Page:Southern Historical Society Papers volume 36.djvu/354

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Southern Historical Society Papers.

might prefer, on the following terms: A was to have first wish, and whatever A received was to be doubled to B. A promptly wished for the loss of one eye. "Are our slaves" wrote Jefferson to John Adams, "to be presented with freedom and a dagger?" The so-called freedom had been bestowed and the dagger had not been drawn.

THE REAL REASON.

D. H. Chamberlin, once reconstruction governor of South Carolina, could speak with authority. "Under all the avowed motives for this policy," he wrote (in the Atlantic Monthly of April, 1901). "lay a deeper cause than all others., the will and determination to secure party ascendancy and control at the South and in the nation by the negro vote. * * * Not one of them professed or cared to know more. * * * Eyes were never blinder of facts; minds never more ruthlessly set upon a policy, than were Stevens and Morton on putting the white South under the heel of the black South. * * * Seventy-eight thousand colored votes were distinctly and of design pitted against forty-six thousand whites, who held all the property, education and public experience of the State. It is not less than shocking to think of such odds, such inevitable disaster. Yet it was deliberately planned and eagerly welcomed at Washington. * * * To this tide of folly and worse, President Grant persistently yielded. * * * Those who sat in the seats, nominally of justice, made traffic of their judicial powers. * * * No branch of the public service escaped the pollution." "No property in man!" No: but justice is the stuff laid on the bargain counter; justice is bought and sold; the soul of the State made vendible and venal. The president who made Underwood a Federal judge did not carry love of justice to a fanatical extreme. Is not justice a human right? It is the one inalienable right of man. The great abolition was the abolition of justice. To put "the white South under the heel of the black South!" Nothing devised by Weiler in his worst estate; nor by Alva; nor by Attila, promised such hideous doom, as the calculated cruelty of the design to make the black man in the South the white man's master.

"Have we," inquired Frank Blair in the senate of the United