Note 18 — PART I SOUTHWARD HO!

For the benefit of English readers, it may be well to state clearly what Reconstruction meant. I do so in the words of Mr. Edgar Gardner Murphy (“The Present South,” p. 9): “The policies of reconstruction represented two cardinal movements of purpose. One was the withdrawal of political and civic power from those, especially those in official positions, who had borne arms against the United States. This effort was an expedient of distrust. It was as natural as it was unintelligent, and it was as successful as it was mischievous.... This was not all. The suffrage which the masters were denied was by the same act committed into the hands of their former slaves, vast dumb multitudes, more helpless with power than without power.” It is almost universally admitted that the Reconstruction policy was a mistake, which would never have been made had Lincoln lived, and that its results were grotesque and often tragic. I find only Professor Du Bois putting in a word for it and for some of its results. “The granting of the ballot to the black man,” he says (“The Souls of Black Folk,” p. 38), “was a necessity, the very least a guilty nation could grant a wronged race, and the only method of compelling the South to accept the results of the war.” But he adds, “Thus negro suffrage ended a civil war by beginning a race feud.” The Reconstruction policy was overthrown by the “Revolution” of 1876, when the military support, on which the Reconstruction governments had rested, was withdrawn.