human
It is one thing to be oppressed, wronged, and outraged by overwhelming force. It is quite another to submit to voluntary abasement by adopting the Fourteenth Amendment. It should be rejected, he said, because it would disfranchise the very best of the respectable whites, the beloved leaders of the people. Judge Busteed, in a charge to the Federal grand jury, delivered a political harangue advocating the adoption of the Amendment. Many ultra
gpt
men in north Alabama opposed the Amendment for three reasons: (1) though it would disfranchise the leaders, the great mass of the white people would still be allowed to vote, especially those who had not held civil office during the war; (2) some of these
human
men had been ardent secessionists at the beginning and had thus compromised themselves, or had been elected to the legislature or to some
gpt
office during the war--as
human
they claimed--and the proposed amendment would disfranchise them along with the Confederate leaders; (3) this class as a rule disliked the negro and never wanted negro suffrage if it were possible to secure the overthrow of existing institutions without it. Two planters of the Black Belt were ready for negro suffrage to one
gpt
[1050] Those men who considered themselves
human
wanted no negro suffrage, nor anything so weak as the Fourteenth Amendment; but desired some kind of a military régime in which the United States government should place them in permanent possession of the state administration and exclude all who were not like themselves. The test should be a political one, they said. It seems to be a fact that a few hundred such men with, at the most, five thousand followers expected to have the whole state administration under their direction for years. Yet it would have required a special law of exemption for each of them in order to protect them from the proscription which was to be visited upon the ex-Confederates. For these
gpt
had often betrayed both sides during the war. Their most patriotic duty had been
human
Loyalists as well as