nestly
declaring that the actual conditions of the South called for stronger
remedies than the President had provided. A joint resolution brought
before Congress a report which had been made to the President by Carl
Schurz, after a tour of several months for which he had been specially
commissioned. With this report, the President sent also one from General
Grant, whom he had asked, during an official trip of a few days, to
observe the general disposition and temper of the Southern people. Grant
stated his conclusion to be that "the mass of thinking men of the South
accept the present situation of affairs in good faith"; and that they
cordially acquiesce in the restoration of the national sovereignty and
the abolition of slavery; and Grant's name carried great weight.

But Mr. Schurz's much longer and more careful study had brought him to
very different conclusions. He was a trained observer and thinker; a
German refugee after the disturbances of 1848; a leader among the
emancipationists in Missouri before the war, a general in the Union
army, and a political radical. Mr. Schurz recapitulated his observations
and conclusions, as he then reported them, in an article in _McClure's
Magazine_ for January, 1904; and they come now with increased weight
after a life-time of disinterested and sagacious public service. That he
found the Southern whites acquiescing in their defeat only as of
necessity, conquered but not convinced--is no matter of surprise; though
Mr. Schurz seems somewhat to have shared the Northern expectation that
their late foes should take the attitude of repentant sinners. But as to
their practical attitude toward the negro, his testimony is important.
He relates that he found the general assertion to be "You cannot make
the negro work without compulsion." This conviction he encountered
everywhere; all facts to the contrary were brushed aside, and every
instance of idleness or vagabondage was cited as proof positive of the
negro's unwillingness to labor. The planter who seriously maintained in
Mr. Schurz's presence that one of his negroes was unfit for freedom
because he refused to submit to a whipping, went only a little further
than his neighbors.

As to actual behavior of the negroes, under this sudden and tremendous
change of condition, certain facts were noted; not a single act of
vengeance was charged against them; a great part, probably the large
majority, remained or soon went back to work for their