franchise
that. If you will only disfranchise him for the qualities
which you say unfit him to vote and not for his race or the
color of his skin there is no Constitutional obstacle in your
way.

So it was not wholly a race or color problem. It was largely
a question of party supremacy. In three states, Alabama,
South Carolina and Florida, white Democrats charged each other
with stifling the voice of the majority by fraudulent election
processes, and in Alabama they claimed that a majority of
white men were disfranchised by a false count of negro votes
in the black belt.

It was not wholly unnatural that the men who, in dealing
with each other, were men of scrupulous honor and of undoubted
courage should have brought themselves to do such things,
or at any rate to screen and sympathize with the more hot-
headed men who did them. The proof in the public records
of those public crimes is abundant. With the exception of
Reverdy Johnson of Maryland there is no record of a single
manly remonstrance, or expression of disapproval from the
lips of any prominent Southern man. But they had persuaded
themselves to believe that a contest for political power with
a party largely composed of negroes was a contest for their
civilization itself. They thought it like a fight for life
with a pack of wolves. In some parts of the South there were
men as ready to murder a negro who tried to get an office
as to kill a fox they found prowling about a hen roost. These
brave and haughty men who had governed the country for half
a century, who had held the power of the United States at
bay for four years, who had never doffed their hats to any
prince or noble on earth, even in whose faults or vices there
was nothing mean or petty, never having been suspected of
corruption, who as Macaulay said of the younger Pitt, "If
in an hour of ambition they might have been tempted to ruin
their country, never would have stooped to pilfer from her,"
could not brook the sight of a Legislature made up of ignorant
negroes who had been their own slaves, and of venal carpet-
baggers. They could not endure that men, some of whom had
been bought and sold like chattels in the time of slavery,
and others ready to sell themselves, although they were freemen,
should sit to legislate for their States with their noble
and brave history. I myself, although I have always maintained,
and do now, the equal right of all men of whatever color or
race to a sh