uth
Carolina, attracted unusual attention by his speech in reply to
Alexander Stephens on the constitutionality of the Civil Rights bill. At
the same time among the Negro legislators there was also considerable
ignorance, and there set in an era of extravagance and corruption from
which the "carpet-baggers" and the "scalawags" rather than the Negroes
themselves reaped the benefit. Accordingly within recent years it has
become more and more the fashion to lament the ills of the period, and
no representative American historian can now write of reconstruction
without a tone of apology. A few points, however, are to be observed.
In the first place the ignorance was by no means so vast as has been
supposed. Within the four years from 1861 to 1865, thanks to the army
schools and missionary agencies, not less than half a million Negroes in
the South had learned to read and write. Furthermore, the suffrage was
not immediately given to the emancipated Negroes; this was the
last rather than the first step in reconstruction. The provisional
legislatures formed at the close of the war were composed of white men
only; but the experiment failed because of the short-sighted laws that
were enacted. If the fruit of the Civil War was not to be lost, if all
the sacrifice was not to prove in vain, it became necessary for Congress
to see that the overthrow of slavery was final and complete. By the
Fourteenth Amendment the Negro was invested with the ordinary rights and
dignity of a citizen of the United States. He was not enfranchised, but
he could no longer be made the victim of state laws designed merely to
keep him in servile subjection. If the Southern states had accepted
this amendment, they might undoubtedly have reentered the Union without
further conditions. They refused to do so; they refused to help the
National Government in any way whatsoever in its effort to guarantee
to the Negro the rights of manhood. Achilles sulked in his tent, and
whenever he sulks the world moves on--without him. The alternative
finally presented to Congress, if it was not to make an absolute
surrender, was either to hold the South indefinitely under military
subjection or to place the ballot in the hands of the Negro. The former
course was impossible; the latter was chosen, and the Union was really
restored--was really saved--by the force of the ballot in the hands of
black men.

It has been held that the Negro was primarily to blame for the
corruption