in the South. The ballot will be his standing army. The poet has truly said, —

“There is a weapon surer yet,And better, than the bayonet;A weapon that comes down as stillAs snow-flakes fall upon the sod,And executes a freeman’s willAs lightning does the will of God;A weapon that no bolts nor locksCan bar. It is the ballot-box.”

Even “The New-York Herald,” some time ago, went so far as to say, —

“We would give the suffrage at once to four classes of Southern negroes. First, and emphatically, to every negro who has borne arms in the cause of the United States; second, to every negro who owns real estate; third, to every negro who can read and write; and, fourth, to every negro that had belonged to any religious organization or church for five years before the war. These points would cover every one that ought to vote; and they would insure in every negro voter a spirit of manhood as well as discipline, some practical shrewdness, intellectual development, and moral consciousness and culture.”

Impartial suffrage is what we demand for the colored people of the Southern States. No matter whether the basis be a property or an educational qualification, let it be impartial: upon this depends the future happiness of all classes at the South. Test-oaths, or promises to support the laws, mean nothing with those who have come up through the school of slavery.

“As for oaths, the rebels, whose whole career has been a violation of the solemn obligations of which oaths are merely the sign, care no more for them than did the rattlesnake to which our soldiers in West Virginia once administered the oath of allegiance. Impartial suffrage affords the only sure and permanent means of combating the rebel element in the Southern States.”

CHAPTER XLIV – CASTE

Slavery the Foundation of Caste. – Black its Preference. – The General Wish for Black Hair and Eyes. – No Hatred to Color. – The White Slave. – A Mistake. – Stole his Thunder. – The Burman. – Pew for Sale.

Caste is usually found to exist in communities or countries among majorities, and against minorities. The basis of it is owing to some supposed inferiority or degradation attached to the hated ones. However, nothing is more foolish than this prejudice. But the silliest of all caste is that which is founded on color; for those who entertain it have not a single logical reason to offer in its defence.