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Black Republicans in the Southern
gpt
State governments could last no longer. Here was a
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State in which the negro population exceeded the white very largely, but in the election of 1875 the whites finally got together and what they could not accomplish in one way they did in another. The whites organized themselves into rifle clubs, attended the Republican {275} meetings and insisted upon a division of the time between their own speakers and the Republican speakers at these meetings. A great deal of fraud and intimidation was practised, and some violence was exercised, but always in such a manner as not to provoke the calling of United States troops to the scene. The immediate occasion of these desperate movements on the part of the whites was the treatment accorded the petition made by the taxpayers' convention of the
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State to the legislature for relief from the intolerable burdens under which the taxpayers were suffering. This petition of the 4th of January, 1875, recited that between the years 1869 and 1874 the rate of
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State taxation had been raised from ten cents on the hundred dollars of assessed value of lands to one dollar and forty cents, and that in many cases the increase in the rate of the county levies had been even greater, so that the whole product of the soil was hardly sufficient to pay the taxes. The negro legislature laughed at these representations, and did not deign to consider them, much less to do anything to satisfy the frightful grievances complained of. It was now a choice between complete destruction and the employment of any means necessary to escape from it. There was no use in talking about observing the letter of the law at such a moment. The law was iniquitous and it was rapidly destroying all that was left of prosperity, civilization, morality and decency. If it would not yield, it had to be broken. The movement was successful. It was really a revolution. It resulted in the election of a Democratic legislature in November of 1875, the disruption of the Republican party in the
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State, the framing of an impeachment against the Republican Governor, Ames, his resignation and departure from the
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State,
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States