The political reactions after Reconstruction varied, of course, in the different states, being most violent in states like South Carolina, where the old aristocratic régime was most firmly entrenched, and least violent in North Carolina, which has always been the most democratic of Southern states. In South Carolina then, for example, the aristocrats in 1875 returned to political supremacy. General Wade Hampton, who represented all that was highest in the old régime, became governor of the state. A similar tendency developed, of course, in the other Southern states, and a notable group of statesmen (and they _were_ statesmen) appeared in politics--Hill and Gordon of Georgia, Lamar and George of Mississippi, Butler of South Carolina, Morgan of Alabama, all aristocrats of the old school. Apparently the ancient order was restored; apparently the wounded man ran as well as ever. But the Old South, after all, had received its mortal wound. There _had_ been a revolution; society _had_ been overturned. The institution on which it had reared its ancient splendour was gone: for the aristocrat no longer enjoyed the special privilege, the enormous economic advantage of _owning_ his labourers. He was reduced to an economic equality with other white men, and even with the Negro, either of whom could _hire_ labour as easily and cheaply as he could. And the baronial plantation which had been the mark of his grandeur before the war was now the millstone of his doom. Special privilege, always the bulwark of aristocracy, being thus removed, the germ of democracy began to work among the poor whites. The disappearance of competitive slave labour made them unexpectedly prosperous; it secured a more equable division of wealth. With prosperity came more book-reading, more schooling, a greater _feeling_ of independence. And this feeling animated the poor white with a new sense of freedom and power. Enter now, when the time was fully ripe for a leader, the rude man of the people. How often he appears in the pages of history, the sure product of revolutions, bursting upward like some devastating force, not at all silken-handed or subtle-minded, but crude, virile, direct, truthful. _Tillman, the Prophet_