re a share.

From 1868 to 1870, the legislatures of seven states were overwhelmingly
radical and in several the radical majority held control for four,
six, or eight years. Negroes were most numerous in the legislatures of
Louisiana, South Carolina, and Mississippi, and everywhere the votes of
these men were for sale. In Alabama and Louisiana, Negro legislators had
a fixed price for their votes: for example, six hundred dollars would
buy a senator in Louisiana. In South Carolina, Negro government appeared
at its worst. A vivid description of the Legislature of this State in
which the Negroes largely outnumbered the whites is given by James S.
Pike, a Republican journalist*:

*Pike, "The Prostrate State", pp. 12 ff.

"In the place of this old aristocratic society stands the rude form of
the most ignorant democracy that mankind ever saw, invested with the
functions of government. It is the dregs of the population habilitated
in the robes of their intelligent predecessors, and asserting over them
the rule of ignorance and corruption.... It is barbarism overwhelming
civilization by physical force. It is the slave rioting in the halls of
his master, and putting that master under his feet. And, though it is
done without malice and without vengeance, it is nevertheless none
the less completely and absolutely done.... We will enter the House of
Representatives. Here sit one hundred and twenty-four members. Of
these, twenty-three are white men, representing the remains of the old
civilization. These are good-looking, substantial citizens. They are men
of weight and standing in the communities they represent. They are all
from the hill country. The frosts of sixty and seventy winters whiten
the heads of some among them. There they sit, grim and silent. They feel
themselves to be but loose stones, thrown in to partially obstruct a
current they are powerless to resist....

"This dense Negro crowd... do the debating, the squabbling, the
lawmaking, and create all the clamor and disorder of the body. These
twenty-three white men are but the observers, the enforced auditors of
the dull and clumsy imitation of a deliberative body, whose appearance
in their present capacity is at once a wonder and a shame to modern
civilization.... The Speaker is black, the Clerk is black, the
doorkeepers are black, the little pages are black, the chairman of the
Ways and Means is black, and the chaplain is coal black. At some of the
desks sit