Reconstruction seemed to him an easy task. “We tried to leave the Union. You have defeated us in our effort. What can there be, then, for us to do but to return our Senators and Representatives to the Congress from which we tried to withdraw forever? We acknowledge the defeat, and are ready to send back our Congressmen. That is what you have been fighting for; what more can the General Government have to do with the matter?” The Amnesty Proclamation had just arrived. Like nearly all other men of Southern sympathies, he thought the exceptions very unwise, and needlessly irritating. “You’ve determined to keep us in the Union. Isn’t it more statesmanlike, then, to avoid adding to our popular discontent? Is it better to have us a conquered province, or an integral part of the nation—better to have an Ireland on the Gulf, or a Scotland?” The proposition for negro suffrage seemed to him utterly loathsome. “Surely, sir,” said he to the Chief Justice, “you do not know the negro. If you but understood as we understand the condition of these people, their ignorance, their degradation, you would shrink back in horror from your own proposition.” Mr. Hunt forgot that these once degraded creatures had been rescued from their native barbarism, and, as he and the other Southern orators have so often told us, had been elevated and civilized by the Christianizing influences of the system of slavery! If their degradation was now so horrifying, these gentlemen must have been formerly mistaken in regarding slavery as such a Christian civilizer. If they were mistaken then, it is among the possibilities that they may be mistaken now. It is a continual source of surprise to observe how these thorough-going Southern gentlemen speak constantly of their knowledge of the negro, as one might speak of the most recondite theorems of the differential calculus. “If you only knew these negroes as we do—but, then, of course, you can’t. Why, we were born among them!” To credit such persons, one must regard the negro’s nature as something requiring very profound study and long-protracted investigation. I happened to mention to Mr. Hunt the story of “Old Sandie” of Key West. He considered it a very surprising story, “if credible.” “But then, if you understood, from a lifetime’s experience, the character and debasement of the negro, you would not be misled by such exceptional cases.” I mentioned the prosperity of the Sea Islanders, and their beginnings of self-government. “You saw only the one side of the picture. If you had been born among those people, you would have talked in a very different way.” Nothing short of this “being born among negroes” is accepted as qualification for comprehending their nature. And I have observed that the most strenuous in insisting upon it are able editors, eloquent lawyers, and successful business men, who were born in the North, but have lived so long South that they suppose their origin to be unknown.