Southern counsels were now much divided. Many good men, like Governor Brown, of Georgia; General Longstreet and ex-Senator Albert Gallatin Brown, of Mississippi, advised acquiescence and assistance, "not because we approve the policy of Reconstruction, but because it is the best we can do." These advisers hoped that good men, well known to the negroes, might control them for the country's good; and zealous efforts were made along this line in every State, but they were futile. The blacks had already, before they got the suffrage, accepted the leadership of those claiming to be the "men who had freed them." These leaders were not only bureau agents but army camp-followers; and there was still another brood, who espied from afar a political Eden in the prostrate States and forthwith journeyed to it. All these Northern adventurers were called "carpet-baggers"—they carried their worldly goods in their hand-bags. The Southerners who entered into a joint-stock business with them became "scalawags." These people mustered the negroes into leagues, and everywhere whispered it into their ears that the aim of the Southern whites was to reënslave them.
Politics in the South in the days before the war had always been more or less intense, partly because there were so many who had leisure, and partly because the general rule was joint political discussions. The seams that had divided Whigs and Democrats, Secessionists and Union men, had not been entirely closed up, even by the melting fires of the Civil War. Old feuds for a time played their part in Southern politics, even after March, 1867. These old feuds made it difficult for Southern whites to get together as a race; and, in fact, conservative men dreaded the idea. It tended toward an actual race war which, for many years, had been a nightmare; but in every reconstructed State the negro and his allies finally forced the race issue.
The new rulers not only increased taxes and misappropriated the revenues of counties, cities, and States; they bartered away the credit of State after State. Some of the States, after they were redeemed, scaled their debts by compromising with creditors; others have struggled along with their increased burdens.
There were hundreds of negro policemen, constables, justices of the peace, and legislators who could not write their names. Justice was in many localities a farce. Ex-slaves became judges, representatives in Congress, and United States senators. The eleven Confederate States had been divided into military districts. Many of the officers and men who were scattered over the country to uphold negro rule sympathized with the whites and evidenced their sympathy in various ways. Others, either because they were radicals at heart, or to commend themselves to their superiors, who were some of them aspiring to political places, were super-serviceable; and it was not uncommon for a military officer, in a case where a negro was a party, to order a judge to leave the bench and himself take the place. In communities where negro majorities were overwhelming there were usually two factions, and when political campaigns were on agents for these clans often scoured the fields clear of laborers to recruit their marching bands. In cities these bands made night hideous with shouts and the noise of fifes and drums. The negro would tolerate no defection from his ranks to the whites, and negro women were more intolerant than the men. It sometimes happened that a bloody clash between the races was imminent when white men sought to protect a negro who had dared to speak in favor of the Democratic and Conservative party. In truth, the civilization of the South was being changed from white to negroid.
The final triumph of good government in all the States was at last accomplished by accepting the race issue, as in Alabama in 1874. The first resolution in the platform of the "Democratic and Conservative party" in that State then was, "The radical and dominant faction of the Republican party in this State persistently, and by fraudulent representations, have inflamed the passions and prejudices of the negroes, as a race, against the white people, and have thereby made it necessary for the white people to unite and act together in self-defence and for the preservation of white civilization."
The people of North Carolina recovered the right of self-government in 1870. Other States followed from time to time, the last two being Louisiana and South Carolina in 1877.
Edwin L. Godkin, who was for long at the head of the Nation and the Evening Post, of New York, is thought by some competent judges to have been the ablest editor this country has ever had. After the last of the negro governments set up in the South had passed away, looking back over the whole bad business, Mr. Godkin, in a letter to his friend Charles Eliot Norton, written from Sweet Springs, West Virginia, September 3, 1877, said: "I do not see in short how the negro is ever to be worked into a system of government for which you and I could have much respect."[94]
Garrison is dead. At the centenary of his birth, December 12, 1904, an effort was made to arouse enthusiasm. There was only a feeble response; but we still have extremists. Professor Josiah Royce, of Harvard, in "Race Questions" (1906), speaking of race antipathies as "trained hatred," says, pp. 48-49: "We can remember that they are childish phenomena in our lives, phenomena on a level with the dread of snakes or of mice, phenomena that we share with the cats and with the dogs, not noble phenomena, but caprices of our complex nature."