RECONSTRUCTION

 

By WALTER SILLERS

 

 

In 1865 the last gun of the bloody struggle was fired, and as the smoke of battle drifted away, the South, broken and crushed, folded her banners and bowed her head in defeat. The prosperous country, the luxuriance of the slave-holder were destroyed and wiped away; the empire which our fathers had builded had fallen, and its institutions had disappeared.

 

When the Federals gained control of the Mississippi River, many planters abandoned their plantations, taking their slaves to the interior of the state to avoid their capture by the enemy. Most of the slaves that were left in the county fled to the camps of the Federals established along the River for fugitive slaves. There were no towns left in the county when the war closed-only a store here and there at the steamboat landings. Prentiss, the largest town and county site, was burned by the Federals.

 

In the early spring of 1865, the levee near Prentiss caved into the river, and all the country east and south of the break was deluged. Soldiers, ragged and war-torn, who came straggling back, worked their way through the overflow in dugouts and other crude watercraft as best they could to the high lands on the river front. Levees to the north were broken also, and the Mississippi poured its waters over the county, and the counties to the south, making the country practically a wilderness and a waste.

 

These returning war-torn soldiers had been inured to hardships and dangers, but they had never been trained to toil in the fields, and the country would have been abandoned but for the fact that on the cessation of hostilities, the Negroes, used to the freedom of the field, were anxious to leave the reconstruction camps, and many returned to their old plantation homes and their former owners. These men, as determined in defeat as they were dauntless in war, organized the forces of peace and began the long struggle to build up the waste places of their devastated country. "Some of them lived, but the most of them died." Those who lived struggled on and again won from flood and forest the great Yazoo Delta, which, under the old regime, they had builded into an empire.

 

Former master and former slave quickly adjusted themselves to the new conditions. Contracts were drawn under which the planter furnished the land and everything necessary to make the crops; the Negroes, the labor. Things were moving along amicably in the new order of things, when the fanatical majority of the North conceived the idea of mongrelizing the South or driving her people into exile in other lands and turning over this fair land to the ignorant slave population, at that time in the majority in nearly all the slave states and in a numerical majority of 10 to 1 in the Delta country.

 

     These people, recently acquired from the jungles of Africa, uneducated, without preparation for the duties of government, illiterate, intensely ignorant as to the requirements of citizenship and civic duties, were given the ballot and backed by troops of the victors, who were stationed over the South to hold the Southern white man in subjection, while the jungle hordes took over the reins of government. A horde of jackals came trooping in from the North to prey upon a fallen people and to disturb the peaceful relations of the races by recounting wrongs which the Negro had never suffered, and to stir up racial animosity and hatred.

 

     I cannot recall an instance in history where any conquering Caucasian race displayed a more ignominious policy toward the vanquished than was displayed by the North towards the South. The white race, by a white race, people of the same blood, was made subservient to hordes of an ignorant, inferior race, in the hope of amalgamation and final extinction of the superior race.

 

History teaches that the most irrational, vindictive, cruel, blighting force that the world has ever known, or that has ever devastated any land, is the malignant majority of the fanatics of religion or liberty. . The Caucasian South may forgive; it will never forget.

 

With the enfranchisement of the slaves and the coming of the venal alien, came hate and fear which manifested itself in the protecting organization of the Ku Klux Klan and a resentful, determined state of mind in the white men. The native white Southerner, who for self power deserted his race, was ostracized and hated with a holy hatred. How any man could have been so false, so craven, as .to abandon his people in the dark days of this period, is beyond the conception of the loyal Southerner. The only way to account for these renegades is that in their making, something was left out.

 

The blow fell like the click of the guillotine. Many left the South seeking a white man's country, but the most of us stayed. General Stark, who was sheriff of the county, was ousted, and B. K. Bruce, a Negro, afterwards United States Senator from Mississippi, was put in his place. The writer's brother was chief deputy in General Stark's office, and the writer, then under 20 years of age, was riding deputy. Being a riding deputy when he heard of the coming of Bruce, the rider rode home to the plantation. Bruce graciously offered to retain my brother as deputy, but the offer was courteously declined. Bruce was tactful and very deferential to the old slave-holding class and courteous to all white men.

 

The chancery clerk, an adventurer from the North, H. T. Florey, a white man, young and rather handsome, smart as a whip, politic and forceful, rose at once to leadership in the county and held full sway until 1875.

                                                                                              

      In 1875 General Charles Clark called a meeting of the white men of the county to meet at Rosedale to organize a white men's party in the county and state. A few met, among them Colonel F. A. Montgomery, formerly of the 1st Mississippi Cavalry; Colonel Green Clay, formerly colonel of a Federal regiment and nephew of the noted Abolitionist, Cassius M. Clay, of Kentucky; and Colonel Strather, formerly from Virginia, all planter citizens of the county. A delegation was sent to Jackson to a convention, of which General Charles Clark was made chairman, and war was declared on ignorance, misrule and corruption. History tells the rest. The result was the complete triumph of the Anglo American, who trampled under foot negro rule, drove corrupt alien and traitorous renegades from power forever in Mississippi, and dispelled the idea of a mongrel South.

 

Bolivar County, being a slave-holder's county, necessarily had a sparse white population, the ratio of black to white being ten to one, but the result of the first battle was a drawn battle. Colonel Green Clay and Dr. J. I. J. Shelby were elected as our representatives, and General James R. Chalmers as our senator. The impeachment of Ames, radical governor of the state, and the taking over of the state government by the white man, is state and national history, and the white man came into his own.

 

1876

 

Encouraged by partial success in the county in 1875 and the complete victory in the state, the white leaders rallied in the memorable struggle for the presidency between Tilden and Hendricks, and Hays and Wheeler in 1876.

 

A meeting was called at Rosedale for the purpose of discussing the feasibility of organizing Democratic clubs, and after half a day spent in discussion, nothing definite was determined. As the meeting broke up, the writer said to a young lawyer, Oscar McGuire, that nothing had been done and asked him if he knew how to organize a club, suggesting that the best way to organize a Democratic club was to organize it; and it was agreed between the two that the writer would organize a club at Beulah, and McGuire, one at Rosedale. The writer immediately mounted his horse; rode into the country and began enrolling members for the Beulah Club. White men were scarce and scattered, but a few days later fifteen men met in the town of Beulah, in the old law office of General Charles Clark. While they were organizing, a commotion occurred on the outside of the office. It was discovered that the meeting was surrounded by three hundred members of the Loyal League, a negro organization, a number of whom dismounted and crowded into the meeting place. They said they understood that the meeting was held for the purpose of organizing a movement with the view of putting the Negro back into slavery. That question, the writer told them, had been settled at Appomattox, that the meeting was being held to organize a Democratic political club, and they were finally gotten rid of.

 

     Captain J. L. Perkins, a brave ex-Confederate soldier, was made president of the club, and the writer within a week secured a membership of eighty members, a great majority of whom were ex-Confederate soldiers. This was the first Democratic club ever organized in Bolivar County. A club of sixty members was organized shortly afterwards at Rosedale, and organizations were perfected over the entire county. The clubs were uniformed with red shirts, and equipped with six-shooters, and some of them with Winchester rifles.

 

A big rally was held by the Negroes at Rosedale, and Shadd, a prominent negro politician, addressed the meeting. All the Democratic clubs attended in full uniform, and when parading, looked so much like an English cavalry regiment that the Methodist preacher stationed at Rosedale, who was an Englishman, went wild with enthusiasm and cheered the troopers to the echo. Shadd's speech was perhaps not such as he had intended to make.

 

When the election came off in the fall, the Negroes in the Loyal League marched to the polls in companies with fife and drum. The ticket handler gave the man at the head of the column a ticket, who voted and took his place at the foot of the column, and so on until all had voted. It was of no avail; all the boxes went overwhelmingly Democratic. There were 20 white men registered at Beulah and 400 Negroes. When the "smoke" of the ballots had blown away, 400 Democrats had voted and only 20 Negroes. It stuck, however. The white man was armed, dressed in red, and looked dangerous.

 

This election encouraged the white voters of the county, and discouraged the Radical white leaders. In 1877, when the solid white Democratic vote of the county met at Rosedale and nominated a full white ticket for vacant offices, H. T. Florey, chancery clerk, John Leas, circuit clerk, and all other prominent Radical officials resigned and left the county. At this convention, three of the most popular citizens of the county were candidates for the office of sheriff - R. M. Wilson, of the northern end, a Confederate veteran, James S. Sillers, who had been a 15-year old Confederate soldier, and William R. Campbell, an ex-Confederate soldier, from the lower end of the county. After the convention had balloted 119 times and failed to make a nomination, it decided to place all these candidates in the field as nominees of the party. Sillers declined to go into an open race before the big negro vote in the county, and it was run off between Wilson and Campbell, Campbell being elected. Campbell died before his term expired and Wilson was elected in his place and died during his term of office of yellow fever contracted while nursing his friends during the yellow fever epidemic of 1878 or 1879. Wilson's election to succeed W. R. Campbell in 1877 was in recognition of his former service as sheriff when he was deposed from office by Frank Webber, a carpet-bagger.

 

     In 1879, the leading citizens led by Colonel Green Clay and James F. Stokes (the latter being a brilliant parliamentarian and ex-Speaker of the House of Representatives of Tennessee) chairman of the Democratic Executive Committee, of which the writer was a member, advocated a division of the county officers among the Democrats and Republicans. The writer opposed that policy and favored the move to pledge every Democrat in the county to refuse to go on a Republican's bond. This policy finally prevailed and was endorsed and adopted by the Democratic Convention.

 

The election was held, and every Democratic candidate except T. R. McGuire, candidate for chancery clerk, was defeated, but the Democrats stood together and refused to make the bond of the Republicans elected, and no Republican could qualify and take office for want of a bond. Major D. C. Herndon, an outstanding Confederate soldier was the defeated Democratic candidate for sheriff. A new election was ordered, and Colonel F. A. Montgomery, the Honorable Charles Scott, George Y. Scott, James C. Sillers, Fred Clark, O. G. McGuire, T. R. McGuire, the writer, and other prominent citizens supported the renomination of Major Herndon as the man who had made the fight and was entitled to renomination. Unfortunately, Major Herndon was defeated by a few votes in the second convention, and H. C. Grimm was nominated as the standard-bearer and candidate for sheriff. This created dissension in the Democratic ranks, and a white Republican by the name of Libby,' the brilliant negro leader, J. H. Bufford, and George W. Gayles, negro state senator, took advantage of the dissension and offered the votes of the Republican party for sheriff to any white man who would bolt the Democratic party and lead the ticket in opposition to the Grimm ticket. This offer was accepted by George P. Melchior, who had influential relatives in the county who espoused his cause; and a split in the party, resulting in twenty years of bitter factionalism, followed.

 

Melchior was elected, and though his bond was contested by the writer, who had been appointed to contest all Republican bonds, yet, through influential friends, Melchior was enabled to present a solvent bond and qualified himself as sheriff of the county, which office he held for two terms.

 

In 1883, George Y. Scott offered as a candidate against Melchior, and after the most heated and expensive campaign that ever entered the county, he defeated Melchior and became sheriff.

 

In 1895 the two factions of the Democratic party in the county harmonized in supporting A. J. McLaurin for governor and agreed on an equal division of county offices. Subsequent friction between Governor McLaurin and Charles Scott caused another split, the writer and his friends aligning with McLaurin, Scott and his friends with John M. Allen. The county officers were also involved. After the election of 1899, Charles Scott and the writer, realizing the hurtful effect of factionalism upon the welfare of the county, agreed never again to foster or favor factional alignment in the county. The two factions, Scott and Anti-Scott were dissolved, and when Mr. Scott was a candidate for governor in 1905, he had the solid support of the county.

 

 

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