in fact, whatever he may be in
law, a de-citizenized man--exposed in consequence to the enmities, the
jealousies, the insults and the violence of other citizens who are more
fortunate in this regard. He is, whatever may be his legal status on
paper, a proscribed man, subject to unmerited and unmeasured ignominies
and injustices at the hands of his country, its society, its passions and
prejudices. Governor Andrew was right, a disfranchised man, a
disfranchised class must become ultimately, "The hopeless pariah of a
merciless civilization." This is the peril, the fate which hangs over the
colored race at the close of the first fifty years of its emancipation.

Governor Andrew's scheme for the reconstruction of the rebel states
included not only the extension of the suffrage to the blacks but the
re-admission to their full citizenship of the class of old slaveholders
who had carried those states out of the Union. They were needed as leaders
in the work of restoration and reconstruction, he shrewdly argued. And he
was right. They were indeed the natural leaders of the South, and had they
turned their backs upon the past and faced patriotically the new problems
and the new posture of their affairs they might have led both races into
the promised land of freedom and peace and Southern industrial expansion
and greatness. Had they seized their golden opportunity for progressive
and constructive statesmanship, the sceptre of their ascendency in the
governments of their section could not have been wrested from them by
another class of whites, risen since the war, who distrust and hate them,
but they might instead have transmitted their ascendency undiminished to
their descendants, who ought to be today the leaders of the new South.

The course laid down by Governor Andrew was not followed either by the
South or by the North. The Southern leaders taking advantage of the
opportunity given them by Andrew Johnson reconstructed their section along
the lines of their old social system, reducing its changes to a minimum.
They emerged out of their reconstruction operation with a Negro serf
system to take the place of their old slave system. The Negro as a serf
was just about as valuable as an industrial asset to the great landlords
and to the small ones too for that matter, as had been the Negro as a
slave. Just about as much unpaid and involuntary labor could be got out of
the first as out of the last. Thus did the old master class per