each branch of Congress the judge of the eligibility of its members was used as a pretext to reject these Southern representatives and senators.

Then began the contest between Congress and the president. February 26, 1866, Congress appointed a committee of fifteen, twelve Republicans and three Democrats, to look into Southern affairs. On June 18, this committee reported against the president's policy, treated the South as still in a state of rebellion, and, under the leadership of violent Southhaters, entered upon a new era of persecution.

Meantime, the prostrate South was fast in the grip of the Freedman's Bureau, the shiftless freedman himself, and the schoolmarm, and could not be reinstated in the Union. Her great offenses-what led Congress to denounce her as still in rebellion-were first, that she had passed laws against vagrancy; but this had been done to protect property from millions of idlers, mostly of the freedman class; and, second, that she was unwilling to receive the slaves as political equals, competent to vote and to hold public office. These bitter pills she could not swallow in a moment. After a while, however, she submitted to the inevitable, and, in order to get some kind of government and go to work to rebuild her shattered fortunes, accepted the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments to the constitution. These two amendments, with the thirteenth abolishing slavery, are the constitutional results of the War between the States, alias the "Rebellion." The thirteenth amendment confirmed the Emancipation Proclamation. No one wishes to see it repealed.

The fourteenth amendment brought a new being into ex

Before its

istence, that is, a citizen of the United States. adoption, men were citizens of their respective states, and incidentally residents of the United States. Its object of course was to make citizens of the negroes emancipated by the war.

The fifteenth amendment went farther, and gave votes to all negro males over 21 years of age. For thirty years or more, these votes were cast almost solidly in the interests of one political party, and the Southern people saw that there was no probability that the negro vote would ever be divided between the parties. This led to the restriction of the suffrage in several Southern states. The results are excellent. As said elsewhere, a good many whites are disfranchised by the new constitutions of the Southern states. The best class of colored men retain their votes, and the mass of idle and vicious ones are disfranchised. In these results, the North has practically acquiesced, and the Supreme Court of the United States has shown no inclination to upset the new constitutions. All this is a happy omen. It is one of the most significant signs that "the war is at last over."

March 2, 1867, is the "Black Friday" of the South. On that day, Congress passed, over the president's veto, a bill dividing the territory of secession, except Tennessee, into five military districts, to be commanded by generals of the United States army. These military governors were ordered to ignore the state governments and the state officers as illegal and as insufficient to protect the freedman in his rights under the constitution. Under this act, the mass of

intelligent white men in the South were disfranchised, and all negro males over twenty-one were given the ballot. The results may be imagined.

VIII

The Carpetbagger and the Scalawag

In the midst of this hurlyburly of wrack and ruin, and as a part of the diabolical machinery, appears that monstrosity, that vulture of society, the "carpetbagger." He is the product of putrefaction, the child of carrion and decay. In our day, he packs his bag and speeds to the sister isle of Cuba, and his odor is even now borne to us on the southern zephyr. When the Philippines are "pacified," he will take ship to "loot" the treasury of that territory.

The carpetbagger of 1865 was the lowest of his ilk, the basest of his species. Often he was an apostate in religion, a preacher driven out of some community for political corruption, for immorality, or for robbing his church's treasury. He refugeed to the prostrate South to recoup his fortunes by plundering bankrupt commonwealths.

To inflame the negroes against their former masters; to speak contemptuously of the "poor white rebel trash;” to point the negro to the home of "that broken-down aristocrat" and ask him how he would like to have it; to ogle him and embrace him, calling him "Mister" and "Brother," and count upon his vote at the next election,—such was the employment of this bird of prey, this cross between the cormorant and the buzzard.

Forth from this cesspool of corruption, sprang another creature forever infamous as the "scalawag." He is a renegade Southerner, who joined the carpetbagger and the negro in dividing offices, plundering citizens, and robbing the public treasury. Before the war, he was a blatant "daybefore-yesterday secessionist." During the war, he probably held a bomb-proof position far from the post of danger. When Congress quarrelled with the president, he saw the opportunity of his life, sneaked slimily out of his hole, and with oily tongue ingratiated himself with the august representatives of the conqueror, while gleams of the gubernatorial mansion and of senatorial honors flashed before his snaky vision.

The carpetbagger is no new character in history. He has lived in all periods and among all nations. He crossed the Mediterranean, and checked his carpetbag for Utica and Magnesia. He was with the infamous Verres, whom Cicero denounced for plundering Sicily. He crossed the Channel with William the Norman, and battened on the decaying carcass of Anglo-Saxon civilization. History repeats itself.

Scalawags, also, were produced in earlier ages; but ours seem fouler. Sicily, Africa, and Asia Minor had them in abundance; but those were pagan days, and men were sunk in superstition and brutality. England under the Conqueror had them in plenty; but that was before the days of nice honor and chivalric ideals. The scalawag of 1865, we repeat, was "the basest of his species."

IX

The Third Triumvirate

When Cæsar, Crassus, and Pompey divided the Roman world among them, they were indulging “that vaulting ambition which o'erleaps itself," but were themselves the worst sufferers. When Octavius, Antony, and Lepidus drew up their deadly proscription, they were but following the precedents of a pagan age; but their deeds, though bloody and heinous, did not undermine the civilization of the Roman world. Not so with the third triumvirate, composed of the carpetbagger, the scalawag, and the negro. They rode roughshod over private rights, piled up huge debts for posterity, plundered the public treasury, and made heinous plcts against the hearth and home of the Southern family.

We must say, however, that the poor ignorant freedman was but a pliant tool in the hands of unprincipled men of the other two classes. Rascality and robbery ran riot. Enormous debts were piled up against the states; the bonds were sold cheap to adventurers from every section; and colossal fortunes were made by depraved and corrupt men like Legree, famous in ante-bellum fiction. The debt of Alabama increased from about six million to about thirty-eight million; that of Florida from two hundred and twenty-one thousand to nearly sixteen million; that of South Carolina from five million to thirty-nine million; and the debts of other states in about the same proportion. The debts of the eleven seceding states were increased from eighty-sever