en
passed upon.

"Governor Hampton, General Hagood, Judge Simonton, Judge Wallace
and in fact, all of the conservative thinking Democrats aligned
themselves under the provision enacted by us for the certain and
final settlement of the bonded indebtedness and appealed to their
Democratic legislators to stand by the Republican legislation on
the subject and to confirm it. A faction in the Democratic party
obtained a majority of the Democrats in the legislature against
settling the question and they endeavored to open up anew the whole
subject of the state debt. We had a little over thirty members in
the house and enough Republican senators to sustain the Hampton
conservative faction and to stand up for honest finance, or by our
votes place the debt question of the old state into the hands of
the plunderers and peculators. We were appealed to by General
Hagood, through me, and my answer to him was in these words:
'General, our people have learned the difference between profligate
and honest legislation. We have passed acts of financial reform,
and with the assistance of God when the vote shall have been taken,
you will be able to record for the thirty odd Negroes, slandered
though they have been through the press, that they voted solidly
with you all for honest legislation and the preservation of the
credit of the state.' The thirty odd Negroes in the legislature and
their senators, by their votes did settle the debt question and
saved the state $13,000,000. We were eight years in power. We had
built school houses, established charitable institutions, built and
maintained the penitentiary system, provided for the education of
the deaf and dumb, rebuilt the jails and court houses, rebuilt the
bridges and re-established the ferries. In short, we had
reconstructed the state and placed it upon the road to prosperity
and, at the same time, by our acts of financial reform transmitted
to the Hampton Government an indebtedness not greater by more than
$2,500,000 than was the bonded debt of the State in 1868, before
the Republican Negroes and their white allies came into power."

With the disgraceful dicker of 1877, this era closed, and with it passed
away for a time, whose limit has not yet been fixed, whatever there has
been, of republican government in the South. Ho