and we would rather be counted out than bulldozed; can't we arrange this thing? I made a proposition to him and said, "You know I am renominated on the Republican ticket, but I will get out of the way for any moderate Democrat you may name to save the State and district ticket. We will not vote for your State ticket; you cannot make the colored people vote the State ticket; but if you will let us have our State ticket we will give you the local offices." We offered them the clerk of the court, not the sheriff, and the two representatives. We told him we would not give them the senator, but the district judge and attorney. After this interview Holmes sent us to Dr. Askew, ex-chairman of the Democratic committee, and he said to me, "Now, Murrell, there is no use talking, I advise you to stand from under. When these men get in here we can't control them. We like you well enough and would not like to see you hurt. I will see you to-night at Mr. Holmes." We had an interview with Mr. Holmes and made this proposition, and Holmes asked me this question: "Murrell, you know damned well the niggers in this parish won't vote the Democratic ticket—there is no use to tell me you will give us the clerk of the court, you know the niggers won't do it. You can't trust the niggers in politics; all your eloquence and all the speeches you can make won't make these niggers vote this ticket or what you suggest, even if we was to accept it. No, by God, we are going to carry it. Why," said he, "there is more eloquence in double-barreled shot-guns to convince niggers than there is in forty Ciceros." I said to him, "Well, do you suppose the merchants and planters will back you up," and he said, "O, by God, they have got nothing to do with it. We have charge of it. We three men, the Democratic committee, have full power to work."
The result of this "work" was, as stated by the witness, and not disputed by any one before the committee, that in this parish, containing 2,700 registered Republican voters, and only 238 Democrats, the Democrats returned a majority of 2,300. The witness, who was a candidate on the Republican ticket, swears that not more than 360 votes were cast. Democratic shot-gun eloquence did its "work," as prophesied by Mr. Askew, ex-chairman of the Democratic committee, but it also served as a wonderful stimulus to migration from Madison Parish.
We cite this case for two reasons: First, because it has been said that the Negroes have not emigrated from bulldozed parishes; and, secondly, because it serves as an illustration of the many similar cases which were given to the committee.
We desire also to invite attention to the evidence of Henry Adams, a colored witness from Shreveport, La. Adams is a man of very remarkable energy and native ability. Scores of witnesses were summoned by the majority of the committee from Shreveport but none of them ventured to question his integrity or truthfulness. Though a common laborer, he has devoted much of his time in traveling through Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas, working his way and taking notes of the crimes committed against his race. His notes, written in terse and simple language, embraced the names of six hundred and eighty-three colored men who have been whipped, maimed or murdered within the last eight years, and his statement of these crimes covers thirty-five pages of closely printed matter in the report. We are sure no one can read it without a conviction of its truthfulness, and a feeling of horror at the barbarous details he relates. Adams is the man who has organized a colonization council, composed of laboring colored people, and rigidly excluding politicians, which numbers ninety-eight thousand who have enrolled themselves with a view to emigration from that country as early as possible. He details the character and the purpose of the organization and the efforts it has made to obtain relief and protection for its members. "First," he says, "we appealed to the President of the United States to help us out of our distress, to protect us in our rights and privileges. Next, we appealed to Congress for a territory to which we might go and live with our families. Failing in that," says he, "our other object was to ask for help to ship us all to Liberia, Africa, somewhere where we could live in peace and quiet. If that could not be done," he adds, "our idea was to appeal to other governments outside of the United States to help us to get away from the United States and go and live there under their flag." What a commentary upon our own boasted equality and freedom! Finding no relief in any direction, they finally resolved to emigrate to some of the Northern States. He says they had some hope of securing better treatment at home until 1877, when "we lost all hopes and determined to go anywhere on God's earth, we didn't care where; we said we was going if we had to run away and go into the woods." Perhaps we can best summarize the condition of affairs in Louisiana and the causes of the exodus from that State, as the Negroes themselves regarded them, by quoting a brief extract from the report of the business committee to the colored State convention held in New Orleans on the 21st of April, 1879:
Mr. President: Your committee on business have the honor to submit this their final report. Discussing the general and widespread alarm among the colored people of Louisiana, including so potent a fear that in many parishes, and in others perhaps largely to follow, there is an exodus of agricultural labor which indicates the prostration and destruction of the productive, and therefore essentially vital, interests of the State. The Committee find that the primary cause of this lies in the absence of a republican form of government to the people of Louisiana. Crime and lawlessness existing to an extent that laughs at all restraint, and the misgovernment naturally induced from a State administration itself the product of violence, have created an absorbing and constantly increasing distrust and alarm among our people throughout the State. All rights of freemen denied and all claims to a just recompense for labor rendered or honorable dealings between planter and laborer disallowed, justice a mockery, and the laws a cheat, the very officers of the courts being themselves the mobocrats and violators of the law, the only remedy left the colored citizens in many of parishes of our State today is to emigrate. The fiat to go forth is irresistible. The constantly recurring, nay, ever-present, fear which haunts the minds of these our people in the turbulent parishes of the State is that slavery in the horrible form of peonage is approaching; that the avowed disposition of men in power to reduce the laborer and his interest to the minimum of advantages as freemen and to absolutely none as citizens has produced so absolute a feat that in many cases it has become a panic. It is flight from present sufferings and from wrongs to come.
Here are the reasons for the exodus as stated by the colored people themselves. In view of the facts which we have stated, and of the terrible history which we cannot here repeat, does any one believe their statement of grievances is overdrawn? Is there any other race of freemen on the face of the earth who would have endured and patiently suffered as they have? Is there any other government among civilized nations which would have permitted such acts to be perpetrated against its citizens?
We will not dwell upon the conditions which have driven these people from Mississippi. It would be but a repetition of the intolerance, persecutions, and violence which have prevailed in Louisiana. The same Democratic "shot-gun eloquence" which was so potent for the conversion of colored Republicans in the one has proven equally powerful in the other. The same "eloquence" which wrested Louisiana from Republicans also converted Mississippi. And in both the same results are visible in the determination of the colored people to get away.
Nearly all the witnesses who were asked as to the causes of the exodus answered that it was because of a feeling of insecurity for life and property; a denial of their political rights as citizens; long-continued persecutions for political reasons; a system of cheating by landlords and storekeepers which rendered it impossible for them to make a living no matter how hard they might work; the inadequacy of school advantages, and a fear that they would be eventually reduced to a system of peonage even worse than slavery itself.
On the latter point they quoted the laws of Mississippi, which authorize the sheriff to hire the convicts to planters and others for twenty-five cents a day to work out the fine and cost, and which provide that for every day lost from sickness he shall work another to pay for his board while sick. Under these laws they allege that a colored man may be fined $500 for some trifling misdemeanor, and be compelled to work five or six years to pay the fine; and that it is not uncommon for colored men thus hired out to be worked in a chain gang upon the plantations under overseers, with whip in hand, precisely as in the days of slavery. And some of the witnesses declared that if an attempt be made to escape they are pursued by blood-hounds, as before the war.
Henry
