Judge Albion W. Tourgee says of this policy in his book called A Fool’s Errand:  “It was a magnificent sentiment that underlay it all,—­an unfaltering determination, an invincible defiance to all that had the seeming of compulsion or tyranny.  One cannot but regard with pride and sympathy the indomitable men, who, being conquered in war, yet resisted every effort of the conqueror to change their laws, their customs, or even the personnel of their ruling class; and this, too, not only with unyielding stubbornness, but with success.  One cannot but admire the arrogant boldness with which they charged the nation which had overpowered them—­even in the teeth of her legislators—­with perfidy, malice, and a spirit of unworthy and contemptible revenge.  How they laughed to scorn the Reconstruction Acts of which the wise men boasted!  How boldly they declared the conflict to be irrepressible, and that white and black could not and should not live together as co-ordinate ruling elements!  How lightly they told the tales of blood—­of the Masked Night-Riders, of the Invisible Empire of Rifle clubs and Saber clubs (all organized for peaceful purposes), of warnings and whippings and slaughter!  Ah, it is wonderful! * * * Bloody as the reign of Mary, barbarous as the chronicles of the Comanche!”

FOOTNOTES: 

[7] We of the United States take credit for having abolished slavery.  Passing the question of how much credit the majority of us are entitled to for the abolition of Negro slavery, it remains true that we have only abolished one form of slavery—­and that a primitive form which had been abolished in the greater portion of the country by social development, and that, notwithstanding its race character gave it peculiar tenacity, would in time have been abolished in the same way in other parts of the country.  We have not really abolished slavery; we have retained it in its most insidious and widespread form—­in the form which applies to whites as to blacks.  So far from having abolished slavery, it is extending and intensifying, and we made no scruple of setting into it our own children—­the citizens of the Republic yet to be.  For what else are we doing in selling the land on which future citizens must live, if they are to live at all.—­Henry George, Social Problems, p. 209.

[8] Although for the present there is a lull in the conflict of races at the South, it is a lull which comes only from the breathing-spells of a great secular contention, and not from any permanent pacification founded on a resolution of the race problem presented by the Negro question in its present aspects.  So long as the existing mass of our crude and unassimilated colored population holds its present place in the body politic, we must expect that civilization and political rights will oscillate between alternate perils—­the peril that comes from the white man when he places civilization, or sometimes his travesty of it, higher than the Negro’s political rights, and the peril that comes from the black man when his political rights are placed by himself or others higher than civilization—­President James C. Willing, on “Race Education” in The North American Review, April, 1883.