_ CHAPTER LVIII. COMING TO THE FRONT
In an evil hour Hesden Le Moyne yielded to the solicitations of those whom he had befriended, and whose rights he honestly believed had been unlawfully subverted, and became a candidate in his county. It had been so long since he had experienced the bitterness of persecution on account of his political proclivities, and the social relations of his family had been so pleasant, that he had almost forgotten what he had once passed through; or rather, he had come to believe that the time had gone by when such weapons would be employed against one of his social grade.
The years of silence which had been imposed on him by a desire to avoid unnecessarily distressing his mother, had been years of thought, perhaps the richer and riper from the fact that he had refrained from active participation in political life. Like all his class at the South, he was, if not a politician by instinct, at least familiar from early boyhood with the subtle discussion of political subjects which is ever heard at the table and the fireside of the Southern gentleman. He had regarded the experiment of reconstruction, as he believed, with calm, unprejudiced sincerity; he had buried the past, and looked only to the future. It was not for his own sake or interest that he became a candidate; he was content always to be what he was--a quiet country gentleman. He loved his home and his plantation; he thoroughly enjoyed the pursuits of agriculture, and had no desire to be or do any great thing. His mother's long illness had given him a love for a quiet life, his books and his fireside; and it was only because he thought that he could do something to reconcile the jarring factions and bring harmony out of discord, and lead his people to see that The Nation was greater and better than The South; that its interests and prosperity were also their interest, their prosperity, and their hope--that Hesden Le Moyne consented to forego the pleasant life which he was leading and undertake a brief voyage upon the stormy sea of politics.
He did not expect that all would agree with him, but he believed that they would listen to him without prejudice and without anger. And he so fully believed in the conclusions he had arrived at that he thought no reasonable man could resist their force or avoid reaching a like result. His platform, as he called it, when he came to announce himself as a candidate at the Court House on the second day of the term of court, in accordance with immemorial custom in that county, was simply one of plain common-sense. He was not an office-holder or a politician. He did not come of an office-holding family, nor did he seek position or emolument. He offered himself for the suffrages of his fellow-citizens simply because no other man among them seemed willing to stand forth and advocate those principles which he believed to be right, expedient, and patriotic.
He was a white man, he said, and had the prejudices and feelings that were common to the white people of the South. He had not believed in the right or the policy of secession, in which he differed from some of his neighbors; but when it came to the decision of that question by force of arms he had yielded his conviction and stood side by side upon the field of battle with the fiercest fire-eaters of the land. No man could accuse him of being remiss in any duty which he owed his State or section. But all that he insisted was past. There was no longer any distinct sectional interest or principle to be maintained. The sword had decided that, whether right or wrong as an abstraction, the doctrine of secession should never be practically asserted in the government. The result of the struggle had been to establish, beyond a peradventure, what had before been an unsettled question: that the Nation had the power and the will to protect itself against any disintegrating movement. It might not have decided what was the meaning of the Constitution, and so not determined upon which side of this question lay the better reasoning; but it had settled the practical fact. This decision he accepted; he believed that they all accepted it--with only this difference, perhaps, that he believed it rendered necessary a change in many of the previous convictions of the Southern people. They had been accustomed to call themselves Southern men; after that, Americans. Hereafter it became their duty and their interest to be no longer Southern men, but Americans only.
"Having these views," he continued, "it is my sincere conviction that we ought to accept, in spirit as well as in form, the results of this struggle; not in part, but fully." The first result had been the freeing in the slave. In the main he believed that had been accepted, if not cheerfully, at least finally. The next had been the enfranchisement of the colored man. This he insisted had not been honestly accepted by the mass of the white people of the South. Every means, lawful and unlawful, had been resorted to to prevent the due operation of these laws. He did not speak of this in anger or to blame. Knowing their prejudices and feelings, he could well excuse what had been done; but he insisted that it was not, and could not be, the part of an honest, brave and intelligent people to nullify or evade any portion of the law of the land. He did not mean that it was the duty of any man to submit without opposition to a law which he believed to be wrong; but that opposition should never be manifested by unlawful violence, unmanly evasion, or cowardly fraud.
He realized that, at first, anger might over-bear both patriotism and honor, under the sting of what was regarded as unparalleled wrong, insult, and outrage; but there had been time enough for anger to cool, and for his people to look with calmness to the future that lay before, and let its hopes and duties overbalance the disappointments of the past. He freely admitted that had the question of reconstruction been submitted to him for determination, he would not have adopted the plan which had prevailed; but since it had been adopted and become an integral part of the law of the land, he believed that whoever sought to evade its fair and unhindered operation placed himself in the position of a law-breaker. They had the right, undoubtedly, by fair and open opposition to defeat any party, and to secure the amendment or repeal of any law or system of laws. But they had no right to resist law with violence, or to evade law by fraud.
The right of the colored man to exercise freely and openly his elective franchise, without threat, intimidation, or fear, was the same as that of the whitest man he addressed; and the violation of that right, or the deprivation of that privilege, was, really an assault upon the right and liberty of the white voter also. No rights were safe unless the people had that regard for law which would secure to the weakest and the humblest citizen the free and untrammeled enjoyment and exercise of every privilege which the law conferred. He characterized the laws that had been enacted in regard to the conduct of elections and the selection of local officers as unmanly and shuffling--an assertion of the right to nullify national law by fraud, which the South had failed to maintain by the sword, and had by her surrender virtually acknowledged herself in honor bound to abandon.
He did not believe, he would not believe, that his countrymen of the South, his white fellow-citizens of the good old county of Horsford, had fairly and honestly considered the position in which recent events and legislation had placed them, not only before the eyes of the country, but of the civilized world. It had always been claimed, he said, that a white man is by nature, and not merely by the adventitious circumstances of the past, innately and inherently, and he would almost add infinitely, the superior of the colored man. In intellectual culture, experience, habits of self-government and command, this was unquestionably true. Whether it were true as a natural and scientific fact was, perhaps, yet to be decided. But could it be possible that a people, a race priding itself upon its superiority, should be unwilling or afraid to see the experiment fairly tried? "Have we," he asked, "so little confidence in our moral and intellectual superiority that we dare not give the colored man an equal right with us to exercise the privilege which the Nation has conferred upon him? Are the white people of the South so poor in intellectual resources that they must resort to fraud or open violence to defeat the ignorant and weak colored man of even the least of his law-given rights?
"We claim," he continued, "that he is ignorant. It is true. Are we afraid that he will grow wiser than we? We claim that he has not the capacity to acquire or receive a like intellectual development with ourselves. Are we afraid to give him a chance to do so? Could not intelligence cope with ignorance without fraud? Boasting that we could outrun our adversary, would we hamstring him at the starting-post? It was accounted by all men, in all ages, an unmanly thing to steal, and a yet more unmanly thing to steal from the weak; so that it has passed into a proverb, 'Only a dog would steal the blind man's dinner.' And yet," he said, "we are willing to steal the vote of the ignorant, the blind, the helpless colored man!"
It was not for the sake of the colored man, he said in conclusion, that he appealed to them to pause and think. It was because the honor, the nobility, the intelligence of the white man was being degraded by the course which passion and resentment, and not reason or patriotism, had dictated. He appealed to his hearers as
white men, not so much to give to the colored man the right to express his sentiments at the ballot-box, as to regard that right as sacred because it rested upon the law, which constituted the foundation and safeguard of their own rights. He would not appeal to them as Southern men, for he hoped the day was at hand when there would no more be any such distinction. But he would appeal to them as men--honest men, honorable men--and as American citizens, to honor the law and thereby honor themselves.
It had been said that the best and surest way to secure the repeal of a bad law was first to secure its unhindered operation. Especially was this true of a people who had boasted of unparalleled devotion to principle, of unbounded honor, and of the highest chivalry. How one of them, or all of them, could claim any of these attributes of which they had so long boasted, and yet be privy to depriving even a single colored man of the right which the Nation had given him, or to making the exercise of that right a mockery, he could not conceive; and he would not believe that they would do it when once the scales of prejudice and resentment had fallen from their eyes. If they had been wronged and outraged as a people, their only fit revenge was to display a manhood and a magnanimity which should attest the superiority upon which they prided themselves.
This address was received by his white hearers with surprised silence; by the colored men with half-appreciative cheers. They recognized that the speaker was their friend, and in favor of their being allowed the free exercise of the rights of citizenship. His white auditors saw that he was assailing with some bitterness and earnest indignation both their conduct and what they had been accustomed to term their principles. There was no immediate display of hostility or anger; and Hesden Le Moyne returned to his home full of hope that the time was at hand for which he had so long yearned, when the people of his native South should abandon the career of prejudice and violence into which they had been betrayed by resentment and passion.
Early the next morning some of his friends waited upon him and adjured him, for his own sake, for the sake of his family and friends, to withdraw from the canvass. This he refused to do. He said that what he advocated was the result of earnest conviction, and he should always despise himself should he abandon the course he had calmly decided to take. Whatever the result, he would continue to the end. Then they cautiously intimated to him that his course was fraught with personal danger. "What!" he cried, "do you expect me to flinch at the thought of danger? I offered my life and gave an arm for a cause in which I did not believe; shall I not brave as much in the endeavor to serve my country in a manner which my mind and conscience approve? I seek for difficulty with no one; but it may as well be understood that Hesden Le Moyne does not turn in his tracks because of any man's anger. I say to you plainly that I shall neither offer personal insult nor submit to it in this canvass."
His friends left him with heavy hearts, for they foreboded ill. It was not many days before he found that the storm of detraction and contumely through which he had once passed was but a gentle shower compared with the tornado which now came down upon his head. The newspapers overflowed with threat, denunciation, and abuse. One of them declared:
"The man who thinks that he can lead an opposition against the organized Democracy of Horsford County is not only very presumptuous, but extremely bold. Such a man will require a bodyguard of Democrats in his canvass and a Gibraltar in his rear on the day of the election."
Another said:
"The Radical candidate would do well to take advice. The white men of the State desire a peaceful summer and autumn. They are wearied of heated political strife. If they are forced to vigorous action it will be exceedingly vigorous, perhaps unpleasantly so. Those who cause the trouble will suffer most from it. Bear that in mind, persons colored and white-skinned. We reiterate our advice to the reflective and argumentative Radical leader, to be careful how he goes, and not stir up the animals too freely; they have teeth and claws."
Still another said:
"Will our people suffer a covert danger to rankle in their midst until it gains strength to burst into an open enemy? Will they tamely submit while Hesden Le Moyne rallies the colored men to his standard and hands over Horsford to the enemy? Will they stand idly and supinely, and witness the consummation of such an infamous conspiracy? No! a thousand times, No! Awake! stir up your clubs; let the shout go up; put on your red shirts and let the ride begin. Let the young men take the van, or we shall be sold into political slavery."
Another sounded the key-note of hostility in these words:
"Every white man who dares to avow himself a Radical should be promptly branded as the bitter and malignant enemy of the South; every man who presumes to aspire to office through Republican votes should be saturated with stench. As for the negroes, let them amuse themselves, if they will, by voting the Radical ticket. We have the count. We have a thousand good and true men in Horsford whose brave ballots will be found equal to those of five thousand vile Radicals."
One of his opponents, in a most virulent speech, called attention to the example of a celebrated Confederate general. "He, too," said the impassioned orator, "served the Confederacy as bravely as Hesden Le Moyne, and far more ably. But he became impregnated with the virus of Radicalism; he abandoned and betrayed the cause for which he fought; he deserted the Southern people in the hour of need and joined their enemies. He was begged and implored not to persevere in his course, but he drifted on and on, and floundered deeper and deeper into the mire, until he landed fast in the slough where he sticks to-day. And what has he gained? Scorn, ostracism, odiurn, ill-will--worse than all, the contempt of the men who stood by him in the shower of death and destruction. Let Hesden Le Moyne take warning by his example."
And so it went on, day after day. Personal affront was studiously avoided, but in general terms he was held up to the scorn and contempt of all honest men as a renegade and a traitor. Those who had seemed his friends fell away from him; the home which had been crowded with pleasant associates was desolate, or frequented only by those who came to remonstrate or to threaten. He saw his mistake, but he knew that anger was worse than useless. He did not seek to enrage, but to convince. Failing in this, he simply performed the duty which he had undertaken, as he said he would do it--fearlessly, openly, and faithfully.
The election came, and the result--was what he should have been wise enough to foresee. Nevertheless, it was a great and grievous disappointment to Hesden Le Moyne. Not that he cared about a seat in the Legislature; but it was a demonstration to him that in his estimate of the people of whom he had been so proud he had erred upon the side of charity. He had believed them better than they had shown themselves. The fair future which he had hoped was so near at hand seemed more remote than ever. His hope for his people and his State was crushed, and apprehension of unspeakable evil in the future forced itself upon his heart. _