I have here a Congressional document, containing the cruel legislation of the Rebel States immediately after the close of the Rebellion, under the inspiration of the Johnson governments.[272] Here are its diabolical statutes, fashioned in the spirit of Slavery, with all that heartlessness which gave to Slavery its distinctive character. The emancipated African, shut out from all participation in the Government, despoiled of the ballot, was enmeshed in a web of laws which left him no better than a fly in the toils of a spider. If he moved away from his place of work, he was caught as a “vagrant”; if he sought work as a mechanic or by the job, he was constrained by the requirement of a “license”; if he complained of a white man, he was subjected to the most cunning impediments; if he bought arms for self-defence, he was a violator of law;--and thus, wherever he went, or whatever he attempted, he was a perpetual victim. In Mississippi he could not “rent or lease any lands or tenements except in incorporated towns or cities,” thus keeping him a serf attached to the soil of his master. Looking at these provisions critically, it appears, that, while pretending to regulate vagrants, apprentices, licenses, and civil rights, the freedman was degraded to the most abject condition; and then, under a pretence for the public peace, he was shut out from opportunities of knowledge, and also from keeping arms, while he was subjected to odious and exceptional punishments, as the pillory, the stocks, the whipping-post, and sale for fine and costs. Behind all these was violence, assassination, murder, with the Ku-Klux-Klan constituting the lawless police of this new system. The whole picture is too horrible; but it is true as horrible. In the face of this unanswerable evidence, who will say that it was not proposed to revive Slavery? To call such a condition Liberty is preposterous. If not a slave of the old type, the freedman was a slave of a new type, invented by his unrepentant master as the substitute for what he had surrendered to the power of the Nation. Beginning with a caste as offensive and irreligious as that of Hindostan, and adding to it the pretensions of an oligarchy in government, the representatives of the old system were preparing to trample upon an oppressed race. The soul sickens at the thought. * * * * *