Chapter 1:
Reconstruction

MR. LINCOLN’S death made Mr. Johnson President. The first tasks of peace were to be hardly less difficult than the tasks of war had been; and the party which had triumphed was left without executive leadership at their very beginning. Mr. Johnson was a man who, like Mr. Lincoln himself, had risen from very humble origins to posts of trust and distinction; but his coarse fibre had taken no polish, no refinement in the process. He stopped neither to understand nor to persuade other men, but struck forward with crude, uncompromising force for his object, attempting mastery without wisdom or moderation. Wisdom of no common order was called for in the tasks immediately before him. What effect had the war wrought upon the federal system? What was now the status of the States which had attempted secession and been brought to terms only by two million armed men sent into the field and the pouring out of blood and treasure beyond all reckoning? Were they again States of the Union, or had they forfeited their statehood and become conquered provinces merely, to be dealt with at the will of Congress? If conquered possessions, how and when were they to be made States once more and the old federal circle restored in its integrity? Mr. Lincoln had made up his mind upon these points with characteristic directness and simplicity. So long ago as December, 1863, he had issued a proclamation of amnesty in which he had treated secession as a rebellion of individuals, not of States, and had offered full forgetfulness and the restoration of property and of citizenship to all who should take oath to "support, protect, and defend the constitution of the United States and the union of the States there under," and respect the action of the federal government in the emancipation of the slaves. Some classes of persons he excepted from the amnesty: those who had taken a prominent and official part in secession or who had left the service of the United States for the service of the Confederacy; but he invited those who would take the oath proposed to set up governments once more and make ready to take part as of old in the federal system, though they should number but one tenth of the voters of 1860. The qualified voters of Arkansas, Louisiana, and Tennessee had accepted these terms before the war ended. Mr. Lincoln had fulfilled his promise to them and given full recognition to the new governments they set up, so far as the Executive was concerned, as once more in their places in the Union. He did not stop to discuss the question of the lawyers, whether these States had been all the while in the Union, despite their attempts at secession and their acts of war against the federal government, or had for a time been out of it; and declared that he thought that merely an abstract inquiry, a question practically immaterial. "We all agree that the seceded States, so called, are out of their proper practical relation with the Union," he said, "and that the sole object of the government, civil and military, in regard to those States is to again get them into that proper practical relation. I believe that it is not only possible, but in fact easier, to do this without deciding or even considering whether these States have been out of the Union, than with it. Finding themselves safely at home, it would be utterly immaterial whether they had ever been abroad."

But Congress had not acquiesced in Mr. Lincoln’s policy. Mr. Lincoln had been too much inclined, it seemed to the leaders of the houses, to regard the restoration of the southern States to their "proper practical relation to the Union" as a matter to be settled by the action of the Executive. The constitution mide each house the sole judge of the validity of elections to its membership: Congress was at liberty, should it choose, to exclude all southern members until it should itself be satisfied with the process by which the States they claimed to represent had been re-established upon their old footing; and the temper of the congressional leaders had grown more and more radical as the fortunes of war had turned their doubt into hope, their hope into triumphant confidence. At first they had been puzzled how to read the law of the constitution in so unprecedented a matter; but each victory in arms had seemed to them to make it less necessary that they should read it with subtlety. Success seemed to clear the way for other considerations, of plainer dictate than the law of the constitution. Turn the matter this way or that, it seemed mere weakness to accord the southern States their old place in the Union without exacting of them something more than mere submission. Should their social system be left untouched, their old life and power given back to them to be used as before for the perpetuation of political beliefs and domestic institutions which had in fact lain at the heart of the war? Opinion slowly gathered head to prevent any such course. Something should be demanded of them which should make them like the rest of the Union, not in allegiance merely, but in principle and practice as well.

Mr. Lincoln had himself made it a condition precedent to his recognition of the re-established liberties and allegiance of those southerners whom he was ready to permit to bring their States into proper practical relation with the Union again that the laws of the rehabilitated governments should "recognize and declare the permanent freedom" of the negroes and provide for their education; no one, North or South, dreamed that slavery was to be set up again. But every man mistook his feeling for principle in that day of heat, and Mr. Lincoln’s cool, judicial tone and purpose in affairs was deeply disquieting to all who loved drastic action. The solemn, sweet-tempered sentences with which his second inaugural address had closed seemed themselves of bad omen to high-strung men. "With malice towards none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; . . . to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves, and with all nations." In the proclamation in which he had called upon all who were willing to return to their allegiance in the South to reconstruct their governments he had promised that, as President, he would object to no temporary legislation which should deal in exceptional fashion with the negroes "as a laboring, landless, homeless class" for a little while under tutelage, provided only their substantial freedom should be recognized and their ultimate elevation by education provided for. There was in all this entirely too much consideration for the southern people to suit the views of ordinary partisans. An opposition gathered head against Mr. Lincoln which it seemed likely even his tact, his genius for leadership and conciliation, his authority in that day of his final prestige could not overcome.

Men of many minds and of all morals were arrayed against him: the philanthropist and the reformer, who saw the Rights of Man involved, the statesman who wished to see the ground once for all cleared of every matter of risk and controversy, the politician who was keen to gain the utmost advantage for his party, the vindictive bigot who wished to wreak exemplary vengeance on the slaveholding rebels. To many of these nothing was so exasperating as moderation,—moderation in a day of absolute triumph, when every fruit of conquest they chose to stretch out their hands and pluck was within their easy reach. It was not an air in which to judge calmly. Four years of doubt and fear and struggle had wrought every sentiment, good or bad, to the pitch of ecstasy. A radical course of reconstruction in the South had come to look like the mere path of duty,—of duty not to opinion only but to mankind as well. Men of imagination felt every moment of action dramatic, full of consequence, and grew self-conscious, each as it were with a touch of the emotional actor, in what they did. The extraordinary strain and tension of feeling in the houses of Congress was perceptible to mere lookers on in the galleries. It had been notably manifest when the House of Representatives agreed, on the last day of January, 1865, to an amendment of the constitution formally abolishing slavery in the very terms of the Wilmot proviso, and the celebrated Ordinance of 1787 upon which so much bitter history had turned. The Senate had proposed the amendment, the Thirteenth it was to be,—the first change in the constitution proposed since 1803,—ten months before, on the 8th of April, 1864; but the necessary two-thirds vote had been lacking then in the House and it had been laid aside. When it came a second time to the vote a deathly stillness prevailed in the House while the roll call proceeded, until it became evident that the requisite majority was secured. Then members of the House itself broke through all restraint and joined in the great shout of joy that went up from the packed galleries, and embraced one another, with tears streaming down their cheeks, to see that prayed for end come at last. Men dreamed, as they had dreamed in the Constituent Assembly of France, that they had that day seen a new nation born, a new era ushered in.

Congress had already abolished slavery in the District of Columbia, prohibited slavery in the Territories, repealed the Fugitive Slave Law, and bestowed freedom upon the negroes who had served in the federal armies. The amendment was to complete the work of emancipation, and make the results of the war once for all safe against reaction. The votes of the southern States were necessary to make up the three-fourths vote of the States required to ratify the amendment. Those which accepted Mr. Lincoln’s terms of rehabilitation ratified it without hesitation: no one doubted that a condition precedent to the final closing of the long strife that had rent the Union; and on the 18th of December, 1865, it was proclaimed an integral part of the law of the constitution. But there were men in Congress, true spokesmen of thousands of men out-of-doors, thoughtful and thoughtless, with consciences and without, who meant to go much further. By some means they meant to thrust their hands into southern affairs to control them, to make good the freedom and the privilege of the negroes even at the cost of all privilege to those who had been their masters. To some such a course seemed a mere dictate of humanity: the nation owed it to the negro that he should be supported by the federal power until he was able to make his freedom good for himself, unassisted. To others it seemed but the plain way of prudence in statesmanship. How else could a lasting structure of law be built about the new citizenship of the one-time slave: how else could he be kept safe from the intellectual and even physical domination of the white men who once had owned him? To others it was the course of personal satisfaction: in no other way could they bring upon the spirits of southern men the punishment merited by their rebellion. To others it was the obvious means of party mastery. These last it was who, when Mr. Lincoln was gone, ruled Congress, the masters of party strategy—as clear of their motive as Samuel Adams, as astute to veil it upon occasion: masters always by consistent and aggressive force of purpose.

The party they spoke for was not one of the historic parties of the Union. It was the child of the slavery contest. It had come into existence, an odd mixture of Whigs, Democrats, Free Soilers, Anti-Nebraska men, to prevent the spread of slavery into the Territories, and had come into power with a programme which spoke, indeed, of other matters, with a tone which was chiefly the tone of the older Whigs, but which carried as its chief, its creative principle that single matter of the restriction of the slave power. It was without record or tradition of ordinary service in times of normal life and growth. Its single task had been war for the preservation of the Union. It could not of a sudden get the temper of that task out of its thoughts; conciliation it had never learned; compromise and accommodation seemed to it bad things of a past age when men were not bold for the right. Mr. Thaddeus Stevens, of Pennsylvania, was the real leader of the House. He had come slowly to his final view of what should be done, acted upon by the times and the confused voices of counsel about him, as every man was in that shifting air, but he had reached conclusions at last which he spoke with callous frankness. In his judgment, he said, the southern States "ought never to be recognized as capable of acting in the Union, or of being recognized as valid states, until the Constitution should have been so amended as to make it what its makers intended, and so as to secure perpetual ascendency to the party of the Union." The perpetual ascendency of his party was, in his programme, to be the guarantee of the safe reconstruction of the southern governments.

The events of the memorable summer of 1865 had hardened his temper to that view. At first Mr. Johnson had seemed to the radical leaders of Congress a man to their own mind. His origin, his character, his place of leadership among the southern men who had doggedly set themselves against secession, had made him a fit instrument of radical action. He came of plebeian stock; had risen, not by address, but by blunt force of character, from among the humbler whites who owned no slaves, boasted no privilege, had no initiative voice in affairs; and had flung himself on the side of the Union as much out of antagonism to the men who played the parts of leadership in secession as out of principle. It was "a rich man’s war," he said, "but a poor man’s fight"; and he, for one, would not fight for the behoof of the rich planters who assumed the mastery in such a struggle. A "Democrat" he was still, by cast and nature committed to the elder doctrines of the Jeffersonian creed, which exalted the common man and knew no rank or privilege of class; but a Democrat for the Union. He had been put upon the presidential ticket with Mr. Lincoln because upon every question that touched the war the Republican leaders had wished to keep men of all opinions upon other matters of policy united behind Mr. Lincoln. His short and heavy figure, his rugged, swarthy face, bespoke him a man as strong, as indomitable as Stephen Douglas, for all he lacked Douglas’s charm and had no gift of persuasion.

Mr. Lincoln had trusted him, and he had justified the confidence reposed in him, not indeed by wisdom, but by resolute, consistent, efficient action. When the war came he was one of the senators from Tennessee, and kept his post, ignoring the secession of his State. When his term as senator was ended Tennessee was in the hands of the federal troops, and Mr. Lincoln commissioned him military governor of the State, to bring it again into "proper practical relation to the Union" in accordance with the Executive’s plan of reconstruction. Like every man, untouched with greatness, who has stood out against his own people in matters that have been carried the length of civil war, there was a dash of bitterness in Mr. Johnson’s attitude and action in affairs. The first words he uttered as President showed with what spirit he meant to use his new power. "The American people," he said, "must be taught to know and understand that treason is a crime.

It must not be regarded as a mere difference of political opinion. It must not be excused as an unsuccessful rebellion, to be overlooked and forgiven." The Committee on the Conduct of the War, to which Congress had throughout the stress of the fighting intrusted the shaping of its business, called upon him the day following his assumption of the presidency, and took heart to believe after their interview with him that they might count upon such executive action as radicals would relish,—that they were once for all rid of the mild counsels of Mr. Lincoln. "Johnson, we have faith in you," cried Mr. Benjamin Wade, the radical leader of the Senate. "By the gods! there will be no trouble now in running the government."

But a few weeks changed the whole aspect of affairs. Mr. Johnson retained Mr. Lincoln’s cabinet unchanged. More than that, he kept to the plans Mr. Lincoln had made. Perhaps his judgment was cleared by sudden access of responsibility; no doubt his knowledge of the southern people enabled him to see, more clearly even than Mr. Lincoln had seen, the healing and beneficent effects of a plan of reconstruction which should make as little of the antagonism and as much of the community of interest between the sections as possible: for he acted upon experience, Mr. Lincoln only upon the instinct of a natural leader of men. No doubt men whom he trusted gave him moderate counsel and instructed his will. Whatever the forces that ruled him, he proved at once that he meant to take no radical course of his own, but would follow in Mr. Lincoln’s footsteps. On the 29th of May he issued his own proclamation of amnesty. Its terms were substantially the terms of Mr. Lincoln’s proclamation of 1863. The list of those excluded for the time being was a little extended. Besides persons still prisoners of war, those who had "held the pretended offices of governors of States in insurrection against the United States," graduates of the military and naval academies who had been officers in the confederate service, those who had engaged in the destruction of the commerce of the United States in aid of the Confederacy,—whom Mr. Lincoln had not specifically included in his catalogue of exclusions,—he added, as if to please himself and satisfy his instinct of class, all participants in secession whose taxable property exceeded twenty thousand dollars in value. But even to those thus specifically excepted he promised to extend clemency upon very liberal terms, if they would make personal application for it, dealing with them in as generous a manner as might seem "consistent with the facts of the case and the peace and dignity of the United States."

It was his plan, as it had been Mr. Lincoln’s, to set up new governments in the South by as simple and expeditious a process as possible. He knew as well as any man the practical details of what Mr. Lincoln had meant to do, for he had himself been Mr. Lincoln’s agent in putting his plan of reconstruction into execution in Tennessee. Each State was to have a provisional governor, appointed by the President, who should be authorized to summon a constitutional convention, to be chosen under its old laws of suffrage by such of the voters of the State as would take the unqualified oath of submission and allegiance prescribed by the proclamation of amnesty. It had been Mr. Lincoln’s wish to include among the voters such freed-men as could read and write and those who had served in the federal armies; Mr. Johnson confined his view to the white men qualified under the laws of their States as they had stood in the spring of 1861. Conventions made up of and selected by those who were willing and were permitted to take the oath offered were to be given full power to recast their state constitutions and set their state governments in order for the final withdrawal of the federal troops and the federal superintendence, provided only that the voters actually enrolled should number at least one tenth of the total number shown upon the rolls of 1861. The persons explicitly excluded from taking the oath and participating in the reconstitution of the southern governments,—those who had been the leading spirits and chief agents of the Confederacy, whether in counsel or in action,—were, of course, the leading men of the South. Almost no one could take the oath of amnesty except men of the rank and file, the men who had not been slaveholders, who had fought in the armies of the Confederacy but who had had no part except the part of mere acquiescence in bringing the war on,—the men of little property and no leading part in affairs from whose ranks Mr. Johnson himself had sprung. His added exclusion of all participants in secession who owned property valued at more than twenty thousand dollars made it the more certain that it should be a reconstruction by the third estate, and not by the old leaders of opinion. He had the greater heart and interest on that account to see the plan succeed.

He had come into office at the beginning of the long congressional recess. The term of the Congress chosen in 1862 had expired on the 4th of March; the Congress chosen in the autumn of 1864 was not to come together until December. He had eight months before him in which to act without congressional interference. He was urged to call the houses together in extraordinary session and take counsel with them what should be done; but he refused to do so. He wished to act without restraint. He had no more doubt than Mr. Lincoln had had that the process of reconstruction, so far as it concerned the reorganization of the southern governments, was the function and the duty of the Executive, whose power of pardon covered every offence committed against the Union upon which Congress had not passed sentence of impeachment. It rested with Congress, he knew, to determine for itself whether it would receive the senators and representatives chosen under the governments which the President should authorize the southern conventions to set up; but the erection and recognition of those governments he conceived to be his own unquestionable constitutional prerogative. He filled the year, therefore, to the utmost with action and the rehabilitation of States. By the autumn every State of the one-time Confederacy had acted under his proclamation, had set up a new government, had formally agreed to the emancipation of the negroes, and had chosen senators and representatives ready to take their seats the moment Congress should admit them. Eleven of them had in due form adopted the Thirteenth Amendment, and their votes had been counted in its ratification.

But other things had happened which had touched Congress quite as nearly as these processes of reconstruction, and the houses came together in December in no temper either to accept Mr. Johnson’s leadership or to admit the southern members who had come to Washington under his patronage. Critical matters touching the negroes had put opinion in the North in a mood to insist on radical measures of legislation in behalf of the helpless multitudes whom the war had set free. Had there been no question what should be done with the negroes, all might have gone smoothly enough, whether the leaders of Congress and of opinion liked the re-admission of the southerners to their place and privilege in the general government or not. But there was much more to be done, as it seemed to the radicals who now stood at the front of counsel, than merely to determine the processes by which the governments of the southern States were to be formally reconstituted and made safe within the Union: and it was no doubt necessary to do what was to be done before admitting southern men to Congress, where their presence would reduce the Republican majorities from absolute mastery to mere preponderence. They were but "whitewashed rebels," at best, and in nothing showed their unchanged temper more clearly than in their treatment of the freedmen. That, in the view of the radicals, was the crux of the whole matter; and they had the pity and the humane feeling of the whole country on their side.

They did not deem the southerners safe friends of the freed slaves. They had not noted how quiet, how unexcited, how faithful and steady at their accustomed tasks, how devoted in the service of their masters the great mass of the negro people had remained amidst the very storm and upheaval of war; they had noted only how thousands had crowded into their camps as the armies advanced and plantations were laid waste, homes emptied of their inmates; and how every federal commander had had to lead in his train as he moved a dusky host of pitiful refugees. It was a mere act of imperative mercy to care in some sort for the helpless creatures, to give them food, if nothing else, out of the army’s stores; and yet to feed them was but to increase their numbers, as the news of bread without work spread through the country-sides. When the fighting neared its end, and it was likely that the whole South would be in the hands of the federal commanders through a long season of unsettled affairs, it became obviously necessary that, for a time at least, Congress should take the negroes under the direct supervision and care of the government. On the 3d of March, 1865, therefore, while Mr. Lincoln still lived, an Act had been passed which created in the War Department a "Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands," whose powers were most elastic and paternal. It was in every way to succor the negroes: to supply their physical needs when necessary, to act as their representative and guardian in finding employment and making labor contracts, to settle labor disputes and act as the next friend of negro litigants in all trials and suits at law, to lease to them tracts of abandoned land temporarily in the hands of the government because of the removal or disappearance or technical outlawry of their white owners,—in all things to supply them with privilege and protection.

It was such aid and providential succor the negroes had ignorantly looked for as the news and vision of emancipation spread amongst them with the progress of the war. They had dreamed that the blue-coated armies which stormed slowly southward were bringing them, not freedom only, but largess of fortune as well; and now their dream seemed fulfilled. The government would find land for them, would feed them and give them clothes. It would find work for them, but it did not seem to matter whether work was found or not: they would be taken care of. They had the easy faith, the simplicity, the idle hopes, the inexperience of children. Their masterless, homeless freedom made them the more pitiable, the more dependent, because under slavery they had been shielded, the weak and incompetent with the strong and capable; had never learned independence or the rough buffets of freedom.

The southern legislatures which Mr. Johnson authorized set up saw the need for action no less than Congress did. It was a menace to society itself that the negroes should thus of a sudden be set free and left without tutelage or restraint. Some stayed very quietly by their old masters and gave no trouble; but most yielded, as was to have been expected, to the novel impulse and excitement of freedom and made their way straight to the camps and cities, where the blue-coated soldiers were, and the agents of the Freedmen’s Bureau. The country filled with vagrants, looking for pleasure and gratuitous fortune. Idleness bred want, as always, and the vagrants turned thieves or importunate beggars. The tasks of ordinary labor stood untouched; the idlers grew insolent, dangerous; nights went anxiously by, for fear of riot and incendiary fire. It was imperatively necessary that something should be done, if only to bring order again and make the streets of the towns and the highways of the country-sides safe to those who went about their tasks. The southern legislatures, therefore, promptly undertook remedies of their own-such remedies as English legislators had been familiar with time out of mind.

The vagrants, it was enacted, should be bound out to compulsory labor; and all who would not work must be treated as vagrants. Written contracts of labor were required, and current rates of wages were prescribed. Those who did not enter into formal contracts for regular employment were obliged to obtain licenses for their trades and occupations from the magistrates or the police authorities of their places of labor, under the penalty of falling under the law of vagrancy. Minor negroes were to be put under masters by articles of apprenticeship. Negroes were forbidden, upon pain of arrest by a vigilant patrol, to be abroad after the ringing of the curfew at nine o’clock, without written permission from their employers. Fines were ordered for a numerous list of the more annoying minor offences likely to be committed by the freedmen, and it was directed that those who could not pay the fines should be hired out to labor by judicial process. There was no concert or uniformity between State and State in the measures adopted: some were more harsh and radical than others. Each State acted according to the apparent exigencies and circumstances of its own people. Where the negroes mustered in largest numbers, as in South Carolina, where they outnumbered the whites, restriction was, of course, pushed farthest and the most thorough-going legal tutelage for the freedmen attempted. Where their numbers were more manageable, where conditions were more favorable, their freedom of movement and of occupation was less interfered with.

There was nothing unprecedented in such legislation, even where it went farthest. The greater part of it was paralleled by statutes of labor and vagrancy still to be found on the statute books of several of the northern States. But it was impossible it should stand in the same light. The labor and vagrancy laws of Maine, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, which they most resembled, were uttered against a few tramps and beggars, here and there a runaway servant or apprentice, an occasional breach of duties regularly contracted for; while these new laws of the South were uttered against an entire race, but just now emancipated. Whatever their justification, it was inevitable that they should shock the sentiment of the North and make new and bitter enemies for the South in Congress. It was no ordinary time of action, when matters could be judged coolly and on their merits. For the leaders of Congress it was unpalatable enough that the southern States should have legislatures at all, upon a plan made and executed without conference with them; that those legislatures should thus undo the work of emancipation seemed a thing intolerable. And the new legislation seemed to them nothing less than that. It seemed to them merely an effort to substitute compulsory contracts of service and fixed rates of wages for the older rights of control and duties of support which custom had vouchsafed and assigned masters of slaves—a sort of involuntary servitude by judicial process and under the forms of contract. They did not stop to consider the pressing necessity or the extraordinary circumstances which justified such legislation. There were many theories held among them as to the legal powers and remaining rights of the southern States, but their purpose of mastery in the readjustment of southern affairs was not materially affected by their differing theories. They in effect regarded the southern States as conquered provinces, and looked upon emancipation as the main fruit of conquest. To make that emancipation good was only to secure the conquest itself. The negro had got a veritable apotheosis in the minds of northern men by the processes of the war. Those who had sent their sons to the field of battle to die in order that he might be free could but regard him as the innocent victim of circumstances, a creature who needed only liberty to make him a man; could but regard any further attempt on the part of his one-time masters to restrain him as mere vindictive defiance. They did not look into the facts: they let their sentiment and their sense of power dictate their thought and purpose.

Neither was it any part of the case, so far as they and their leaders in Congress were concerned, that the restricive legislation which they so bitterly resented had been practically without effect, because virtually set aside by the action of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Everywhere throughout the South agents of the Bureau practically made the law which should in fact govern the negro and determine his relation to his employer. It was a Bureau of the War Department; its head was a general of the army; and its agents were for the most part army officers. In many instances they were men of fine purpose and unimpeachable integrity, manly and anxious to do what was right and just to all concerned; but in many other instances they were men of petty temper, fond of using arbitrary power very masterfully, and glad upon occasion to use it for the utter humiliation of the southern white men with whom they dealt. Sometimes they were actually corrupt, and apt at every practice which promised them either added authority or private gain. Their powers, under the Act of Congress, were in effect unlimited. They interfered with the processes of the courts; constituted themselves judges of every matter, whether of law or policy, that affected the negroes; made contracts for them and released them from their obligations at will prescribed the services they should render and the wages they should receive; ignored and set at naught every provision of state law which touched the action or the privileges of the freedmen; and, for good or ill, to fulfil their duty or to please themselves, were masters of the situation.

But that was what the congressional leaders had planned and expected. It did not lessen their irritation that the southern legislators had been in large part unsuccessful in what they had attempted to do. When at last the long recess was over, therefore, and the houses once more assembled (December 4, 1865), it at once became evident that they had come together in a mood to insist upon their own way of settling southern affairs. The names of all the States that had seceded were omitted in the roll call. As soon as possible after the organization of the House, a joint committee of fifteen, consisting of nine representatives and six senators, was set up to take charge of the business of the houses in the matter of reconstruction. It was commissioned to make thorough inquiry into the condition of affairs at the South and to advise Congress what action it should take with regard to the readmission of the southern States to representation. There was no need that it should be in haste to report. The houses had already in effect adopted the view of Mr. Thaddeus Stevens: that the secession of the southern States had suspended all federal law, whether of the constitution or of statute, so far as they were concerned; that only the law-making and war-making branch of the federal government, the Congress itself, could authoritatively declare that law in force again; and that it might and should refuse to do so until itself satisfied of the absolute submission and unqualified obedience of the rebellious communities. There was every reason, if the President meant to stand in its way, why Congress should keep for the present its omnipotent party majorities. Each house, as it stood, had a Republican majority large enough, and compact enough, if it came to a struggle with the President, to override any veto he might venture to interpose to check its action. Should the southern States be readmitted to representation as they stood, under the President’s reconstruction, they would quite certainly send Democratic members to swell the ranks of the party which had, in its convention of 1864, declared the war a failure, and would rob the war party of its predominance. For they must be accorded an increased representation. The slaves, now that they were free, must all be counted in apportioning representation; and yet the whites only would vote. It was that view of the future of party politics that had led Mr. Sumner to declare, even before the actual struggle of the war was over, that "the cause of human rights and of the Union needed the ballots as well as the muskets of the colored men"; and the leaders of the houses had no mind to yield their complete power until they had won their final ascendency.

In February, 1866, their Committee on Reconstruction safely in the saddle, they found themselves in direct conflict with the President, and the fight for which they had made ready begun. The Act of March, 1865, which had established the Freedmen’s Bureau, had limited its operation to one year. On the 6th of February, 1866, a bill passed the houses continuing it indefinitely, and at the same time largely increasing its powers. It made any attempt to obstruct, interfere with, or abridge the civil rights and immunities of the freedmen a penal offence, to be adjudged and punished by federal military tribunals. The President vetoed it. He declared that he withheld his assent both because the measure was calculated to increase the restlessness and uneasiness of the negroes and delay their settlement to a normal way of life, and because it had been passed by a Congress in which the southern States were not represented; and so joined issue directly with the men who had set the houses in a way of mastery. An attempt to pass the bill over his veto failed. The full party vote was not yet at the command of the radicals; some still held off from an open and final breach with the President.

But not for long. The President was in a mood as bitter and defiant as that of the extremest radical of the congressional majority. By sheer rashness and intemperance he forced the consolidation of the majority against him. In a public speech uttered on the 22d of February, an anniversary of hope and good omen, he spoke of the majority in unmeasured terms of denunciation, and of its leaders by name, as men who themselves entertained some covert purpose of disloyalty to the government, planning to make it a government, not federal, but consolidated and unlimited in power,—it might be even encouraging some criminal deed against himself such as had once already removed an obstacle from the path of their ambition. Accommodation between himself and the houses was once for all impossible. It was as if he had openly declared war upon them; and their temper hardened to crush him. Though the effort to pass the bill for the continuation of the Freedmen’s Bureau had failed in the Senate, the houses had in their very hour of failure sent to the President and published to the country a concurrent resolution in which they announced that no senator or representative would be admitted from any State held to have been in insurrection until Congress had upon its own terms and initiative declared it entitled to representation. Having heard his bitter speech of the 22d, they moved forward to execute the programme of their Committee on Reconstruction with a new spirit of mastery.

In March they sent to the President a "Civil Rights" bill which declared "all persons born in the United States, and not subject to any foreign power," citizens of the United States; denounced severe penalties against interference with the civil rights of any class of citizens; and gave to officers of the United States the right to prosecute, to the courts of the United States the exclusive right to try, all such offences,—meaning thus to put the negroes upon a footing of civil equality with the whites in the South. The President vetoed the bill, as both unwise and in plain excess of the constitutional powers of Congress. In April, the houses passed it over his veto. The same month their Committee, as if less confident of their constitutional ground than of their parliamentary supremacy, submitted the draft of a Fourteenth Amendment to the constitution which should embody the principles of the Act in a form which would give them unalterable validity. It conferred citizenship in the terms of the bill the President had rejected. In June Congress adopted the Amendment, and it went to the States, with the understanding that no southern State which did not accept it should be readmitted to representation. Tennessee promptly adopted it, and in July was formally reinstated in her "former proper practical relation to the Union" by the admission of her senators and representatives to Congress. Her case stood apart from the rest. Ever since Mr. Lincoln’s proclamation of 1863 was put into effect she had been in process of reorganization. She had gone doubting and divided into the Confederacy, more than half her people, it might be, still staunchly minded to stand by the Union. Her "Union men" had controlled the process of reconstruction; and were heeded without serious difficulty when they knocked for admission into the houses. The other States, being as yet in other hands, were obliged to wait.

The troubled year went uneasily upon every hand. As the spring came on, and all the country saw how it had come to an open breach between the President and Congress, movements began on the Canadian frontier which discovered a new disturbing element in international politics. While the war lasted New York had become the seat of the offices of a great society of Irishmen whose purpose was revolution over sea and that liberation of Ireland which Irishmen had ever prayed for. Across the sea, in Ireland, it was an association of peasants, not of politicians: it held a rank and file, not of agitators, but of plain, unsophisticated, earnest men on its rolls, men who might be taken to stand for the mass of Irish Catholics. In America it grew strong and drank of the spirit of war from the thousands of Irish-American soldiers who served as enthusiastically in the execution of its plans as in the battles for the preservation of the Union. Servant girls, cab drivers, porters, laborers on the railways filled its treasury out of their scant earnings. "Fenian," the name it bore, was said to have been the name of the ancient Celtic militia of the emerald isle from which no true Irishman ever really tore his heart entirely away. Every man who looked below the surface of affairs believed that some day the secret of this great organization would spring to light in some burst of revolution which would shake Ireland with the rising of a whole people; and the close of the war for the Union seemed the time it had sought for a release of its power. Its first sally was not in Ireland, but in America,—across the northern border, against the English empire in Canada. It proved a thing to smile at after it was over: a few hundred men attempting a set invasion; a fort here and there set upon by a handful of reckless adventurers; quick defeat, repulse, dispersion. It was no slight cause of irritation to Canada, none the less, and to the English government over sea that these foolhardy foes should come from the territory of a friendly power to attempt their purpose. The government at Washington seemed singularly indifferent; did little that was effective to check the criminal business; was apparently helpless against a handful of outlaws. A touch of tragedy was added to the perplexities of politics.

There was tragedy enough in the domestic situation; but it was a moral tragedy, not the tragedy of bloody raids upon a peaceful border. It was impossible to come to an understanding with Mr. Johnson. A more moderate, more approachable, more sagacious, less headstrong man might by conference have hit upon some plan by which his differences with the leaders In Congress would have been accommodated and at least a modus vivendi devised. But to differ with Mr. Johnson was to make an enemy of him, and Congress had suspected him an opponent rather than a friend from the first and was disinclined to seek accommodation. His intemperate fashion of speech exaggerated his views in the mere statement; he seemed a violent partisan when he wished merely to enforce a conviction and make a resolute purpose plain. Mr. Sumner came away from an interview with him convinced that he had spoken with a man who heartily despised the entire North, felt a genuine contempt for its sentiments, and meant to serve the South as entirely, as openly, as illegally as Mr. Jefferson Davis himself. What was quite as bad, the South itself got wind of his partisan temper in its behalf, nursed the false hope that it would be shielded by his power, and deepened all the mischief by acting on the hope.

It was no time at which to defy northern opinion and strengthen the hands of Congress by resistance. The autumn of the year was to bring another congressional election, and the leaders of the Republican majority in the houses would go to the country with a much better chance of winning than the President could possibly count upon in the equivocal position into which he had got himself. In July the houses passed, over the President’s veto, a bill which continued the Freed men’s Bureau for two years; provided for the sale of public lands to the negroes on easy terms; appropriated the property of the confederate government to their education; and placed their civil rights under direct military protection. On the 18th of June the Committee on Reconstruction had made formal report of its views upon the situation. It was the policy of Congress enforced by reasons-reasons which, it might be hoped, would fortify the minds of members of Congress and please the voters of the North in the coming contest. It declared that the governments of the States recently in secession were practically suspended, by reason both of the irregular character of the new governments which had been set up and of the reluctant acquiescence of the southern people in the results of the war; and that it was essential to the peace and sound policy of the Union that they should not be reinstated in their former privileges by Congress until they should have given substantial pledges, such pledges as Congress should demand, of their entire loyalty and submission. With that appeal the houses went to the country.

The friends of the President and of a moderate course in affairs, both Democrats and Republicans, came together in goodly numbers in convention, led by men whom the country knew and had reason to trust, and made a demonstration in favor of the policy which had been Mr. Lincoln’s and which should be that of every man who loved peace and sought accommodation and their action did not fail to make a considerable impression everywhere upon those who could put passion aside. But Mr. Johnson would not let quiet counsel alone. Incapable of prudence, scornful of soft words, a bitter hater, cast by nature for the rough contacts of personal conflict and debate, he spoke to the country himself. At mid-summer he made a journey to Chicago, and at almost every stopping place where the people crowded about his car he uttered, with that air of passion which always went with what he said, invectives against Congress so intemperate, so coarse, so hot with personal feeling that those who heard him looked upon him as almost a man distraught, thrown from his balance. He, not the leaders of Congress, seemed the radical, the apostle of passion; and his passion, men could say, was against the Union, not for it. He had set himself, his opponents declared, not to bring peace and restore the government to its integrity, but to perpetuate discord and cheat the party of the Union of its legitimate power.

Two days after Congress adjourned (July 30, 1866) a New Orleans mob broke up an irregular "constitutional convention" of negroes and their partisans with violence and bloodshed. In October the southern States, as if taking their cue from the President, not from Congress, began, one after the other, to reject the Fourteenth Amendment; and every impression that had been formed of reaction and recalcitrancy at the South was confirmed. The result of the elections was a foregone conclusion. A Republican majority was sent to the House as overwhelming as that which dominated the Congress about to expire; the Republican numbers in the Senate were maintained. The houses came together again in December heartened, resolute, triumphant, ready to override the President with a policy of Thorough which should put the fortunes of the South entirely at their disposal.

It was provided, by special Act, that the new Congress, just chosen, should convene, not in the following December, but on the 4th of March, 1867, in order that there might be no long vacation in which the President would be left free to exercise his independent authority. Before the 4th of March came a Reconstruction Act had passed through the slow fires of debate and become law (March 2d) which embodied in their unmarred integrity the radical plans of the joint committee of fifteen. It provided that the States of the Confederacy, with the exception of Tennessee, which had already been permitted to adopt the Fourteenth Amendment and resume its place in Congress, should be grouped for purposes of government in five military districts, under the command of five general officers of the army to be appointed by the President. These military governors were to control and direct the processes of reconstruction. A temporary clause of the proposed Fourteenth Amendment, which the southern States had rejected, excluded from office, whether under the States or under the federal government, at the pleasure of Congress, all who had at any time or in any capacity, civil or military, taken oath to support the constitution of the United States and afterwards "engaged in insurrection or rebellion" against it, "or given aid or comfort to its enemies." The military governors under the Act were instructed to enroll in each State, under oath, only such citizens of voting age and of one year’s residence within the State as they should deem qualified in accordance with the spirit of this prospective Amendment, the negroes, of course, included. They were to reject as voters all whom the proposed Amendment disqualified for office. They were then to order and hold in each State an election for delegates to a constitutional convention, in which none but the voters on their rolls should be allowed either to vote or to stand for election. They were to direct the conventions thus chosen to frame constitutions by which the elective suffrage should be extended without distinction to all classes of citizens included within the terms of the enrolment already made; and were to submit the constitutions thus framed to the same voters for ratification. When adopted by the voters, the constitutions which this plan of Thorough had brought into existence were to be sent to Congress, through the President, for final approval. Each State, it was agreed, whose constitution Congress should approve was to be readmitted to representation so soon as its legislature had ratified the Fourteenth Amendment. Meanwhile, its government was to be deemed "provisional only, and in all respects subject to the paramount authority of the United States, at any time to abolish, control, or supersede it." The houses had already ordered, by resolution, at their previous session, that the troops should be kept at their stations in the South until Congress should direct their recall. They now invested General Grant, the General of the Army, with powers which made him, and the army itself, practically independent of the President. He was given sole authority to order the removal or suspension of an officer, and military commanders were explicitly excused from accepting the opinion of any civil official of the government in the, construction of their powers.

Many motives had governed the members of Congress in the adoption of this extraordinary programme. Some had allowed themselves to be driven to radical courses by sheer bitter feeling against the President, who insisted so intemperately upon a course more simple, more moderate, more indulgent to the South; some could reason in statesmanlike fashion enough upon the premises of action, but could propose no alternative plan which seemed practicable or likely to command the support of the rank and file of their party; others were party men, without pretence or refinement of view, their whole temper hardened and embittered by the war and all its unpalatable consequences, and were willing to follow those who were frankly bent upon bringing the South to utter humiliation and penitent submission. Their leaders wished not only to give the negroes political privilege but also to put the white men of the South, for the nonce at any rate, under the negroes’ heels. Every black voter, they cynically predicted, would once for all become under such tutelage a Republican voter, and the party which had conquered the South would rule it. Men who looked more scrupulously to their motives saw no way to withstand what they disapproved; were themselves convinced that something must be done to protect the helpless blacks; feared as much as the radicals themselves to see the real leaders of the South again in control; and, with misgivings not a few, lent their aid to the revolutionary programme.

The same months that saw the drastic Act debated and adopted witnessed a tragic revolution at the further south in which the government at Washington also played its part. While the war for the Union was being fought, the emperor of France, looking to see that war rack the United States to pieces, had sent troops into Mexico and had set up a kingdom there for the Arch-duke Maximilian of Austria. He had got his opportunity in a way which had seemed for a time to make other great powers of Europe his partners and allies in the conquest. The closing days of the year 1857 had brought political upheaval and sharp civil war upon Mexico, which had resulted within two years in making Juarez, a Zapoteca Indian of singular capacity, master of the country. Juarez had not only confiscated the property of the church, but had also suspended by decree the payment of foreign debts, the debt of the Mexican nation itself included; and that decree had led, late in 1861, to a demonstration in force upon his coasts by the three nations, England, France, and Spain, who were Mexico’s principal creditors. England and Spain would consent to do no more than was necessary to enforce the just claims of their citizens, and Napoleon had agreed to be governed by the terms of cooperation which they prescribed: the seizure, it might be, of a custom house or two, but no serious stroke against the sovereignty of the country. From the first, nevertheless, he had meant to disregard his engagements in the matter. He had long dreamed of conquest there in the south, and saw the time come now, as he thought, when he need fear no enforcement of the Monroe doctrine against him by the distracted government at the north. In despite of protests, he sent an army of conquest to Mexico, and, postponing open possession by France, put the Archduke Maximilian in the usurped place of authority, keeping his armies there to secure his throne and the predominance of France. The government at Washington protested but could do nothing more. The usurped throne stood, the armies of France remained, until the war for the Union closed and the hands of the President were free. Then the protests from Washington took another tone and meaning, which Louis Napoleon was not self-deceived enough to suppose he could ignore. American troops began to be massed in the neighborhood of the Mexican frontier, near the familiar ground of General Taylor’s movements twenty years before; and the French government saw that it must yield. The French troops were withdrawn, and Maximilian was left to shape his fortunes alone. He was a man of high spirit, not apt to yield upon any point of honor, mindful of what he conceived to be his duty though he mistook it: a man of character, resolved to stand by his throne even though the French withdrew. The resolution cost him his life. Though he gathered a party about him, they were beaten by the partisans of Juarez. He was court-martialled, condemned, and shot. The melodramatic play which the histrionic genius of Napoleon had planned turned out a genuine tragedy, and a noble gentleman made a pitiful ending.

The same month that witnessed the withdrawal of the troops of France from Mexico saw final arrangements made for the withdrawal of Russia from the Pacific coast of North America. On the 30th of March, 1867, a treaty was agreed upon between Mr. Seward and the Russian minister at Washington for the sale of Alaska to the United States for the sum of seven million two hundred thousand dollars in gold. In May the treaty was ratified; and in the following October formal transfer of the great territory was effected. Mr. Monroe had checked the movement of Russian power southward upon the Pacific coast by his message of 1823, and in the forty odd years which had elapsed since that notable announcement of the supremacy of the United States in the western hemisphere the government at St. Petersburg had grown very indifferent to the retention of the bleak fragment of America left in its hands-so far away, so difficult, it might be, of defence. Informal communications in regard to its sale had passed between the two governments so long ago as 1859. Russia was anxious to sell; and the final purchase of 1867 was easily arranged for. There was a certain dramatic consistency in the association of the purchase of Alaska with the forced "withdrawal" of the French from Mexico. They stood together as logical consequences of the Monroe doctrine, whose avowed object had been to keep the American continents free from the control of European monarchies.

The deep effects wrought by Mr. Stevens’s policy of Thorough in the southern States worked themselves out more slowly than the tragedy in Mexico, but with no less revolutionary force. Its operation brought on as profound a social upheaval as its most extreme advocates could have desired. The natural leaders of the South either would not take the oath prescribed or were excluded from the right to enroll themselves as voters by the very terms of the Reconstruction Act. The negroes were the chief voters. The conventions which they chose and the governments which those conventions set up were constituted to secure them power. In Virginia, Mississippi, and Texas, after the conventions had acted, the white voters rallied strong enough at the polls, as it turned out, to defeat the constitutions they had framed when they were submitted for ratification; but they were only kept so much the longer under military government, and were obliged to accept them at last. In Georgia the new constitution was adopted; but the statutes of the reconstituted State debarred negroes from holding office, and Congress would not admit her to representation so long as those statutes stood unrepealed. In the Carolinas, in Florida, in Alabama, Arkansas, and Louisiana nothing stayed the execution of the congressional plan, and by midsummer, 1868, Congress was ready to readmit those States to representation. But South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida were utterly given over in the process to the government of adventurers.

Negroes constituted the majority of their electorates; but political power gave them no advantage of their own. Adventurers swarmed out of the North to cozen, beguile, and use them. These men, mere "carpet baggers" for the most part, who brought nothing with them, and had nothing to bring, but a change of clothing and their wits, became the new masters of the blacks. They gained the confidence of the negroes, obtained for themselves the more lucrative offices, and lived upon the public treasury, public contracts, and their easy control of affairs. For the negroes there was nothing but occasional allotments of abandoned or forfeited land, the pay of petty offices, a per diem allowance as members of the conventions and the state legislatures which their new masters made business for, or the wages of servants in the various offices of administration. Their ignorance and credulity made them easy dupes. A petty favor, a slender stipend, a trifling perquisite, a bit of poor land, a piece of money satisfied or silenced them. It was enough, for the rest, to play upon their passions. They were easily taught to hate the men who had once held them in slavery, and to follow blindly the political party which had brought on the war of their emancipation.

There were soon lands enough and to spare out of which to make small gifts to them without sacrifice of gain on the part of their new masters. In Mississippi, before the work of the carpet baggers was done, six hundred and forty thousand acres of land had been forfeited for taxes, twenty percent of the total acreage of the State. The state tax levy for 1871 was four times as great as the levy for 1869 had been; that for 1873 eight times as great; that for 1874 fourteen times. The impoverished planters could not carry the intolerable burden of taxes, and gave their lands up to be sold by the sheriff. There were few who could buy. The lands lay waste and neglected or were parcelled out at nominal rates among the negroes. In South Carolina the taxes of 1871 aggregated $2,000,000 as against a total of $400,000 in 1860, though the taxable values of the State were but $184,000,000 in 1871 and had been $490,000,000 in 1860. There were soon lands to be had for the asking wherever the tax gatherer of the new governments had pressed his claims. The assessed valuation of property in the city of New Orleans sank, during the eight years of carpet-bag rule, from $146,718,790 to $88,613,930. Four years and a half of "reconstruction" cost Louisiana $106,020,337. The demoralization of affairs in Louisiana had begun in 1862, when General Butler took possession of the city of New Orleans. The rich spoils of the place had proved too much for the principles of the men intrusted with the management of her affairs in times when law was silent; and the political adventurers who came out of the North to take charge of the new government set up under Mr. Stevens’s plan of reconstruction found the work they had come to do already begun.

Taxes, of course, did not suffice. Enormous debts were piled up to satisfy the adventurers. The cases of Louisiana and South Carolina were no doubt the worst, but other States suffered in proportion to the opportunities they afforded for safe depredation. In 1868 the debt of South Carolina had been $5,000,000; in 1872 it was nearly $30,000,000. The debt of Louisiana in 1868 had been between six and seven millions; in 1872 it was $50,000,000. Where the new rulers acted with less assurance and immunity or with smaller resources at hand, debts grew more slowly, but the methods of spoliation were everywhere much the same; and with the rise of debts went always the disappearance of all assets wherewith to pay them. Treasuries were swept clean. Immense grants were made in aid of public works which were never completed, sometimes not even begun. Railways were subsidized, and the subsidies, by one device or another, converted into outright gifts, which went into the pockets of those who had procured them, not into the building or equipment of the road. A vast burden of debt was piled up for coming generations to carry; the present generation was much too poor to pay anything.

The real figures of the ruin wrought no man could get at. It was not to be expressed in state taxes or state debts. The increase in the expenditure and indebtedness of counties and towns, of school districts and cities, represented an aggregate greater even than that of the ruinous sums which had drained the treasuries and mortgaged the resources of the governments of the States; and men saw with their own eyes what was going on at their own doors. What was afoot at the capitals of their States they only read of in the newspapers, or heard retailed in the gossip of the street, but the affairs of their own villages and country-sides they saw corrupted, mismanaged, made base use of under their very eyes. There the negroes themselves were the office holders, men who could not so much as write their names and who knew none of the uses of authority except its insolence. It was there that the policy of the congressional leaders wrought its perfect work of fear, demoralization, disgust, and social revolution.

No one who thought justly or tolerantly could think that this veritable overthrow of civilization in the South had been foreseen or desired by the men who had followed Mr. Stevens and Mr. Wade and Mr. Morton in their policy of rule or ruin. That handful of leaders it was, however, hard to acquit of the charge of knowing and intending the ruinous consequences of what they had planned. They would take counsel of moderation neither from northern men nor from southern. They were proof against both fact and reason in their determination to "put the white South under the heel of the black South." They did not know the region with which they were dealing. Northern men who did know it tried to inform them of its character and of the danger and folly of what they were undertaking; but they refused to be informed, did not care to know, were in any case fixed upon the accomplishment of a single object. Their colleagues, their followers, kept, many of them, a cooler mind, a more prudent way of thought, but could not withstand them. They, too, were ignorant of the South. They saw but a little way into the future, had no means of calculating what the effects of these drastic measures would be upon the life and action of the South, and lacked even the knowledge of mere human nature which might have served them instead of an acquaintance with the actual men they were dealing with. They had not foreseen that to give the suffrage to the negroes and withhold it from the more capable white men would bestow political power, not upon the negroes, but upon white adventurers, as much the enemies of the one race as of the other. In that day of passion, indeed, they had not stopped to speculate what the effects would be. Their object had been to give the negro political power in order that he might defend his own rights, as voters everywhere else might defend theirs. They had not recked of consequences; for a little while they had not cared what they might be. They had prepared the way for the ruin of the South, but they had hardly planned to ruin it.

News of what was going on in the South was not slow to make its way to the ears of the country at large; but the editors of northern newspapers at first refused to credit what they heard. Men dismissed the reports with an easy laugh, as simply the South’s cry of exasperation that the negro should have been given the ballot and the power to rule. But incredulity grew more and more difficult; the accounts of what was going on grew more and more circumstantial; proof came close upon the heels of rumor; and opinion began to veer unsteadily. It shifted not only because of the disquieting news that came from the South, but also because of the desperate strain the government itself was put to at Washington by reason of the open breach and warfare between the President and Congress. The masterful men who led the congressional majority had not contented themselves with putting such laws as they chose upon the statute books despite the President’s vetoes; they had gone much further and taken steps to make the President a mere figure-head even in administration, and put themselves in virtual control of the executive personnel of the government. Along with the Reconstruction Act of 1867, which placed the governments of the southern States in their hands, they had forced through, over the President’s veto, a Tenure of Office Act which deprived the President of the power of removal from office except by the advice and with the consent of the Senate. It gave even to cabinet officers a fixed tenure of four years. They could be dismissed within the four years of the presidential term only by the consent of the Senate. Here was a deliberate reversal of the constitutional practice of more than two generations. The debates of the first Congress under the constitution, the views of the statesmen who had framed the law of the government, the opinions of lawyers, the unbroken practice of sixteen presidents had been thought to establish beyond question the right of the chief magistrate to remove federal administrative officials at his pleasure. Congress, it seemed, was ready to override law and precedent alike to make good its mastery.

Mr. Johnson was not the man to decline such a challenge. After fighting the policy of Congress in matters purely legislative with caustic vetoes and bitter condemnation he was not likely to submit to have his very powers of administration stripped away without resistance carried to the utmost bounds. He had kept Mr. Lincoln’s cabinet; but he had not relished the attitude of one or two of its members towards him. It had been hard enough for Mr. Lincoln, even, with his shrewd and kindly insight into the real nature of the man and his love for the sheer force and audacity with which he administered his critical office in days almost of revolution, to endure the wilful arrogance of Edwin M. Stanton, the Secretary of War; it was quite impossible for Mr. Johnson to endure it. It was something more than wilfulness that Mr. Stanton showed in his relations with Mr. Johnson. He became openly a partisan of the radical leaders in Congress, and set himself to defeat the President at his own council table. He administered the affairs of his Department as if he considered it an independent branch of the government; carried out the instructions of the President with regard to the South in a way to discredit as much as possible the policy which they embodied; and seemed bent upon maintaining the Department of War as a sort of counterpoise to the presidency itself until a man acceptable to the Republican majority in the houses should come to the head of the government. Mr. Johnson had wished from the first to be rid of him, but had wished also to preserve unbroken the tradition of policy handed on to him from Mr. Lincoln, and had hesitated to ask for his resignation. He determined now to make Mr. Stanton’s case a case for the test of his prerogative and of the Tenure of Office Act which sought to curtail it. In August (1867), during the congressional recess, he demanded Mr. Stanton’s resignation. Mr. Stanton refused to resign, and the President suspended him from office, as the terms of the Act itself permitted, putting General Grant in his place. When Congress reassembled in December the Senate refused to sanction the removal, and Mr. Stanton resigned his office. The President once again issued an order for his removal, and Mr. Stanton again refused to quit his office, appealing to the House for protection. On February 24, 1868, the House voted to impeach the President for high crimes and misdemeanors.

His only offences were that he had added to his vetoes unmeasured abuse of the houses and their leaders and that he had disregarded an Act of Congress in his removal of Mr. Stanton; but the impeachment had been resolved upon as a political, not as a judicial, process of removal, in passion, not in cool judgment,—in the spirit of the men who in Mr. Jefferson’s day had sought to make it a means of party mastery against the judges of the federal courts. From the 5th of March to the 16th of May the unedifying trial dragged on. Even while it pended the President went incorrigibly up and down the country speaking with his accustomed unguarded passion and open defiance of every one concerned against him in the long series of controversies which had brought the trial on. Fortunately there were men among the Republicans of the Senate who put their consciences as lawyers and their scruples as statesmen before their allegiance to their party leaders. On the 16th of May the impeachment broke down. The first test vote was taken; seven Republican senators voted with the ten Democrats of the upper house against the thirty-five Republican senators who cast their votes for conviction. The managers had failed to secure the two-thirds necessary to convict; and a verdict of acquittal was entered. The Secretary of War resigned his office, and the contest was over.

It was, it turned out, the President’s noisy, unapplauded exit from public trust and employment. Four days after the failure of the impeachment proceedings the Republican nominating convention met at Chicago which was to name a candidate for the presidential term to begin on the 4th of March, 1869. It nominated General Grant, unanimously and with genuine enthusiasm, because he was a faithful officer and no politician. Mr. Johnson had shown himself a Democrat, not a Republican, as party lines had been drawn upon the issue of reconstruction; but the Democrats wanted him for another term as little as the Republicans did. Their convention nominated Mr. Horatio Seymour, of New York, a man of high character and unimpeachable reputation in affairs, and went to the country on the question of reconstruction. The result no one seriously doubted from the first. Few voters in the Republican ranks at the North had as yet suffered themselves to see anything in Mr. Stevens’s plan of Thorough to daunt either their taste or their principles; the votes of most of the southern States then reconstructed were turned over to the Republican candidate, as expected, by the negro voters; and Mr. Seymour obtained but eighty ballots in the electoral college to General Grant’s two hundred and fourteen. It was a significant thing, nevertheless, that in a total popular vote of more than 5,700,000 General Grant’s majority was but a little more than three hundred thousand. Mr. Seymour had carried New York and New Jersey at the centre of the old Union. A slight shifting of the winds of opinion might bring weather on which the policy of reconstruction devised in Congress could not survive. But a more normal season seemed at hand. The country was to have at least peace at its capital, a President trusted by the leaders of Congress. Mr. Johnson’s tempestuous and troubled term was over, and a plain soldier again at the head of the government.

Congress did not wait for General Grant’s inauguration, however, to go forward with its policy of reconstruction. Before the end of February, 1869 (February 25th), it proposed to the States a Fifteenth Amendment intended to lay in the constitution itself the foundations of negro suffrage which had as yet only the support of the Reconstruction Acts of 1867, mere statutes. "The right of citizens of the United States to vote," so ran its terms, "shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, California, and Oregon rejected it; Tennessee did not act upon it; but thirty of the thirty-seven States accepted it, and it became part of the constitution. Virginia, Georgia, Mississippi, and Texas had not yet been reconstructed to the satisfaction of Congress; the acceptance of this new Amendment, accordingly, the enactment in perpetuity of the principle of the Reconstruction Act, was made a condition precedent to their readmission to Congress, as the acceptance of the Thirteenth Amendment, which gave the negroes their freedom, and of the Fourteenth, which made them citizens of the United States and of the States of their residence, had been. This, too, was to be part of the hard-driven bargain of reconstruction before the Republican leaders would be satisfied. The dominance of the negroes in the South was to be made a principle of the very constitution of the Union. A long year went by before three fourths of the States had ratified the radical Amendment, but the necessary votes came in at last, and on the 30th of March, 1870, the new article was officially declared in force.

The price of the policy to which it gave the final touch of permanence was the temporary disintegration of southern society and the utter, apparently the irretrievable, alienation of the South from the political party whose mastery it had been Mr. Stevens’s chief aim to perpetuate. The white men of the South were aroused by the mere instinct of self-preservation to rid themselves, by fair means or foul, of the intolerable burden of governments sustained by the votes of ignorant negroes and conducted in the interest of adventurers: governments whose incredible debts were incurred that thieves might be enriched, whose increasing loans and taxes went to no public use but into the pockets of party managers and corrupt contractors. There was no place of open action or of constitutional agitation, under the terms of reconstruction, for the men who were the real leaders of the southern communities Its restrictions shut white men of the older order out from the suffrage even. They could act only by private combination, by private means, as a force outside the government, hostile to it, proscribed by it, of whom opposition and bitter resistance was expected, and expected with defiance Sober men kept their heads; prudent men saw how sad an increase of passion would come out of hasty counsels of strife, an open grapple between those outlawed and those appointed to govern. Men whom experience had chastened saw that only the slow processes of opinion could mend the unutterable errors of a time like that. But there were men to whom counsels of prudence seemed as ineffectual as they were unpalatable, men who could not sit still and suffer what was now put upon them. It was folly for them to give rein to their impulses; it was impossible for them to do nothing.

They took the law into their own hands, and began to attempt by intimidation what they were not allowed to attempt by the ballot or by any ordered course of public action. They began to do by secret concert and association what they could not do in avowed parties. Almost by accident a way was found to succeed which led insensibly farther and farther afield into the ways of violence and outlawry. In May, 1866, a little group of young men in the Tennessee village of Pulaski, finding time hang heavy on their hands after the excitements of the field, so lately abandoned, formed a secret club for the mere pleasure of association, for private amusement—for anything that might promise to break the monotony of the too quiet place, as their wits might work upon the matter, and one of their number suggested that they call themselves the Kisklos, the Circle. Secrecy and mystery were at the heart of the pranks they planned: secrecy with regard to the membership of their Circle, secrecy with regard to the place and the objects of its meetings; and the mystery of disguise and of silent parade when the comrades rode abroad at night when the moon was up: a white mask, a tall cardboard hat, the figures of man and horse sheeted like a ghost, and the horses’ feet muffled to move without sound of their approach. It was the delightful discovery of the thrill of awesome fear, the woeful looking for of calamity that swept through the country-sides as they moved from place to place upon their silent visitations, coming no man could say whence, going upon no man knew what errand, that put thought of mischief into the minds of the frolicking comrades. It threw the negroes into a very ecstasy of panic to see these sheeted "Ku Klux" move near them in the shrouded night; and their comic fear stimulated the lads who excited it to many an extravagant prank and mummery. No one knew or could discover who the masked players were; no one could say whether they meant serious or only innocent mischief; and the zest of the business lay in keeping the secret close.

Here was a very tempting and dangerous instrument of power for days of disorder and social upheaval, when law seemed set aside by the very government itself, and outsiders, adventurers, were in the seats of authority, the poor negroes, and white men without honor, their only partisans. Year by year the organization spread, from county to county, from State to State. Every country-side wished to have its own Ku Klux, founded in secrecy and mystery like the mother "Den" at Pulaski, until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, an "Invisible Empire of the South," bound together in loose organization to protect the southern country from some of the ugliest hazards of a time of revolution. The objects of the mysterious brotherhood grew serious fast enough. It passed from jest to earnest. Men took hold of it who rejoiced to find in it a new instrument of political power: men half outlawed, denied the suffrage, without hope of justice in the courts, who meant to take this means to make their will felt. "They were to protect their people from indignities and wrongs; to succor the suffering, particularly the families of dead confederate soldiers"; to enforce what they conceived to be the real laws of their States "and defend the constitution of the United States and all laws passed in conformity thereto; to aid in executing all constitutional laws and protect the people from unlawful seizures and from trial otherwise than by jury." Similar secret orders grew up alongside the great Klan, or in States where its "dens" had not been established: Knights of the White Camellia, Pale Faces, Constitutional Union Guards, the White Brotherhood, to serve the same ends by the same means. The Knights of the White Camellia, founded in New Orleans in the winter of 1867-1868, spread their organization abroad more widely even than the Ku Klux Klan.

It was impossible to keep such a power in hand. Sober men governed the counsels and moderated the plans of these roving knights errant; but it was lawless work at best. They had set themselves, after the first year or two of mere mischievous frolic had passed, to right a disordered society through the power of fear. Men of hot passions who could not always be restrained carried their plans into effect. Reckless men not of their order, malicious fellows of the baser sort who did not feel the compulsions of honor and who had private grudges to satisfy, imitated their disguises and borrowed their methods. What was done passed beyond mere mummery, mere visiting the glimpses of the moon and making night hideous, that they might cause mere "fools of nature horridly to shake their disposition with thoughts beyond the reaches of their souls." It became the chief object of the night-riding comrades to silence or drive from the country the principal mischief-makers of the reconstruction regime, whether white or black. The negroes were generally easy enough to deal with: a thorough fright usually disposed them to make utter submission, resign their parts in affairs, leave the country,—do anything their ghostly visitors demanded. But white men were less tractable; and here and there even a negro ignored or defied them. The regulators would not always threaten and never execute their threats. They backed their commands, when need arose, with violence. Houses were surrounded in the night and burned, and the inmates shot as they fled, as in the dreadful days of border warfare. Men were dragged from their houses and tarred and feathered. Some who defied the vigilant visitors came mysteriously to some sudden death.

The more ardent regulators made no nice discriminations. All northern white men or women who came into the South to work among the negroes, though they were but school teachers, were in danger of their enmity and silent onset. Many of the teachers who worked among the negroes did in fact do mischief as deep as any political adventurer. The lessons taught in their schools seemed to be lessons of self-assertion against the whites: they seemed too often to train their pupils to be aggressive Republican politicians and mischief-makers between the races. The innocent and enlightened among them suffered in the general opinion from the errors of those who deliberately sowed discord; and the regulators too often failed to discriminate between those who made trouble and those who fulfilled their gentle errand in peace and good temper.

The ranks of those who flocked into the South to take part in the reconstruction of the States and the habilitation of the negro for his life of freedom were strangely mixed of good and bad. The teachers came upon an errand of mercy and humanity, but came too many of them with bitter thoughts and intolerant purpose against the white people of the South, upon whom, as they did not reflect, the fortunes of the negro in any case depended. The politicians came for the most part like a predatory horde; but here and there emerged a man of integrity, of principle, of wise and moderate counsel, who in the long run won the confidence even of those who hated with an ineradicable hatred the party and the practice of federal control which he represented. The Ku Klux and those who masqueraded in their guise struck at first only at those who made palpable mischief between the races or set just law aside to make themselves masters; but their work grew under their hands, and their zest for it. Brutal crimes were committed; the innocent suffered with the guilty; a reign of terror was brought on, and society was infinitely more disturbed than defended. Law seemed oftentimes given over. The right to the writ of habeas corpus was again and again suspended to check the lawless work. At least one governor of the reconstruction period sent to his adjutant general lists of leading citizens proscribed, with the suggestion that those whose names were specially marked should be tried by court martial and executed at once before the use of the writ should be restored. One lawless force seemed in contest with another.

Such was the disturbing subject matter of the news which crept north during the first year of General Grant’s administration as President. It found business as well as politics moved by its own uneasy excitements. The year 1869 witnessed an attempt on the part of a small group of brokers to corner the gold market, singularly audacious, singularly fatal in its consequences to the business of the country. Their operations culminated on a certain "Black Friday," the 24th of September, 1869. All foreign trade balances, all payments of customs duties at the ports, required gold, and the Wall Street firm of Smith, Gould, Martin & Co., in association with a few others, undertook nothing less than to get control of all the gold in the country that was available for such purposes, Outside the Treasury of the United States. They sought to keep the gold in the Treasury out of their way in the market by interesting friends of the President to ply him with arguments based upon public policy to which they thought he would be amenable, and hurried their operations to a crisis while the arguments told; bought gold on every hand, at any figures; and forced its price up, up, until the end came on that Friday which the Street was never to forget. On that day they had the prices and the stock of gold almost at their disposal when the news came that the President had ordered the sub-treasury of the United States at New York to sell gold from the vaults of the government for the relief of the market and it was known that the hundred million which the government held had begun to be released. Then the crash came, and the ruin the operators had wrought, for themselves and others, was laid bare. Trade at home as well as abroad depended upon the available stores of gold. That desperate speculation had upset credit. The movement of the crops halted; foreign trade came to a standstill; the West would not deal with the East; the East could not deal over sea. No man who handled money knew just where he stood. The business of the continent was racked to its centre; and every man who knew the money market knew that it would be many a weary month, it might be many a weary year, before the demoralizing effects of that day would pass away. The operators who had brought the panic on shielded themselves in the courts, and even the immediate ruin they had wrought upon their victims could not be repaired.

There were abundant crops, and business lacked nothing to make it prosperous but a steady money market. The census taken in 1870 showed the population of the country increased by more than seven millions since 1860, for all it had been a decade filled with death and war. Even the South had added some eight hundred thousand to her reckoning. Industry went forward at a quiet pace, and the wealth of the country grew in the very season of financial panic. It was the unquiet spirit of adventure that upset affairs. The war had thrown business from its ordinary courses. The huge purchases of the War Department, the unusual peril of the seas so long as the confederate privateers were abroad, the necessary hazards of business while war filled every transaction with conjecture had bred the speculative temper and quickened the instinct for adventurous operations on the grand scale; had made men apt at managing "corners" and reckless what risks they added to the legitimate hazards of trade.

Embarrassments alike of business and of feeling, created by the war and all that had come in its train, cleared very slowly away. Local storm though it was, the war had not failed to send its airs abroad and cry ate international disturbances as well as domestic. It had particularly threatened to bring about serious misunderstandings between England and the United States. Most of the confederate privateers and swift cruisers that had played havoc with the sea-going trade of the United States during the earlier years of the war had been built in English ship yards and had come from English ports. Their arms and equipment had been bought in England. Their officers had waited for them in England, drawing their pay, the while, through English banks. The English government acknowledged itself bound to prevent all overt attempts of its subjects to aid or arm the enemies of a nation with which it was at peace, and to prevent the use of its ports and waters as a base of naval operations against her; but it did not consider itself bound, as the government of the United States contended that it should, to canvass every case of suspicion in such matters and detain vessels merely upon reasonable ground of belief that they were intended for uses inconsistent with its neutrality. Mr. Charles Francis Adams, the minister of the United States, had brought every case promptly to the attention of her Majesty’s ministers and in more than one case had laid convincing evidence before them of the character and destination of vessels being fitted out in English ship yards for the service of the Confederacy; and the government at Washington could not but connect their slow and indifferent action in the cases submitted, their apparent unwillingness to examine the evidence, their slackness in taking steps to seize the suspected vessels with their manifest friendliness, or at least benevolent neutrality, towards the Confederate States, their recognition of their belligerent rights, their half inclination to accord them full recognition as an independent power. It soon became evident that entire cordiality of feeling between the two governments could not be restored until the matter had been brought to a definite reckoning and final adjustment.

The reckoning came at the very outset of General Grant’s administration. Mr. Seward had tried to bring it about while Mr. Johnson was President, but the Senate had rejected the method of settlement he had been willing to adopt, and an arrangement agreeable to both governments was not arrived at until the spring of 1871. In May of that year, a Joint High Commission appointed by the President and the ministers in London and sitting in Washington, agreed upon a treaty, acceptable to the Senate, which referred the claims of the United States against Great Britain on account of the damage inflicted by the Alabama, the Florida, the Shenandoah, and all other confederate vessels alleged to have been fitted out in British ports, "generically known as the Alabama claims," to the arbitration of a tribunal of five persons to be named by the President of the United States, the Queen of England, the King of Italy, the President of the Swiss Confederation, and the Emperor of Brazil respectively, and to sit at Geneva, in Switzerland. The treaty of Washington,—so it was called,—provided also for the settlement of other matters in dispute between the two governments which touched their permanent interests: the right of American fishermen to catch fish upon the Canadian coasts and of Canadian fishermen to make their catches upon the northern coasts of the United States, and the exact line of boundary between the United States and British North America within the streams which separated them and within the channel between Vancouver’s Island and the continent; but the Alabama claims for the moment seemed to all eyes to stand at the front of the matter. On the 14th of September, 1872, after a three months’ hearing, the Geneva tribunal rendered a decision in favor of the United States, only the English member of the court dissenting. It awarded to the United States $15,500,000 in damages. But the strain of the matter had been taken off by the treaty; the decision of the tribunal ended, not a controversy, but a judicial process at the end of controversy.

The strain of domestic politics was enough to withdraw heat from such matters when once they had become mere matters of business. The reconstruction even of those southern States in which the establishment of negro majorities had miscarried and the white voters had mustered strong and stubborn enough to reject the laws Congress tried to thrust upon them (Virginia, Georgia, Mississippi, and Texas) was complete by midsummer, 1870. But the mere completion of the formal process of reconstruction, as planned in Congress, did not mean order or the quiet settlement of affairs in the South. The white men, with whom effective initiative and the real weight of predominance rested in any case, had had their wits quickened and their temper hardened by what the Republican leaders had done. They were shut out from the use of the ballot and from every open and legitimate part in affairs, but they had come at their power in another way. Those who loved mastery and adventure directed the work of the Ku Klux. Those whose tastes and principles made such means unpalatable brought their influence to bear along every line of counsel or of management that promised to thrust the carpet bagger out of office and discourage the negro in the use of his vote. Congress saw where they meant to regain their mastery, at the polls, and by what means, the intimidation and control of the negroes without regard to law—the law thrust upon them, not their own; and hastened to set up a new barrier of statute against them.

In May, 1870, it had passed an Act which put southern elections and the registration of voters in the southern States under the superintendence and virtual control of federal supervisors and marshals, who were empowered to protect all voters in the exercise of their right of suffrage, and whose complaints were to be heard, not by the courts of the States, but by the circuit courts of the United States alone. At its next session it still further strengthened the Act. The forty-second Congress met on the 4th of March, 1871, in extraordinary session, to continue legislation to the same end. Not merely the acts of registration and voting needed to be guarded; every privilege conferred upon the negro as an incident of his new freedom seemed in need of protection: the Republican leaders were determined that the Fourteenth as well as the Fifteenth Amendment should be buttressed about by penal legislation and the whole force of the government, if necessary, brought to bear to put them into effectual execution. A committee of seven senators and fourteen representatives was appointed to inquire into the actual condition of the South and ascertain the facts with regard to the alleged outrages there, and a drastic Act was passed (April 20,1871) which was meant to crush the Ku Klux Klan and all lawless bands acting after its fashion. Its provisions made such acts, whether of violence or of mere intimidation, as the secret societies of the South had committed conspiracy against the government of the United States, punishable by heavy fines or by imprisonment, or by both fine and imprisonment, and authorized the President, whenever the state authorities were unable or unwilling to prevent or check them, to use the land and naval forces of the federal government for their suppression, as against an insurrection. It authorized him, also, until the close of the next regular session of Congress, to suspend at his pleasure the writ of habeas corpus "during the continuance of such rebellion against the United States," in such portions of the southern country as seemed to him most touched by the disorders of the time or most under the control of the secret associations. The Act gave to the federal courts which were empowered to enforce it the right to exclude from their juries persons suspected of sympathizing with those who violated its provisions. It was meant to destroy root and branch the organizations which had set themselves to annul the rights of the negroes. The Act of May, 1870, had made it a criminal offence "to go in disguise upon the highway, or upon the premises of another" by way of conspiracy "to deprive any citizen of his constitutional rights," striking directly at the secret orders and their more lawless imitators.

General Grant used the powers conferred upon him with the energy and directness of a soldier, as Congress had expected. On the 12th of October, 1871, singling out nine counties of South Carolina in which such acts as Congress had aimed its blow at were most frequent, he called upon the members of all illegal associations within them to surrender their arms and disguises within five days. Five days afterwards, his proclamation not having been heeded, he suspended the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus in the counties named, and two hundred arrests, followed promptly enough by prosecution and conviction, were immediately made. It was easy, with the powers bestowed by the Act upon the federal judges, to push trials to a quick consummation, and to eliminate all reasonable chance of escaping conviction. And the action of the President in South Carolina was but a beginning of his action throughout the South. Everywhere that the secret orders or the reckless fellows who plied their means of intimidation without scruple or principle or public object had been most active arrests and prosecutions came thick and fast; and within but a little more than a year an end was made of the business.

But, though the Act had worked its drastic remedy, peace, accommodation, the rational relationships between race and race upon which alone a reasonable order of life could rest, were, it might be, further off than ever. The joint committee of Senate and House which Congress had appointed to accompany the execution of the Act with a thorough-going inquiry into the actual condition of the South filled thirteen volumes with the reports of their investigations. They found no justification for what the white men of the South, desperate to free themselves from the rule of negroes and adventurers, had done; they drew forth from their witnesses little but what was dark and of evil omen; they made no serious attempt to understand the causes which underlay conspiracy and chronic disorder; they only laid before the country a mass of undigested testimony, crude, unverifiable, and uttered their expected condemnation of a people at bay. But the country began to see for itself the real philosophy of the painful story. Significant rifts began to show themselves in opinion. It began to be plainly evident to all who were willing to look facts in the face what Mr. Stevens and his radical colleagues had really accomplished by their policy of Thorough. They had made the white men of the South implacable enemies, not of the Union, but of the party that had saved the Union and which now carried its affairs in its hands. Their reconstruction, whose object had been, not the rehabilitation of the southern governments, but the political enfranchisement of the negroes, had wrought a work of bitterness incomparably deeper, incomparably more difficult to undo, than the mere effects of war and a virtual conquest of arms. They had made the ascendency of the party of the Union seem to the men of the South nothing less than the corruption and destruction of their society, a reign of ignorance, a regime of power basely used; and this revolt, these secret orders with their ugly work of violence and terror, these infinite, desperate shifts to be rid of the burden and nightmare of what had been put upon them, were the consequence.

The reactions of opinion were slow. The country, though it grew uneasy, was not yet ready to put itself in the hands of the Democratic party, which had opposed the war, and which still suffered in the thought of the voters the discredit of its old alliance with the slave owners. The presidential election of 1872 came and went without disturbing the supremacy of the majority. But it brought to light many things that gravely disquieted the Republican leaders. Thoughtful and influential men whose support they could ill afford to lose, were, they perceived, being alienated from them. It was a serious matter that their plans in the South had so miscarried and required even yet the policing of whole districts by armed men. Evidently nothing but force sustained them, or could sustain them; and no humane or thoughtful man could look with complaisance upon a perpetual subjection of the South to federal arms. The administration of southern affairs from Washington wore, moreover, from another angle an unhandsome appearance. Its objects seemed to be, not so much the enforcement of constitutional rights as the aggrandizement of personal adherents of the President and of the close partisans of the Republican leaders who were most in his confidence. The troublesome, unwholesome matter of official patronage played too prominent a part in the motives of the government, and made the treatment of southern affairs seem only a phase of the general "spoils system" of appointment to office which seemed to have fastened itself upo]1 the party organization of the country.

It was bad enough that the federal offices should be emptied wholesale upon a change of parties in the administration, to make room for the partisans of the successful leaders, as they had been when Mr. Lincoln came to the presidency,—as they had been at every change of parties since General Jackson’s day; but that had at least given political solidarity to the administration and made the President in some sort master in the counsels of his party. Now a new and sinister sign was added that the official patronage of the government was to be used, not to strengthen and solidify the administration, but to give secure political power to local managers who were to be permitted to dictate to the President whom he should appoint to office. In one State after another there emerged some one man,—a senator, a representative, a federal official of high office—who was recognized as the President’s only adviser with regard to all appointments within his State; and all federal office holders within that State became by natural consequence his sycophants. In the South these petty masters were too often the political adventurers who had been drawn to their places of preferment by the temptations of the process of reconstruction, when the negroes waited to be used, or men who were themselves the subservient tools of politicians in Washington. General Grant himself felt the demoralization of the system very keenly and desired its radical reformation, but was easily imposed upon by men whom he trusted, and trusted men without discrimination. He had great simplicity of character. He judged men shrewdly enough when he saw them in action, but had little insight into their real motives and character when associated with them in counsel. It seemed to him unnatural, unfaithful, as it had seemed to General Jackson, to doubt or distrust his friends,—not so much because he was a soldier and ready to stand by his comrades with stout allegiance as because, like most men of simple nature, he deemed others as honest as himself, and suspicion a thing for rogues to harbor.

The President had alienated, moreover, certain men whose support he could not afford to dispense with. He had set his heart upon the annexation of Santo Domingo to the United States, and had come to an open breach with Mr. Charles Sumner, chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs upon the matter. That and many other things, great and small, had driven Mr. Horace Greeley also into opposition, the erratic, trenchant editor of the New York Tribune. Mr. Sumner seemed to a great many men in the country to stand for the older, better, more elevated traditions of the Republican party, which General Grant seemed to be fast drawing to the lower levels of self-aggrandizement and power. Mr. Greeley wrote editorials every day which told like sharp blows upon the consciousness of all the thousands of plain men the country-sides through who looked to the Tribune for guidance as to an oracle. It was no light matter to have such men set against the administration.

It was the more embarrassing because there were large matters of policy, as well as scattered items of mistaken action and vague fears for the civil service, upon which an opposition could concentrate. At the heart of these was the disfranchisement of the white men of the South. It was plain to see that the troubles in the southern States arose out of the exclusion of the better whites from the electoral suffrage no less than from the admission of the most ignorant blacks. It was no doubt in part because the South could not use its real leaders in open political contest that impatient men and radicals had been driven to use secret combination and all the ugly weapons of intimidation. The processes of reconstruction were made by those who managed them to depend as much upon withholding the suffrage from all who had participated with any touch of leadership in secession as upon the use of the negroes as voters and the radical amendment of the southern constitutions; and it presently became evident that there was a rapidly growing number of thoughtful men in the Republican ranks who thought it high time to grant a general amnesty and bring affairs to a normal condition again in southern society. Mr. Greeley was strongly of that opinion, and it took form and bred concert of action rapidly enough to play a determining part in the presidential campaign of 1872. In 1870 the question had taken very definite form among the Republicans of Missouri, and the party had split asunder there into a radical and a liberal faction. The radicals wished for the present to maintain the disqualifications imposed by the constitution of the State upon those who had identified themselves with secession during the war; the liberals demanded "universal amnesty and universal enfranchisement," and won in the state elections. The leaders of the successful revolt were Mr. Benjamin Gratz Brown and Mr. Carl Schurz. Mr. Brown had been politician, editor, soldier, senator these twenty years, and with the success of his party became governor of the State. Mr. Schurz was a member of the Senate, a man but just turned of forty but bred since a lad to the role of aggressive liberal in politics,—an exile from his German home because of his participation in the revolutionary movements of 1849. He was an orator whom opponents not prepared to join frank issue found it prudent to avoid in open contest. Mr. Lincoln had named him minister to Spain in 1861, but he had preferred the field and entered the army; and at the close of the war had been sent by the legislature of Missouri to the Senate of the United States.

The "Liberal Republicans" of Missouri, thus led, called upon men of like views everywhere to join them, and their ranks for a little seemed to fill upon a scale which threatened to make them a formidable national faction. The form the presidential campaign of 1872 was to take was determined by their initiative. In May, 1872, a national convention of their partisans came together at Cincinnati, at the call of the Missouri leaders, and nominated Mr. Greeley for the presidency, Mr. Benjamin Gratz Brown for the vice presidency. These were nominations which the country found it hard to take seriously. Mr. Greeley’s irregular genius, useful as it was in the trenchant statement of issues and the sharp challenge of opinion, was not of the kind prudent men were willing to see tried in the conduct of the government. He was too much a man of impulse, without poise or calculable lines of action. Mr. Brown the country did not know, except as a picturesque Missouri soldier and politician. The names of much more statesmanlike men had been proposed in the convention, but it had acted like a great mass meeting rather than like the organ of a party, upon impulse and hastily considered policy rather than with prudent forecast or real knowledge of the true grounds of expediency. Its platform exhibited the same characteristics of half-formed opinion and a hurried compromise of interests. It condemned the existing administration as corrupt in its use of the patronage and absolutely disregardful of constitutional limitations in its use of power in the States, and demanded the "immediate and absolute removal of all disabilities imposed on account of the rebellion," in the belief that universal amnesty would "result in complete pacification in all parts of the country"; but its formulations of policy were vague and evasive. It was framed to please all elements of a mixed opposition, and to make as acceptable as possible its closing invitation to "all patriotic citizens, without regard to previous political affiliations," to join with its framers in purifying the government.

The Democratic convention, which met in Baltimore early in July, accepted both the platform and the candidates of the Cincinnati convention, though the Democratic leaders liked neither. The platform spoke no recognizable Democratic doctrine, except, indeed, in its advocacy of the maintenance of the public credit by a speedy return to specie payments, and the candidates were men whom no experienced politician could hope to see elected. But the split in the Republican ranks evidenced by the Cincinnati convention was the only sign anywhere visible to the Democratic leaders of a change in public sentiment likely to weaken the party in power. Without the coalition they knew themselves helpless; with it they hoped to make at least a show of strength. Such allies might be worth the weak candidates and the inconclusive declaration of principles that went with them. The "Liberal Republicans" had given form to the whole campaign, as they had expected.

The result was what every one who had the least sagacity in reading the signs of political weather perceived from the first it must be. The Democrats added but one hundred and thirty thousand to their popular vote of four years before, though the number of voters in the country had greatly increased and for the first time in the history of the government every State chose its electors by the direct suffrage of the people. The Republicans added six hundred thousand to their vote, and General Grant was elected for a second term by an overwhelming majority in the electoral college (286-63). The congressional elections which accompanied the choice of President gave the Republicans again, moreover, their accustomed two-thirds majority in both houses. All things stood as before; the opposition were yet a long way off from power. Mr. Greeley survived the elections but a few weeks. He had not seen how hopeless his candidacy was. He was turned of sixty and had been broken in health. All his years had been full of such keen and unremitting labor as robs a man at last of his elasticity. The sudden stroke of utter defeat, touched almost with farce, so that men laughed to see how complete it was, was more than he could bear. On the 29th of November, 1872, before the electors had voted, he died. The few votes that would have gone to him were given as the electors pleased to men who had been his allies in the novel coalition he had led.

And yet, though the coalition had failed, the Democrats were nearer their day of success than they dreamed. Within two years the Republican majority of nearly one hundred in the House of Representatives had been supplanted by a Democratic majority almost as large, and the men who had led the party of reconstruction found their season of mastery gone by. The country had begun to see with how radical a demoralization the war party it had trusted was beginning to be touched, and how impotent the amiable soldier they had put at the head of the government was to guide or better it. General Grant had found that the appointment of men to political office upon the recommendation of politicians and personal friends, though the friends were his own and the politicians men whom the country honored and whom he would have deemed it a reproach upon himself to distrust, was a very different matter from promoting officers tested under his own eye in camp and field. The leaders of Congress perceived plainly enough the movement of opinion out-of-doors, saw the service of the government steadily sinking to a lower level of efficiency, knew what influences were at work to debase it and what condemnation must come upon them should the use made of the patronage come fully to light. On the 3d of March, 1871, accordingly, they put through Congress an Act which authorized the President to frame and administer, through a commission, such rules as he thought best for the regulation of admissions to the civil service. The President accepted the Act with cordial approval, with an obvious sense of relief, indeed; and with complete indifference to the distress of the politicians proceeded to establish and enforce a system of competitive examinations for office. But the politicians were stronger in Congress than the President, and after two years of painful exclusion from the use of the patronage induced the houses to withhold the appropriation necessary for the administration of the President’s new system of appointment. They had not yet learned how hard a master public opinion was to be in that matter.

Possibly the mere demoralization of the civil service would not by itself have brought upon them the bitter discipline of defeat which they presently underwent. Other things went along with it which stirred the country more deeply; which made Congress itself seem corrupt and the party which controlled it without a watchful sense of honor. The year 1869, in which General Grant became President, had been marked by the completion of both the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific railways, the two lines begun in 1863, the one eastward from the Pacific, the other westward from the Missouri River, which when completed at their point of junction at last bound East and West together across the long plains and the high passes of the Rockies upon which so many a slow caravan had lost its way and its precious freight of human lives. In 1867 the company which had undertaken the construction of the Union Pacific had acquired by purchase the charter of a corporation organized in Pennsylvania in 1863 upon the model of the great French Societe Generate dir Credit Mobilier, for the placing of loans, the handling of all marketable stocks, and the transaction of a general banking business. The French company had come very near to getting into its hands the whole brokerage business and mercantile credit of France; the promoters of the Union Pacific Railway bought out the Pennsylvania company in order to obtain a suitable instrument for conducting the financial operations connected with their undertaking. Congress had made immense grants in aid of the Pacific railway, regarding its construction as of no less importance to the government than to the commerce and material development of the country, because it would bind the two coasts of the continent which had hitherto been almost like separated countries together by a great highway along which authority and the influences of opinion could travel as well as trade. Its subsidies had taken the form of six per cent gold bonds: $16,000 for every mile of rails upon the prairies or the coast plains beyond the mountains, from $32,000 to $48,000 for every mile through the passes of the mountains or the difficult country between range and range,—besides twenty-five million acres of public land along the line of the road.

Here was a perilously close connection between a great financial undertaking and legislation by Congress; and in the presidential campaign of 1872 it was openly charged by the Democrats that Mr. Colfax, the Vice President, Mr. Henry Wilson, the Vice President elect,—the Speaker of the House of Representatives, and a number of senators and representatives had accepted gifts of Credit Mobilier stock in consideration of legislative and other services to be rendered the company. Both houses appointed committees of investigation. The revelations which ensued filled the country with uneasiness and disgust. Against the more prominent officials accused no proof of conscious wrongdoing was found. Only two members of the House and a single member of the Senate were found to have deliberately engaged in transactions which touched their integrity and honor. But many a detail came to light which showed that members carried very easy-going consciences in such matters, accepted favors without looking too curiously into their motive or significance, thought more often of their personal interests than of the public honor, and felt very slightly the responsibility of their posts of trust. It was open to any one who chose to believe that less had been told than had been covered up; that, with but a little more probing, it might have been possible to unearth many an unsavory intrigue. The discredit of the ruling party in the houses was steadily deepening.

The painful impressions left by the investigation were heightened by the deliberate action of the houses during the very session which saw it instituted and concluded. They did not scruple to pass an Act which increased the compensation of senators and representatives and which was made to apply retroactively to the sessions of the past two years,—an Act which the country very bluntly dubbed a "salary grab" and deemed quite in keeping with the reputation of a Congress which had censured but did not expel the members whom its own investigation had shown to be guilty of corrupt connection with the Credit Mobilier.

Other impressions, well or ill founded, supervened which confirmed the country in its distrust of the men who were in control of affairs. In September, 1873, financial panic once more came upon the country with a rush, amidst abundant trade, amidst every sign of prosperity, when wages were good, employment readily found, factories busy, prices normal, money easy. Railways had been built too fast in the West. Within five years no less than $1,700,000,000 had been spent in railway construction. A Northern Pacific Railroad was in course of construction, to be pushed forward through a new section of the country; and not a new Pacific railway only but shorter lines also by the score in regions where as yet there were no people, in order that parts of the country otherwise inaccessible might be opened up to quick settlement and profitable use. Such roads could not reasonably look to make a profit for twenty years to come. They were built with borrowed money. Their bonds filled every market, at home and abroad. Some new roads there were which were only extensions of older lines of established earning capacity; but the older portions could not earn enough to pay for the new. Certain as the prospects of profit were, when the country should grow and settlers come to dot the lines of rail with towns, flank them with farms, and put factories at every point of vantage, their construction was for the present purely speculative, and the processes of growth upon which they depended to keep them from bankruptcy could not be sufficiently hurried to save their credit. Early in September, 1873, the break began to come. One by one banking and brokerage firms in New York which had advanced money to western and Canadian railways began to announce their inability to meet their obligations. On the morning of the 18th Mr. Jay Cooke, the agent of the federal government, with $4,000,000 of deposits from all parts of the country and $15,000,000 of the paper of the Northern Pacific company, declared himself unable to meet his debts, and the "Street" knew that the end had come. Firm after firm, company after company, went to the wall, some of them reputed the strongest in the country, and a long, slow winter of panic ensued whose effects the business of the country was to feel for years to come.

Men who did not know how to reason upon such matters or how to distinguish the real forces that governed the credit of the country were inclined to attribute this sudden sweep of calamity across a money market apparently prosperous and at peace to the financial legislation of Congress. On the 12th of February, 1873, an Act had become law which, it was said, had "demonetized" silver and upset values. The Act had dropped from the list of authorized coins the silver dollar of 412 1/2 grains, which had hitherto been the standard silver dollar of the coinage, and had authorized, in partial substitution, a "trade dollar" of 420 grains. No silver dollars of 412 1/2 grains had been coined since 1808; since 1853 there had been no silver dollars in circulation; the Act simply made what was fact also law, and had passed without objection. But when the financial crisis of the autumn of 1873 came many persons recalled the "demonetization" of silver effected at the opening of the year, and made shrewd theories about the causes of a panic whose explanation was obvious and upon its face. The Republicans in Congress had had the ill fortune to alter the law of the currency upon the very eve of a financial disturbance, and those who did not like their conduct of the government and suspected them of more corruption than had been proved were at liberty to add this to the list of things they had done amiss, to the damage of the country. The congressional elections of the autumn of 1874 went heavily against them; the House was lost to the Democrats; their majority in the Senate was retained only because the Senate was guarded by its constitution against sudden change. The impressions of that autumn and the events of the next year lost them also the local elections in many of the northern States which had so far seemed their safe strongholds. Even Massachusetts chose a Democratic governor.

The country could not overlook the evidences of demoralization at Washington. In 1875 it was discovered that there was concerted action in the West between distillers and federal officials to defraud the government of large amounts in respect of the internal revenue tax on distilled spirits, a "whiskey ring," as the newspapers called it, which did not hesitate to use a portion of its fraudulent profits to make good its opportunity and its immunity by political corruption. Mr. Belknap, the Secretary of War, was accused of accepting bribes in dispensing the patronage of his Department, and, upon impeachment on that charge, resigned his office as if in confession, to escape punishment. Venality and fraud began on all hands to be suspected, even where they did not exist, and mere inefficiency began to irritate the country as if it were but a part of the general decadence of official honor. The President himself saw how ill, how discreditably, and with how incorrigible a tendency towards serious and even criminal misconduct, the administrative branches of the public service operated under his hand, and with the simplicity and frankness which were characteristic of him,—the simplicity and frankness which unscrupulous politicians played upon to betray him,—acknowledged his failure and longed for release from duties in the performance of which he knew that he had blundered. His eight years of power had cost his party its predominance.

It was not the condition of the civil service alone, however, or the mere alarm of the country at the too frequent disclosures of malfeasance in office which brought the ascendency of the Republicans to an end. Congress did its part to make it plain that nothing but blunders were to be expected from the political legislation of the men who had devised and forced to their execution the measures of reconstruction. On Christmas day, 1868, President Johnson had proclaimed full pardon and amnesty for all who had participated in secession, without reserve or exception, and by an Act of the 2d of May, 1872, Congress had removed the political disabilities imposed by the third section of the Fourteenth Amendment from all who had served the Confederate States, except only those who had left the Congress of the United States or the judicial, military, or naval service of the federal government, the headship of an executive Department or the post of minister at a foreign court to take part with the seceding States. But, though they thus cleared away the more abnormal obstructions to the return of settled peace and a natural order of life at the South, the congressional leaders could not keep their hands from the race question. Mr. Sumner, in particular, was insistent that the negroes should be given imperative federal law for their support in the assertion of their social no less than of their political rights; and in February, 1875, at last had his way, though he did not live to see it. A bill passed which gave the federal courts the authority, by appropriate process and penalty, to enforce the right of negroes to accommodation in public inns, theatres, railway carriages, and schools, and to service upon all juries, upon the same footing as white persons. The Act became law on the 1st of March, three days before the expiration of the term of the last House of Representatives the Republicans were effectually to control for fifteen years. It was the older leaders’ last Act for creating friction at the South. For eight years it was to fail utterly of accomplishing its object and yet to work its work of irritation, to be set aside at last by the Supreme Court (1883) as an invasion of the legal field of the States which no portion of the constitution, new or old, could be made to sustain.

The reconstruction of the southern States had been the undoing of the Republican party. The course of carpet bag rule did not run smooth. Every election fixed the attention of the country upon some serious question of fraud or violence in the States where northern adventurers and negro majorities were in control. Congress could not remove the political disabilities of the southern white men without increasing their power at the polls and cutting at the foundations of Republican rule in the South; and yet, though the white voters were disfranchised, in at least three of the southern States Republican rule was maintained only by direct aid from Washington—and sometimes at the point of the bayonet. General Grant had grown infinitely impatient that there should come every year, from State after State, calls for troops to keep the Republican governments at the South in their place of power. "The whole public are tired out with these annual autumnal outbreaks in the South," he said, in refusing troops to the governor of Mississippi, "and the great majority are ready now to condemn any interference on the part of the government. I heartily wish that peace and good order may be restored without issuing the proclamation. But, if it is issued, I shall instruct the commanders of the forces to have no child’s play." Here was the right feeling of the man and the grim firmness of the soldier. He was not mistaken as to the feeling of the country; and though he withheld his hand where he could, there was military interference enough to exasperate that opinion to the utmost. Before his term was out the white voters of the South had rallied strong enough in every State except South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana to take their governments out of the hands of the men who were preying upon them. That they had done it by methods which only an almost revolutionary state of society justified no one doubted: by keeping the negroes away from the polls by every form of intimidation, by forceable interference with their rights when necessary, by every expedient, whether of law or of subtile management, that promised them mastery; but they had triumphed, and there was at least an end of chronic revolution.

But in Louisiana, in Florida, and in South Carolina, though desperately beset, the Republicans had, by desperate means, kept their hold upon the governments they had made. The troops of the United States were first used to adjust the contest in Louisiana. The revised constitution of Louisiana, revised in the interest of the congressional plan of reconstruction, provided, as most of the new southern constitutions did, for the determination of the results of all elections by a returning board so constituted as to be always under the control of the existing administration of the State. That board had the right to reject, without judicial process and upon its own mere opinion, the votes of all counties or precincts where force or fraud had been employed; and it used that power to check the rising Democratic vote wherever it seriously threatened the supremacy of those in authority. Its surveillance went smoothly enough so long as the Republicans were themselves united; but the Republicans of Louisiana had fallen apart into factions, vacancies upon the returning board had been made and filled by removals and any pointments, amidst disputes and contests of legal right, until there were at last two boards instead of one, and before the matter was quieted three, each of which claimed to be the legal returning board of the State. The result of the election of the autumn of 1872 turned upon their rival claims. Over one the Democrats had got control by coalition with the "liberal" wing of the Republicans; another declared the Republican state officers and the Republican candidates for the state legislature elected, and federal aid was asked to carry its judgment into effect. A committee of Congress, sent down to investigate the matter, found it impossible to disentangle the hopeless quarrel; Congress failed to pass the only measure of relief its leaders were able to think of, a bill providing for a new election; and the President recognized and installed the Republican governor.

It was not an affair which either party could look back upon with complacency, but the Republicans took the greater discredit from it, and the country grew very restive. A committee of the Senate reported that the district judge of the United States for the District of Louisiana had undoubtedly gone far beyond the scope of his power and acted in "flagrant disregard of his duty" in his use of writs of injunction issued in aid of the faction which the President sustained. Some unsavory intrigue had been uncovered at almost every step of the investigation. Moreover, the action of the President was no settlement of the difficulty. It left the State in a heightened temper of revolution. Riots accompanied the efforts of the questionable government he set up to enforce its authority. In September, 1874, the partisans of Mr. McEnery, the leader of the combined Democrats and "liberal" Republicans, rose in arms, put every officer of his opponent’s administration from his place, and assumed control of the government. Again federal troops intervened, and the ousted officers were reinstated. Nice compromises, difficult to maintain and satisfactory to nobody, had to be devised to keep the peace until there should be another trial of strength in the election of a governor at the polls.

The summer of 1876 was darkened by a tragic war with the Indians of the far West. In 1874 gold had been discovered in the Black Hills which lay upon the border line of Wyoming and Dakota, and the rush of settlers and miners thither had exasperated the Sioux tribes to take the war path. Their chief was Sitting Bull, whom the troops of the United States were to find an opponent to put them on their mettle. Gathering his forces within the secluded valley of the Little Big Horn by the upper waters of the Yellowstone, where he could best mask his strength, he struck first at one and then at another of the three small bodies of soldiers sent to converge upon him. One he forced back; another he effectually checked; part of the third he trapped and utterly destroyed. General Terry, coming against him from Bismarck, sent General Custer forward with the seventh cavalry to go round about and attack him at the rear; and on the 25th of June, riding with five companies hard upon the camp, Custer rode into a death trap. The Indians swarmed around him in numbers which utterly overwhelmed and completely cut him off from retreat, and not a man came away to tell the tale. The other seven companies of the regiment were not at hand to fight with then, or to give them succor, and found themselves obliged, when at last they came up, to fortify a bluff near at hand as a place of safety and retreat until they should themselves be succored and relieved. The forces of the government gathered at last to complete the work so ill begun, and the Indians retired to the mountains; but it took much painful fighting, and many toilsome marches, prosecuted through all the long autumn and the winter itself, to bring them to terms; and Sitting Bull slipped through their hands across the northern border at last.

Meanwhile the presidential election of 1876 had come and the full harvest of the mischief done in the reconstruction of the South was being reaped. The Democrats nominated Mr. Samuel J. Tilden, a man who had shown his quality as governor of the State of New York and won the respect of all thoughtful men, alike for his integrity and for his ability. The Republicans nominated Mr. Rutherford B. Hayes, who had won his place in the public confidence as an officer of volunteers in the war for the Union, as a member of the House of Representatives, and as governor of Ohio. Both men stood removed from the passionate contests of the period of reconstruction. Their candidacy put the emphasis of party contest as much as might be upon the issues of the new day rather than of the old. But the immediate past was a weight upon the fortunes of the Republicans; the country had turned with evident distrust from the work of confusion they had wrought. Again, as in 1874, Democratic majorities seemed to sweep the country. Only the confusion the Republicans themselves had brought about saved them from utter defeat. State elections had been held, as usual, in most of the States at the same time that presidential electors were chosen, and once again the result of the elections in Louisiana, Florida, and South Carolina was in dispute. The electoral votes of all of these States were necessary for the election of Mr. Hayes. Mr. Tilden had carried Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, Indiana, and Missouri, as well as the ten southern States whose votes were not in dispute; one hundred and eighty-four electoral votes were secured for him beyond a doubt, and one hundred and eighty-five constituted a majority. A single additional electoral vote would bring him into the presidency, and it seemed possible that at least one might be added to his reckoning by Oregon. There three Republican electors had undoubtedly been chosen, but one of them was thought to have been ineligible under the law, and the Democratic governor had appointed in his stead the next candidate on the poll, a Democrat, and given him his certificate.

In the South nineteen electoral votes were in dispute. In Louisiana there had, apparently, been a clear majority of Democratic votes cast at the polls, alike for presidential electors and for governor and state legislators; but once again the returning board, which was in the hands of Republicans, had turned a Democratic into a Republican majority by rejecting the votes of precincts in which it declared fraud or intimidation to have been used. Certificates had been given to the Republican presidential electors, accordingly, and again a Republican state government had been set up by force of authority. But again the Democrats had refused to yield. They had set up, on their own part, a Democratic administration, and Mr. Nicholls, whom they claimed to have elected governor, gave certificates to the Democratic electors. In Florida the vote had been very close indeed, and turned upon the votes of a single county. The returning board of the State had but a single Democratic member, the Attorney General, and the majority of the board had given the vote of the State to the Republicans The Attorney General had issued certificates over his own signature to the Democratic electors. In South Carolina federal troops had in many places guarded the polls, and federal troops had assisted the Republican leaders of the State to put the governor and state legislators whom they claimed to have elected into office; but the Democrats claimed that their candidates had in fact been chosen, notwithstanding the obstructions to free voting created by the presence of troops and the interference of federal supervisors acting under the "Force Bills" of 1870 and 1871; inaugurated their own governor, General Wade Hampton, a distinguished cavalry commander of the Confederacy; and set up their own legislature. General Hampton issued certificates of election to the Democratic presidential electors.

All the country saw, with an instant thrill of misgiving, how perilous a situation was thus created. Here were double returns from three States in a presidential election, and the decision which should be chosen must determine the election. One vote out of the twenty in dispute, though it were only the single questionable vote of Oregon, would give the presidency to the Democrats. The control of the government turned upon the action of the houses when they should come to count the votes in joint session. The House of Representatives was Democratic, the Senate Republican; there was no hope that they could agree. No one could confidently say, though he put partisanship aside and held his judgment at the nicest poise, upon which side the right lay in the disputed southern elections. It was plain enough that in any case the returning boards would have given the vote to the Republicans, whatever the face of the returns, so long as the men for whom they acted felt that they could count upon the support of the Executive at Washington in the maintenance of their authority. It was equally clear, on the other hand, that there were all but indisputable evidences of fraud or at the least irregularity in the votes upon which the Democrats relied. In South Carolina serious riots had occurred whose avowed object had been the intimidation of the negroes. The country had grown very impatient, as General Grant said, of seeing governments maintained at the South by federal arms, and wished very heartily to see the hand of the federal Executive withdrawn, come what come might; and yet it was not as clear as could be wished that this was the occasion for their legitimate overthrow.

What the country had really to fear was, not the difficulty of the problem as a question of justice, but the passion of parties, the danger that those who stood at the front of party counsels would seek the success of their party by some intrigue, even by some stroke of violence. Foreseeing a certain deadlock of the houses when it should come to a counting of the votes, there was talk among the more headlong and reckless partisans of each side of taking the law into their own hands. There were signs almost of civil war in the air for a few troubled weeks of that anxious autumn.

But it was never really likely it would come to that. Men trained in the temper of American institutions had never thought to settle a constitutional difficulty after that fashion. Congress listened very willingly to counsels of compromise and moderation. It was agreed that an electoral commission should be constituted, which should consist of five members of the House, three Democrats and two Republicans, five members of the Senate, three Republicans and two Democrats, two Democrats and two Republicans from the supreme bench of the United States, and an additional Justice from the same court selected by the four Justices named in the bill; and that to that commission should be referred every question in dispute. Such a commission was undoubtedly an extra-constitutional body, and its decisions disappointed the country of any display of judicial impartiality it may have hoped for from it. Mr. Justice Bradley, who was chosen by his fellow Justices of the commission to be the fifteenth member of the tribunal, voted in every instance in favor of the Republican claims, as did every other member of the commission, whether judge, senator, or representative, whose affiliations were with the Republican party. Every Democrat of the commission voted in favor of the claims of the Democratic managers. Every question submitted was settled by a vote of eight to seven. But there was at least a settlement, which no one dreamed of disputing or attempting to annul. General Grant gave way to Mr. Hayes, and the government remained in the hands of the Republicans.

To Mr. Hayes the tacit obligations of the situation were plain. He withdrew the federal troops from the South. The Republican governments of Louisiana and South Carolina were dissolved, and the Democratic governments which had claimed the election quietly took their place. The supreme court of Florida obliged the returning board of the State to accept the returns which had come to them from the disputed county, and a Democratic government came there also into power. The era of reconstruction was at an end.

The quiet figure of the retiring President began to seem almost at once like a figure lingering out of an age gone by. The honest, simple-hearted soldier had not added prestige to the presidential office. He himself knew that he had failed, that the administrative scandals, the stain of corruption, of intrigue, of malversation, the appearance as if of a group of personal allies bent upon their own aggrandizement rather than of a body of public servants devoted to the honest conduct of the nation’s business, which had marked his management of the executive office must always stand as proof that he ought never to have been made President. But the corruption had not touched him. He was unstained. Every one who thought justly of the matter attributed his failure rather to his very honesty and simplicity of nature than to any fault of will. His trustfulness had betrayed him; his desire to be faithful to his friends had led him to shield knaves. He had thought other men as honest, as straightforward as himself. He had come to a great office untrained in affairs. Men’s eyes followed his retreating figure with respect, with veneration, with deep affection, and forgot that he had been duped by politicians; remembered only that he had been the successful leader of the armies of the republic.

Authorities. All the larger and more systematic histories of the country stop short of times so recent as those covered by this chapter. Neither is it any longer feasible to distinguish general authorities from contemporary accounts. All accounts of a time so recent are contemporary. We have for general guidance Judson S. Landon’s Constitutional History and Government of the United States, Alexander Johnston’s American Politics, the same author’s admirable articles on the several topics here treated of, such as Reconstruction, the Ku Klux, Credit Mobilier, etc., in Lalor’s Cyclopaedia of Political Science, Political Economy, and United States History, John Clark Ridpath’s popular History of the United States, John W. Burgess’s Reconstruction and the Constitution, Edward Channing’s Student’s History of the United States, Edward Stanwood’s History of the Presidency, Appleton’s Annual Cyclopaedia, Edward McPherson’s Handbook of Politics, issued in biennial volumes, except in 1870, from 1868 to 1894, Scribner’s Statistical Atlas of the United States, to 1880, William A. Dunning’s Essays on the Civil War and Reconstruction, G. W. Williams’s History of the Negro Race in America, W. H. Barnes’s History of the Thirty-ninth Congress, Albert Bushnell Hart’s Foundations of American Foreign Policy, and many valuable articles scattered through the volumes of the Atlantic Monthly (especially a series on Reconstruction which appeared in 1901), the North American Review, The Forum, The Nation, and the Political Science Quarterly.

Among the more important memoirs are James G. Blaine’s Twenty Years of Congress, S. S. Cox’s Three Decades of Federal Legislation, 1855 to 1885, Hugh McCulloch’s Men and Measures of Half a Century, John Sherman’s Recollections of Forty Years in the House, Senate, and Cabinet, Dabney Herndon Maury’s Recollections of a Virginian, Bishop R. H. Wilmer’s Recent Past from a Southern Standpoint, Reuben Davis’s Recollections of Mississippi and Mississipians, and G. W. Julian’s Political Recollections.

Adam Badeau’s Grant in Peace, A. R. Conkling’s Life and Letters of Roscoe Conkling, John Bigelow’s Life of Samuel J. Tilden, Albert Bushnell Hart’s Salmon P. Chase in the American Statesmen Series, and Moorfield Storey’s Charles Sumner, in the same Series, cover parts of the period from the point of view of the several men of whom they treat.

Mr. Hilary A. Herbert’s Why the Solid South? and Mr. William Garrott Brown’s The Lower South in American History throw a great deal of light upon the time in regard to the affairs and the sentiment of the South; Mr. J. Lawrence Laughlin’s History of Bimetallism in the United States and Professor F. IV. Taussig’s Silver Situation in the United States and Tariff History of the United States, and Mr. A. S. Bolles’s Financial History of the United States, furnish excellent summaries of financial and fiscal conditions; Mr. Carroll D. Wright’s Industrial Evolution of the United States sketches the development of industry and invention, and Mr. David A. Wells’s Recent Economic Changes the altered economic conditions; Mr. Lauros G. McConachie’s Congressional Committees and Miss M. P. Follett’s The Speaker of the House of Representatives discuss the transformations of Congress and its relations to public business; and Mr. Henry Jones Ford’s Rise and Growth of American Politics affords one of the best philosophical analyses of the general history of parties, party organization, and party control, anywhere to be found.

The sources are in the Journals of Congress, the Congressional Record, the House and Senate Documents, the Messages and Papers of the Presidents, and the periodical press of the time.