“It is believed that this would not have been done if Lincoln had lived.  Lincoln was always the President of all the people of the United States, and his death was a far greater loss to the South than to the North.  To place the power to govern the intelligent white of the South absolutely in the hands of their former ignorant slaves was undoubtedly the most abominable political blunder recorded in history; and even this was intensified by the unprincipled white-skinned vultures who came among us to fatten upon our dead or dying conditions.  Those years of so-called reconstruction, constitute the blackest page in the history of modern civilization.”

“I quite agree with you,” said Percy, “and so far as I know them the soldiers of the northern armies also agree with you.  Several of my own relatives fought to free the negro slave; but none of them fought to enslave their white brothers of the South by putting them absolutely under negro government.  And yet there is one possible justification for that abominable reconstruction policy.  It may have averted a subsequent war which might have lasted not for four years, but for forty years.  Even if this be true, perhaps there is no credit in the policy for any man who helped to enforce it, but you will grant that there were two important results from those bitter years of reconstruction: 

“First, the negro learned with certainty at once and forever that he was a free man.

“Second, he at once acquired a degree of independence effectually preventing the development of a situation throughout the South, in which the negro, though nominally free, would have remained virtually a slave, a situation which, if once established, might have required a subsequent war of many years for its complete eradication.  Even under the conditions which have prevailed, there have been isolated instances of peonage in the southern states since the war; and if the education and gradual enfranchisement of the negro had been left wholly in the hands of their former masters, from the immediate close of the war, I can conceive of conditions under which slavery would essentially have been continued.”

“Such a possibility is, of course, conceivable,” said Mr. West, “and we must all admit that there were some slave holders who would have taken advantage of any such opportunity; but had Lincoln lived the terms made would probably have been such that the South would have felt in honor bound to enforce them.  Probably the enfranchisement would have been based upon some sort of qualification such as the southern states have very generally adopted in subsequent years; but the idea of social equality of slave and master was so repulsive to the white people of the South that it could not be tolerated under any sort of government.”