at once seen that if the party which had insisted
upon the emancipation of the slave as a final condition of peace,
should now abandon him to his fate, and turn him over to the anger and
hate of the class from whose ownership he had been freed, it would
countenance and commit an act of far greater wrong than was designed
by the most malignant persecutor of the race in any one of the Southern
States. When the Congress of the United States, acting independently
of the Executive power of the Nation, decreed emancipation by amending
the Constitution, it solemnly pledged itself, with all its power, to
give protection to the emancipated at whatever cost and at whatever
sacrifice. No man could read the laws which have been here briefly
reviewed without seeing and realizing that, if the negro were to be
deprived of the protecting power of the Nation that had set him free,
he had better at once be remanded to slavery, and to that form of
protection which cupidity, if not humanity, would always inspire.

The South had no excuse for its course, and the leaders of its public
opinion at that time will always, and justly, be held to a strict
accountability. Even the paltry pretext, afterwards so often advanced,
that they were irritated and maddened by the interposition of carpet-bag
power, does not avail in the least degree for the outrages in the
era under consideration. When Mr. Johnson issued his proclamation of
reconstruction, the hated carpet-bagger was an unknown element in the
Southern states. What was done during the year immediately following
the surrender of the rebel armies was done at Southern suggestion, done
by Southern men, done under the belief that the President's policy
would protect them in it, done with a fixed and merciless determination
that the gracious act of emancipation should not bring amelioration to
the colored race, and that the pseudo-philanthropy, as they regarded
the anti-slavery feeling in the North, should be brought into contempt
before the world. They deliberately resolved to prove to the public
opinion of mankind that the negro was fit only to be a chattel, and
that in his misery and degradation, sure to follow the iniquitous
enactments for the new form of his subjection, it would be proved that
he had lost and not gained by the conferment of freedom among a
population where it was impossible for him to enjoy it. They resolved
also to prove that slavery was the normal and natural state of