"What are you laughing at, Uncle?" he was asked."Well, boss, I'se been sold 'leben times in my life and dis is de fust time I eber got de money." Godkin, in the "Nation", said that the Georgia officials were "probably as bad a lot of political tricksters and adventurers as ever got together in one place."This description will fit equally well the white officials of all the reconstructed states.Many of the Negroes who attained public office showed themselves apt pupils of their carpetbag masters but were seldom permitted to appropriate a large share of the plunder.In Florida the Negro members of the legislature, thinking that they should have a part of the bribe and loot money which their carpetbag masters were said to be receiving, went so far as to appoint what was known as a "smelling committee" to locate the good things and secure a share.
From 1868 to 1870, the legislatures of seven states were overwhelmingly radical and in several the radical majority held control for four, six, or eight years.Negroes were most numerous in the legislatures of Louisiana, South Carolina, and Mississippi, and everywhere the votes of these men were for sale.In Alabama and Louisiana, Negro legislators had a fixed price for their votes: for example, six hundred dollars would buy a senator in Louisiana.In South Carolina, Negro government appeared at its worst.A vivid description of the Legislature of this State in which the Negroes largely outnumbered the whites is given by James S.Pike, a Republican journalist*:
*Pike, "The Prostrate State", pp.12 ff.
"In the place of this old aristocratic society stands the rude form of the most ignorant democracy that mankind ever saw, invested with the functions of government.It is the dregs of the population habilitated in the robes of their intelligent predecessors, and asserting over them the rule of ignorance and corruption....It is barbarism overwhelming civilization by physical force.It is the slave rioting in the halls of his master, and putting that master under his feet.And, though it is done without malice and without vengeance, it is nevertheless none the less completely and absolutely done..
..We will enter the House of Representatives.Here sit one hundred and twenty-four members.Of these, twenty-three are white men, representing the remains of the old civilization.These are good-looking, substantial citizens.
They are men of weight and standing in the communities they represent.They are all from the hill country.The frosts of sixty and seventy winters whiten the heads of some among them.There they sit, grim and silent.They feel themselves to be but loose stones, thrown in to partially obstruct a current they are powerless to resist....
"This dense Negro crowd...do the debating, the squabbling, the lawmaking, and create all the clamor and disorder of the body.These twenty-three white men are but the observers, the enforced auditors of the dull and clumsy imitation of a deliberative body, whose appearance in their present capacity is at once a wonder and a shame to modern civilization....The Speaker is black, the Clerk is black, the doorkeepers are black, the little pages are black, the chairman of the Ways and Means is black, and the chaplain is coal black.At some of the desks sit colored men whose types it would be hard to find outside of Congo; whose costumes, visages, attitudes, and expression, only befit the forecastle of a buccaneer.It must be remembered, also, that these men, with not more than a half dozen exceptions, have been themselves slaves, and that their ancestors were slaves for generations...
"But the old stagers admit that the colored brethren have a wonderful aptness at legislative proceedings.They are "quick as lightning" at detecting points of order, and they certainly make incessant and extraordinary use of their knowledge.No one is allowed to talk five minutes without interruption, and one interruption is a signal for another and another, until the original speaker is smothered under an avalanche of them.Forty questions of privilege will be raised in a day.At times, nothing goes on but alternating questions of order and of privilege.The inefficient colored friend who sits in the Speaker's chair cannot suppress this extraordinary element of the debate.Some of the blackest members exhibit a pertinacity of intrusion in raising these points of order and questions of privilege that few white men can equal.Their struggles to get the floor, their bellowings and physical contortions, baffle description.
"The Speaker's hammer plays a perpetual tattoo to no purpose.The talking and the interruptions from all quarters go on with the utmost license.Everyone esteems himself as good as his neighbor, and puts in his oar, apparently as often for love of riot and confusion as for anything else....The Speaker orders a member whom he has discovered to be particularly unruly to take his seat.The member obeys, and with the same motion that he sits down, throws his feet on to his desk, hiding himself from the Speaker by the soles of his boots....After a few experiences of this sort, the Speaker threatens, in a laugh, to call the "gemman" to order.This is considered a capital joke, and a guffaw follows.The laugh goes round and then the peanuts are cracked and munched faster than ever; one hand being employed in fortifying the inner man with this nutriment of universal use, while the other enforces the views of the orator.This laughing propensity of the sable crowd is a great cause of disorder.They laugh as hens cackle--one begins and all follow.
