is added
power on the floor of Congress united to their political aiders and
abettors from the Northern States, there is scarcely any project they
may not be able to carry through in their own time and way. Nor is there
room for a doubt, that it is the spirit and purpose of the slave
oligarchy, whipped and cowed as they say by force of might, not right,
to make a most desperate political fight to regain their old supremacy
in the legislation of the country.

I base my estimate of the nature and intentions of the to-be-restored
representation of the South, on the results of the elections already
held in several of the rebel States, and from the efforts everywhere
among the old planters again to reduce the black freedmen, as nearly as
possible, to the status of slavery. In Virginia, the elections gave a
legislature largely secession and almost wholly anti-negro. The planters
have solemnly leagued themselves together to pay only five dollars per
month to able field hands, each laborer to furnish his own clothes and
pay his own doctor bills. This, too, when these same planters used to
pay or receive for the hire of these same laborers, the sum of fifteen
dollars and upwards. In South Carolina, Gen. Rufus Saxton reports that
the old planters are actually driving the freedmen to work in the fields
in chain gangs, and that the woods are strewn with the bodies of negroes
shot dead in their efforts to escape the cruel torture. In Murfreesboro,
Tennessee, the city election resulted in a secession mayor and common
council. The only Union success I have noticed is that of Fernandina,
Florida, and there the negroes were allowed to vote. Even the loyal
State of Missouri saved her free constitution by less than two thousand
votes.

The result of white suffrage can not be other than the election of large
majorities of anti-negro, if not absolutely secession State and National
representatives. Tennessee, the President's own State, of the loyalty of
whose people we have heard much, has adopted a free constitution, and
under it framed a new code of anti-negro laws; and we can hardly expect
any rebel State to do better, for these new free State law-makers are
the persecuted loyal men of Tennessee who have been outraged in their
homes, hunted to the caves and mountains, or for a time driven out of
the State altogether by the secessionists. One of these new free State
laws says, the testimony of no "free colored person shall be received in