the right to vote on grounds of race,
color, or previous condition of servitude, and was not submitted to the
States until after the inauguration of General Grant. A fear that the
South would disfranchise the freedmen, pay the price, and revert to
Democratic control seems to have been the prime motive in its adoption.
When it was proclaimed, March 30, 1870, the radical Republicans had done
everything in their power to save themselves, and had inflicted on the
conquered States, in malice, ignorance, or mistaken philanthropy, a
condition that in the North, with its trifling number of negroes, was
tolerated with reluctance.

The South was in name completely restored in 1870, but neither
restoration nor reconstruction was in fact far advanced. In the latter
process it was yet clearing away the wreckage of the institution of
slavery, breaking up the plantations, devising new systems of tenure and
wage, rebuilding the material equipment that the war had left desolate.
The former process was only commenced. It was unthinkable that an
American community should permit itself to remain subject to the
absolute control of its least respected members, yet this was the aim of
white disfranchisement and negro suffrage. Law or no law, the
restoration of the South was not complete until its government was back
in the control of its responsible white population.

Almost without exception, until 1870, the Southern State Governments
were what Congress had chosen to make them. Their Senators and
Representatives in Congress were Republican, commonly of the carpet-bag
variety. Their governors, administrative officers, and legislatures were
Republican, too. Rarely were they persons of property or standing in
their communities, and often, as their records show, they were both
black and illiterate. Had all possessed good intentions they could
hardly have hoped to meet the local needs, which called for a wise
revision of law in order that the community might recover and live. That
their work should be accompanied by error and waste was inevitable.

From the contemporary accounts of travelers in the South, from public
documents, from the growing body of Southern biography and reminiscence,
it is easy to gather a mass of detail upon the extravagance of the
Reconstruction Governments. Printing bills and salary lists rose without
a corresponding increase in service done. When expenditures exceeded the
revenues, loans were created carelessly and rec