landlord law, republican, and "nigger-hounds"

Full text of "The Republican campaign text book for 1880 ..":

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ystem. 

The profits are so great and the opprobrium 
ao sliest in the 8tMe, that a United States 
Senator was one of the largest contractors, un- 
til expoanre of the system and his connection 
therewith to the public in the Northern States 
compelled him to dispose of his interest in it. 

Slarery was equally profitable to certain 
daflsea ci owners, and no more deatructive of 
the honor and welfare of the State. 



A Hlaalaslppl case of costs, 

'« In Pontotoc county Horace Wilder (colored) wan 
sent to the penitentiary for eighteen montha for steal- 
ing a pig valaed at $1.60. He had Juat finished hiM 
term of service and the superintendent asked for the 
cost of prosecution. The circuit clerk oertifled tho 
amount to be the enormous sum of $74.H6— the net 
expense of prosecuting a colored lad for stealing a pig 
worth a dollar and a half. At twentT'fire cents a day 
he will be required to work three hundred days."— 
{Uomt Buk tfn the Solid South, page 6.] 



aystem wtlrcraal in the Soath. 

^nie contract system is universal in the 
South ; and its barbarity might be illustrated 
by citations from the laws of all the States; but 
tt&e fnr^going will do, and is all that space can 
be apaoredfor. 

The cost of costs. 

1!he ooatB of arrest and oonTiction are also 
ttt^icd agamat the convict, and when the pen- 
ally itself is comparatively light, these costs 
Lonnt to months of servitude, j 



The Texas practice. 

emigrant from Texas to Kansas testified 
before the E^dus Ck>mmittee as follows in re- 
g&r d to some of the causes of the desire of the 
colored people to leave the former State : 

The lawyer's fees worked In. 

* * When a man ^ets intoxicated or plays a 
{(&zxie of cards, he is tried before the county 

C>dge and fined, and the courts work in the 
^^rjei^B fee, until the whole thing amounts 
vp to sixty-five, seventy-five or one hundred 
doUars," 

TIavee yean aerrltatf e for carrytnff i^ ^^^' 

. shooter. 

' ' A man who was arrested in Milam county 
for carrying a six-shooter was fined sixty-five 
dollars ; I think the costs and lawyer's fees 
ttDaouDted to sixty-five dollars. <> <> o He 
▼as at work all last year, and the year before 
l^t, and the year before that again." 

A quarter of a cmt a day. 

"A colored woman was arrested (in Mata- 
gorda county) and the judge hired her out at 
a quarter of a cent a dav. ~ Q. To work out 
, kow much of a fine ? A. I Uiink thirty dollars. " 

WorklBff under shot-snns. 

"They call these people county convicts. 
I know some of these men who have convicts 
that thev hire, and thev are under the super- 
vision of a seigeant with a gun and nigger- 
hounds. * * * They hire them and put them 
in the same gang with the striped suits on, 
and if they want, the guard can bring them 
down with his shot-gun " [pp. 414, 415]. 

PART IV. . 

The siveeping Eianillord IJeii 
Eiawa— A man <»imot sell his 
crop hi open markel; — The 
Ijandlord has choice oT all prac- 
tical re-enslavement; of tiie 
colored tenants — Democ^ratlc 
Senatorial opinion — The lMii%'n 
*' appear hard on the surihee." 

A system of liens on the crops for rent, food 
and supplies, has been devised which keeps 
the colored men in debt, and compels them 
to sacrifice their crops to the landlord for 
whatever he chooses to allow. 

Cannot acU or use hia own crop. 

No matter how good an opportunity he may 
have to sell port of his crop, the tenant cannot 
sell a bushel of com or a roast pig* until tbi> 
landlord is paid, without makmg himflclt' 
liable to some of the special laws against him 
noted in the preceding chapter. He has to 
turn the crop over to the landlord altogether, 
and trust to his generosity for a remnant for 
his family. 

The South Carolina law. 

The landlord has a lien on one third of the 
crop of the renter for rent, without any con- 
tract, and may take a lien and all by contract. 
[Acts S. O., 1878, p. 411, sees. 6 and 6.] 

The colored tenant having been stripped 
by the liens of one year has not food and 
supplies ahead for the next, and must sign a 
contract giving his landlord control of all or 
starve. 

The Georgia law—Landlord takes all 
without the formality of a contract. 

Bv the Revised Statutes of 1873, page 340. 
landlords have a Uen on the crop, and also nil 
other property of the tenant for rent. By 
contract landlords or storekeepers have a 
lien on the crops and all a man s property 
on all articles of any kind furnished. The 
act, approved February 25, 1875 provides thnt 
"the liens of landlords shall nnse by opera- 
tion of law from the relation of landlord and 
tenant.** [Laws of Georgia, 1875, page 20.] 

The tendency of these laws is to keep the 
I)Oor colored people, who are dependent 
upon the landowners for supplies, to raise a 
crop in a state of constant peonnge. This is 
one of the most common reasons assigned 
tor the exodus by those seeking homes in 
I 
' 



132 



THE LABOR QUB6TIOK. 



the North; While they do the work the land- 
lord takes the crop, 

Profnresslon In eTil. 

The foregoing are fair samples of the tenant 
laws in all the Southern States. As the conser- 
vatives became assured that their control of the 
le^^islat^e. was permanent, they regularly 
eliminated aU the just and merciful features 
of the laws, until they have reached their pres- 
ent tyrannical form and made universal 
the l)arbarous practioes which are making 
the States, nbm&^ly free, really slave. 

Ontraffeous prices nuacted. 

Under the operation of ^e law the .most 
outrageous eltortions are practised' -on the 
colot«d people. They are eliarged an annuid 
reButal <n from i.Vie to. teadoUns ati acto— 
oft^n more than the land itself will bring if 
sold in fee simple. They are charged double 
forbran, com, meat &c., ^at the same may 
be bact for frotti ^e stOMkeeper wbo wotdd 
also pay thehi a fair price for their produce. 
But with the landlord's lien covering every- 
thing, they can neither sell nor buy except at 
his pleasure a^d to his profit 

**Oiil7 hard on tlie surface." 

Senators Voorhees, Vance, and Pendleton, 
in their report to the Senate on the recent 
ezodns tern the South, admit that *' the land- 
lord claa< for their own protection, procured 
the passage of the laws giving them a lien 



upon the crop made by the tenant,** and that 
**upon the turface thete laws appeared to be hard'* 
Yet the committee thought them among the 
most beneficent of provisions for the blade. 

The thousands of colored people striving to 
get away from their operation seem to tbink 
differently — that the laws are hard to the core. 

Bad men In spite of such ffood laws. 

'* Your committee regret to say that tliej 
found it to be frequently the case that design- 
ing men, or bad and dishonest men, wonld 
take advantage of the ignorance or neoesdtj 
of the negroes." [ P. 6, JSenaUMepoii, 693, 1880.] 

The committee then proceeds to argue that 
bad men exist everywhere, but i^ores the 
fact that bad men elsewhere are bad in vitk- 
turn of law, while in the case under considera- 
tion the law ^ems tohava Immimaiifvr badmen; 
to give them' greater facilities for inhumanity. 

The system hreeda had men. 

Before the war all the cruelties of slaTery 
were laid on bad men and the overseen. 
Slavery made these classes^ and all its laws 
were made to protect them in villainy by the 
good men who reaped the greater part of the 
profit. So at the present time the lien lews 
of Uie South are made to enable the bad men 
to inaugurate. and perpetuate practises which 
will make the good men's plantations equally 
profitable. 

The profit and abominatian is universal, 
and the solid South must endure the 
indignation of the civilized world. 



CHAPTEE XIV. 

Tbe Labor Question. 



"Th«I>et»oeratteparty is (he jyiend<if lector and the tabprin^num, a^d pkigt* Uaelf io prolect liitn 
a ike agamittheoonnorant and ft«oommuii«;"— DeUration 13, Democratic Bational Plaiioim, 18S0. 



PAKT I. 

Tlie Lisborftue^tton— democratic 
Elforts to Hesrade and Ifiruia,!- 
ize I^bor^The Itepubllcan 
Party the True liabor Party, 

What does the workingman want that the 
Bepublican party is not pledged by every tra- 
dition and measure to do for him? That 
party was absolutely bom in a fight with the 
slave powers— the power of owned lahoT, owned 
by Democrats. Aiid throughout its existence 
it has ever frowned down and legislated 
against any and all movements to degrade la- 
bor and make it servile. The Democratic 
party, on the other hand» has not had a 
thought for the past forty*five years beyond 
the preservation of the accursed systems fif 
slavery and servile labor. For the right to 



own slave labor instead of paying "a fair day's 
wage for a fair day's work," that partjr 
plunged the nation into a terrible four-years 
sectional war. For the right to ovm labor under 
a system of peonage (quite as degrading as 
the old system of slavery), instead of payinff 
**a feir day's wage for a fair day's work," 
that party, in the event of a close electoral 
majority fi>r Garfield and Arthur, will not hes- 
itate to plunge this nation into all the horrors 
of a civil war. Out of that threatening civU 
war the Democratic party, coiitrolled oy the 
South, believes it will come bloodily triumph- 
ant, with the old labor ideas of the South 
dominant over all of the United States. 
Nothing can be more instructive to the laborer 
of the Korth than a brief review of theSoiitb- 
em "idea" of labor— an "idea," which, 
though chanp^ in its practical expression» 
from slavery in the past to the peonage of the 
present and future, survives the war, and