Radical Pow Wow- Too Thin

Radical Pow Wow- Too Thin

Chronicling America

Whig and Tribune

1874-07-18

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Radical Pow-Wow! - Too Thin!!

Saturday last was a great day with the Radicals of this county. They met at the Fair Grounds in Convention, and in their own conceit did a wonderfully sharp thing. They passed a series of Resolutions that bear deception upon their very face The Resolutions are published in another column. They were intended to deceive intended to inspire false hopes in the hearts of candidates now in the field - intended to null the storm of suspicion that was spreading over the country, and we seriously fear that they will accomplish the object for which they were evidently framed. The meeting on Saturday at the Fair Grounds was surreptitious in the extreme. No one knew of it except those interested in it. There was no public advertisement of the meeting. It was evidently the result of a secret understanding among the negroes and a few white men who aspire to control the ignorance and passion of the negro race in their own personal interest. By the merest accident this office was made acquainted with the fact that such a meeting was being held. A reporter was at once dispatched to the scene and fortunately for the weal of the country, we hope, he arrived there in time to hear measurably all that was said. On arrival upon the grounds our reporter found about two hundred negroes gathered close around a stand in the center of the amphitheater, from which J. R. Abernathy was thundering borrowed invective [/unclear] against the Democratic party. W. G. Cockrill, Esq., occupied a prominent seat as chairman of the meeting. Off to one side, considerably removed from the from the main crowd, we observed George G. Perkins, J. H. Harper, Henry Epperson, [insertion]: [/insertion] Sam. . M. Easly and eight negroes, whose names appear elsewhere, engaged in the earnest discussion of a paper presented by Mr. Perkins. This paper turned out to be the Resolutions which we publish in another column. They were evidently the subject of very serious discussion. Harper, Perkins, and the other whites of the committee, did the principal talking. It was evident that they were at considerable trouble to explain the full meaning and purpose of the Resolutions to the colored members of the committee. If the Resolu-

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members of the committee. If the Resolutions meant no more than Perkins, Harper & Co., would have the people believe they meant, if they were not intended to deceive the white people of the county, why was it that so much time and talk was expended in getting the endorsement of the negro members of the committee? The truth is, that Harper's long speech before the committee, Perkins' repeated explanations and the earnest efforts of Easly and Epperson, were all to make the negroes understand that the Resolutions were a sharp trick to deceive the whites, to encourage the candidates now in the field to remain in the field, and thus enable the Radicals to surreptitiously elect a ticket which had been already secretly prepared. In support of this theory we give below a synopsis of the speeches made after the committee reported and their resolutions were adopted. Mr. E. S. Rogers, better known as "Jolly," made the first speech. He said, in substance - that he was a candidate for Sheriff

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of Madison county--that - that he was a friend of the negro race, and if elected, would give them equal rights on juries with the white people. He told them that they had to heretofore been tried in the courts of the county by their enemies, and that nine times out of ten convicted whether innocent or guilty. He said that the County Jail was filled with men and women of their race--that - that they saw them go in, but seldom saw them come out--that - that the courts, as organized and under the system now practised, the negroes were at the mercy of their enemies, the whites. He argued that they had the right to be tried by a jury of their peers, and that this right they had never enjoyed in Madison county. Hence the colored race filled the county jail, and hence they were convicted of crimes of which they were frequently innocent. The leading idea of his speech was, that the whites of Madison county were, as a rule, the enemies of the negro race, and that justice was seldom ever done them in the courts. He urged them to stand by no man that did not stand by the platform and manifesto adopted and promulgated by their race in a recent convention at Nashville, and to elect men of their own principles to all the offices of the government, from Constable to President. When he told the negroes to stand by no man that did not stand by the infamous and incendiary declarations of the Nashville colored convention, he endorsed in a whole and in part that acme of vindictive and sectional partizan hate, the civil rights bill. When he argued that the white people of Madison county were the enemies of the negro race, that in the courts the negroes seldom ever got justice, that they were nine times out of ten convicted whether guilty or innocent, he perpetrated an unpardonable, inexcusable, and groundless slander on the people and courts of a county that has for years tolerated him as a citizen. So far as

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years tolerated him as a citizen. So far as "Jolly" Rogers is concerned, we hardly feel it to be right to hold him responsible for the vile utterances published above. We regard him as simply a tool in the hands of a smarter and meaner men. His is the dirty work, and for doing it he will receive no other compensation than the contempt of both those he assails and those who use him. We pity him for the reason that we cannot believe that he is willfully, or in other words, innately vicious or malicious. He is simply a tool in the hands of cowards who have not his courage or recklessness, but who are scheming to profit by his boldness and his pitiful ignorance. As a cat's-paw we dismiss him and pass on to Jesse H. Harper's dirtier and more criminal speech. Harper commenced his speech by endorsing everything that Rogers had said, but urging that Rogers had not gone far enough. He proclaimed that the negroes did not know that they were free- - that they were oppressed and wronged, tyrannized over and denied vital rights. He told them that they were freemen, and that God nor the devil, nor the democratic party, could prevent them from controlling this country. That they were entitled to all the rights, privileges and immunities of American citizens, and yet they were still held in practical bondage. He endorsed the civil rights bill, but said, with a concession and a complacency truly remarkable, that he did not intend by his endorsement, to urge that white men should be forced to invite colored men to dine with them, or that white men should be compelled to invite negroes to marry their daughters. With these provisos, however, he endorsed the bill, or he is utterly ignorant of the meaning of the words. He warned them against sneezing whenever an imaginary court-house clique took snuff, but they were at perfect liberty to sneeze when Harper's snuff was the inspiration. He would not tell them who to vote for, but he urged them to vote for the "right men." This latter injunction, "vote for

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the right men," he frequently repeated. He warned them against "pledging their votes to any one," but when the time arrived to vote for their "friends," the best men and the men who would give them "equal rights." He said "you know whether I am your friend or not," and "you know that I never run for office except when you call on me to to do so." With much earnestness he urged the negroes to stick together "as close as the teeth of a fine tooth comb" and to vote as a unit for the "right men." He told them that they had been like dogs with collars about their necks, lead by chains in the hands of their enemies. Thus they had been lead against the interest of their race and kept down at the feet of the "white democracy" of the country. He appealed to them to stand together and demand all the rights of freemen; and especially to vote in the pending election for the "right men." His abuse of the democratic party was characteristically vulgar and meaningless, and entirely too dirty for the ears and eyes of the gentlemen. A more vile appeal to the ignorance and passions of the negro we have seldom ever heard, and his speech forever cuts him loose from all the sympathy with the white men of the country. The great pity is that his skin is not as black as his political sentiments. If he had been born a negro he would not have been blacker than his speech of Saturday painted him. After Harper's harangue Pete White, a colored man took the stand. Pete was evidently very much embarrassed, but after a few hesitating remarks he shot off in a manner decidedly lively and suggestive. He de-

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plored the ignorance of his race as to the Constitutions of the United States and the State of Tennessee, and confessed that he didn't know much about either. But with all the vim and effrontery of ignorance he urged his people to use and profit by all their privileges, and to steadily aspire to still higher ones. Like Harper, he directed their attention to the vital importance of selecting for county officers the "right men." Upon this point he said--"As - "As we have candidates that belong to our own party let us stand by them as one man." In this sentence he let the "cat out of the wallet" and made suspicion positive that the radicals have a secret ticket already in the field. He dug among the dead ashes of the past, and exhibited the wasted skeleton of slavery. Dwelling upon the horrors of that effete institution, he stirred his race to the tallest height of his passion. They cheered him wildly and continually. He told them that they were taught to forgive when asked for forgiveness, but that he had never yet heard of the whites asking of the colored people that forgiveness. The inference he left was, that there was a war between the races that could only cease when the whites humbled themselves before their former slaves. After urging his people to vote for the "right men," men pledged to civil rights, he concluded his speech with this significant peroration: My colored brothers, said he, let us "Advance our banner high Throw it against the sky And resolve to do or die."

Pete's speech was the best connected and the most significant made on the occasion. Although he plainly exposed the whole radical programme of the county, yet he is evidently fully capable of teaching logic, rhetoric and decency to the white men who were engaged with him in the meeting. We have no quarrel with the colored men of Madison county; ; left to their own instincts of right we believe that they would act in the future, as they have acted in the past, so far as county elections are concerned. We know, and they know, that

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they have no right to complain of the courts or of the people. Full justice has been invariably meted out to them, and their color has never had a feather's weight in the balances of Justice. After a while the colored people will learn that those en- engaged in teaching them a different lesson are their worst enemies. When money is to be raised to build churches, or schoolhouses, houses, or other things in the interest of the colored race, the men denounced on Saturday as the enemies of the colored race are the first that are called on. This is a fact that colored men cannot deny, nor can they forget. We do not care to enlarge upon this idea. It needs no argument. The men engaged in poisoning the minds of the colored people of Madison county will, in due time, reap their reward of in- infamy or obscurity, or both. We leave them in the vile embrace of the monster they have conjured, to be devoured, as they will be, by the creations of their own infamous acts. But before the meeting at the Fair Grounds closed, a meeting we have in part described, Mr. Perkins announced that on Saturday next (to-day) Mr. Boyd, of Brownsville, would address the Republicans cans of Madison county. He announced Boyd as the radical candidate for the office of Chancellor of this Chancery District. He eulogised him as the right man for the place and the especial friend of the negro. In this endorsement of Boyd, Perkins goes squarely back upon the resolutions of last Saturday's meeting at the Fair Grounds. Those resolutions proclaimed that in all elections, except political -itical ones, the best and most competent

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men should be chosen. That Judge Livingston ston is one of the ablest Judges in the State, and that he has made a record on the bench alike honorable to the State and the bench alike honorable to the State and the nation, is well known to Mr. Perkins. But this endorsement of Boyd is, under the circumstances, a key to the meeting and the resolutions of Saturday last. It is the same old card that has been often played by him on the people of Madison county. It has proved to be a trump-card, card, and may be one again. But we hope differently, and our hope is based upon the fact that the speeches reported in this article, the resolutions printed in another column, and the circumstances surrounding the whole thing, will show to our people the inspiration and the designs of those engaged in stirring up the passions and the hates of the colored people of our heretofore peaceable and prosperous county.

State Convention

Nashville

TN

USA

1874-04-28

1874-04-29

Library of Congress

1874.TN-04.28.NASH