The Wheeling daily register. [volume] (Wheeling, W. Va.) 1864-1878, 1876-12-11
RECONSTRUCTION IN THE SOUTH.

Mr.. RRDFIELD, the Southern CORES
pondent of the Cincinnati Commercial,
has been in the South for some time, and
MS letters during the sittingIof the Re-
turning Board excited good deal of
criticism on account of his frequency in
strsddling the fence. But it cannot be
denied that his position has boen favor
able for studying the Southern question,
and his views may be taken for some
thing on that point. In his last letter
from New Orleans he says:
With Nichols and the Democracy in
power there will be peace in the State
and an end OF the preplexIng Louisiana
case, both in and out of Congress. But
under Packard and the so-called Re-
publican Government there will be four
years more of lawlessness, ASSASSINATION,
rifle clubs, turmoil and confusion. The
laws will not be respected Indeed,
Louisiana will be for the next four years
what she has been for the last four. The
people live under sense of having been
cheated, and the so-called Republican
Government will be farce.
You may as well face the music first
as lsst There is no way to bring peace
to Louisiana and end the Louisiana case
in Congress and out OF Congress but to
let the Democracy, which means the
white people, have the State and control
it. Every other remedy is only make
shit, which reacts powerfully against the
blacks and what few scattering white
Republicans there are in the rural dis
trIcts."
The reconstruction policy OF the Re-
publicans was an acknowledged blunder,
and Mr.. REDyIELD, after looking over
the field at this late day, comes to the
same conclusion. He says:
The reconstruction policy was gigan-
tic blunder, The party which carried
the country triumphsntIy through the
civil war lost its cunning rs soon rs Lee
surrendered. 1t has done little but blum
der since. The cotton states at least
should have been kept under military
government for many years. The people
would have preferred it to what they
have had since. 1t would have, been
cheap, life and property would have been
Cypress people who came out.of the war
with but little but their necks.
IEstead of that, the Republicans pitch
ed plantation negroes and their late
masters into pot together, stirred them
up enough to make one conceited and
the other mad, and then dished them out
as States" and said in effect, "Go it,"
They went it. These Estates" or rather
the so-called governments that they have
been Under have been libels upon clvih-
zation. The negroes were incompetent
to conduct decent government, the car
pet baggers were mainly rascais, who dug
out for nome as soon AS out OF office
Taxation increased woefully and the law
less element among the whites sought re-
yenge against the de enseless blacks IN
'the.rural districts. Then they had out
RACES, never-tslling crop, each year.
Outrages that did not cease until the
whites, through much tribulatlon, some
fighting and good deal of buying came
to power.
In Arkansas, under Governor Garland
and the Democratic government, there
has not been one political outrage where
there were fifteen under Clayton and
the Clayton gang who SO long ruled the
State. From 1866 until 1874, when Gar.
land got in under the new constitution,
there was row after row, complication
after complication, outrage after outrage,
assassination after ASSASSINATION, and
frantic appeals for troops every SIX
months. But that is all over. The so.
called Democratic government there Is a
great improvement on the concern they
had before, in local point ofvlew. There
is even less lawlessnessness now than
before the war.
The Florida correspondent OF the same
paper says that the Democratic process OF
intimidation only consisted in the native
whites employing the negro, and assum-
ing a pa,ronizing attitude toward him
made friends of them. This is what the
Radicals call bull-dozing.