, but in general the
Democrats were not able to carry their measures over the President's
veto. From the Supreme Court, however, they received practical
assistance, for while this body did not formally grant that the states
had full powers over elections, it nevertheless nullified many of the
most objectionable sections of the laws. Before the close of the decade,
by intimidation, the theft, suppression or exchange of the ballot boxes,
the removal of the polls to unknown places, false certifications, and
illegal arrests on the day before an election, the Negro vote had been
rendered ineffectual in every state of the South.

When Cleveland was elected in 1884 the Negroes of the South naturally
felt that the darkest hour of their political fortunes had come. It had,
for among many other things this election said that after twenty years
of discussion and tumult the Negro question was to be relegated to the
rear, and that the country was now to give main attention to other
problems. For the Negro the new era was signalized by one of the most
effective speeches ever delivered in this or any other country, all
the more forceful because the orator was a man of unusual nobility of
spirit. In 1886 Henry W. Grady, of Georgia, addressed the New England
Club in New York on "The New South." He spoke to practical men and he
knew his ground. He asked his hearers to bring their "full faith in
American fairness and frankness" to judgment upon what he had to say.
He pictured in brilliant language the Confederate soldier, "ragged,
half-starved, heavy-hearted, who wended his way homeward to find his
house in ruins and his farm devastated." He also spoke kindly of the
Negro: "Whenever he struck a blow for his own liberty he fought in open
battle, and when at last he raised his black and humble hands that the
shackles might be struck off, those hands were innocent of wrong against
his helpless charges." But Grady also implied that the Negro had
received too much attention and sympathy from the North. Said he: "To
liberty and enfranchisement is as far as law can carry the Negro.
The rest must be left to conscience and common sense." Hence on this
occasion and others he asked that the South be left alone in the
handling of her grave problem. The North, a little tired of the Negro
question, a little uncertain also as to the wisdom of the reconstruction
policy that it had forced on the South, and if concerned with this
section at all, interested