of the
Southern States, by any and all means which might be by them considered
most desirable, judicious, expedient, and effectual; the solidifying of
these Southern States into a new Confederation, or league, in fact--with
an unwritten but well understood Constitution of its own--to be known
under the apparently harmless title of the "Solid South," whose mission
it would be to build up, and strengthen, and populate, and enrich itself
within the Union, for a time, greater or less, according to
circumstances, and in the meanwhile to work up, with untiring devotion
and energy, not only to this practical autonomy and Sectional
Independence within the Union, but also to a practical re-enslavement of
the Blacks, and to the vigorous reassertion and triumph, by the aid of
British gold, of those pernicious doctrines of Free-Trade which, while
beneficial to the Cotton-lords of the South, would again check and drag
down the robust expansion of manufactures and commerce in all other
parts of the Land, and destroy the glorious prosperity of farmers,
mechanics, and laborers, while at the same time crippling Capital, in
the North and West.

In order to accomplish these results--after whatever of suspicion and
distrust that might have still remained in Northern minds had been
removed by the public declaration in 1874, by one of the ablest and most
persuasively eloquent of Southern statesmen, that "The South--prostrate,
exhausted, drained of her life-blood as well as of her material
resources, yet still honorable and true--accepts the bitter award of the
bloody arbitrament without reservation, resolutely determined to abide
the result with chivalrous fidelity"--these old Rebel leaders commenced
in good earnest to carry out their well organized programme, which they
had already experimentally tested, to their own satisfaction, in certain
localities.

The plan was this: By the use of shot-guns and rifles, and cavalcades of
armed white Democrats, in red shirts, riding around the country at dead
of night, whipping prominent Republican Whites and Negroes to death, or
shooting or hanging them if thought advisable, such terror would fall
upon the colored Republican voters that they would keep away from the
polls, and consequently the white Democrats, undeterred by such
influences, and on the contrary, eager to take advantage of them, would
poll not only a full vote, but a majority vote, on all questions,
whether involving the mere election