Cui Bono. The Negro Vote [pp. 289-292]

THE NEGRO VOTE.
points contiguous to the army, it was not uncommon to get up a
kind of spontaneous entertainment called storm parties, at which
there were no refreshments, but where the light fantastic toe
was tripped by gay belles and gallant officers. At times this was
carried to excess, and not a little dissipation, and some demoral ization, were the natural result. Such scenes were in sad
contrast with the sufferings of the country.
ART. III. —CUI BONO?-TtIE NEGRO VOTE.
PORT ROYAL, VA., September 17th, 1867.
MESSRS. EDITORS-The Radicals have overreached themselves.
The negroes throughout the South are determined not to become
their allies and supple tools, but to set up a party of their own,
and to vote for none but negro candidates for office. They
naturally reject with scorn and contempt the Radical proposition
that henceforth there shall be no distinctions of color or race, but
that all men shall stand on their own merits. They see, that
under a thin disguise, this is a proposition that the negroes shall
do the voting, and the Radicals fill all the offices. Four millions
of negroes in the South, they insist, by virtue of their numbers
and their loyalty, are entitled to fill most of the Federal and State
offices at the South, and not to become mere hewers of wood and
drawers of water for a handful of false, hypocritical, newly-converted white UInionists. Thrown upon their individual merit
regardless of color or race, and they know that no negroes would
be elected or appointed to office, for more capable white men are
everywhere to be found. Obliterate all distinctions of race, and
the negroes at the South, like those at the North, would become
outcasts, pariahs, paupers and criminals. They would be confined to the most loathsome and least lucrative employments, and
spend half their time in prisons, work-houses and poor-houses.
They know that mere political equality would at once condemn
them to social slavery-and they see at the North, that this social
slavery, or slavery to skill and capital, of an inferior to a superior race, is the worst possible condition in which human beings
can be placed. You, and your readers, must see that the negroes
will not be satisfied with a nominal, but deceptive equality, but
are everywhere determined to become masters of those who lately
owned them as slaves. We admire their pluck. They are all
armed and ready; all burning for a fight. They are impatient at
the tedious process of reconstruction, and lavish much more
abuse upon the Federal soldiers, the Freedman's Bureau and the
Radicals, than upon the Secessionists. So soon as invested with
the voting franchise, they will be full masters of the situation, for
they constitute a majority on every acre of good land (except a
little about the mountains) from Maryland to Florida, from the
VOL. IV.-NO. YI.
289
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