year, and remained in control of the State.
Virginia, which had advisedly kept under military rule until, with
President Grant's aid, she came in without the excluding clauses, early
in 1870, passed at once under Democratic rule. In the same year North
Carolina became Democratic. Texas and Arkansas remained under Republican
sway until the majority shifted to the Democrats in 1874. In Alabama,
the Democrats gained the Governorship and the lower House as early as
1870; two years later the result was disputed, the Democrats conceding
the Governor but claiming the Legislature, while the Republicans
organized a rival Legislature; the Republican Governor-elect called for
United States troops, which were promptly dispatched, and with their
backing a Republican Legislature was secured. In 1874 a Democratic
Governor and Legislature were chosen and installed without dispute. The
Federal interference in Alabama, and the experience of others of the
reconstructed States,--South Carolina, Mississippi, and
Louisiana,--recalls us to that phase of the history which deals with
Washington and the national government.

Through the eight years of Grant's administration, the public life of
the nation was concerned mainly with clearing away the wreckage left by
the war. There was an enormous debt to be handled and an inflated
currency to be reduced; there was to be curbed administrative
extravagance and corruption, bred of profuse expenditure; a bitter
quarrel with England was to be guided toward war or peace; and the
disordered South was to be composed. These tasks were encountered by men
whose habits and sentiments had been formed in a long and desperate
contest, and in an atmosphere slowly cooling from the fiery glow of
battle. The soldier had to beat his sword into a plowshare, and small
wonder if the blacksmithing was sometimes clumsy.

Grant was too completely a soldier to be changed into a statesman. He
could deal with a definite, limited, though gigantic business,--the
overcoming of the armies of the Confederacy. But it was beyond his power
to comprehend and master the manifold and intricate problems that center
in the Presidency. Given a specific, well-defined question, within the
reach of his sturdy sense and loyal purpose, and he could deal with it
to good effect, as he did with the English arbitration and the Inflation
bill. But he was incapable of far-reaching and constructive plans
carefully laid and patiently pursued. When he