the Negro legislators there was also considerable ignorance, and there set in an era of extravagance and corruption from which the “carpet-baggers” and the “scalawags” rather than the Negroes themselves reaped the benefit.  Accordingly within recent years it has become more and more the fashion to lament the ills of the period, and no representative American historian can now write of reconstruction without a tone of apology.  A few points, however, are to be observed.  In the first place the ignorance was by no means so vast as has been supposed.  Within the four years from 1861 to 1865, thanks to the army schools and missionary agencies, not less than half a million Negroes in the South had learned to read and write.  Furthermore, the suffrage was not immediately given to the emancipated Negroes; this was the last rather than the first step in reconstruction.  The provisional legislatures formed at the close of the war were composed of white men only; but the experiment failed because of the short-sighted laws that were enacted.  If the fruit of the Civil War was not to be lost, if all the sacrifice was not to prove in vain, it became necessary for Congress to see that the overthrow of slavery was final and complete.  By the Fourteenth Amendment the Negro was invested with the ordinary rights and dignity of a citizen of the United States.  He was not enfranchised, but he could no longer be made the victim of state laws designed merely to keep him in servile subjection.  If the Southern states had accepted this amendment, they might undoubtedly have reentered the Union without further conditions.  They refused to do so; they refused to help the National Government in any way whatsoever in its effort to guarantee to the Negro the rights of manhood.  Achilles sulked in his tent, and whenever he sulks the world moves on—­without him.  The alternative finally presented to Congress, if it was not to make an absolute surrender, was either to hold the South indefinitely under military subjection or to place the ballot in the hands of the Negro.  The former course was impossible; the latter was chosen, and the Union was really restored—­was really saved—­by the force of the ballot in the hands of black men.

It has been held that the Negro was primarily to blame for the corruption of the day.  Here again it is well to recall the tendencies of the period.  The decade succeeding the war was throughout the country one of unparalleled political corruption.  The Tweed ring, the Credit Mobilier, and the “salary grab” were only some of the more outstanding signs of the times.  In the South the Negroes were not the real leaders in corruption; they simply followed the men who they supposed were their friends.  Surely in the face of such facts as these it is not just to fix upon a people groping to the light the peculiar odium of the corruption that followed in the wake of the war.