that national spirit which forms the basis of true loyalty and patriotism." Another government official in Florida was quite doubtful of the Southern whites. "I would pin them down at the point of the bayonet," he declared, "so close that they would not have room to wiggle, and allow intelligent colored people to go up and vote in preference to them. The only Union element in the South proper... is among the colored people. The whites will treat you very kindly to your face, but they are deceitful. I have often thought, and so expressed myself, that there is so much deception among the people of the South since the rebellion, that if an earthquake should open and swallow them up, I was fearful that the devil would be dethroned and some of them take his place."

The point of view of the Confederate military leaders was exhibited by General Wade Hampton in a letter to President Johnson and by General Lee in his advice to Governor Letcher of Virginia. General Hampton wrote: "The South unequivocally 'accepts the situation' in which she is placed. Everything that she has done has been done in perfect faith, and in the true and highest sense of the word, she is loyal. By this I mean that she intends to abide by the laws of the land honestly, to fulfill all her obligations faithfully and to keep her word sacredly, and I assert that the North has no right to demand more of her. You have no right to ask, or expect that she will at once profess unbounded love to that Union from which for four years she tried to escape at the cost of her best blood and all her treasures." General Lee in order to set an example applied through General Grant for a pardon under the amnesty proclamation and soon afterwards he wrote to Governor Letcher: "All should unite in honest efforts to obliterate the effects of war, and to restore the blessings of peace. They should remain, if possible, in the country; promote harmony and good-feeling; qualify themselves to vote; and elect to the State and general legislatures wise and patriotic men, who will devote their abilities to the interests of the country and the healing of all dissensions; I have invariably recommended this course since the cessation of hostilities, and have endeavored to practice it myself."

Southerners of the Confederacy everywhere, then, accepted the destruction of slavery and the renunciation of state sovereignty; they welcomed an early restoration of the Union, without any punishment of leaders of the defeated cause. But they were proud of their Confederate records though now legally "loyal" to the United States; they considered the Negro as free but inferior, and expected to be permitted to fix his status in the social organization and to solve the problem of free labor in their own way. To embarrass the easy and permanent realization of these views there was a society disrupted, economically prostrate, deprived of its natural leaders, subjected to a control not always wisely conceived nor effectively exercised, and, finally, containing within its own population unassimilated elements which presented problems fraught with difficulty and danger.

CHAPTER II. WHEN FREEDOM CRIED OUT

The Negro is the central figure in the reconstruction of the South. Without the Negro there would have been no Civil War. Granting a war fought for any other cause, the task of reconstruction would, without him, have been comparatively simple. With him, however, reconstruction meant more than the restoring of shattered resources; it meant the more or less successful attempt to obtain and secure for the freedman civil and political rights, and to improve his economic and social status. In 1861, the American Negro was everywhere an inferior, and most of his race were slaves; in 1865, he was no longer a slave, but whether he was to be serf, ward, or citizen was an unsettled problem; in 1868, he was in the South the legal and political equal, frequently the superior, of the white; and before the end of the reconstruction period he was made by the legislation of some states and by Congress the legal equal of the white even in certain social matters.

The race problem which confronted the American people had no parallel in the past. British and Spanish-American emancipation of slaves had affected only small numbers or small regions, in which one race greatly outnumbered the other. The results of these earlier emancipations of the Negroes and the difficulties of European states in dealing with subject white populations were not such as to afford helpful example to American statesmen. But since it was the actual situation in the Southern States rather than the experience of other countries which shaped the policies adopted during reconstruction, it is important to examine with some care the conditions in which the Negroes in the South found themselves at the close of the war.

The Negroes were not all helpless and without experience "when freedom cried out."* In the Border States and in the North there were, in 1861, half a million free Negroes accustomed to looking out for themselves. Nearly 200,000 Negro men were enlisted in the United States army between 1862 and 1865, and many thousands of slaves had followed raiding Federal forces to freedom or had escaped through the Confederate lines. State emancipation in Missouri, Maryland, West Virginia, and Tennessee, and the practical application of the Emancipation Proclamation where the Union armies were in control ended slavery for many thousands more. Wherever the armies marched, slavery ended. This was true even in Kentucky, where the institution was not legally abolished until the adoption of the Thirteenth Amendment. Altogether more than a million Negroes were free and to some extent habituated to freedom before May 1865.

Most of these war-emancipated Negroes were scattered along the borders of the Confederacy, in camps, in colonies, in the towns, on refugee farms, at work with the armies, or serving as soldiers in the ranks. There were large working colonies along the Atlantic coast from Maryland to Florida. The chief centers were near Norfolk, where General Butler was the first to establish a "contraband" camp, in North Carolina, and on the Sea Islands of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, which had been seized by the Federal fleet early in the war. To the Sea Islands also were sent, in 1865, the hordes of Negroes who had followed General Sherman out of Georgia and South Carolina. Through the border states from the Atlantic to the Mississippi and along both sides of the Mississippi from Cairo, Illinois, to New Orleans, there were other refugee camps, farms, and colonies. For periods varying from one to four years these free Negroes had been at work, often amid conditions highly unfavorable to health, under the supervision of officers of the Treasury Department or of the army.

Emancipation was therefore a gradual process, and most of the Negroes, through their widening experience on the plantations, with the armies, and in the colonies, were better fitted for freedom in 1865 than they had been in 1861. Even their years of bondage had done something for them, for they knew how to work and they had adopted in part the language, habits, religion, and morals of the whites. But slavery had not made them thrifty, self-reliant, or educated. Frederick Douglass said of the Negro at the end of his servitude: "He had none of the conditions of self-preservation or self-protection. He was free from the individual master, but he had nothing but the dusty road under his feet. He was free from the old quarter that once gave him shelter, but a slave to the rains of summer and to the frosts of winter. He was turned loose, naked, hungry, and destitute to the open sky." To prove that he was free the Negro thought he must leave his old master, change his name, quit work for a time, perhaps get a new wife,