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 1865] Dissatisfaction in the North. 627 with whites was forbidden, and a long series of crimes and minor offences were made punishable with special penalties. The most drastic laws bore evidence of an intention to force the negroes into semi-servile work. Vagrancy was made punishable by fine or forced service, old masters being preferred as lessees ; labour contracts entered into by negroes were rendered inviolable under penalties of forced service; and apprentice laws provided for the binding out of negro children, former masters again being preferred. Finally, a variety of laws in certain States endeavoured to restrict the negroes, by a system of licenses or by other devices, to the career of agricultural labourers. It need hardly be said that the new State governments failed to pacify immediately the dis- tressed districts. Poverty and destitution prevailed; acts of violence and lawlessness continued; and the negroes, actively supported by the Federal military authorities, showed no tendency to submit to the new codes. Still, in spite of all drawbacks, the whites of the South had begun the task of reconstruction; and hope had returned to a devastated region. Moreover by the votes of these States the Thirteenth Amend- ment had been ratified, and it was proclaimed as part of the Constitution in December, 1865. So much, then, had been accomplished, for good or for ill, by the presidential policy. But meanwhile an ominous spirit had been rising in the North. The majority of Unionists, lacking entirely the magnanimity of Lincoln or Johnson, regarded Confederates with a distrust and dislike too intense to permit them to see any distinction between Whigs and Democrats in the South, or to contemplate without alarm the restoration of the former slaveholders to their place in the Union. The Northern leaders felt that Reconstruction could not be regarded as a mere incident of the President's pardoning power, but should be dealt with by the repre- sentatives of the States and the people. This feeling they had already shown by the passing, in 1864, of a Reconstruction Act which Lincoln had refused to sign. When Johnson began his rapid process of re- constituting State governments, the people of the North looked on with distrust and soon with increasing anger. It seemed to them that their defeated enemies were being brought back into power, and the results of the war placed in jeopardy. The most sinister impressions were made by the reports of lawlessness and violence between whites and blacks, and above all by the negro codes, vagrancy laws, and apprentice regu- lations, all of which convinced the Union men that the lives and liberty of the freedmen could not safely be left at the mercy of their former masters. By the end of the year 1865 the feeling was widely spread and freely expressed that it would not do to accept the results of Johnson's action without additional precautions against Southern dis- affection and safeguards for the negro. As to what form these should take, opinions varied widely, ranging from the radical utterances of former Abolitionists, who demanded negro suffrage as a panacea, to the CH. xx. 402