rnor
Moses of South Carolina was several times bribed and at one time,
according to his own statement, received $15,000 for his vote as speaker
of the House of Representatives. Governor Stearns of Florida was charged
with stealing government supplies from the Negroes; and it was notorious
that Warmoth and Kellogg of Louisiana, each of whom served only one
term, retired with large fortunes. Warmoth, indeed, went so far as to
declare: "Corruption is the fashion. I do not pretend to be honest, but
only as honest as anybody in politics."

The judiciary was no better than the executive. The chief justice
of Louisiana was convicted of fraud. A supreme court judge of South
Carolina offered his decisions for sale, and Whipper and Moses,
both notorious thieves, were elected judges by the South Carolina
Legislature. In Alabama there were many illiterate magistrates, among
them the city judge of Selma, who in April 1865, was still living as
a slave. Governor Chamberlain, a radical, asserted that there were two
hundred trial judges in South Carolina who could not read.

Other officers were of the same stripe. Leslie, a South Carolina
carpetbagger, declared that "South Carolina has no right to be a state
unless she can support her statesmen," and he proceeded to live up to
this principle. The manager of the state railroad of Georgia, when asked
how he had been able to accumulate twenty or thirty thousand dollars on
a two or three thousand dollar salary, replied, "By the exercise of the
most rigid economy." A North Carolina Negro legislator was found on one
occasion chuckling as he counted some money. "What are you laughing at,
Uncle?" he was asked. "Well, boss, I'se been sold 'leben times in
my life and dis is de fust time I eber got de money." Godkin, in the
"Nation", said that the Georgia officials were "probably as bad a lot of
political tricksters and adventurers as ever got together in one place."
This description will fit equally well the white officials of all the
reconstructed states. Many of the Negroes who attained public office
showed themselves apt pupils of their carpetbag masters but were seldom
permitted to appropriate a large share of the plunder. In Florida the
Negro members of the legislature, thinking that they should have a part
of the bribe and loot money which their carpetbag masters were said to
be receiving, went so far as to appoint what was known as a "smelling
committee" to locate the good things and secu