No one has expressed this more convincingly than a Negro who was himself a member of the Reconstruction legislature of South Carolina, and who spoke at the convention which disfranchised him against one of the onslaughts of Tillman.  “We were eight years in power.  We had built school houses, established charitable institutions, built and maintained the penitentiary system, provided for the education of the deaf and dumb, rebuilt the jails and court houses, rebuilt the bridges, and reestablished the ferries.  In short, we had reconstructed the state and placed it upon the road to prosperity, and at the same time, by our acts of financial reform, transmitted to the Hampton government an indebtedness not greater by more than two and a half million dollars than was the bonded debt of the state in 1868, before the Republican Negroes and their white allies came into power."[105]

So, too, in Louisiana in 1872, and in Mississippi later, the better element of the Republicans triumphed at the polls and, joining with the Democrats, instituted reforms, repudiated the worst extravagance, and started toward better things.  Unfortunately there was one thing that the white South feared more than Negro dishonesty, ignorance, and incompetency, and that was Negro honesty, knowledge, and efficiency.

In the midst of all these difficulties the Negro governments in the South accomplished much of positive good.  We may recognize three things which Negro rule gave to the South:  (1) democratic government, (2) free public schools, (3) new social legislation.

In general, the words of Judge Albion W. Tourgee, a white “carpet bagger,” are true when he says of the Negro governments, “They obeyed the Constitution of the United States and annulled the bonds of states, counties, and cities which had been issued to carry on the War of Rebellion and maintain armies in the field against the Union.  They instituted a public school system in a realm where public schools had been unknown.  They opened the ballot box and the jury box to thousands of white men who had been debarred from them by a lack of earthly possessions.  They introduced home rule into the South.  They abolished the whipping post, the branding iron, the stocks, and other barbarous forms of punishment which had up to that time prevailed.  They reduced capital felonies from about twenty to two or three.  In an age of extravagance they were extravagant in the sums appropriated for public works.  In all of that time no man’s rights of persons were invaded under the forms of law.  Every Democrat’s life, home, fireside, and business were safe.  No man obstructed any white man’s way to the ballot box, interfered with his freedom of speech, or boycotted him on account of his political faith."[106]