nt--all this in addition to bond issues. In South
Carolina the one item of public printing, which from 1790 to 1868 cost
$609,000, amounted in the years 1868-1876 to $1,326,589.

Corrupt state officials had two ways of getting money--by taxation and
by the sale of bonds. Taxes were everywhere multiplied. The state tax
rate in Alabama was increased four hundred percent, in Louisiana
eight hundred percent, and in Mississippi, which could issue no bonds,
fourteen hundred percent. City and county taxes, where carpetbaggers
were in control, increased in the same way. Thousands of small
proprietors could not meet their taxes, and in Mississippi alone the
land sold for unpaid taxes amounted to six million acres, an area as
large as Massachusetts and Rhode Island together. Nordhoff* speaks of
seeing Louisiana newspapers of which three-fourths were taken up
by notices of tax sales. In protest against extravagant and corrupt
expenditures, taxpayers' conventions were held in every state, but
without effect.

*Charles Nordhoff, "The Cotton States in the Spring and
Summer of 1875".

Even the increased taxation, however, did not produce enough to support
the new governments, which now had recourse to the sale of state and
local bonds. In this way Governor Holden's Administration managed in two
years to increase the public debt of North Carolina from $16,000,000 to
$32,000,000. The state debt of South Carolina rose from $7,000,000 to
$29,000,000 in 1873. In Alabama, by 1874, the debt had mounted from
$7,000,000 to $32,000,000. The public debt of Louisiana rose from
$14,000,000 in 1868 to $48,000,000 in 1871, with a local debt of
$31,000,000. Cities, towns, and counties sold bonds by the bale. The
debt of New Orleans increased twenty-five fold and that of Vicksburg
a thousandfold. A great deal of the debt was the result of fraudulent
issues of bonds or over-issue. For this form of fraud, the state
financial agents in New York were usually responsible. Southern bonds
sold far below par, and the time came when they were peddled about at
ten to twenty-five cents on the dollar.

Still another disastrous result followed this corrupt financiering. In
Alabama there was a sixty-five percent decrease in property values,
in Florida forty-five percent, and in Louisiana fifty to seventy-five
percent. A large part of the best property was mortgaged, and
foreclosure sales were frequent. Poorer property could be neither
mortgaged nor