Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 12.djvu/335

Rh the blacks themselves, were found to require that the superior race should rule. It seems strange that even any were so dull as to expect success of the opposite policy." Governor Chamberlain, of South Carolina (Republican), said: "The Republican party in power was not all nor nearly all Northern adventurers, Southern renegades, or depraved negroes. Among all the classes so described were worthy and able men, but the crude forces with which they dealt were temporarily too strong for their control or their resistance. Corruption ran riot; dishonesty flourished in shameless effrontery; incompetency was the rule in public offices." (Noted Men of the Solid South.)

Louisiana, South Carolina and Florida were not entirely reclaimed till after President Hayes was inaugurated in 1877. One of the first acts of the new president was to order the withdrawal of the United States troops from the South. As soon as this was done, the Republican governments in the Southern States at once fell to pieces, and the Democratic State governments, which had been legally elected and had claimed to be the true governments, took their places. The rule of the white people was once more inaugurated in all the lately seceded States. They had governed these States from their earliest colonial or territorial days, until the reconstruction policy of the presidents (Lincoln and Johnson) was overturned by the armed forces of the government, as the Confederate government had been overturned by the same force in 1865, and the negro governments established in their places in 1867, under the reconstruction laws of Congress. As already explained, this reconstruction might be styled "destruction," for it took what little the Southern people had left after coming out of the war which had impoverished them, and left their country devastated and devoid of nearly all property.

The assessed property in 1876 was about one-third of what it was in 1860. Two-thirds of the wealth of the