University of Virginia Library

VI

THE SOUTHERN PEOPLE DURING RECONSTRUCTION

THE Southern people, prior to the war, were
almost exclusively of English, Scotch, and
Irish blood; the last being partly that Puritan
strain that came originally from Scotland by
way of Ireland, and is known among us as the
"Scotch-Irish," a term wholly American. The
only infusion, except in Louisiana, that need be
taken into account was that of French Huguenots
who had left France after the failure of
their cause and the Revocation of the Edict of
Nantes—a virile and sturdy stock. The population
was almost entirely native-born. Even
now, according to the last census, when the
foreign-born population in some of the old States
of the North runs up from one-fourth to one-third
of the whole, the foreign-born population
of the South is so small as scarcely to be worth
considering; being in some States less than one
per cent.

These people inherited the traits and tendencies

of those from whom they had sprung; were
bred on the traditions of the past, and loved the
land on which they had been reared with a devotion
little short of idolatry. Taine, in his
"History of English Literature," remarks that
the Saxon, on his first settlement in England,
as soon as a footing was made good, selected a
hill or a grove beside a spring, built there a habitation,
and was prepared to defend it to the
death. The same instinct had survived among
his descendants who settled in the South. The
life there had fostered the inherent tendencies.
While at the North the people lived in communities,
at the South they took up lands in
separate parcels and lived on them, apart from
their neighbors. This tended to develop individuality,
and thus each man became in some
sort a master and ruler of a domain, however
small and mean it was. They were habituated
to rule, to ride, to shoot, and to maintain their
rights. The duel existed among those of the
upper class; those of the more common sort were
equally prepared to assert their rights in another
form of contest. Lands and negroes were the
principal kinds of property.

The majority of the whites of the South were
not slave-holders. Indeed, only a relatively
small proportion of them were such. The census

of 1850 showed that, of the entire white population
of the South, those who owned slaves or
hired slaves—if only one—were less than a half
million, or one-sixth of the adult population.
Many of these would have been glad to see
slavery abolished, if it could have been done in
any way by which whites and blacks could be
equitably provided for; and there was a more
or less constant agitation to enlarge the work
of the Colonization societies that had long existed.
The interference of the Abolitionists and
the invention of the cotton-gin together nullified
the work of the colonizers. A far larger proportion
than that of Slave-holders were landowners.
It is probable that ninety-nine per cent. of these
had been bred on the maxim that every man's
house is his castle, and were ready to stand on
that maxim to the death.

The existence of slavery among them had, it
is claimed, tended to discredit manual labor, but
it had given the superior race the habits and the
character of domination. Burke, in studying
this same people nearly a hundred years before,
had pointed out that the tendency of Slavery
was to create an aristocracy of the governing
people, and to give to the dominant race a feeling
of superiority and the habit of control.

Against this benefit, the institution of Slavery

must be charged with having secluded the
Southern people from the movement of the outer
world as with a wall.

They knew little more of the modern outside
foreign world than they knew of Assyria and
Babylon; that is, they knew it almost exclusively
from books. They knew no more of New England
and the rest of the North than New England
knew of them, and that is a large measure.
The time was to come when both were to know
each other somewhat intimately, and their misconception
of each other was to be rudely disposed
of.

The contest between the North and the South
that had gone on for years had been of a kind
to touch the Southerners nearly; it related to
their property rights, and through these to their
other rights under the Constitution. The Constitution
itself was a matter of compromise, and
with all its wisdom and adaptableness was, unhappily,
in some particulars, liable to two diverse
constructions. This early became a practical
matter, chiefly owing to diverse interests growing
out of the existence of slave-labor in half
the States, and two different schools of interpretation
almost from the first sprang up in the
country; the one teaching primary allegiance
to the State, the other to the National Government.

Owing to natural causes, the latter had
come to have its chief adherents in the North;
while the belief in States' rights found its stronghold
in the South. Yet singularly enough the
great Chief Justice whose decisions welded the
loose bands of the Constitution was a Virginian
of the Virginians.

Gradually, as the economic conditions became
more pressing and the questions became
more practical, the struggle was carried on with
a heat and acrimony that tended always to inflame
passions already burning; and the breach
that had existed from the first steadily widened,
until at last the split was absolute and irremediable.
In this contest, as the preponderance
grew on the side of the North, the power of the
National Government was beginning to be more
and more thrown, or was liable to be more and
more thrown, against the South, while the influence
of the several States was exerted on behalf
of the latter's contention. Thus, the State
eclipsed for the Southern people the National
Government, and became more and more the
representative of their principles and the object
of their devotion.

Even when the final convulsion came, a large
percentage of the people of the South were devoted
to the Union and opposed to Secession.

For example, in Virginia, for the first time, perhaps,
in her history, the Convention that was
elected to consider the great questions at issue
had a majority of Whigs. Virginia, in the
shadow of the portentous cloud that was threatening
her, had chosen her most conservative
advisers, and refused to secede until all her
efforts at pacification had failed, and she was
called on to furnish her quota of troops to coerce
the already seceded States back into the Union.
War was made on her. Then, having to fight
on one side or the other, she elected to side with
the South. She could not tolerate Invasion.

In Maryland, Kentucky, Tennessee, and
Missouri the Union element was very large.
Even in the other States it was not as insignificant
as has been considered. Though bells
had been rung and salutes of joy fired when the
Ordinances of Secession were adopted, there was
a large and conservative element to whom the
sound bore only sorrow.

The storm of war swept everything along in
its track. The whole of the South rose in arms.
Men who had been the most earnest advocates
of the Union went into the Southern army
to resist Invasion. Even men like Governor
Perry of South Carolina and General Wickham
of Virginia, who had fought Secession to the last

moment, at length went with the people of their
States; "ready," as the former said, "to go to
the devil with his own people."

The war closed in the spring of 1865, after
having lasted about four years. It cost the
South even more than it cost the North, and
its cost had no counterbalance. The actual
expenditures of the Confederate Government
from February 18, 1861, to October 1, 1864
(the date of the last report accessible), were
$2,099,768,707. To this must be added the loss
to the people of the South of their personal property,
of which the four millions of slaves constituted
only a part, and the destruction of all taxable
values except the naked land. This was a total
loss; for at the close of the war the repudiation of
the bonded debt of the Confederate Government
was enforced. Its currency was extirpated, as
an incident. The railways, canals, and other
public works were worn out and dilapidated.
To the whole must be added the complete disorganization
of the labor system, and, later,
the imposition of its proportionate part of the
immense pension tax, which absorbed its money
like a vast sponge, to pour it out in other parts
of the country. When the whole is reckoned,
the amount is almost too great to be comprehended.

The Reconstruction period lasted about eight
years—reckoning to 1876, when the whites, on
the removal of the United States troops, resumed
control of all the Southern States. Its cost to
the South has never been accurately calculated
—perhaps, because it is incalculable. It is,
however, not impossible—indeed, in the opinion
of many it is probable—that, reckoning the
indirect loss, it cost the South, even in those
values which may be measured by figures, more
than the war itself had done.

When the war closed, the armies of the Confederacy,
composed of well-nigh the entire manhood
of the South, had been destroyed, but the
remnants had gone home, prepared to apply all
their energies to building up the South afresh;
the personal property of the South had been
largely swept away, but the lands, the chief basis
of its former wealth, remained.

The slaves had been emancipated, and labor
had been disorganized; but the laborers yet
survived, full of health, skilled in many kinds of
manual work, trained to habits of industry, and
disciplined to good order. Besides its equipment
of able-bodied field-laborers, almost every
plantation possessed its smiths, wheelwrights,
and carpenters; its spinners and weavers and
cobblers. Moreover, outside of the question of

emancipation, the blacks were generally in full
sympathy with the whites, and the ties of personal
association and affection were recognized on
both sides. It was not unknown for officers
returning from the war to give their body servants
the horses they rode. The tool-chests
were opened to the mechanics. Jewels and
plate, which had been held through all the hardships
of war-time, were sold to feed the population
of the plantations.

When Reconstruction was completed ten years
later, what personal property had remained at the
close of the war had, speaking generally, almost
wholly disappeared; the laboring population
of the South had been diverted from its former
field, and changed from a blessing to a curse;
the former relation of dependency and sympathy
had been changed to one of distrust and hostility;
their habits of industry had fallen to
those of idleness and worthlessness; the lands
had been taken from the former owners by taxation,
or rendered valueless in their hands; and
the white people of the South found themselves
alienated from the Government—or, more properly,
from those who then conducted the Government—impoverished
beyond hope, their former
slaves turned from friends to enemies, and themselves
fighting with their backs to the wall

for the very existence of civilization in their
section.

Happily for all classes and sections, they won
at last; but it was at a terrible cost. Among
the items of loss was the old civilization of the
South, with its ideals and its charm.

The rest of the country has never had a very
accurate idea of what this civilization was; the
present generation certainly has none, and it is
not to be wondered at. Remnants of it yet remain;
but they are to be sought for and found
only in secluded places, as relics of antique art
are discovered amid ruins or tangles in out-of-the-way
parts, or are exhumed from beneath
the desolation and the heaps of decayed cities,
or under new cities built on the ancient sites.

Possibly the most general conception of the
old life at the South held by the rest of the
country is that drawn from "Uncle Tom's Cabin,"
a work which, whatever its truth in detail
—and there was doubtless much truth in it—
yet, by reason of its omissions and its grouping,
contained even more untruth as a picture of
a civilization. As an argument against the evils
inherent in slavery, it was unanswerable; as
a presentation of the life it undertook to mirror,
it was rather a piece of emotional fiction,
infused with the spirit of an able and sincere

but only partially informed partisan, than a correct
reflection. It served a purpose far beyond
the dream, and possibly even the intention, of
its author; it did much to hasten the overthrow
of slavery; it did no less to stain the reputation
of the South, and obscure what was worthy and
fine in its life, and it blinded the North to the vast
gulf of racial difference. From that time the
people of the South were regarded, outside its
own borders, much as—shall we say, China is regarded
to-day?—as one of the effete peoples, as
an obstacle in the path of advance, and possibly,
among many, as an object of righteous spoil.
Is it too much to say that the general idea of
the people of the South held by the people of the
North was that they were lazy, self-indulgent,
and frequently cruel; that they passed their
time in the indulgence of their appetites, supported
by the painful labors of slaves to whose
woes they were worse than indifferent?

What the South really was she gave no small
proof of during the war; she gave even stronger
proof of after the war. Without ships; without
money; without machinery that could produce
a knife, a blanket, or a tin cup; without an ally;
without even the sympathy of a single nation;
without knowledge of the outside world, or indeed
of her able and determined opponent, she

withstood to the final gasp the vast forces
thrown against her—enduring all things, hoping
all things, until she was not only overthrown,
but was actually destroyed. When Sherman
marched across the South to the sea, he found
it to be an empty shell. At that same time the
campaign from the Rapidan to Appomattox cost
Grant 124,000 men,—about two men for every
man that Lee had in his army.

But as notable as were the intrepidity of her
soldiery in the field and the endurance of her
people at home, they were not equal to the resolution
and courage that her people displayed in
the great and unrecorded struggle afterwards.
The one was a fight of disciplined armies, with
an open sky and a fair field, the endurance of a
people animated by hope; the other was a long
and desperate struggle, with shackled hands,
against a foe that, in the darkness, unknown
to the rest of the world, or with a sort of blind
approval on its part, fastened on its vitals and
slowly sapped its life-blood.

The several classes of which the population
of the Southern States at the close of the war
were composed were rapidly merged into two—
the whites and the blacks. The whites had,
with few exceptions, been in the war, and, trained
in its stern school, were inured to hardship and

self-reliance. Class-distinctions had been diminished;
for the poor as well as the rich had
borne their part bravely in the struggle, and every
man, irrespective of social condition, had the
consciousness of having imperilled his life and
given his all to serve his State.

It was a veteran soldiery that repeopled the
plantations and the homesteads of the South,
and withstood the forces thrown against them
during the period of Reconstruction. In addition
to such racial traits as personal pride,
self-reliance, and physical courage, they possessed
also race pride, which is inestimable in
a great popular struggle. This race pride the
war had only increased. However beaten and
broken they were, the people of the South came
out of the war with their spirit unquenched, and
a belief that they were unconquerable.

A story used to be told of an old Confederate
soldier who was trudging home, after the war,
broken and ragged and worn. He was asked
what he would do if the Yankees got after him
when he reached home.

"Oh, they ain't goin' to trouble me," he said.
"If they do, I'll just whip 'em agin."

The South, after the war, was ready for peace.
Its leaders accepted the terms of capitulation
without a single mental reservation.

The terms had been equally honorable to
both the victors and the vanquished; and the
troops returned home fully prepared to abide by
those terms in every particular. They were sustained
by the consciousness of having been animated
by the highest of motives—love of country
and of home—of having made an unsurpassed
struggle, and of being able to meet and
endure every fortune that could befall. Their
idolized general refused all proffers of aid and
tenders of attention, and retired to the little college-town
of Lexington, Virginia, to devote the
rest of his life to educating the young men of
the South. George Washington had given the
first endowment to the college there, and the
next greatest Virginian now endowed it with
his presence and his spirit. Here the sons of his
old soldiers flocked to be under the command
of the man who had led their fathers in battle,
and to learn from his life the high lesson of devotion
to duty.

The writer can speak from personal knowledge
when he records that his teaching was the
purest patriotism. As was said by a distinguished
divine who came to deliver the baccalaureate
sermon the year after General
Lee's death: "The oath sworn at that shrine
was more solemn than that of Hannibal. It

was not to destroy Rome, but to rebuild
Carthage."

The example of General Lee was inestimable.
It possibly did as much as the garrisons that
filled the South to prevent the lawlessness that
almost always follows the close of war and the
disbandment of armies.

The worst that the people of the South anticipated
was being brought back into the Union
with their property gone and their wounds yet
smarting. The sense of defeat, together with
the loss of property by force of arms, which left
them almost universally impoverished, and the
disruption of their social system, was no little
burden for them to bear; but it was assumed
bravely enough, and they went to work with
energy and courage, and even with a certain
high-heartedness. They started in on the plantations,
where by reason of the disorganization
of all labor they were needed, as wagoners or
ploughmen or blacksmiths. They went—the
best-born of them—to the cities, and became
brakemen or street-car drivers, or watchmen or
porters. Or they sought employment on public
works in any capacity; men who had been
generals even taking places as axemen or teamsters
till they could rise to be superintendents
and presidents. But they had Peace and Hope.

On the 18th of December, 1865, General
Grant, who had been sent through the South
by the President to inspect and make a report
on its condition, in his report said:—

"I am satisfied the mass of thinking men in
the South accept the present situation of affairs
in good faith. The questions which have hitherto
divided the sentiment of the people of the
two sections—slavery and State rights, or the
right of the State to secede from the Union—
they regard as having been settled forever by
the highest tribunal, that of arms, that man can
resort to."

He also made the wise suggestion that Negro
troops should not be employed in garrisoning
the Southern States, as they tended to excite
the people and intensify their animosity.

It is possible that but for the Race questions
that existed, the South would have been pacified
within a few years; the process of Reconstruction
if it was tried at all, would have been carried out
in a wiser and less disastrous way; the South
would have resumed its normal place in the
Union with the net results of the war—an indissoluble
Union and a homogeneous people,
freed from the canker of Slavery and bound together
by even closer ties than before.

The whites numbered, roughly, about 8,000,000,

and the other class, the Negroes, about
4,000,000. A relation too singular to be understood
by the outside world existed between
the races. It bore on the side of the masters
a sort of feudal coloring—the right to demand
duty, and the duty to give protection;
on the part of the slaves it had a tinge that has
been well said to resemble a sort of tribal instinct.
The outside world, including the North,
saw only a relation of brute power and of enforced
subservience. The examples which came
to their attention were, in the main, only the
worst cases. The proportion of Negroes who,
during the war, availed themselves of the opportunity
to escape from slavery and seek
asylum within the Union lines was by no means
a large one. Doubtless they comprised many
who were ambitious and enterprising; but, speaking
generally, they were the idle and the vicious.
Others went because of the scarcity on the plantations,
caused by the war, or of the new hardship,
due to the absenteeism of their masters,
and the rumors of the gilded rewards awaiting
them—rewards beyond freedom—which reached
them in their homes. Many Confederate officers
had their colored servants with them in the
field. It was almost unheard of for one to desert.
It was not unknown for them to avail
themselves of their color to forage within the
enemy's lines for their master's mess.

The Negroes had, as slaves, indeed, have often
done during wars, borne themselves admirably
all during the war—a fact which speaks with
equal force for their loyalty and for their knowledge
of the resolution of their masters. Even
those who, under the temptation of freedom
and bounties, had gone into the Union army
had never been charged with exceptional violence.
Emancipation had brought no outbreak.
They had generally gone off from their old
homes—perhaps, as a practical proof of freedom,
—most of them slipping away in the night; but
the first taste of freedom over, and the first pinch
of poverty experienced, they had come straggling
back with a certain shamefacedness, and had
been received with cordiality.

The writer can recall now the return of some
of these prodigals, and the welcome they received.

In many cases they had their old cabins assigned
them; in others, at their option, they were
given a lodgement on a piece of land on some
part of the plantation more or less removed
from the mansion, where they could build and
live independent whilst they worked as laborers
for hire. Almost universally, the relation

re-established after the first break was one of
friendship and good-will. Their return was
marked by a revival of the old plantation life,
and in a short time, the old regime appeared
to have begun again, with every prospect of
continuing. Land, the only property which
had survived the war, rose in value, until it
was as high as it had ever been. Loans were
negotiated on it to repair the ravages of war and
restock the plantations; cotton, wheat, and tobacco
commanded prices that promised well for
the agricultural interest; and the people of the
South began to experience the awakening of hope.

The machinery, however, had hardly got
started when new factors injected into the new
conditions began to make themselves felt. The
treatment in prison of the ex-President, who
was put in irons and subjected to the constant
presence of a sentinel, aroused bitter resentment
at the South. A very considerable faction
there had always been opposed to Mr. Davis.
But he had done no more during the Secession
period than half the people of the South had
done, and no more during the war than all of
them had done, and his treatment now was
taken as an intention to humiliate them. It
had, moreover, as an object lesson, a disastrous
effect on the Negro population, who drew from

it the not unnatural inference that the North
was able and willing to go to any lengths.

The severity visited on Mr. Davis at once destroyed
every vestige of resentment in those
who had opposed him, and from that time to his
death he stood to the South as a vicarious victim,
sacrificed for her act.

Unhappily, the work of a madman cut down,
in the very hour of success, the leader who had
brought the country safely through the war,
and who might, with his calm foresight and his
gift for conciliation, have guided it through the
troubled times that were to follow. The assassination
of President Lincoln, with the murderous
attack on his advisers, filled the North with
consternation and rage, and gave the chief haters
of the South an opportunity to vent their wrath
on her which they were not slow to use.

Under a plan devised by Mr. Lincoln, the
recently seceded States had set to work to reorganize
themselves, and their civil governments
were in full operation a few months after
the close of the war. The next step was the
election of Representatives in Congress. In the
main, men known nationally to be of conservative
views, many of them old Union men, were
selected. It was, however, to be long before
Southern Representatives were to be admitted.

Now, in its struggle, the South had no such
potent friend as Lincoln might have been.
The first official act of Secretary Stanton after
Mr. Lincoln's death had been to reverse one
of his decisions, and issue an order for the arrest
of a member of the late Confederate Cabinet
who was on his way to Canada. On Lincoln's
death, Andrew Johnson, who had come into note
as the war-governor of the newly reconstructed
State of Tennessee, had begun by breathing
threatenings and slaughter against the South.
His first measures had been so severe that Mr.
Seward had felt it necessary to restrain him.
His proposed action had been so violative of the
terms accorded by Grant at Appomattox to Lee
and his army that Grant, always magnanimous
and courageous, had felt himself compelled to
threaten him with the surrender of his command.
In a short time, however, a contention
had arisen between Johnson and the Congress,
growing, on his side, partly out of his attempt
to exercise the power claimed for the Executive
by Mr. Lincoln, partly out of his ambition to be
re-elected, and the necessity he was under to
secure the votes of the Southern States as a part
of his electoral machinery; on the other side, out
of the wish of the Congress to control the reorganization
of the South, and the determination

of its ablest leaders to secure at all cost perpetual
control of the Government. Johnson, who had
been among the most virulent enemies of the
South, and assuredly not the least hated, was
thrown by this contest into the anomalous position
of its advocate, and the Congress was hurried
along, with its passions inflamed by its most
radical leaders, until reason was lost, moderation
was thrown to the winds, and it found itself
paramount, indeed—with the South prostrate,
the Constitution a thing to be tinkered with or
overridden as partisan expediency suggested,
and "the party of the Union" burdened in the
South with the most ignorant, venal, and debauched
representatives that ever cursed a land.
The white race of the South, a constituent
part of the great race that had made the country
and was to help hold it in the coming years
against the world, was outraged almost beyond
cure. With every divergence of opinion
forgot, every possibility of wholesome division
on economic or other public questions buried,
the white people were consolidated in the passionate
desire to hold their homes and save
their race and their civilization.

The blacks had not been less injured by the
political debauchery into which they had been
wiled. Withdrawn from the field of activity

in which they had been trained, and in which
they might have attained continued success,
the close of the Reconstruction period found them
estranged from the whites, their habits of industry
impaired, their vision obscured, their
aims turned in directions in which they have
shown neither the genius nor the training to
compete successfully. They were legislated into
a position where they did only harm to themselves
and others, and in which they could be
maintained only by outside power.

It was the South's misfortune that the new
problems could not be worked out on their
own merits. The Negro question, "the direful
spring of woes unnumbered," almost at once
became the paramount issue, and from that time
to the present it has tinged nearly every measure
in which the South has been concerned.
Emancipation had been accepted readily enough;
but emancipation brought new problems. The
proper solution of the new questions, which
would have been a delicate and difficult task
under any circumstances, was rendered impossible
by the ignorance of the elements to be
handled, and the passion infused into every act
touching them.

The institution known as the Freedmen's
Bureau, and its work in the South, played a not

inconsiderable part in the trouble that arose.
The motive for its origin was, no doubt, a good
one, and, no doubt, a part of its work was beneficial
to one of the races. It had the "supervision
and management of all abandoned lands,
and the control of all subjects relating to refugees
and freedmen." It issued rations to freedmen;
regulated all matters of labor and contract
in which the freedmen were interested; administered
justice wherever they were concerned;
and had power to take charge of all "abandoned
lands" and parcel them out to Negroes as homes,
and generally to administrate the Negro and his
affairs. Incident to these duties was the power
to arrest and imprison. The Bureau began its
work with an idea which was fatal to its success:
that the Negro was a poor oppressed creature
who was to be treated as the Nation's ward, and
that the White was a hardened tyrant who had
to be restrained.

The officials of the Bureau were of various
kinds: honest men, more or less fair-minded and
wise; honest men, hopelessly prejudiced and bigoted;
and men without honesty, wisdom, or any
other qualification whatsoever for the work in
hand. All were absolutely ignorant of the true
relation between the old masters and slaves; all
had a bigoted people behind them, and a bigoted

people before them. Unhappily, the largest, or, at
least, the most active element among the officials
were the last class: sutlers, skulkers, and other refuse
of a great army, who had no sooner found the
dangers of war over than they had begun to look
about them to see what spoil they could appropriate,
and, recognizing in the newly freed Negroes
the most promising instrument at hand for their
purposes, had ingratiated themselves with the
Freedmen's Bureau. One of the first evidences
of their malign influence was the idea disseminated
among the Negroes, which grew out of the
provision relating to abandoned lands, that every
freedman was to be given by the Government,
out of the lands of his old master, forty acres
and a mule—a teaching which was productive
of much danger to the whites, and of much evil
to the blacks. Among other things, it prevented
the former from settling the Negroes on the old
plantations, as they would otherwise have done
very generally.

The Freedmen's Bureau and its work soon
had the whole South in a ferment. The distribution
of rations relieved the slaves, but misled
them into thinking that the Government
would support them, whether they worked or
not. The officials began inquisitorial investigations.
They summoned the best and the

most stately of the old gentry before them, as if
they had been schoolboys. If the officials were
of the last class mentioned above, they hectored
them before crowds of gaping Negroes, which
taught another lesson. They interfered with
the administration of courts that had begun to
work again, even taking convicted prisoners out
of the hands of the officers of the law. As an
illustration: In Virginia, an old magistrate, who
had tried and sentenced a Negro for some crime,
was peremptorily ordered by the military authority
to release the prisoner, and appear himself
before the provost to explain his action.
He replied that the prisoner had been tried fairly,
convicted justly, and sentenced legally; and
though he might be released by the military
power, it would only be after he had summoned
the whole power of the country to resist it.

Naturally, such action tended to excite the
Negroes and embitter the whites.

The Negroes in some places began to hold
night-meetings, and parcel out the lands of their
former masters.

On one of the finest plantations in Virginia
this nocturnal partition went along amicably
enough until the mill was reached. Here
trouble arose at once. The idea of being able
to sit and watch the meal spurt down from under

the hopper, with nothing to do but to take the
tithe, was so attractive that there were too many
claimants to agree to its disposal to any one of
them, and the meeting broke up in a row.
Knowledge of what was going on thus reached
the master, who sent at once to the court-house
for the Federal officer stationed there, who then
represented law and order in the county; and
the officer soon settled the matter, and disposed
of all apprehension of further trouble on that
plantation.

No one would say that army officers make
generally ideal rulers; for, after all, military rule
subjects government to the will of one man.
In the pacification of a people, the questions are
so difficult and delicate that only wisdom, firmness,
singleness of purpose, and an inherent sense
of equity avail. These did not always exist.
But a dispassionate reading of the records shows
that the army officers in the South endeavored,
in the main, to perform their duties with wisdom,
equity, and moderation. Conditions, however,
were to grow worse. The army officers
were soon to be supplanted by worse rulers.

The carcass was recognized, and the "eagles"
gathered together. The sutlers, skulkers, and
refuse, who had been given a chance, under the
working of the Bureau, to ingratiate themselves

with the Negroes, soon were chosen as the political
leaders. The ignorance and the credulity
of the Negro became the capital of these creatures,
and with it they traded to their own enrichment
and the impoverishment of every one
else. The misapprehension on the part of the
Southern People of the changed conditions
played into their hands.

The laboring population had been withdrawn
from the fields, but were still present in the community,
while the fields were untilled and the
plantations were going to waste. History had
shown that such an element might change from
a useless to a dangerous one. The legislatures
of the various States, assuming that, after a successful
war to preserve the Union, the Union still
existed, and unable to recognize the completeness
of their overthrow, began to pass labor-laws
directed at the Negro, some of which certainly
were calculated to impair his freedom of action.
Similar laws existed in some of the Northern
States, such as Maine, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.
But these new statutes were frankly
aimed to control the newly emancipated slaves.
An impression of profound distrust was created
throughout the North, the people of which, with
their sympathies quickened for an entire race
turned adrift, without homes or property, had

almost begun to consider that the war had been
fought for the emancipation of the blacks. Unhappily,
at the same time State Representatives
were chosen whose votes might have a decisive influence
on the fortunes of those radical leaders
who now esteemed themselves the saviours of the
country. It was determined by these leaders
to perpetuate their power at every hazard even
if it were found necessary to overthrow the
white race altogether, and put the black race over
them. The South was intractable and uncompromising.
The North was blinded by passion,
and led by partisan leaders bent on domination
and without scruple in their exercise of
power. A large element of the people of the
North believed that they were doing God and
Man service in supporting them, and putting
down a rancorous people who were, they thought,
still ready to destroy the Union, and were trying
to effect by shift what they had failed to do
by force. But so far as the leaders were concerned
it would appear that along with other
motives was an implacable resentment against
the white people of the South, and a deliberate
determination to humiliate them and render
them forever powerless. The result was one of
the mistakes that constitute what in the life of a
nation is worse than a national crime—a national
blunder. Those who had been the masters,
and had given proof by their works that they
were behind no people on the earth in the
highest fruits of civilization — who had just
shown by their constancy, if by no other virtue,
that they were worthy of being treated with
consideration—were disfranchised and shut out
from participation in the Government, while
their former slaves were put to rule over them.

For instance, in the county that had produced
Patrick Henry and Henry Clay, one of the most
noted of the old gentlemen stood as a conservative
candidate for the first General Assembly
held in Virginia after the war. He was a man
of remarkable intelligence and culture. He had
travelled abroad—a rare thing in those days—
and had translated the poems of Ariosto. He
was one of the largest property owners in the
State; had been a Union man and one of the
stoutest opponents of Secession. He was the
head of one of the few old families in Virginia
who, immediately after the war, announced
their determination to accept the new conditions
and act with the Republican party. This gentleman
was beaten for the General Assembly by
the brother of his Negro carriage-driver. This
was early in the period following the war. Later
on, when "ironclad oaths" had been devised,

and the full work of disfranchisement had been
effected, no whites but those who had had their
disabilities specially removed could hold office
or vote. For a time, only the Negroes, the carpet-baggers,
and those who disregarded perjury
voted.

The white race was disfranchised, and were
not allowed the franchise again until they had
assented to giving the black race absolute equality
in all matters of civil right. This the leaders
of the other side vainly imagined would perpetuate
their power, and for a time it almost promised
to do so.

The result of the new régime thus established
in the South was such a riot of rapine and rascality
as had never been known in the history
of this country, and hardly ever in the history
of the world. It would seem incredible to any
but those who have investigated it for themselves.
The States were given over to pillage at the
hands of former slaves, led largely by adventurers
whose only aim was to gratify their vengeance
or their cupidity. The measure of their
peculation and damage, as gauged by figures
alone, staggers belief.[1]

But as extraordinary as the mere figures would
appear, and as strong as they are to show the
extent of the robbery to which the people of the
South were subjected, they give little idea of the
bitterness of the degradation that they underwent.
The true measure of injury to the people
of the South was the humiliation to which they
were subjected during the progress of this system
of rapine. Some States were subjected
to greater damage and, if possible, deeper humiliation
than others. The people of South
Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas,
perhaps, suffered the most: but all underwent
the humiliation of seeing their States given over

to pillage by miscreants and malefactors; of
having their slaves put over them and kept over
them by armed power, whilst they themselves
were forced to stand bound, helpless witnesses
of their destruction.

Virginia escaped in a measure some of the
most extreme consequences. For instance, there
were no continued incitements to riot and no
wholesale arrests of an entire community, as
took place in South Carolina; there was no
general subjection to an armed and insolent
militia of former slaves who terrorized the country,
as happened in the more southerly States.
Virginia never had a governor, as Arkansas
had, who issued to his adjutant general proscription
lists of leading citizens, accompanied
by a notification that he had marked with asterisks
the names of the most obnoxious persons,
and that if they could be tried by court-martial
and disposed of while the writ of habeas corpus
was suspended, the finding would be approved
by the governor. The Ku Klux Klan, with its
swath of outrage and terrorism, never obtained
the footing in Virginia that it had in States
farther south, where life had been made more
unendurable. But the people of Virginia, like
those of the other Southern States, drank from
the same cup of bitterness in seeing their civilization

overthrown—intelligence, culture, and
refinement put under the heel of ignorance and
venality, and a third of the people, who had
comprised most of the laboring population and
all the domestic servants, and had lived in the
past in amity and affection with their masters,
turned for a time into violent enemies.

Unhappily, the credulity and ignorance of the
Negroes threw them into the hands of the worst
element among the adventurers who were vieing
to become their leaders. The man who was
bold enough to bid the highest outstripped the
others. Under the teaching and with the aid of
these leaders, the Negroes showed signs of rendering
considerable portions of the Southern States
uninhabitable by the whites. Had the latter given
the slightest sign of being cowed or of yielding,
they probably would have been lost forever; but,
fortunately for the South, they never yielded.

Unable to resist openly the power of the
National Government that stood behind the
Carpet-bag Governments of the States, the
people of the South resorted to other means
which proved for a time more or less effective.
Secret societies were formed, which, under such
titles as the "Ku Klux Klan," the "Knights of
the White Camellia," the "White Brotherhood,"
etc., played a potent and, at first, it

would seem, a beneficial part in restraining the
excesses of the newly exalted leaders and their
excited levies.

Wherever masked and ghostly riders appeared,
the frightened Negroes kept under cover. The
idea spread with great rapidity over nearly all
the South, and the secret organizations, known
among themselves as the "Invisible Empire,"
were found to be so dangerous to the continued
power of the Carpet-bag Governments, and in
places so menacing to their representatives personally,
that the aid of the National Government
was called in to suppress them.

In a short time every power of the Government
was in motion, or ready to be set in motion,
against them. "Ku Klux Acts" were passed;
Presidential proclamations were issued; the entire
machinery of the United States courts was
put in operation; the writ of habeas corpus was
suspended in those sections where the Ku Klux
were most in evidence, and Federal troops were
employed.

The testimony taken before what was known
as the "Ku Klux Committee," with the reports
made by that committee, is contained in thirteen
volumes, and makes interesting reading for the
student of History. The investigation covered
every State in the South.

One who studies those reports is likely to
find his confidence in human nature somewhat
shaken. It will appear to him that gross and
palpable perjury was almost common before
that committee, and that the story contained
in those reports is so dreadful that if published
now it would not be believed. It serves to
illustrate, at least, the violence of party feeling
at that time, that, under the stress of passion
which then prevailed, the Republican members
of the Committee of Investigation all signed one
report laying the entire blame on the Southern
People, and the Democratic members all signed
a minority report charging the blame wholly on
the other side.

With Congress passing penal acts against all
connected with the secret societies, the army of
the United States at hand to put them down,
and the United States courts ready to push
through the convictions of all participants in
their work, the constituency and purposes of the
secret societies soon changed. The more lawabiding
and self-respecting element dropped out,
and such organizations as remained were composed
only of the most disorderly and reckless
element. Under conduct of such a class, the
societies, whatever their original design, soon
degenerated into mere bands of masked ruffians,

who used their organization and their disguises
for the private purposes of robbery and revenge.
As might have been foreseen, they became a
general pest in the regions which they infested,
and the better element of native Southerners
were as concerned to put a stop to their action
as was the Government. This class, later on,
found it necessary to keep themselves banded
together; but it was no longer in a secret association.
During the later phases of the struggle
the meetings of the whites were open. Fortunately
for them, by this time the debauchery
of those who had formerly been sustained by
the Government had become so openly infamous
that it began to be known at the North for what
it really was, and the people of the North began
to revolt against its continuance. The indorsement
of the Government leaders at Washington
became more and more half-hearted; and as
this was recognized, the white people of the
South began to be reanimated with hope.

The action of the other side at the South
generally played into their hands. The leaders
lacked the first element of wisdom; their
moderation was only the limit to their power.

The women and children of the Southern
States, during the utmost excitement of war,
had slept as secure with their slaves about them

as if they had been guarded by their husbands
and fathers; but under the new teaching the
torch became a weapon. A distinguished leader
of the colored race, a native white man in
South Carolina, said, in a public speech to his
constituents, that the barns had been built by
them, and their contents belonged to them; and
if they were refused the distribution of those
contents, "matches were only five cents a box."
Is it to be wondered at that, with such suggestion,
the burning of houses became more or
less frequent in the belts subject to the domination
of the excited race? This man, who had
many crimes to answer for, after passing through
numberless dangers, became the victim of a foul
assassination. A story is told that some years
later two men were sitting together in a well-known
restaurant in Washington. One of
them, who was from a Northern State, said to
the other who was from South Carolina, "Tell
me, now that it is so long past, who murdered
So-and-So," mentioning the name of the leader
who has been spoken of. "Well," said the
other quietly, "I was tried for it."

Amiable and orderly as the colored race were
when the whites were in control, as soon as an
election approached they showed every sign of
excitement. When they were in power, life

became intolerable, and a clash was imminent
at every meeting; many families, unable to endure
the strain, abandoned their homes, and
moved to other communities or other States.
The distinguished pastor of a large church in
the North, one of the godliest of men, who had
a church during this period in one of the Southern
States, has said that when he went to his
night services he as regularly put a pistol in his
pocket as he took his Bible. Even funerals
were liable to be interrupted by the half-maddened
creatures, and instances occurred when
the hearse had to be driven at full speed to
outstrip a mob bent on the last extremity of
insult.

It was notable that even during the periods
of greatest excitement, when the Negroes were
stirred almost to frenzy, the old family servants
ever stood ready to prevent personal harm to
their former masters and mistresses; and that
when the excitement had passed, the entire race
were ready to resume, and even to seek, friendly
relations with the whites.

When, at last, with their homes rendered unsafe
and their life intolerable, the people of the
South finally threw off the yoke under which
they had been bowed, it is hardly strange that
they should thenceforth have remained solidified

to withstand the possibility of such a condition
ever being repeated.

It is not probable that any wholly sane man
of any section or race, who knows the facts,
would ever wish its repetition. The last governor
of South Carolina under the carpet-bag régime
stated during his incumbency, that when, in
May, 1875, he entered on his duties as governor,
two hundred trial-justices were holding office by
executive appointment (of his predecessor) who
could neither read nor write. No wonder that
he should have declared, as he did, in writing
to the New England Society, that the civilization
of the Puritan and Cavalier, of the Roundhead
and Huguenot, was in peril.

In the last stages of their existence, these governments
were sustained solely by the bayonet.
As soon as the United States troops were removed
they melted away. As an illustration:
In South Carolina, in 1876, after the extraordinary
Wade Hampton campaign, in which the
whites had won a signal victory, two distinct
State Governments performed their functions
in the State House; a small guard of United
States soldiers marched their beats back and
forth, representing the power that alone sustained
one of those governments. An order
was issued by the President of the United States

removing the troops, and in twenty-four hours,
without a drop of blood shed, without a single
clash, the government of the carpet-bagger and
the Negro had disappeared, and the government
of the native South Carolinian and of the white
man had quietly, after a lapse of years, resumed
control. But during those years the people of
the South had seen their most cherished traditions
traversed, their civilization overthrown.

The late Senator Hoar, of Massachusetts,
passed, years ago, a judgment upon the Southern
People which was not lacking in vigorous
criticism; but his criticism was tempered by a
piece of characterization which it seems not
impertinent to quote here.

"They have," he said, "an aptness for command,
which makes the Southern gentleman,
wherever he goes, not a peer only, but a prince.
They have a love for home; they have, the best
of them, and the most of them, inherited from
the great race from which they come the sense
of duty and the instinct of honor as no other
people on the face of the earth. They are
lovers of home. They have not the mean traits
which grow up somewhere in places where
money-making is the chief end of life. They
have, above all, and giving value to all, that supreme
and superb constancy which, without regard

to personal ambition and without yielding
to the temptation of wealth, without getting
tired and without getting diverted, can pursue
a great public object, in and out, year after
year, and generation after generation."

Looking at the other race in the South—
who must be reckoned, if they will allow themselves
to be so, as a part of the Southern People
—whilst there is much to cause regret and even
disappointment to those who are their truest
friends, yet there is no little from which to draw
hope. No other people ever had more disadvantages
to contend with on their issue into
freedom. They were seduced, deceived, misled.
Their habits of industry were destroyed,
and they were fooled into believing that they
could be legislated into immediate equality
with a race that, without mentioning superiority
of ability and education, had a thousand years'
start of them. They were made to believe that
their only salvation lay in aligning themselves
against the other race, and following blindly
the adventurers who came to lead them to a new
Promised Land. It is no wonder that they committed
great blunders and great excesses. For
nearly a generation they have been pushed along
the wrong road. But now, in place of political
leaders who were simply firebrands, is arising

a new class of leaders, who, with a wider horizon,
a deeper sagacity, and a truer patriotism, are
endeavoring to establish a foundation of morality,
industry, and knowledge, and upon these to
build a race that shall be capable of availing
itself of every opportunity that the future may
present, and worthy of whatever fortune it may
bring.

Many of the baleful fruits of reconstruction
remain among us. Inability to divide freely on
great public questions is a public misfortune.

Obedience to Law is one of the highest qualities
of a people, and one of the first elements
of national greatness. However strong the necessity
may appear, Law cannot be overridden
without creating a spirit that will override Law
—a spirit which is liable to end by substituting
for Law its will, and by confounding with right
its interest.

Among the baleful fruits is whatever fraud
or evasion has appeared in the electoral system
in any part of the South. In old times this
evil was not known among the people of the
South. Fighting the devil with fire may be the
only effective mode of such warfare; but fire
is a dangerous weapon to use under any circumstances.

Much has been said recently on the subject

of lynching in the South. It is not too much
to say that nearly every black victim of lynching
and nearly every victim of that person may be
set down to the not yet closed account of Reconstruction.
This, too, was a crime which in
old times was scarcely known in the South.

Among the better signs is the increasing feeling
that it is best, on the whole, to leave every
section to work out its own problems. Many
years ago Mr. Seward said of the Negro race
"They will find their place; they must take
their level. The laws of political economy will
determine their position and the relation of
the two races. Congress cannot contravene
those."

Congress attempted to contravene them; but
though for a brief period it appeared to have
succeeded, the lapse of time has shown its failure.
It might as well have attempted to contravene
the law of gravitation.

That intelligence, virtue, and force of character
will eventually rule is as certain in the
States of the South as it is elsewhere; and everywhere
it is as certain as the operation of the law
of gravitation. Whatever people wish to rule
in those States must possess these qualities.
Whatever people wish to rule there must
profit by the rigorous lessons of the Reconstruction

Period, when the South proved that
she could survive even that.

All this is now matter of history. The fierce
passions of that time have almost, or quite,
burned out. Even the memory of the enforced
humiliation through which the people of the
South passed is blunted by the passage of time,
by the ever-increasing friendliness between the
sections, which grows steadily under the influences
of a greater community of interest, a
better understanding of each other, and a wider
patriotism. The old life of the South, of the
kind which made it distinguished, has more or
less passed away; a new life, and possibly one
that embraces a larger section of the people in
its advantages, is taking its place. A more
practical spirit is growing up, prepared to utilize
present conditions, and avail itself of all the
material advantages that may be offered. The
waste and the anguish of that time have long
since been passed to the account of profit and
loss, which only the historian or the student ventures
to open. Many of the old houses which
were the chief charm of the South went down
under the ploughshare of Reconstruction. The
people who made them and gave them their
sweetness have passed or are passing away.

One riding through the stretches of country

where the fields have reverted to forest, or are
worked by the small-cropper, can form little
idea of the time when they were a part of a wide
and well-tilled domain which supported the
whole population of a teeming plantation. He
might imagine as well that the quiet, grizzled
farmer whom he sees in the field or meets on
the road, in friendly intercourse with some
dusky neighbor, once fought in battles that
marked the high tide of Anglo-Saxon courage,
or rode with a band of night-riders, resolute to
withstand for his race those who threatened it,
even though they were backed by the dread
power of the United States.

The present generation is, as is, of course,
every generation, the product of heredity and
environment. Its members are said to exhibit
qualities which were once wanting, or which, if
they existed, were despised; but, in reckoning
their virtues, a deeper student is likely to conclude
that the best that is in them is the inheritance
from their fathers: devotion to duty, the
sense of honor, and a passion for free government.