Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 12.djvu/312

296 could only be obtained through them, it would prolong the necessity of their offices being continued. All this unsettling work was done through men nearly all of whom were not born in the South and had never been citizens of the South, but who had all the prejudices and bad blood of the times toward the South.

There were some features in the new constitutions adopted and in the laws being passed by the legislatures under these constitutions, which were to be seized upon by the Republican party as an excuse for a more severe reconstruction by Congress. I mention first that suffrage was confined to the whites alone; even the most conservative element, which had taken the lead in restoring the States, did not think their recent slaves fit subjects for the great boon of the ballot. A good many of the Northern States did not allow negroes to vote; in fact, several States even after the war defeated acts proposing to give them the ballot, when there were only a few negroes within their borders. This suffrage feature had much to do with the States not being admitted. Public opinion at the North, under the lead of Mr. Thaddeus Stevens, of Pennsylvania, and other extreme partisans, was fast drifting in favor of universal suffrage and the adoption of a disciplinary and coercive legislation toward the South, forgetting that nearly all negroes lived at the South, with but few at the North to be affected by such legislation. It was a great problem, yet hostility toward the South turned the scale to the enfranchisement of the negro and disfranchisement of enough whites to create negro domination in the South.

General Grant, in his description of the Freedmen's bureau, stated enough to show that legislation was necessary to check the demoralization among the negroes, and to influence them to return to habits of industry and self-