James Blaine

No such fees were exacted of white men and no such fees were exacted of the free black man during the era of slavery.

In the laws of South Carolina the oppression and injustice towards the negro were conspicuously marked.

She was left unprotected by law against the brutal lust and the violence of white men.

A peculiarly atrocious discrimination against the negro was included in the sixth section of the law from which these quotations are made.

This restriction upon the negro was far more severe than that imposed in the days of slavery, when, in many of the Southern States, the gallery of the church was permitted to be freely occupied by them.

The latter punishment was reserved expressly for the negro.

Its first section provided that where punishment of an offense had hitherto been limited to fine or imprisonment, there should be superadded, as an alternative, the punishment of standing in the pillory for one hour, or whipping, not…

The law was thus cunningly contrived to hurry the negro into an odious form of slavery, and to make the earnings which came from his hard labor pay the public expenses, which were legitimately chargeable upon the property of the county.

The general phrasing was to deceive people outside, and, perhaps, to lull the consciences of some objectors at home, but it made no difference whatever in the execution of the statutes.

The makers of the law evidently intended that it should apply to the negro alone, for it was administered on that basis with rigorous severity.

Loitering around tippling-shops, one of the offenses enumerated, was in far larger proportions the habit of white men, but they were left untouched and the negro alone was arrested and punished.

It is barely possible that a white vagrant of exceptional depravity might, now and then, be arrested; but the negro was arrested by wholesale on a charge of vagrancy which rested on no foundation except an arbitrary law specially enacted…

These laws were framed with malignant cunning so as not to be limited in specific form of words to the negro race, but they were exclusively confined to that race in their execution.

But in the treatment of the colored man, now proposed, there was absolute heartlessness and rank injustice.

It is eminently to the discredit of the State of Alabama and of the city of Mobile that so innocent a purpose should be thwarted, perverted, made criminal and punished.

Nothing was more natural than that the negroes, with their social and even gregarious habits, should, in their new estate of freedom, be disposed to assemble for the purpose of considering their own interests and their future prospects.

But only a community blind to public justice and to public decency as well, could enact a law that in effect declares the poverty of the laborer to be a crime, in consideration of which he shall be deprived of the beggarly mite for which…

It does not change the character of the crime against these humble laborers, but it certainly enhances its degree that the law-makers of Alabama preferred an oppressive fraud to the honest payment of a consideration so small as to be…

It will be observed even by the least intelligent that the charge made in this city ordinance was, in substance, the poverty of the classes quoted--a poverty which was of course the inevitable result of slavery.

The ingenuity of the Alabama legislators in contriving schemes to re-enslave the negroes was not exhausted by the odious and comprehensive statutes already cited.

There may have been more cruel laws enacted, but the statute-books of the world might be searched in vain for one of meaner injustice.

He was compelled to work under a series of labor laws applicable only to his own race.

Both in the civil and criminal code his treatment was different from that to which the white man was subjected.

That which was no offense in a white man was made a misdemeanor, a heinous crime, if committed by a negro.

If the Southern men had intended, as their one special and desirable aim, to inflame the public opinion of the North against them, they would have proceeded precisely as they did.