all sides. Not only was there no
violent opposition, but for a few weeks there was no opposition at all.
The civil officials were openly unsympathetic, and the newspapers voiced
dissent not untouched with disgust; others simply could not take the
situation seriously because it seemed so absurd; many leaders were
indifferent, while others among them, Generals Lee, Beauregard, and
Longstreet, and Governor Patton--without approving the policy, advised
the whites to cooperate with the military authorities and save all they
could out of the situation. General Beauregard, for instance, wrote in
1867: "If the suffrage of the Negro is properly handled and directed,
we shall defeat our adversaries with their own weapons. The Negro is
Southern born. With education and property qualifications he can be made
to take an interest in the affairs of the South and in its prosperity.
He will side with the whites."

Northern observers who were friendly to the South or who disapproved
of this radical reconstruction saw the danger more clearly than
the Southerners themselves, who seemed not to appreciate the full
implication of the situation. In this connection the New York "Herald"
remarked:

"We may regard the entire ten unreconstructed Southern States, with
possibly one or two exceptions, as forced by a secret and overwhelming
revolutionary influence to a common and inevitable fate. They are all
bound to be governed by blacks spurred on by worse than blacks--white
wretches who dare not show their faces in respectable society anywhere.
This is the most abominable phase barbarism has assumed since the dawn
of civilization. It was all right and proper to put down the rebellion.
It was all right perhaps to emancipate the slaves.... But it is not
right to make slaves of white men even though they may have been former
masters of blacks. This is but a change in a system of bondage that is
rendered the more odious and intolerable because it has been inaugurated
in an enlightened instead of a dark and uncivilized age."

The political parties rapidly grouped themselves for the coming
struggle. The radical Republican party indeed was in process of
organization in the South even before the passage of the reconstruction
acts. Its membership was made up of Negroes, carpetbaggers, or Northern
men who had come in as speculators, officers of the Freedmen's Bureau
and of the army, scalawags or Confederate renegades, "Peace Society"
men,* and Unionists