Every one admits that the heaviest blow ever dealt to the South was that
which laid Abraham Lincoln in the dust. He, if any one, could have
averted the mistakes which delayed by fifteen years the very beginning
of the process of reconciliation. His wise and kindly influence
removed, the North committed what is now recognised as the fatal blunder
of forcing unrestricted negro suffrage on the South. This measure was
dictated partly, no doubt, by honest idealism, partly by much lower
motives. Then the horde of "carpet-baggers" descended upon the
"reconstructed" States, and there ensued a period of humiliation to the
South which made men look back with longing even to the sharper agonies
of the war. Coloured voters were brought in droves, by their Northern
fuglemen, to polling-places which were guarded by United States troops.
Utterly illiterate negroes crowded the benches of State legislatures. A
Northerner and staunch Union man has assured me that in the Capitol of
one of the reconstructed States he has seen a coloured representative
gravely studying a newspaper which he held upside down. The story goes
that in the legislature of Mississippi a negro majority, which had
opposed a certain bill, was suddenly brought round to it in a body by a
chance allusion to its "provisions," which they understood to mean
something to eat! This anecdote perhaps lacks evidence; but there can be
no doubt that the freedmen of 1865 were, as a body, entirely unfitted to
exercise the suffrage thrust upon them.
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