those I entail upon him.  The character of the people called upon to settle the debt of Virginia, contracted in 1860, before or immediately after, differed radically from the character of the people who were called upon to tax themselves to cancel that debt.  Not only had the character of the people undergone a radical change; the whole social and industrial mechanism of the state had undergone a wonderful, almost an unrecognizable, metamorphosis.  The haughty aristocrat, with his magnificent plantation, his army of slaves, and his “cattle on a thousand hills,” who eagerly contracted the debt, had been transformed into a sour pauper when called upon to honor his note; while the magnificent plantation had been in many instances cut into a thousand bits to make homes for the former slaves, now freemen and citizens, the equals of “my lord,” while “his cattle on a thousand hills” had dwindled down to a stubborn jackass and a worn out milch cow.  True, the white man possessed, largely, the soil; but he was, immediately after the war, utterly incapable of wringing from it the bounty of Nature; he had first to be re-educated.

But, when the bloody rebellion was over, the country, in its sovereign capacity, and by individual States, was called upon to deal with grave questions growing out of the conflict.  Mr. Lincoln, by a stroke of the pen,[9] transferred the battle from the field to the halls of legislation.  In view of the “Emancipation proclamation” as issued by Mr. Lincoln, and the invaluable service rendered by black troops[10] in the rebellion, legislation upon the status of the former slave could not be avoided.  The issue could not be evaded; like Banquo’s ghost, it would not down.  There were not wanting men, even when the war had ended and the question of chattel slavery had been forever relegated to the limbo of “things that were,” who were willing still to toy with half-way measures, to cater to the caprices of that treacherous yet brave power—­the South.  They had not yet learned that Southern sentiment was fundamentally revolutionary, dynamic in the extreme, and could not be toyed with as with a doll-baby.  So the statesmen proceeded to manufacture the “Reconstruction policy”—­a policy more fatuous, more replete with fatal concessions and far more fatal omissions than any ever before adopted for the acceptance and governance of a rebellious people on the one hand and a newly made, supremely helpless people on the other.  It is not easy to regard with equanimity the blunders of the “Reconstruction policy” and the manifold infamies which have followed fast upon its adoption.

The South scornfully rejected and successfully nullified the legislative will of the victors.