The steps toward the Fifteenth Amendment were taken slowly.  First Negroes were allowed to take part in reconstructing the state governments.  This was inevitable if loyal governments were to be obtained.  Next the restored state governments were directed to enfranchise all citizens, black or white, or have their representation in Congress cut down proportionately.  Finally the United States said the last word of simple justice:  the states may regulate the suffrage, but no state may deprive a person of the right to vote simply because he is a Negro or has been a slave.

For such reasons the Negro was enfranchised.  What was the result?  No language has been spared to describe these results as the worst imaginable.  This is not true.  There were bad results, and bad results arising from Negro suffrage; but those results were not so bad as usually painted, nor was Negro suffrage the prime cause of many of them.  Let us not forget that the white South believed it to be of vital interest to its welfare that the experiment of Negro suffrage should fail ignominiously and that almost to a man the whites were willing to insure this failure either by active force or passive acquiescence; that besides this there were, as might be expected, men, black and white, Northern and Southern, only too eager to take advantage of such a situation for feathering their own nests.  Much evil must result in such case; but to charge the evil to Negro suffrage is unfair.  It may be charged to anger, poverty, venality, and ignorance, but the anger and poverty were the almost inevitable aftermath of war; the venality was much greater among whites than Negroes both North and South, and while ignorance was the curse of Negroes, the fault was not theirs and they took the initiative to correct it.

The chief charges against the Negro governments are extravagance, theft, and incompetency of officials.  There is no serious charge that these governments threatened civilization or the foundations of social order.  The charge is that they threatened property and that they were inefficient.  These charges are in part undoubtedly true, but they are often exaggerated.  The South had been terribly impoverished and saddled with new social burdens.  In other words, states with smaller resources were asked not only to do a work of restoration, but a larger social work.  The property holders were aghast.  They not only demurred, but, predicting ruin and revolution, they appealed to secret societies, to intimidation, force, and murder.  They refused to believe that these novices in government and their friends were aught but scamps and fools.  Under the circumstances occurring directly after the war, the wisest statesman would have been compelled to resort to increased taxation and would have, in turn, been execrated as extravagant, dishonest, and incompetent.  It is easy, therefore, to see what flaming and incredible stories of Reconstruction governments could gain wide currency and belief.  In fact the extravagance, although great, was not universal, and much of it was due to the extravagant spirit pervading the whole country in a day of inflated currency and speculation.