ward of the nation”; that he was a peculiar people whom the nation had taken under its wing and would support and foster; and that he could, by its fiat, be made the equal of the white, and would, by its strong arm, be sustained as such, may, perhaps, be traced most of the misfortunes of the Negro[Pg 49] race, and, indeed, of the whole South, since the war. The Negro saw the experiment being tried; he saw his former master, who had been to him the type of all that was powerful and proud, and brave, and masterful, put down and held down by the United States Government, while he, himself, was set up and declared his full equal. He is quick to learn, and during this period, when he was sustained by the Government, he was as insolent as he dared to be. The only check on him was his lurking recognition of the Southerner’s dominant force.

[Pg 49]

The one thing that saved the Southerners was that they knew it was not the Negroes but the Federal Government that held them in subjection.

The day the bayonets were withdrawn from the South, the Negro power, which but the day before had been as arrogant and insolent as ever in the whole course of its brief authority, fell to pieces.

It is little less than amazing that the whites of the South should, after all that they went through during the period of reconstruction, have retained their kindly feeling for the Negroes, and not only retained but increased their loyalty to the Union. To the writer, it seems[Pg 50] one of the highest tributes to the white people of the South that their patriotism should have remained so strong after all they had endured.

[Pg 50]

The explanation is that the hostility of the Southern people was not directed so much against the United States or its Government, to form which they had contributed so much and in which they had taken so much pride, as against that element among the people of the North that had always opposed them, particularly where slavery was concerned. In seceding, the Southerners had acted on the doctrine enunciated by so distinguished a Northerner as John Quincy Adams in 1839, when he declared that it would be better for the States to “part in friendship from each other than to be held together by constraint,” and look forward “to form again a more perfect friendship by dissolving that which could not bind, and to leave the separated parts to be reunited by the law of political gravitation to the centre,”[24] and now, slavery and secession having finally been[Pg 51] disposed of, they 

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