restored supremacy. From the white point of view these results were undeniably good. But as time went on, the Klan became a cloak for lawlessness of various kinds, which could not be justified in any way. By the time the society was taken over by the generally unscrupulous, its original purposes had been largely achieved. So far as there was justification for it, it was to be found in its effectiveness as a means of driving out of power the hopelessly ignorant or shameless ly corrupt politicians who had been wrecking southern society.

Congress of course was compelled to come to the rescue of the upholders of its régime in the South, and it did so in various ways. In 1869 Congress submitted to the states the Fifteenth Amendment, which prohibited any state from denying the right to vote on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. In 1870, Congress passed the so-called Enforcement Act, which imposed heavy penalties upon all who infringed upon the rights conferred by the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendments. In order to make sure of justice, the federal courts were given jurisdiction over cases arising under the Enforcement Act. A later enforcement act extended federal power over Congressional elections in the South. Then the Ku Klux Act gave the federal courts jurisdiction over conspiracies against the blacks, and authorized the President to suspend the privilege of Habeas Corpus. So effective was the measure that there were over a thousand convictions under it in two years.

Both Congress and the state legislatures passed laws to give the blacks social equality, to match their political equality. Sumner was one of the liveliest agitators in behalf of equal rights, urging the negroes to insist upon recognition of their dignity on all occasions. The last step of Congress in this direction was the enactment of the Civil Rights Act of 1875, granting the blacks equal rights in hotels, places of amusement, on public conveyances, and on juries.

In the South "Reconstruction" is still looked upon as one of the gravest injustices ever imposed in this country. It piled up a load of needless debt, seriously retarded recovery from the effects of the war, and created a far wider gulf between the blacks and the whites. To be sure that was exactly what Sumner and Stevens set out to accomplish, and they got all the satisfaction which comes with success. Judged by its results, Congressional reconstruction was a stupendous blunder. Angered and humiliated, and alienated from the North, the South

nursed its bitterness for a generation or more, and the feeling has not entirely disappeared even yet. Furthermore, reconstruction put an end to all prospects of a two-party system in the South. Every respectable white man there was enrolled in the Democratic Party. For this "solid South" the country can thank the Republican leaders of the reconstruction era.

THE RESTORATION OF WHITE CONTROL

In the South the primary concern was to throw off this incubus which Congress had fastened upon the section, and by 1875 results were beginning to appear. With the help of the Ku Klux Klan the white people regained control in Tennessee in 1869, and in Virginia and North Carolina in 1870. The negro voters were intimidated into staying away from the polls, so the whites had little opposition. They would have recovered Louisiana and Alabama at the same time, and in the same way, had it not been for the Congressional enforcement acts. Because of the large number of federal troops and federal marshals on duty there was little gain from 1870 to 1874; after that white successes came rapidly.

In course of time the rise of new interests and new issues drew the attention of the North away from the South, and so furnished the opportunity for which the section had long been waiting. News of ill-treatment of the blacks ceased to arouse a general response in the North. While the North was growing indifferent, the Southern Republican Party began to show signs of dissension; as so often happens, the thieves began to quarrel among themselves over the division of the spoils. As the negroes grew in wisdom and in skill, they demanded a larger share of the loot. Then too some of the states had been nearly bankrupted by the carpet-bag policies, and when the prospects of plunder diminished, the white leaders began to drop out. This situation gave the conservative whites their opportunity. In 1874 the white man's party carried Alabama, Arkansas, and Texas, and Mississippi in the following year. By the end of 1875, only three states were left under carpet-bag control: Louisiana, Florida, and South Carolina, and there the radical governments were upheld solely by the pressure of federal troops. When President Hayes withdrew them in 1877, those governments collapsed, and with their disappearance reconstruction was finished.

Henceforth the Democrats took undisputed possession of the

southern state governments, and proceeded to work back toward decency in their financial administration. Their first task, as they saw it, was the permanent elimination of the negro as a factor in politics. Sometimes intimidation was enough. The presence of armed men at the polling places kept the blacks away. In other cases more complicated methods were needed. South Carolina devised an elaborate ballot box system, with different boxes for the ballots for different officers. Under that law a ballot placed in the wrong box was void. The election officials shifted the position of these boxes frequently, so as to eliminate the negro votes. In almost every state where it seemed necessary the whites were ready to follow the example of the southern judge who declared: "I would stuff a ballot-box in order to have a good, honest government."

As a result of such work the Republican Party in the South was reduced to a skeleton organization. Down to the Cleveland administration all the federal office holders were Republicans, but as a factor able to influence elections there the party had ceased to exist. As conditions were then, there was no guarantee of permanence in the exclusion of the blacks. To prevent them from ever getting back into power, the states began to amend their constitutions to make the exclusion of the negroes as nearly permanent as possible. Some states did it by so fixing the poll tax laws that the colored people automatically disfranchised themselves. Then literacy and educational tests were devised, which could be manipulated to favor an ignorant white, and to exclude even an educated black.

But because these restrictions tended to keep out possible white voters, the states put into their constitutions the so-called "Grandfather Clauses," which permitted a person who had voted in 1860, or the descendant of any such person, to vote regardless of his failure to meet the requirements. Even though in 1915 the Supreme Court declared the Oklahoma Grandfather Clause unconstitutional, the position of the blacks has not been materially changed. These restrictions are so drawn that they do not violate the Fifteenth Amendment, but they do lay the states open to the penalty provided in the Fourteenth. That, however, has never been enforced. As the matter stands now, the southern white people take the exclusion of the negro as a matter of course, and any attempt to restore suffrage to the colored race would be strongly opposed.

CHAPTER XLVIII

GRANT AND POLITICS, 1868-1877

For a full decade after the enactment of the Reconstruction Acts of 1867 political compaigns and the national government were inevitably bound up with the Congressional policy in the South. The Republican Party had staked its very existance on the successful application of that policy, and Republican leaders used it as the main basis of their appeal to the voters. Whether they wanted to do this or not mattered little, because they were driven to it by the force of circumstances. In putting an end to slavery, the war and the Thirteenth Amendment had deprived the Republicans of their original reason for existence. Their reform had been accomplished. But the Republicans were more than reformers, they were a political party, and as a party they could not continue to live without an issue. An older organization might have kept itself alive with nothing but its past record to sustain it. Both the great parties have done that in more recent years. But at the close of the Civil War the Republican Party had no roots, no traditions, and no momentum acquired from age. Its only hope of success lay in the kind of appeal it was prepared to make right then.

THE ELECTION OF 1868

As the campaign of 1868 approached, the prospect was none too bright. The fundamental principle of Congressional Reconstruction was the proscription of the southern white people, and the enfranchisement of the blacks. Negro suffrage was generally looked upon with disapproval in the northern states, and no one could tell whether the country was prepared to indorse the Stevens-Sumner Carpet-bag régime or not.

The Republicans would doubtless have preferred to fight out the election of 1868 on the single issue of reconstruction, but they could not do it. A new currency issue had arisen, one which appealed strongly to many Democrats, probably because they saw in it a chance to embarrass the party in power. During the war the federal

government had issued "greenbacks" to the extent of $433,000,000. They had been put out as an emergency measure, and the government planned to retire them as soon as possible. By 1868 McCulloch, the Secretary of the Treasury, had succeeded in reducing the total in circulation to about $356,000,000. But this gradual retirement decreased the volume of money in circulation, and consequently sent prices down. Eastern business men generally approved the policy of retirement because they could appreciate the advantages of a speedy return to a hard money basis. But the debtor classes and farmers protested against the retirement, and in 1868 Congress put a stop to further withdrawals of these treasury notes. The debtor classes, and certain other interests, advocated retention of the paper money, and they even approved payment of the principal of war bonds in greenbacks instead of gold.

The rise of this issue placed the Republicans in a delicate position. They could not champion the cause of the debtors without alienating the support of business interests, and yet the debtor classes had votes which they wanted to keep. Being out of power, the Democrats were free to advocate anything, so they took the popular side.

Embarrassed by this currency issue, the Republicans had to select as their candidate a man who could draw votes regardless of the party's stand on the greenback question. The one man who best answered their purposes was Ulysses S. Grant, the hero of the war. To be sure he was not much of a Republican; the only presidential vote he had ever cast was for Buchanan, in 1856. But he was at least opposed to Johnson, and after considerable urging he consented to run. The Republicans were sure of the electoral vote in the six Carpet-bag states,- North and South Carolina, Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, and Arkansas, and there was a fair prospect of adding Georgia to the list. With those certain votes as a nucleus, they could depend upon Grant's great personal popularity to carry them through. The Democrats were free to criticise the tragedies of reconstruction in the South, and to make any statement regarding the greenbacks which seemed most likely to win votes, but they were not so fortunate as to candidates. There were numerous aspirants for the honor, but not one could compare with Grant in a vote-drawing contest. There was Salmon P. Chase, former Secretary of the Treasury, then chief justice of the Supreme Court. He was very eager for the presidency, so keenly desirous that with a brazenness rare even