The Southern States reconstructed by Congress were subject for periods of varying length to governments designed by radical Northerners and imposed by elements thrown to the surface in the upheaval of Southern society.Georgia, Virginia, and North Carolina each had a brief experience with these governments; other States escaped after four or five years, while Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida were not delivered from this domination until 1876.The states which contained large numbers of Negroes had, on the whole, the worst experience.Here the officials were ignorant or corrupt, frauds upon the public were the rule, not the exception, and all of the reconstruction governments were so conducted that they could secure no support from the respectable elements of the electorate.
The fundamental cause of the failure of these governments was the character of the new ruling class.Every state, except perhaps Virginia, was under the control of a few able leaders from the North generally called carpetbaggers and of a few native white radicals contemptuously designated scalawags.These were kept in power by Negro voters, to some seven hundred thousand of whom the ballot had been given by the reconstruction acts.The adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment in March 1870, brought the total in the former slave states to 931,000, with about seventy-five thousand more Negroes in the North.
The Negro voters were most numerous, comparatively, in Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Alabama, and Georgia.There were a few thousand carpetbaggers in each State, with, at first, a much larger number of scalawags.The latter, who were former Unionists, former Whigs, Confederate deserters, and a few unscrupulous politicians, were most numerous in Virginia, North Carolina, Texas, Arkansas, and Tennessee.The better class, however, rapidly left the radical party as the character of the new regime became evident, taking with them whatever claims the party had to respectability, education, political experience, and property.
The conservatives, hopelessly reduced by the operation of disfranchising laws, were at first not well organized, nor were they at any time as well led as in antebellum days.In 1868, about one hundred thousand of them were forbidden to vote and about two hundred thousand were disqualified from holding office.The abstention policy of 1867-68 resulted in an almost complete withdrawal of the influence of the conservatives for the two years, 1868-70.As a class they were regarded by the dominant party in state and nation as dangerous and untrustworthy and were persecuted in such irritating ways that many became indifferent to the appeals of civil duty.They formed a solid but almost despairing opposition in the black districts of Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, and South Carolina.For the leaders the price of amnesty was conversion to radicalism, but this price few would pay.
The new state governments possessed certain characteristics in common.Since only a small number of able men were available for office, full powers of administration, including appointment and removal, were concentrated in the hands of the governor.He exercised a wide control over public funds and had authority to organize and command militia and constabulary and to call for Federal troops.The numerous administrative boards worked with the sole object of keeping their party in power.Officers were several times as numerous as under the old regime, and all of them received higher salaries and larger contingent fees.The moral support behind the government was that of President Grant and the United States army, not that of a free and devoted people.
Of the twenty men who served as governors, eight were scalawags and twelve were carpetbaggers, men who were abler than the scalawags and who had much more than an equal share of the spoils.The scalawags, such as Brownlow of Tennessee, Smith of Alabama, and Holden of North Carolina, were usually honest but narrow, vindictive men, filled with fear and hate of the conservative whites.
Of the carpetbaggers half were personally honest, but all were unscrupulous in politics.' Some were flagrantly dishonest.* Governor Moses of South Carolina was several times bribed and at one time, according to his own statement, received $15,000 for his vote as speaker of the House of Representatives.
Governor Stearns of Florida was charged with stealing government supplies from the Negroes; and it was notorious that Warmoth and Kellogg of Louisiana, each of whom served only one term, retired with large fortunes.Warmoth, indeed, went so far as to declare: "Corruption is the fashion.I do not pretend to be honest, but only as honest as anybody in politics."The judiciary was no better than the executive.The chief justice of Louisiana was convicted of fraud.A supreme court judge of South Carolina offered his decisions for sale, and Whipper and Moses, both notorious thieves, were elected judges by the South Carolina Legislature.In Alabama there were many illiterate magistrates, among them the city judge of Selma, who in April 1865, was still living as a slave.Governor Chamberlain, a radical, asserted that there were two hundred trial judges in South Carolina who could not read.
Other officers were of the same stripe.Leslie, a South Carolina carpetbagger, declared that "South Carolina has no right to be a state unless she can support her statesmen," and he proceeded to live up to this principle.The manager of the state railroad of Georgia, when asked how he had been able to accumulate twenty or thirty thousand dollars on a two or three thousand dollar salary, replied, "By the exercise of the most rigid economy." A North Carolina Negro legislator was found on one occasion chuckling as he counted some money.
