se of the Negro to
political power even today is viewed with alarm. The opinions of the
biased historians in this field will be interesting. Several writers
refer to the Negro carpet bag movement as an effort to found
commonwealths upon the votes of an ignorant Negro electorate, as
working an injustice both to the whites and the blacks in that it made
the South solidly democratic.[3] J. G. de R. Hamilton, exaggerating
the actual basis of Reconstruction in the southern commonwealths,
which were never fully controlled by the Negroes, speaks of the work
as having left as a legacy "a protest against anything that might
threaten a repetition of the past, when selfish politicians, backed up
by the Federal Government, for party purposes, attempted to Africanize
the State and deprive the people through misrule and oppression of
most that life held dear."[4] John W. Burgess calls the effort an
"extravagant humanitarianism which had developed in the minds of the
Reconstruction leaders to the point of justifying, not only the
political equality of the races but the political superiority at least
in loyalty to the Union, the constitution and republican government,
of the uncivilized Negroes of the South."[5] Burgess sees justice in
subjecting the inferior to the superior class but none in subjecting
the superior to the inferior.

Of these radical utterances historians need take but little notice.
They are of value here for the reason that they show the lack of
scientific Reconstruction history. No intelligent man who lived
through this stormy period or who has read documents bearing on its
history will contend that these commonwealths were Africanized merely
because the Negroes along with the formerly disfranchised and ignorant
poor whites were given the right of suffrage. It will be difficult to
prove that the majority of poor whites in the South were at this time
sufficiently intelligent and experienced in statecraft to give those
commonwealths a much better government than that administered by the
Negroes and "Carpet baggers"; for the South had been ruled by few
aristocratic families, most of whom because of participation in the
Civil War, could not on the cessation of hostilities be given the
reins of government. A few who had not had any such connection with
the Confederacy haughtily refused to cooperate with the Negroes in the
reconstruction of these governments, although they were persistently
invited by the Negroes who wer