The plan of putting the Southern States wholly and the General Government partially into the hands of negroes is proposed at a time peculiarly unpropitious.  The foundations of society have been broken up by civil war.  Industry must be reorganized, justice reestablished, public credit maintained, and order brought out of confusion.  To accomplish these ends would require all the wisdom and virtue of the great men who formed our institutions originally.  I confidently believe that their descendants will be equal to the arduous task before them, but it is worse than madness to expect that negroes will perform it for us.  Certainly we ought not to ask their assistance till we despair of our own competency.

The great difference between the two races in physical, mental, and moral characteristics will prevent an amalgamation or fusion of them together in one homogeneous mass.  If the inferior obtains the ascendency over the other, it will govern with reference only to its own interests—­for it will recognize no common interest—­and create such a tyranny as this continent has never yet witnessed.  Already the negroes are influenced by promises of confiscation and plunder.  They are taught to regard as an enemy every white man who has any respect for the rights of his own race.  If this continues it must become worse and worse, until all order will be subverted, all industry cease, and the fertile fields of the South grow up into a wilderness.  Of all the dangers which our nation has yet encountered, none are equal to those which must result from the success of the effort now making to Africanize the half of our country.

I would not put considerations of money in competition with justice and right; but the expenses incident to “reconstruction” under the system adopted by Congress aggravate what I regard as the intrinsic wrong of the measure itself.  It has cost uncounted millions already, and if persisted in will add largely to the weight of taxation, already too oppressive to be borne without just complaint, and may finally reduce the Treasury of the nation to a condition of bankruptcy.  We must not delude ourselves.  It will require a strong standing army and probably more than $200,000,000 per annum to maintain the supremacy of negro governments after they are established.  The sum thus thrown away would, if properly used, form a sinking fund large enough to pay the whole national debt in less than fifteen years.  It is vain to hope that negroes will maintain their ascendency themselves.  Without military power they are wholly incapable of holding in subjection the white people of the South.