Republican Governor Daniel Chamberlain’s Reflections

Chamberlain blamed Republican politicians for putting the white south under the heel of the black south. “Lust for power was their motivation. If this is a hard saying, let any one now ask himself, or ask the public, if it is possibly credible that the reconstruction acts would have passed if the negro vote had been believed to be democratic?”

To this feast of reconstruction, this dance of reunion, rushed hundreds, even thousands of white and colored men from the North, who had almost as little experience of public affairs as the negroes of the south....and who were not morally the equals of the negroes of the south. Some of these carpetbaggers may have been “unselfish doctrinaires," humanitarians and idealists but most were simply opportunists. The result was inevitable.

In the mass of 78,000 colored voters in South Carolina in 1867, what elements or forces could have existed that made for good government? Ought it not to have been as clear then as it is now that good government, or even tolerable administration, could not be had from such an aggregation of ignorance and inexperience and incapacity?

The quick sure result was of course, misgovernment. Let a few statistics tell the tale:

Before the war, the average expense of the annual session of the legislature in South Carolina did not exceed $20,000. For the 6 years following reconstruction, the average annual expense was over $320,000, the expense of the session of 1871 alone being $671,000! The total legislative expenses for the 6 years was $2,339,000!

The state’s debt soared to $17,500,000, but without a single public improvement to show for it!

No such result could be possible, except where public and private virtue was well-nigh extinct....Public offices were objects of vulgar, commonplace bargain and sale. Justice in the lower and higher courts was bought and sold....State militia on a vast scale was organized and equipped in 1870 and 1871 solely from the negroes, arms and legal organization being denied to the democrats.

The writer remembered one black county school commissioner who was unable to read or even to write his own name. He was corrupt, too, as he was ignorant. No northern state would have tolerated such an official. One morning he was found dead, shot by the famous and infamous Ku Klux Klan. Their brutal and murderous actions were without excuse. Yet, it was symptomatic of a dreadful disease – the gangrene of incapacity, dishonesty and corruption in public office.