A NEW USE.

The era of political reconstruction came.  The victorious national power decreed that they who had once been master and slave should enter into political partnership on terms of civil equality.  The slaves grasped the boon; but the masters, trained for generations in the conviction that public safety and private purity were possible only by the subjection of the black race under the white, loathed civil equality as but another name for private companionship, and spurned, as dishonor and destruction in one, the restoration of their sovereignty at the price of political copartnership with the groveling race they had bought and sold and subjected easily to the leash and lash.

What followed took every one by surprise.  The negro came at once into a larger share of power than it was ever intended he should or expected he would attain.  His master, related to him long and only under the imagined necessities of plantation government, vowed the issue must and should be, not How shall the two races share public self-government in prosperous amity? but, Which race shall exclusively rule the other, race by race?

The necessities of national authority tipped the scale, and the powers of legislation and government and the spoils of office tumbled, all together, into the freedman’s ragged lap.  Thereupon there fell upon New Orleans, never well governed at the best, a volcanic shower of corruption and misrule.

And yet when history’s calm summing-up and final judgment comes, there must this be pointed out, which was very hard to see through the dust and smoke of those days:  that while plunder and fraud ran riot, yet no serious attempt was ever made by the freedman or his allies to establish any un-American principle of government, and for nothing else was he more fiercely, bloodily opposed than for measures approved by the world’s best thought and in full harmony with the national scheme of order.  We shall see now what these things have to do with our strange true story.

In New Orleans the American public school system, which recognizes free public instruction as a profitable investment of the public funds for the common public safety, had already long been established.  The negro adopted and enlarged it.  He recognized the fact that the relation of pupils in the public schools is as distinctly a public and not a private relation as that of the sidewalk, the market, the public park, or the street-car.  But recognizing also the impracticabilities of place and time, he established separate schools for whites and blacks.  In one instance, however, owing mainly to smallness of numbers, it seemed more feasible to allow a common enjoyment of the civil right of public instruction without separation by race than to maintain two separate schools, one at least of which would be very feeble for lack of numbers.  Now, it being so decided, of all the buildings in New Orleans which one was chosen for this experiment but the “haunted house” in Royal street!