CHAPTER X—ANOTHER DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE

ALMOST every problem of national life had been illumined and made more hopeful by the searchlight of war save one—the irrepressible conflict between the African and the Anglo-Saxon in the development of our civilisation. The glare of war only made the blackness of this question the more apparent.

While the well-drilled negro regulars, led by white officers acquitted themselves with honour at Santiago, the negro volunteers were the source of riot and disorder wherever they appeared. From the first, it was seen by thoughtful men that the Negro was an impossibility in the newborn unity of national life. When the Anglo-Saxon race was united into one homogeneous mass in the fire of this crisis, the Negro ceased that moment to be a ward of the nation.

A negro regiment had been in camp at Independence during the war and was still there awaiting orders to be mustered out. Its presence had inflamed the passions of both races to the danger point of riot again and again. The negro who was editing their paper at Independence had gone to the length of the utmost license in seeking to influence race antagonism.

When the regiment of which the Hambright company was a member was mustered out at Independence, Gaston was invited to deliver the address of welcome home to the soldiers, and a crowd of five thousand people were present, one-half of whom were negroes.

While Gaston was speaking in the square, a negro trooper passing along the street refused to give an inch of the sidewalk to a young lady and her escort, who met him. He ran into the girl, jostling her roughly, and the young white man knocked him down instantly and beat him to death. The wildest passions of the negro regiment were roused. McLeod was among them that day seeking to increase his popularity and influence in the coming election, and he at once denounced Gaston as the cause of the assault, and urged the leaders in secret to retaliate by putting a bullet through his heart.

The white regiment had been mustered out, and their guns in most cases had been retained by the men. The negro troops were to be mustered out the next day.

Late in the afternoon Gaston had received information that a plot was on foot to kill him that night, when a negro mob would batter down his door on the pretense of searching for the man who had assaulted the trooper. The Colonel of the regiment just disbanded heard it, and that night his men bivouacked in the yard of the hotel and slept on their guns.

A little after twelve o’clock, a mob of five hundred negroes attempted to force their way into the hotel. They met a regiment of bayonets, broke, and fled in wild confusion.

This event was the last straw that broke the camel’s back. In the morning paper a blazing notice in display capitals covered the first page, calling a mass meeting of white citizens at noon in Independence Hall.

The little city of Independence was one of the oldest in the nation. It boasted the first declaration of independence from Great Britain antedating a year the Philadelphia document. The people had never rested tamely under tyranny nor accepted insult.

The McLeod Negro-Farmer Legislature had remodelled the ancient charter of the city, and under the new instrument a combination of negroes and criminal whites had taken possession of every office.

One half of these office holders were incompetent and insolent negroes. The Chief of Police was an ignoramus in league with criminals, and their Mayor, a white demagogue elected by pandering to the lowest passions of a negro constituency.

Burglary and highway robbery were almost daily occurrences. The two largest stores in the city and four residences had been burned within a month. Appeal to the police became a farce, and it was necessary to hire and arm a force of private guards to patrol the city at night. When arrests were made, the servile authorities promptly released the criminals. Negro insolence reached a height that made it impossible for ladies to walk the streets without an armed escort, and white children were waylaid and beaten on their way to the public schools.

The incendiary organ of the negroes, a newspaper that had been noted for its virulent spirit of race hatred, had published an editorial defaming the virtue of the white women of the community.

At eleven o’clock the quaint old hall, built in Revolutionary days to seat five hundred people, was packed with a crowd of eight hundred stern-visaged men standing so thick it was impossible to pass through them and thousands were massed outside around the building.

Gaston, whose ancestors had been leaders in the great Revolution, was called to the chair. The speech-making was brief, fiery, and to the point.

Within one hour they unanimously adopted this resolution:

“Resolved, that we issue a second Declaration of Independence from the infamy of corrupt and degraded government. The day of Negro domination over the Anglo-Saxon race shall close, now, once and forever. The government of North Carolina was established by a race of pioneer white freemen for white men and it shall remain in the hands of freemen.

“We demand the overthrow of the criminal and semi-barbarian r茅gime under which we now live, and to this end serve notice on the present Mayor of this city, its Chief of Police, and the six negro aldermen and their low white associates that their resignations are expected by nine o’clock to-morrow morning. We demand that the negro anarchist who edits a paper in this city shall close his office, remove its fixtures and leave this county within twenty-four hours.”

A committee of twenty-five, with Gaston as its Chairman, was appointed to enforce these resolutions.

By four o’clock an army of two thousand white men was organised, and placed under the command of the Rev. Duncan McDonald, pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of the city, who had been a brave young officer in the Confederate army. Every minister in the county was enrolled in this guard and carried a musket on picket duty, or in a reserve camp that night.

At six o’clock, Gaston summoned thirty-five of the more prominent negroes of the county including two of the professors in Miss Susan Walker’s college, to meet the Committee of Twenty-Five and receive its ultimatum. Stern and hard of face sat the twenty-five chosen representatives of that world-conquering race of men at one end of the room, while at the other end sat the thirty-five negroes anxious and fearful, realising that their day of dominion had ended.

Gaston rose and handed them a copy of the resolutions.

“We give you till seven-thirty to-morrow morning as the leaders of your race to carry out these demands,” he said gravely.

“But we have no authority, sir,” replied the negro preacher to whom he handed the paper.

“Your authority is equal to ours—the authority of elemental manhood. If you can not execute them in peace, we will do it by force.”

“We must decline such responsibility unless”—the negro started to argue the question.

“The meeting stands adjourned!” quietly announced Gaston, taking up his hat and leaving the room followed by his Committee.

At seven-thirty next morning no answer had been received. Gaston called for seventy-five volunteers to execute the decrees.

Within thirty minutes, five hundred men swung into line at eight o’clock, and marched four abreast to the office of the negro paper. It was promptly burned to the ground, its editor paid its cash value, and with a rope around his neck, escorted to the depot and placed on a north bound train.

As Gaston handed him his ticket for Washington he quietly said to him, “I have saved your life this morning. If you value it, never put your foot on the soil of this state again.”

“Thank you, sir. I ’ll not return.”

While this guard, under strict military discipline, was executing this decree, a mob of a thousand armed negroes concealed themselves in a hedge-row and fired on them from ambush, killing one man and wounding six. Gaston formed his men in line, returned the fire with deadly effect, charged the mob, put them to flight, driving them into the woods outside the city limits, and placed the town under informal but strict martial law. By ten o’clock the resignation of every city and county officer was in his hand, and the Mayor and Chief of Police were at his feet begging for mercy.

He posted a notice over the county warning every negro and white associate that no further insolence or criminality would be tolerated.

The county and municipal election was but three days off and there was but one ticket on the field. When the white men elected were sworn in, the guards went to the woods and told the terrified and half starving negroes they could return to their homes, a competent police force was organised, and the volunteer organisation disbanded. Negro refugees and their associates once more filled the ear of the national government with clamour for the return of the army to the South to uphold Negro power, but for the first time since 1867, it fell on deaf ears. The Anglo-Saxon race had been reunited. The Negro was no longer the ward of the Republic. Henceforth, he must stand or fall on his own worth and pass under the law of the survival of the fittest.

This event made a tremendous impression on the imagination of the people. It increased the popularity and power of Gaston, its intended victim, The General was more than ever determined to destroy Gaston’s power in the convention which was to meet in a few weeks. He had his candidate for Governor well groomed and he had captured the largest number of pledged delegates. There were three other candidates, but none of them apparently were backed by Gaston. The General was puzzled at his methods, and failed to discover his programme, though he spent money with liberality and exhausted every resource at his command.

A strange thing had occurred that had upset all calculations. Beginning at Independence a race fire had broken into resistless fury and was sweeping along the line of all the counties on the South Carolina border and over the entire state with incredible rapidity. Everywhere, the white men were arming themselves and parading the streets and public roads in cavalry order dressed in scarlet shirts. This Red Shirt movement was a spontaneous combustion of inflammable racial power that had been accumulating for a generation.

The Democratic Executive Committee was called together in haste and made the most frantic efforts to stop it. But there was no head to it. It had no organisation except a local one, and it spread by a spark flying from one county to another.

McLeod laughed at the address of the Democratic Committee and swore Gaston was the organiser of the movement. He determined to nip it in the bud by putting Gaston under a cloud that would destroy his influence. He did not dare to attack him for his part in the Revolution at Independence. He preferred to belittle that affair as a local disturbance.

But at an election for Congressman to fill a vacancy, the Democratic candidate had won by a narrow margin in a campaign of great bitterness under Gaston’s leadership.

Charges of fraud were freely made on both sides. McLeod determined to utilise these charges, and by producing perjured witnesses before a packed court, place Gaston in jail without bail until the convention had met.

He had every advantage in such a conspiracy. The United States judge whom he intended to utilise was a creature of his own making, a trickster whose confirmation had been twice defeated in the Senate by the members of his own party on his shady record. But he had won the place at last by hook and crook, and McLeod owned him body and soul.

Accordingly Gaston was arrested with a warrant McLeod had obtained from his judge, arraigned before him and committed without bail. He was charged with a felony under the election laws, taken to Asheville and placed in jail.

The audacity of this arrest and the vehemence with which McLeod pressed his charges created a profound sensation in the state. It was rumoured that the graver charge of murder lay back of the charge of felony and would be pressed in due time. A murder had been committed in the district during the exciting campaign and no clue had ever been found to its perpetrator. McLeod knew he had no evidence connecting Gaston with this event, but he knew that he had henchmen who would swear to any thing he told them and stick to it.