ites got into Congress; and the Border
States ranged themselves more solidly with the conservatives.

But while the Southern whites were becoming desperate under oppression,
public opinion in the North was at last beginning to affect politics.
The elections of 1874 resulted in a Democratic landslide of which
the Administration was obliged to take notice. Grant now grew more
responsive to criticism. In 1875 he replied to a request for troops to
hold down Mississippi: "The whole public are tired out with these annual
autumnal outbreaks in the South and the great majority are ready now
to condemn any interference on the part of the Government." As soon
as conditions in the South were better understood in the North, ready
sympathy and political aid were offered by many who had hitherto acted
with the radicals. The Ku Klux report as well as the newspaper writings
and the books of J. S. Pike and Charles Nordhoff, both former opponents
of slavery, opened the eyes of many to the evil results of Negro
suffrage. Some who had been considered friends of the Negro, now
believing that he had proven to be a political failure, coldly abandoned
him and turned their altruistic interests to other objects more likely
to succeed. Many real friends of the Negro were alarmed at the evils of
the reconstruction and were anxious to see the corrupt political leaders
deprived of further influence over the race. To others the constantly
recurring Southern problem was growing stale, and they desired to hear
less of it. Within the Republican party in each Southern State, there
were serious divisions over the spoils. First it was carpetbagger and
Negro against the scalawag; later, when the black leaders insisted that
those who furnished the votes must have the larger share of the rewards,
the fight became triangular. As a result, by 1874 the Republican
party in the South was split into factions and was deserted by a large
proportion of its white membership.

The conservative whites, fiercely resentful after their experiences
under the enforcement laws and hopeful of Northern sympathy, now planned
a supreme effort to regain their former power. Race lines were more
strictly drawn; ostracism of all that was radical became the rule; the
Republican party in the South, it was apparent, was doomed to be only
a Negro party weighed down by the scandal of bad government; the state
treasuries were bankrupt, and there was little further opportunity
for plunder.