Much of the above applies to the condition of the Gulf States at large, in the beginning of the winter, quite as well as to Louisiana alone. The case here was, in fact, complicated by the hybrid nature of the attempted reorganization. Elsewhere we had Provisional Governments instituted under appointments from President Johnson; here we had an organization instigated by General Banks, sanctioned by President Lincoln, and already sold out to the enemies of both. While, to complete the chaos, the policy of the returned Rebels, already advocated in most of the newspapers, and freely talked in all political circles, was, to have the Legislature call a new Convention, whose first act should be to declare all the State offices vacant, in order that citizens absent (in the Rebel armies or as registered enemies) when the present ones were chosen, might have a fair share in the voting! “We’ll get Congress to sanction such a Convention,” said a lawyer. “For that matter we can buy up Congress. It doesn’t want to humiliate us, or, if it does, we have money enough to control it.” “When we get in,” continued the lawyer, diverging into general politics, “we’ll put an end to this impudent talk of you Yankees about regenerating the South by Northern immigration. We’ll require you to spend ten years in the State before you can vote.” “Of course we don’t love the Union,” he went on. “We’re not hypocrites enough to make any such professions. I have no love for the flag. It never protected me; it _has_ robbed me and mine!” That man could be believed. He honestly said what he plainly thought. But how should we regard the office-seeking class, who, after four years’ war against the flag, had suddenly been beaten into new-born but most ardent love for it? One of the public journals, protesting against the charge of treason, cited President Buchanan’s book, as to the causes of the war, and exultantly exclaimed: “Such will be the verdict of history. The triumphant party may apply to the people of the South all the opprobrious epithets known to the vocabulary of hate, but they can not efface historical records, or rebut documentary testimony. The guilt of being the originators of the late civil war lies at the door of the Abolitionists. “The people of the South know very well where the guilt and odium of causing the war rests. While they accept and abide by the result as a finality, they do not now, nor will they ever, stand before the world as culprits and felons. They may sorrow over the war and its results, but they have no cause for shame or remorse.” ----- Footnote 60: The New Orleans Daily South, of 19th November, 1865, said: “Ethiopia has invaded the Mississippi Legislature. Some of the members of that body, favoring Judge Sharkey’s transcendental views on the subject of negro testimony, have been talking about ‘justice to the negro.’ The white man seems to be forgotten in the recent gabble about the eternal negro.