ed against the white people; the placing
of these helpless people absolutely in the power of this hereditary
foeman--more absolutely in their power, at their mercy, than under the
merciless system of slavery, when sordid interest dictated a modicum
of humanity and care in treatment. And I arraign the "Reconstruction
policy" as one of the hollowest pieces of perfidy ever perpetrated
upon an innocent, helpless people; and in the treatment of the issues
growing out of that policy, I arraign the dominant party of the time
for base ingratitude, subterfuge and hypocrisy to its black partisan
allies. With the whole power of the government at its back, and with a
Constitution so amended as to extend the amplest protection to the
new-made citizen, it left him to the inhuman mercy of men whose
uncurbed passions, whose deeds of lawlessness and defiance, pale into
virtues the ferocity of Cossack warfare. And, for this treachery, for
leaving this people alone and single-handed, to fight an enemy born in
the lap of self-confidence, and rocked in the cradle of arrogance and
cruelty, the "party of great moral ideas" must go down to history amid
the hisses and the execrations of honest men in spite of its good
deeds. There is not one extenuating circumstance to temper the
indignation of him who believes in justice and humanity.

As I stand before the thirteen bulky volumes, comprising the "Ku Klux
Conspiracy," being the report of the "Joint Select Committee, to
inquire into the condition of affairs in the late Insurrectionary
States," on the part of the Senate and House of Representatives of the
United States, reported February 19, 1872, my blood runs cold at the
merciless chronicle of murder and outrage, of defiance, inhumanity and
barbarity on the one hand, and usurpation and tyranny on the other.

If the shot upon Fort Sumter was treason, what shall we call the
bloody conflict which the white men of the South have waged against
the Constitutional amendments from 1866 to the murder of innocent
citizens at Danville, Virginia, in 1883--even unto the present time?
If the shot upon Fort Sumter drew down upon the South the indignation
and the vengeance of the Federal government, putting father against
son, and brother against brother, what shall we say the Federal
Government should have done to put a period to the usurpation and the
murders of these leagues of horror?

The entire adult male population of the South, though no longer in
a