purposes of either mining or manufacturing these phosphates. One company is organized with a capital of $2,000,000 to mine in all the navigable rivers in the State; and there are several manufacturing corporations, which have each a million dollars capital. The Etiwan Company claims to have the largest acid chamber in the United States; and in the Wando, Etiwan, Pacific Guano, Atlantic, Stono, and Wappoo mills, four or five millions of dollars have been invested since 1868. Important as is this industry, there are a variety of others already developed in Charleston, which promise great future success. In the manufacture of doors, blinds, sashes and machinery, and in ship-build. ing, a large capital is invested. The enterprising citizens are even constructing readymade houses and churches, which can be shipped in sections to new States and territories; a cotton mill, and several tanneries are projected. The "truck farms," vie with those of Norfolk, and are supplying the northern markets with early vegetables. The city's jobbing trade amounted to about $6,000,000 in 1872, and steadily increases at the rate of twenty-five per cent. The highways leading out of the city are all richly embowered in loveliest foliage; the oak, the magnolia, the myrtle, the jessamine, vie with each other in tropical. splendor. Splendid shell roads have been projected, but are not yet completed. The visitor hardly knows which most to admire -the cultivated bloom and glory of the gardens, the tangled thickets where the luxuriant cane rises thirty and forty feet, the shimmering sheets of water on the on the marshes, or the long stretches of sandy pathways, over which the moss-hung oaks stretch their long arms. A palmetto, standing lonely under the rich glow of the splendid southern moon, will provoke poetry from even the prosaic; a cabin, overgrown with vines and tendrils, and half concealed in a green and odorous thicket, behind which one catches the gleam of the river current, will make one enamored of the sweet silence, and restful perfection of the lowland capital's suburbs. The mansion with closed doors, and decaying verandas, from which "Life and thought have gone away—” will recall the revolution's worst phase to him who had almost forgotten it in Charleston's commercial bustle. Along the Ashley, the old manorial houses and estates, like Drayton Hall and the Middleton homestead, stand like sorrowful ghosts. lamenting the past; on James's Island one may wander among rich cotton plantations, now over-growing the maze of fortifications which sprang up during the war; in Magnolia Cemetery, there is no more silence and absolute calm, as there is no more of beauty and of luxuriance, than in the vast parks surrounding these ruined and desolate homes. The monuments in the cemetery to Simons, and Legare, and Colonel Washington, and Vanderhorst are beautiful and tasteful; so are the battered and broken monuments to a dead civilization and a broken-down system which one finds upon the old plantations. There is a rude belt of forsaken plantations near the Cooper River, along the famous Goose Creek, upon whose banks stands the venerable St James's Church, built in 1711. Around this ancient building the ambitious forest is fast weaving a net-work difficult to penetrate, and the very graves are hidden under festoons of wild vines and flowers. Along the harbor there are also deserted and bankrupt towns, like pretty Mount Pleasant, filled with moss-grown and rotting houses, whose owners have fled, unless they are too poor to get away. As the climate of South Carolina is as mild and genial as that of the most favored portions of southern Europe, it is not strange that the lower classes of Italy and other countries should feel inclined to emigrate to the Palmetto State. But the people have been slow to show a proper intelligence on the subject of immigration. The legislators have taken care to encour age certain northern classes to come-since they are sure that they will not; and have discouraged any masses of foreigners from attempting to settle in the State, since they fear that might lead to a new deal in politics. The Italians who went into the commonwealth some time since were offered $100 per year, and a little meal and bacon weekly; but they haughtily rejected any such terms. The white laborer who enters South Carolina must be offered good wages and given land at cheap rates, and the sooner the natives learn that he is not to be expected to work and live as the negroes do, the better it will be for their interest Recently the whites have become tho roughly aroused to the importance of this subject, and there is a great change in the temper with which immigrants are now re ceived. The determination seems to be to make much of them as a sure, if slow, means of working out the political regeneration of the State, and securing its material prosperity. A State Commissioner of Immigration was appointed by the late Taxpayers' Convention, and the counties are appointing local Commissioners. An effort is now making at Charleston to establish a direct steamship line to Liverpool, which, it is hoped, will not only give a stimulus to immigration, but to inward freights as well. The negro is not especially anxious to see immigration come in. The spirit of race is strong within him. He is desirous of seeing the lands in the commonwealth in the hands of his own people before the rest of the world's poor are invited to partake. He is impressed with the idea that South Carolina should be in some measure a black man's government, and is jealous of white intervention. This is not the sentiment, certainly, of the intelligent and refined colored people, but the mass are ignorant, and think that they are right in taking that stand. The black man lets the African which is in him run riot for the time being. He even dislikes to see the mulatto progress; and when he criticises him, it is as if the mulatto were necessarily an inferior. So, too, the negro secretly dislikes the white adventurer, or "carpet-bagger," as our southern friends call him. Black rogue has quickly learned from white rogue all he wishes to know, and now proposes to go alone. The idea of Nemesis, added to the negro's lack of moral consciousness, which has become so pronounced in the two centuries of servitude, makes the negro believe that he is right in stealing and oppressing. He has found, now that he has obtained power, a strange fascination in the use of the political machinery for purposes of oppression and spoliation. He thinks too, grimly, in the words of the Carolinian black savage song: "De bottom rails on de top, An' we's gwine to keep it dar." The political difficulties between the white and the black natives began directly after the close of the war. The mass of undisfranchised whites, imbittered by, and disgusted with the revolution, refused to have anything whatever to do with the new edifice which the negroes were trying to upbuild. Had they frankly accepted the situation, they might have had a share in the framing of the new constitution. The negroes, left alone, were soon interested in the advent of white strangers, who agreed to teach them the political rôle they were called upon to play. Some of these new-comers were honest men; others were thieves. The convention for the making of a new constitution was at once a ludicrous and an impressive gathering. The constitution was ratified at a general election, held on the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth days of April, 1868. South THE ORPHAN ASYLUM-CHARLESTON, Carolina then entered upon her first experience of negro government. Governor Orr left the state executive chair on July 6, 6, 1868. The Commonwealth then had a bonded debt of about $5,500,ooo, and a floating indebtedness amounting to, perhaps, a million and a half more. While the condition of the finances was not hopeful, it was still far from desperate. Peo which, by the way, they have an extraordinary aptitude, jobs began to appear, and the first drawing of blood may be said to have been in connec tion with the job for the re demption of the bills of the Bank of the State. The strong influenced the weak; the ne gro, dazzled and enlivened by the prospect of the reception of sums which seemed to him colossal fortunes, soon became an apt scholar, and needed but little prompting from his white teachers. Measures for authorizing the Governor to borrow on the credit of the State, were at once inaugurated; and then began a series of acts whose results ple hoped that a new railroad develop- | are without a parallel in the history of ment would open up fresh trade, that revolutions. During the four years from money would flow in. The abominable 1868 to 1872, inclusive, the bonded debt and atrocious outrages of the Ku-Klux, was increased from five and a half to however were an effective obstacle to sixteen millions, and the floating debt, northern immigration. The Klan was im- which could be only vaguely ascertained, ported into South Carolina in 1868, before amounted to several millions more. Those the present State government was organ- of the Republicans who were honest ized; and the white population of the had raised their voices loudly against the ruder and remote counties tried to inau- infamies which were the cause of this terrigurate a reign of terror among the negroes. ble increase; had endeavored to oust the The chairman of the Republican State thieves, and failing, had left the party in Central Committee was brutally murdered disgust. In 1870, the Conservatives, as in the fall of 1868. Hundreds of men the white natives style themselves, alarmed were taken from their homes at night and at the riot of corruption and the total disbrutally whipped; some were murdered. regard of decency manifested by the govThe result was the interference of the erning powers, rallied and made a decided Federal government, the arrest of many effort to get the State into their own hands. members of the organization and the break- They nominated R. B. Carpenter, a Republiing up of its secret operations. can Circuit Judge, for Governor, on the simBut while society was completely unset-ple yet broad platform of retrenchment and tled, while the whites were smarting under the humiliation of being crowded out of the representation to which they were entitled, while the negro was master, and was beginning to be insolent and aggressive, the legislature met. The first session after reconstruction was held in August of 1868. And at a later session, Gov. Scott, formerly an agent of the Freedmen's Bureau, sent in his first message, in which he reviewed the financial condition of the State, and the Ku-Klux outrages, then at their height, and counseled moderation and firmness. The negroes nearly filled both Senate and House; there were but few white men. During the first session, when the ignorant blacks were learning parliamentary forms for reform. On their tickets negroes were represented, and for the first time in the history of the State, negroes and Conservative whites spoke upon the same political stump. But the leaders of the negroes refused to believe in the sincerity of the ex-confederates, and Gov. Scott was re-elected over Carpenter. The ring which was soiling its guilty fingers with plunder was jubilant honest Republicans hung their heads with shame and gave up all hope of the State; the native white Carolinians, angered and distressed, and fearing that the negroes might undertake some measures to which resistance would be necessary, formed themselves into a "council of safety." It is said really to have been simply an or ganization to enable planters to protect themselves against strikes, and at most a purely defensive organization, and not an attempt at a revival of Ku-Kluxism, as it has sometimes been called. It had no hold in the lower part of the State, but in the upper counties seems to have been perverted into Ku-Kluxism. The offer of amity which it had cost the pride of the Conservatives such an abasement to make, is not likely to be repeated at once. The struggle was great, the result unsatisfactory; and people grimly submit to be robbed to be robbed without attempting any resistance. But the hostility which they would naturally feel towards the acts of the present state administration was somewhat emphasized; and in the biting criticisms evoked from the press of Charleston so much truth has been told that the outside world has begun to believe in the statement that the revolu tion has been made an instrument of fraud and oppression. Although it would seem an infamy simply to deliberately increase the debt of a State which had been so terribly impoverished as had South Carolina by the war (her total valuation having decreased in ten years from $489,319,128 to $164,409,941), still this was but the beginning of the outrage. Not only was the debt increased, but the revenues of the State were diverted from their proper channels into the pockets of the thieves; and it has been incontrovertibly proven that millions have been added to the State debt without the authority of the legislature. By the official statement of the treasurer of the Commonwealth, the public debt at the close of the fiscal year ending October 31, 1871, amounted to $15,851,327.35. This showed an actual increase since the advent of the reconstruction legislature of ten and a half millions, of which amount only $4,389,400 had ever been in any manner authorized by the legal representatives of the State. And it is considered certain that in 1872 there were already afloat upon the market,-very possibly, in the hands of innocent holders, -without any authority in their original issue, some $6,000,000 in conversion bonds; and it was found necessary to introduce an act, in 1872, to ratify and confirm this illegal issue, for which the "financial board," composed of the governor, the State treasurer, and the attorney-general, were responsible.* Immense sums of money were collected during the four years from 1868 to the beginning of 1872. The people of the State contributed $3,780,000 in taxes, and the financial agents at New York sold bonds to the amount of $2,282,000. Add to this a million dollars of taxes collected up to the close of 1872, and it will be seen that more than seven millions of dollars went into the treasury during two administrations. This revenue, which, in view of the impoverishment caused by the war, was very encouraging, has been stolen from the State in a variety of ways. The officers have never been governed by the appropriation acts; have never been limited by them. The money appropriated for one purpose has been unblushingly expended for another. No honest debts were paid with all the money collected from the white people who are denied the right of representation in this black legislature, not a debt during all last year. The bondholders have not received the interest upon their bonds. The frauds to which the legislature lent itself, and which private individuals perpetrated, were contemptible. A land commission was established. It was ostensibly beneficent. Its apparent purpose was to buy up lands, and distribute them among the freedmen. An appropriation of $700,000 was granted for that purpose. The State was at once robbed. Worthless land was purchased, and sold at fabulous sums to the government. The commissioners were generally accused of extensive corruption. When at last an honest commissioner came in, it was found that a quarter of a million dollars At the last Session, 1873-'74, an act was passed declaring that these bonds, known as Conversion Bonds, amounting to $5.965,000, were put upon the market "without any authority of law," and were "absolutely null and void." A joint resolution was passed for the prosecution of the ex-State Treasurer, but this joint resolution is lost, and can't be found by any one! had been stolen. The "sinking fund commission," is another "oubliette" into which money raised from the State sinks mysteriously. The commissioners of this fraud were authorized to take and sell real and personal property belonging to the State, and to report annually to the legislature the sums received. Public property has rapidly disappeared, but no report has ever been made.* I have already given, in a preceding paper, the history of the operations of this commission with regard to the Blue Ridge Railroad. Let that serve as an illustration. The pockets of an unknown few contain the proceeds of much valuable State property. This is mighty theft; colossal impudence like this was never surpassed. Never was a revolution, originally intended as humane, turned to such base uses. Never were thieves permitted to go unpunished after such bold and reckless wickedness. Never before were a people crushed to earth, kept down and throttled so long. The manliness which we received as a precious legacy, with our Anglo-Saxon blood, demands that we should cry out: "Hold off your hands! Fair play!" The complete centralization which has been the result of the long continuance in power of an ignorant legislature, controlled by designing men, is shown in the history of the elections since reconstruction. The governor has the power to appoint commissioners, who, in their turn, appoint managers of elections in the several counties. In this manner.the governor has absolute control of the elections, for the managers are allowed to keep and count the votes, and are not compelled to report for some days. The chances thus given for fraud are limitless. For the last four years men who have been elected by overwhelming majorities have been coolly counted out, because they were distasteful to the powers that be. The negroes intimidate their fellows, who desire to vote reform tickets, very much, as the Ku-Klux once intimidated them. "The villainy you teach me I will execute." People will say that this is a black picture. It is; there is no light upon it. There seems little hope for a change. The present governor can secure his re-election without difficulty. The white people of An investigating committee of the State Senate on the sinking fund reported, in Feb. 1874, that the proceedings of the Sinking Fund Commission have resulted in nothing but loss to the State; that a large amount of property had been sold, and not a dollar of the public debt had been extinguished. |