ion and dignity. But among the influences that weighed with the
Southern Congressmen was the assurance from Hayes's friends that as
President he would make an end of military interference in the South. In
the giving of the assurance there was nothing unworthy, for the
withdrawal of the troops was dictated by the whole logic of recent
events, and was in keeping with Hayes's convictions.

So, quickly following the inauguration of President Hayes came the
withdrawal of the blue-coats from South Carolina and Louisiana and the
Republican State governments tumbled like card houses. Nicholls took the
governorship in New Orleans and Hampton in Columbia. But it was not by
this act alone that the new President inaugurated a new regime. He
called to his Cabinet as postmaster-general, David M. Key, of Tennessee,
who had fought for the Confederacy. Schurz, liberal and reformer of the
first rank, was given the department of the interior. Evarts in the
State department; Devens, of Massachusetts, as attorney-general; Sherman
in the treasury, to complete the work of resumption; McCrary, of Iowa,
and Thompson, of Indiana, for the war and navy; and Blaine, Morton,
Conkling, Chandler,--nowhere. The administration went steadily on its
way, little loved by the old party chiefs; under some shadow from the
character of its title; but doing good work, achieving resumption of
specie payments; ending the administrative scandals which had grown
worse to the end of Grant's term; reforming the civil service. It was a
peaceful and beneficent revolution, and in its quiet years the Southern
turmoils subsided, and for better or for worse South Carolina and
Mississippi worked out their own way as New York and Ohio worked out
theirs.

CHAPTER XXXVI

REGENERATION

"Evil is good in the making," says the optimist philosopher. Even the
more sober view of life reveals

That men may rise on stepping-stones
Of their dead selves to higher things.

Out of the calamities and horrors of war came to the nation a larger
life. Communities had been lifted out of pettiness, churches had half
forgotten their sectarianism, to millions of souls a sublimer meaning in
life had been disclosed. Lowell said it in two lines:

Earth's biggest country's got her soul,
And risen up earth's greatest nation.

The South had suffered far more than the North, and the South reaped the
larger profit. The fallacy of the old Southern civilization had been the
idea t