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Worse
Than Slavery |
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| WORSE
THAN SLAVERY |
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| How easily wicked and
treasonable organizations may gain the control over the
peaceable and the industrious members of society has always been
signally apparent at the South. A band of wild and desperate
young men, maddened with whisky and torn by demoniac passions,
is the governing power in Texas and Alabama, Georgia, and even
Kentucky. Masked, armed, and supplied with horses and money by
the Democratic candidates for office, they ride over the country
at midnight, and perpetrate unheard-of enormities. It is said,
and no doubt truly, that not one in a hundred of their fearful
deeds is ever told. Their enormous vices and crimes are faintly
depicted in the Ku-Klux reports of 1872. Yet before these
infamous associations Southern society trembles. They rob, they
murder, they whip, they intimidate; yet no man, white or black,
dares to denounce them. If a colored man ventures to tell of
some frightful assassination which he saw in the dim midnight,
he is himself dragged from the prison where he had been placed
for safety and slaughtered, as happened recently in Tennessee,
with horrible mockeries. If a United States official becomes
conspicuous in politics, he is carried into the woods and shot,
as at Coushatta. In Alabama and Louisiana the bands of young
ruffians patrol the country by day as well as night, shooting
down Republican voters. According to a recent estimate, there is
a Republican majority of 20,000 in Louisiana, yet M’Enery and
his band of assassins claim to have carried the last election,
and hope to win the next by their usual outrages. Nor does any
Southern paper in Georgia, or Alabama, or Texas, and scarcely in
Tennessee, venture even to denounce the murderers or the
violators of the laws; or if any Northern journal, roused to a
proper indignation by the wrongs inflicted upon peaceable
settlers and citizens in the disturbed districts, calls for the
suppression and punishment of the lawless crew, it is at once
placed under the ban of the secret associations. Such journals
(exclaims the Austin Daily Statesman) "are more to
be hated than the rattlesnake." Harper’s Weekly
has been especially marked in this way, and its sale is
forbidden by no unmeaning threats to the booksellers of Austin.
The White Leaguers are resolved that the power of a free press
shall never be felt in the South, and hope to pursue their
career of crime unimpeded by the voice of humanity or reason. |
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