d for the political privileges
which were vouchsafed to them and they were to a large extent under
the wrong sort of leadership. It is equally true, however, that
governments were corrupt throughout the United States at this period.
The Reconstruction period was one of corruption and if the Negro
governments were of a lower order than a few others, they were not far
out of accord with the times. The white people, who assumed control of
the government on overthrowing the Reconstruction regime, instituted
in several States a rule of corruption surpassing even that of their
predecessors. Coming back into office like hungry persons who had been
exposed to the cold atmosphere of an exile, the radical whites filled
their purses from the coffers of the public treasury and defaulted to
the amount of thousands of dollars which the tax payers have had to
replace in the years thereafter.[12] The disgraces of Reconstruction,
therefore, have been exaggeratingly flaunted by the South for the same
purpose that it proclaims the widespread false charge of rape of the
present day to justify the persecution of the Negro for being
"unusually criminal."

The Negro was finally driven from southern politics through violence
and fraud. The chief agent of the southern whites in accomplishing
this was a secret organization known as the Ku Klux Klan. This
organized mob killed off or drove the leading "Carpetbaggers" out of
the South and intimidated the Negroes into submission by perpetrating
numerous outrages upon them. After the whites regained control of the
government, through their agents of terror the political ascendancy of
the Negro was at end. The unscrupulous northern friends of the Negro
having discovered that they could no longer successfully exploit them,
therefore, abandoned them in the midst of their calamity. The whites
proceeded to solidify the Democratic party and to eliminate the Negro
entirely from politics in the South.

Politically, however, Reconstruction was in several respects a
success. In the first place, the reconstructed governments were
democratic, lifting a standard that the backward commonwealths of the
South must still struggle for years to reach. In this social upheaval
the poor white man was politically emancipated by receiving the boon
of suffrage theretofore restricted to persons owning property and
given a free and open door to office holding, which, under the old
regime had been restricted to the few aristo