ound by experience to be necessary. But in
fact there was at no time any attempt to go further with National
election laws than to provide for punishment of fraudulent
or violent interference with elections or for a sufficient
provision to ascertain that they were properly conducted,
or to protect them against violence or fraud.

Beside this it was the desire of many Republican leaders,
especially of Mr. Sumner and General Grant, that there should
be a provision at the National charge for the education of
all the citizens in the Southern States, black and white,
so far as the States were unable or unwilling to afford it,
such as had been provided for in the States of the North
for all their citizens. It was never contemplated by them
to give the right to vote to a large number of illiterate
citizens, without ample provision for their education at the
public charge. General Grant accompanied his official announcement
to Congress of the adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment with
an earnest recommendation of such a provision. Earnest efforts
were made to accomplish this result by liberal grants from
the National treasury. Many liberal and patriotic Southern
Democrats supported it. But it was defeated by the timidity,
or mistaken notions of economy, of Northern statesmen. In
my opinion this defeat accounts for the failure of the policy
of reconstruction so far as it has failed. I do not believe
that self-government with universal suffrage could be maintained
long in any Northern State, or in any country in the world,
without ample provision for public education.

It has been claimed with great sincerity and not without
plausible reason that a great hardship and wrong was inflicted
by the victorious North on their fellow citizens when the
political power in their States was given over to their former
slaves. This consideration had great force in the minds of
many influential Republicans in the North. Governor Andrew
of Massachusetts, Governor Morton of Indiana, afterward Senator,
men whose influence was probably unsurpassed by any other
two men in the country, save Grant and Sumner alone, were
of that way of thinking. They thought that our true policy
was to let the men who had led their States into the Rebellion
take the responsibility of restoring them to their old relations.

It is not unlikely that the strength of the Republican Party
would have been seriously impaired, perhaps overthrown, by
the division