Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Three).djvu/413

 political conditions throughout the South were revealing the difficulties of the new dispensation. Against the rule of Northern men and negroes, extravagant, inefficient and corrupt, the Southern whites reacted through secret organizations, terror and violence. The Ku Klux and their deeds made a gruesome record in many localities, and the inability of the State governments to suppress the disorders exposed the frailty of the new political régime.

In Congress, Republican sentiment was seriously divided as to the method of dealing with the Southern situation. All factions agreed in requiring the three States yet to be admitted to ratify the Fifteenth Amendment; and the same requirement was imposed upon Georgia, whose Conservative legislature, by the exclusion of negro members from their seats, had brought the State into a process of re-reconstruction. But when the radicals in Congress undertook to press through a barefaced project for prolonging the term of the Republican governor and legislature in Georgia, regardless of the State law, the moderate Republican Senators joined the Democrats and thwarted the scheme.

Schurz gave hearty aid to the moderates. Abating nothing of his confidence that reconstruction through negro suffrage had been the least objectionable policy, he declined to recognize that the maintenance of Republican party supremacy in the restored States was a sufficient ground for continued interference by the central government. The widespread political and social disorders in the South were regarded by hot partisans like Senators Morton, Drake and Wilson as expressions of the old rebellious spirit in the whites and of a malignant purpose to thwart by violence the building up of the Republican party in the reconstructed States. Louisiana and Georgia had been lost by the Republicans in the presidential elections in 1868;