I consider the schools have been the only systematic agency for permanent good, and I hope every contributor to their support may have the feeling that the money has not been wasted. An education bill is being passed in this State, that, during another year, may get into working order, so as to relieve our friends from the support of this school; but I hope this school year may be continued under their auspices, so as to make no break in the continuous training of these children. Some of our best scholars have left this place to live in Charleston, and they have been sufficiently advanced to enter the best classes of the schools in that city. So our school must have kept pace with theirs. We re-opened the schools at the beginning of the new year, and the cotton season being past, they were large, and have continued with a good average. Our unfinished building is being gradually brought nearer to completion. Friends at Kennett Square, through Dr. Mendenhall and H. Darlington, have furnished Mary P. Jacobs with funds to put a good ceiling upon the large room up stairs, and Fanny E. Gauze, with the aid of relatives and friends, has much improved the condition of hers. My contributions have put our class-room in complete school order with black-boards all round the room, etc.; so I feel quite contented with its present appearance, although we still need books. Your school at Rickersville, which Isabella Lenair teaches, has been prosperous, and has given great satisfaction to that neighborhood. The Sewing School is of great interest to me still; it is now open every afternoon, and the children are improving rapidly. Several girls have determined to make dresses. We have tried to make the school pay something, by taking in sewing; and some weeks our dividends have gone up as high as seventeen cents each. That may not sound large in the North, but seventeen cents cash is hard to earn here.
In closing, I desire that Friends will support this school this year out. Then, if the caterpillars do not attack their crops another year, we will try to get along without their aid, though retaining grateful hearts to them for their help in times of great need, and believing that they must feel a consciousness of having done a great work for this community. Personally thanking all who have facilitated my labors here,
I am sincerely their friend,
Cornelia Hancock
FRANCIS L. CARDOZO, “BREAK UP THE PLANTATION SYSTEM”
(January 14, 1868)
The freeborn, biracial son of a prominent white Charlestonian and a free black woman, Francis Louis Cardozo (1837–1903) ranked as one of South Carolina’s most distinguished and influential black leaders during Reconstruction. Educated in Glasgow and London, upon returning to the U.S., he worked as a minister, educator, and politician, also serving as South Carolina’s secretary of state (1868–1872) and state treasurer (1872–1877). He was South Carolina’s first African-American to hold government office. Elected as a delegate to the state’s 1868 constitutional convention, Cardozo proposed the sale and partition of large, debt-ridden plantations in order to provide family farms for poor people broadly defined, both black and white.
In discussing this measure, I would say to the gentleman who preceded me, and those who will follow, that they will accomplish their object much sooner and with much more satisfaction by not impugning the motives of those with whom they differ. The gentleman who spoke last made gratuitous assumptions and ascribed mercenary motives that, were it not for personal friendship, might be retorted upon him with perhaps worse effect than he made them. He asserted that the gentlemen who opposed him opposed his race. I intend to show that his race is not at all connected with the matter. In giving my view of the measure, I shall not resort to mere declamations or appeals to passion or prejudice. In the first place, I doubt its legality. It is true, it is said the Convention does not propose to legislate, but I contend that a request from this body carries a certain moral influence. It shows what it would do if it had the power. It is virtually legislation. I regard any stay law as unjust and unconstitutional. It is unjust to the creditors. Let every man who contracts a debt, pay it. If he is an honest man he will pay his debts at any sacrifice. In our country it is unfortunate, as Americans, that we have a character by no means enviable as repudiators. Look at the attempt to repudiate the national debt. As an American, I protest against any further repudiation whatever, either in the form of a stay law or illegal legislation. I deem it inappropriate for us to touch the matter at all. We are sent here to form a Constitution. To travel outside of our proper province will probably be to incur odium, displeasure and dissatisfaction. I wish to confine the action of this Convention to its proper sphere. The first question that arises is, what claim have these debtors on our sympathies more than creditors? Are the debtors greater in number than creditors? If we legislate in favor of any, will it be doing the greatest good to the greatest number? I maintain it will not. It is a class measure. This will be but the beginning. We will be burdened with applications, and the burden will be upon those who introduced this measure, not upon those who refused to legislate for other special favorite classes. I ask not only what are the claims of the debtors, but also what are the nature of these sales? Was it the transfer of real estate? I think everyone here will say no. Nine tenths of the debts were contracted for the sale of slaves. I do not wish we should go one inch out of the way to legislate either for the buyer or seller. They dealt in that kind of property, they knew its precarious tenure, and therefore let them suffer. When the war commenced every rebel sold his property to give money to a common cause. And their slaves were sold for the same object, to maintain a war waged for the purpose of perpetually enslaving a people. That was the object. The ladies of the South stripped themselves of their jewels, and the men sold their lands and their slaves for that object. Now, let them suffer for it. As the gentleman from Charleston very ably said, “they have cast the die, let them take the chances.”
There is also another reason, and one of the strongest, why the Convention should not take any action on the subject, but postpone it indefinitely. One of the greatest bulwarks of slavery was the infernal plantation system, one man owning his thousand, another his twenty, and another fifty thousand acres of land. This is the only way by which we will break up that system, and I maintain that our freedom will be of no effect if we allow it to continue. What is the main cause of the prosperity of the North? It is because every man has his own farm and is free and independent. Let the lands of the South be similarly divided. I would not say for one moment they should be confiscated, but if sold to maintain the war, now that slavery is destroyed, let the plantation system go with it. We will never have true freedom until we abolish the system of agriculture which existed in the Southern states. It is useless to have any schools while we maintain this stronghold of slavery as the agricultural system of the country. The gentleman has said that if these plantations were sold now, they would pass into the hands of a few mercenary speculators. I deny it and challenge a single proof to sustain the assertion. On the contrary I challenge proof to show that if the plantations are not sold, the old plantation masters will part with them. If they are sold, though a few mercenary speculators may purchase some, the chances are that the colored man and the poor man would be the purchasers. I will prove this, not by mere assertion, but by facts. About one hundred poor colored men of Charleston met together and formed themselves into a Charleston Land Company. They subscribed for a number of shares at $10 per share, one dollar payable monthly. They have been meeting for a year. Yesterday they purchased six hundred acres of land for $6,600 that would have sold for $25,000 or $50,000 in better times. They would not have been able to buy it had not the owner through necessity been compelled to sell. This is only one instance of thousands of others that have occurred in this city and state. I look upon it, therefore, as the natural result of the war that this system of large plantations, of no service to the owner or anybody else, should be abolished.
I think Providence has not only smiled upon every effort for abolishing this hideous form of slavery, but that since the war it has given unmistakable signs of di
sapprobation wherever continued, by blasting the cotton crops in that part of the country. Men are now beginning not to plant cotton but grain for food, and in doing so they are establishing a system of small farms, by which not only my race, but the poor whites and ninety-nine hundredths of the other thousands will be benefited. The real benefit from this legislation would inhere to not more than thirty thousand landholders against the seven hundred thousand poor people of the State. If we are to legislate in favor of a class at all, any honest man, any man who has the interest of the people at heart will legislate in favor of the greater number. In speaking against the landholders, and in taking this position I do not cherish one feeling of enmity against them as a class or individuals. But this question takes a larger range and is one in which the whole country is involved. I can never sacrifice the interests of nine or ten millions to the interests of three hundred thousand, more especially when the three hundred thousand initiated the war and were the very ones who established an infernal Negro code and want to keep their lands until better times. They do not want that a nigger or a Yankee shall ever own a foot of their land. Now is the time to take the advantage. Give them an opportunity, breathing time, and they will reorganize the same old system they had before the war. I say then, just as General Grant said when he had Lee hemmed in around Petersburg, now is the time to strike, and in doing so we will strike for our people and posterity, and the truest interest of our country.
“THE IMPEACHMENT,” NEW YORK TIMES
(February 24, 1868)
Though steps to impeach President Johnson failed in December 1867, efforts in the House of Representatives to remove him from office resumed in February when he again defied the Tenure of Office Act by dismissing Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton (1814–1869). Johnson appointed General Lorenzo Thomas (1804–1875), adjutant general of the army, Secretary of War ad interim. The New York Times concurred with House Republicans that Johnson had defiantly violated the law but pointed out that he had done so intentionally to test its constitutionality. The U.S. Supreme Court, the newspaper maintained, not the U.S. Senate, was the appropriate venue to determine whether Johnson had acted unconstitutionally.
The Republican Party in Congress seems at last to be unanimous in favor of impeachment. Those who have hitherto been most conservative in this matter seem now most zealous and demonstrative on the other side. There can be very little doubt that the President will be impeached by the House and sent before the Senate for trial—the specific misdemeanor for which he is arraigned being the violation of the Tenure of Office Law, in the removal of Secretary STANTON and the appointment of Gen. [Lorenzo] THOMAS in his place ad interim.
There can be no doubt, we presume, that the President’s action is in violation of the law. The first section declares that “every person holding any civil office to which he has been appointed by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, is and shall be entitled to hold such office until a successor shall have been in like manner appointed and duly qualified.” This clause deprives the President of the power to remove any such officer without the consent of the Senate. The second section gives him the power to suspend officers “during the recess of the Senate” until its next meeting and for one month thereafter, under certain specified circumstances, and to fill vacancies in the same way and upon the same conditions. . . .
The President’s removal of Mr. STANTON and his appointment of Gen. THOMAS were in distinct and unmistakable defiance of these provisions of that law. It is also clear that this violation of the law has been intentional on the President’s part—not with a view, as the heated zealots of Congress assume, of usurping power and overthrowing the institutions of the country, but for the purpose of testing the constitutionality of the law, and of procuring a judicial definition of the limits and prerogatives of the Executive Department of the Government under the Constitution of the United States. . . .
He is not only entitled to such a decision, but the whole country is interested in having it given. Under our form of government, as under every form of government which has been or can be devised, doubts will arrive as to the proper distribution of authority and power. We have, unlike Governments of a different form, a written Constitution by which the limits of official authority are defined, and the powers and prerogatives of the several departments of the Government are described and conferred; and, consequently, the only controversies that can arise out of attempts on the part of one department to encroach on the jurisdiction of another, become questions of construction. . . .
There can be no doubt, we presume, in any one’s mind, that the Supreme Court is the proper tribunal for the decision of the question involved in this particular conflict between the President and Congress. . . .
The impeachment of the President, if pushed to trial in advance of such a decision by the Supreme Court, is in violation of this principle.
S. A. ATKINSON, “THE SUPREME HOUR HAS COME”
(March 13, 1868)
In 1868 the Southern states held elections to approve the new state constitutions mandated by the Reconstruction Act. Georgia’s delegates drafted a new document enfranchising the freedmen, establishing a free public school system, and instituting a system of debt relief. Responding to the state’s proposed new basic law, editor S. A. Atkinson of the pro-Democratic weekly Athens Southern Banner urged Georgians to defeat the constitution in the April referendum because, in his opinion, it would surrender control of the state to “a negro oligarchy.” Georgians ultimately ratified the constitution and the Fourteenth Amendment, and in July 1868, Congress readmitted the state to the Union. In December 1869, however, when the General Assembly expelled its black legislators and refused to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment, Congress remanded Georgia to military rule. Not until July 1870, after its African-American legislators took their seats and the state ratified the Fifteenth Amendment (passed February 26, 1869), did Congress finally restore Georgia to the Union.
Radicalism has so far advanced in its infamous work as to call for the full exercise of every energy that can be enlisted in its defeat. The purpose of that abandoned and shameless organization to control the political destinies of the state by an alliance with negroes and Northern adventurers is too manifest not to be seen and scorned by every just right-minded citizen. . . .
Every white man should gird on the armor for a good fight with the hydra-headed monster which assails civil liberty. If the Constitution framed by the Radical Convention is adopted we do sincerely believe that the State will be controlled by the negroes as certainly as though every whiteman [sic] in the State were disfranchised. One hundred thousand men, voting as a unit, cannot fail to attract to their embrace a large element of abandoned wretches, like many of those in the Convention, who could never make a sign among decent white men. We believe also, that the adoption of this hell-born conspiracy against the white race, must result in violence and strife, if not in the extermination of either the white or black race from the State. Two races, so nearly equal in numbers, never have lived in a free government on terms of peaceful equality. We value the well being of the black race too much to willingly see them deluded into a conflict which cannot fail to be fatal to them, as well as, fearful for the whites. We value the peace of society too much to be silent when a heaving earth quake is about to belch forth its horrid fires upon us. We shall therefore enter upon the great canvas with every energy enlisted—every impulse aroused, and we hope to have the active aid of every white man, and every prudent and sensible black man in this portion of the State. We have no object to observe but the good of society.
Already the Radical papers are being circulated in every neighborhood, full of ingenious appeals in support of the monstrous frauds embraced in the new constitution. Let the county committees see to it that Democratic papers are sent to counteract the poison instilled by these Convention organs. Let those who need relief be shown that the method proposed is a cheat and a swindle, and cannot stand.
Let it be shown that with 100,000 negroes at the ballot box, the white men of Upper Georgia forever lose the control of the State which their numbers have long commanded; and that this populous section becomes but a province, an appendage, of a negro oligarchy.
We appeal to our readers to wake up to the magnitude of the struggle before us. It is no common issue—or ordinary campaign, involving only a choice of individuals. It is the crisis of liberty. Let us meet it like the sons of the fathers of freedom—like honest men, who value honor, integrity, and justice, beyond the glitterized bribe of political power, or the tempting chances of pecuniary advantage.
“KARINUS,” LETTER TO THE EDITOR—“EQUAL SUFFRAGE IN MICHIGAN”
(March 17, 1868)
Racial proscription during the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction was not limited to the Southern states, a fact emphasized by Southern and Northern critics of Radical Reconstruction. Repeatedly referendums in Northern states on enfranchising their relatively small African-American male populations failed to pass. In this letter to the editor of a Michigan newspaper, “Karinus” noted the hypocrisy of Northerners, especially Republicans, who riveted universal suffrage on the South but refused to accept black enfranchisement in their own states.
A Just and Lasting Peace: A Documentary History of Reconstruction Page 35