VIII

THE CAMPAIGN DRAGS

The campaign for white supremacy was dragging.  Carteret had set out, in the columns of the Morning Chronicle, all the reasons why this movement, inaugurated by the three men who had met, six months before, at the office of the Chronicle, should be supported by the white public.  Negro citizenship was a grotesque farce—­Sambo and Dinah raised from the kitchen to the cabinet were a spectacle to make the gods laugh.  The laws by which it had been sought to put the negroes on a level with the whites must be swept away in theory, as they had failed in fact.  If it were impossible, without a further education of public opinion, to secure the repeal of the fifteenth amendment, it was at least the solemn duty of the state to endeavor, through its own constitution, to escape from the domination of a weak and incompetent electorate and confine the negro to that inferior condition for which nature had evidently designed him.

In spite of the force and intelligence with which Carteret had expressed these and similar views, they had not met the immediate response anticipated.  There were thoughtful men, willing to let well enough alone, who saw no necessity for such a movement.  They believed that peace, prosperity, and popular education offered a surer remedy for social ills than the reopening of issues supposed to have been settled.  There were timid men who shrank from civic strife.  There were busy men, who had something else to do.  There were a few fair men, prepared to admit, privately, that a class constituting half to two thirds of the population were fairly entitled to some representation in the law-making bodies.  Perhaps there might have been found, somewhere in the state, a single white man ready to concede that all men were entitled to equal rights before the law.

That there were some white men who had learned little and forgotten nothing goes without saying, for knowledge and wisdom are not impartially distributed among even the most favored race.  There were ignorant and vicious negroes, and they had a monopoly of neither ignorance nor crime, for there were prosperous negroes and poverty-stricken whites.  Until Carteret and his committee began their baleful campaign the people of the state were living in peace and harmony.  The anti-negro legislation in more southern states, with large negro majorities, had awakened scarcely an echo in this state, with a population two thirds white.  Even the triumph of the Fusion party had not been regarded as a race issue.  It remained for Carteret and his friends to discover, with inspiration from whatever supernatural source the discriminating reader may elect, that the darker race, docile by instinct, humble by training, patiently waiting upon its as yet uncertain destiny, was an incubus, a corpse chained to the body politic, and that the negro vote was a source of danger to the state, no matter how cast or by whom directed.