all
her obligations faithfully and to keep her word sacredly, and I assert
that the North has no right to demand more of her. You have no right
to ask, or expect that she will at once profess unbounded love to that
Union from which for four years she tried to escape at the cost of
her best blood and all her treasures." General Lee in order to set an
example applied through General Grant for a pardon under the amnesty
proclamation and soon afterwards he wrote to Governor Letcher: "All
should unite in honest efforts to obliterate the effects of war, and to
restore the blessings of peace. They should remain, if possible, in the
country; promote harmony and good-feeling; qualify themselves to vote;
and elect to the State and general legislatures wise and patriotic men,
who will devote their abilities to the interests of the country and the
healing of all dissensions; I have invariably recommended this course
since the cessation of hostilities, and have endeavored to practice it
myself."

Southerners of the Confederacy everywhere, then, accepted the
destruction of slavery and the renunciation of state sovereignty; they
welcomed an early restoration of the Union, without any punishment of
leaders of the defeated cause. But they were proud of their Confederate
records though now legally "loyal" to the United States; they considered
the Negro as free but inferior, and expected to be permitted to fix his
status in the social organization and to solve the problem of free labor
in their own way. To embarrass the easy and permanent realization of
these views there was a society disrupted, economically prostrate,
deprived of its natural leaders, subjected to a control not always
wisely conceived nor effectively exercised, and, finally, containing
within its own population unassimilated elements which presented
problems fraught with difficulty and danger.

CHAPTER II. WHEN FREEDOM CRIED OUT

The Negro is the central figure in the reconstruction of the South.
Without the Negro there would have been no Civil War. Granting a war
fought for any other cause, the task of reconstruction would, without
him, have been comparatively simple. With him, however, reconstruction
meant more than the restoring of shattered resources; it meant the more
or less successful attempt to obtain and secure for the freedman civil
and political rights, and to improve his economic and social status.
In 1861, the American Negro was everywhere an inferior,