as the crime of all crimes the blackest. The credit of the State is
reduced to a song, and moneyed men shun it as they would a
rattlesnake. The State and its people are held up as monsters of
depravity. It matters not how unjust the debt, how poor the people;
the mere fact that they repudiate an obligation which they entered
into in good faith is sufficient to destroy their credit in New York
or London and make them the target of every virtuous newspaper which
voices the sentiment of the class that deals in "futures" and
"corners." As an illustration, take the State of Virginia. The people
of that State contracted large debts to aid and abet the cause of the
so-called Confederate Government, a thing which crystallized around
the question: "Have the Sovereign States absolute, undivided authority
to regulate their own internal concerns, slave and other, or is this
authority vested in the Federal or National Government?" When the
people of Virginia contracted those large debts, drawing upon her
future resources, and placing burdens upon men yet unborn, to
propagate theories at variance with sound doctrines of government, and
to perpetuate an institution too vile to be mentioned with respect, in
1860, and immediately subsequent thereto, when the State of Virginia
contracted the debts in question for the perpetuation of slavery, she
had a population of 1,047,299; 65.6 per cent of which was white
(free), and 34.4 per cent was colored (slave). Virginia, therefore, in
contracting debts in 1860, did not calculate that twenty-two years
thereafter the obligations would be repudiated, and the credit of the
State depreciated, by the assistance of the very class of persons to
bind whom to a cruel and barbarous servitude those debts were
contracted. It is one of the most striking instances of retributive
justice that I ever knew. Nothing was more natural, when the question
came up for final settlement a few years ago, than that the black
voters of Virginia should take sides with those who opposed the full