debt had been created in the defense of the union, and to the
Republican party every investor in government bonds could look for the
full and honorable discharge of the interest and principal. The spoils
system, inaugurated by Jacksonian Democracy, in turn placed all the
federal offices in Republican hands, furnishing an army of party workers
to be counted on for loyal service in every campaign.

Of all these things Republican leaders made full and vigorous use,
sometimes ascribing to the party, in accordance with ancient political
usage, merits and achievements not wholly its own. Particularly was this
true in the case of saving the union. "When in the economy of
Providence, this land was to be purged of human slavery ... the
Republican party came into power," ran a declaration in one platform.
"The Republican party suppressed a gigantic rebellion, emancipated four
million slaves, decreed the equal citizenship of all, and established
universal suffrage," ran another. As for the aid rendered by the
millions of Northern Democrats who stood by the union and the tens of
thousands of them who actually fought in the union army, the Republicans
in their zeal were inclined to be oblivious. They repeatedly charged the
Democratic party "with being the same in character and spirit as when it
sympathized with treason."

=Republican Control of the South.=--To the strength enjoyed in the
North, the Republicans for a long time added the advantages that came
from control over the former Confederate states where the newly
enfranchised negroes, under white leadership, gave a grateful support to
the party responsible for their freedom. In this branch of politics,
motives were so mixed that no historian can hope to appraise them all at
their proper values. On the one side of the ledger must be set the
vigorous efforts of the honest and sincere friends of the freedmen to
win for them complete civil and political equality, wiping out not only
slavery but all its badges of misery and servitude. On the same side
must be placed the labor of those who had valiantly fought in forum and
field to save the union and who regarded continued Republican supremacy
after the war as absolutely necessary to prevent the former leaders in
secession from coming back to power. At the same time there were
undoubtedly some men of the baser sort who looked on politics as a game
and who made use of "carpet-bagging" in the South to win the spoils that
might result