the dominant whites and vengeful malice against the negro burned like
slow fires. When almost everywhere the countryside was stripped of its
fighting men, these wretches emerged from their swamps and forests,
like the Paris rabble emerging from its dens at the opening of the
Revolution. But unlike the Frenchmen, they were too sodden to be capable
of ideas. Like predatory wild beasts they revenged themselves upon the
society that had cast them off, and with utter heartlessness they
smote the now defenseless negro. In the old days, with the country well
policed, the slaves had been protected against their fury, but war now
changed all. The negro villages--or "streets," as the term was--were
without arms and without white police within call. They were ravaged
by these marauders night after night, and negroes were not the only
victims, for in remote districts even murder of the whites became a
familiar horror.

The antiwar factions were not necessarily, however, users of
violence. There were some men who cherished a dream which they labeled
"reconstruction"; and there were certain others who believed in separate
state action, still clinging to the illusion that any State had it in
its power to escape from war by concluding a separate peace with the
United States.

Yet neither of these illusions made much headway in the States that
had borne the strain of intellectual leadership. Virginia and South
Carolina, though seldom seeing things eye to eye and finally drifting in
opposite directions, put but little faith in either "reconstruction"
or separate peace. Their leaders had learned the truth about men and
nations; they knew that life is a grim business; they knew that war had
unloosed passions that had to spend themselves and that could not be
talked away.

But there was scattered over the Confederacy a population which lacked
experience of the world and which included in the main those small
farmers and semi-peasants who under the old regime were released from
the burden of taxation and at the same time excluded from the benefits
of education. Among these people the illusions of the higher classes
were reflected without the ballast of mentality. Ready to fight on any
provocation, yet circumscribed by their own natures, not understanding
life, unable to picture to themselves different types and conditions,
these people were as prone as children to confuse the world of their own
desire with the world of fact. When hardship