Des Arc weekly citizen., 1868-05-09
The Election.

From the New Orleans Picayune, April 26.
 The election has gone against us. The Constitution is ratified against the all but unanimous protest of the pupu- lation whose political sovereignty it abolishes, by a violence from without which is essentially revolutionary. It will be found on the final record that but an insignificant number of whites has consented to this iniquity. The maiorities for the construction in the parishes where emancipated blacks are numerous, are astcnishiAgly large, be- yond all prede6ent in elections before, and beyond all possible proportion to the real population. The following figures speak for themselves; St. James gives over 1900 majority, when all the negro male population, of all ages, is barely 1000, and the whites arc $40. An honest majority of that magnitude is simply impossible. The same may be said of the majorities of 1,500 in St. Charles, 1,4O0 in Assumption, l,6OO in Ascension, 1,15O in Tensas 1,S00 in Madison, 1,6O0 in Concordia, and so on, wherein the majorities are in some three times greater, and in all largely greater than the whole lawful vote ever cast before, and are out of the range of being possibly fair. They show than it is the negro vote which has ovcrbalanced the white vote, and how it was effected. The new govern ment is revolutionary in it's o1gin, African on it's basis, and tinted all over with fraud. It will go into operation with these seeds of disease in every party of it's framework. If it shall be good government; if it shall not fol- low the law of its percentage, to fulfill the very conditions ofits existence, and shall not be an instrument for anlnixed evil it will disappoint greatly the fears of those who have watched the travail of the monster in it's birth. If any good come out of it, it will be miracle we have no right to expect.
 Very probably no possible effort of the old population of the State could have averted this catastrophe. They were disarmed in advance by n pro- scriptive and dishonest registration, dictated from abroad and enforced by bayonets; they were bound in chains by their enemies, and delivered over to the hybrid faction within, to do its supreme will upon us. The political managers at Washington had an object to accomplish in enslaving us, and they did their work thoroughly, as they be- lieved, If they had not so believed, they would have extended their pro- scriptions to make it more sure But with their military machinery and their Freedmeu's Bureau, to manage to bribe and delude the ignorant black, their carpet-bag emissaries sent on in shoals to organize loyal leagues and di- vide the spells of office with the servile and purchasable whites of the land, that they were sure from the first resis- 1 tance would he hopeless, even If des- 1 poMdcnt Louisiana,ts could rouse tiiem- solves to the effort of protesting and contesting, with all of the privilege oi speech they were permitted to retain l in their own land. Reviewing tlsc ground, we are certain l that the constitution could not have been defeated by any effort. To this extent, there is an cxtenuation for the
 weakness which prevented many we'll
 meaning citizens from going to the polls at all, because they felt that vo' 1 ting was useless. They were subjuga- ted in advance, and the struggle was not worth the effort.