Page:Speeches, correspondence and political papers of Carl Schurz, Volume 5.djvu/96

72 The National Government interposed to keep the peace and to regulate the relations between the former slaves and the former masters. The negroes were endowed with the right to vote. They exercised that right, plantation hands and all, the National Government holding its shield over them. The upshot was the carpet-bag governments, many of them nothing but barbarism led by rascality. Of the profligacy, rapacity and corruption of these it is difficult now to form a conception. The war itself had hardly been more destructive. “Negro supremacy” became the horror, the nightmare, of the Southern people, and, naturally, justly so. In 1877 the National troops were withdrawn, the carpet-bag governments fell, governments controlled by Southern whites took their places, the South began to grow rapidly in prosperity. Where the negroes were in the minority, they found themselves soon in the enjoyment of their political rights. Where they were in the majority, the whites resorted to various devices, from force to fraud, to keep them out of the control of political power; for the carpet-bag days were not forgotten, and negro rule was the nightmare of the South still.

In 1885, twenty years after my mission of inquiry, I visited those States again. I found a marvelous change. The people, white and black, were at work in earnest, with astonishing results. I found the Union truly restored in a new patriotism. It was, indeed, a new South. I inquired carefully into the relations between whites and blacks. I found them steadily growing in a friendship fruitful of beneficial results. True, there was that one dark spot remaining,—where the negroes were in the majority, the dread of negro domination and the old endeavor to prevent the negro from gaining political ascendency,—less by violence now, more by cunning tricks. The evil was indeed growing less; and, moreover,