Matters have changed greatly since those days, and all for the better. The people of the whole country understand one another, and there is no longer any sectional prejudice for the politicians to feed and grow fat upon. But in the days of reconstruction everything was at white heat, and every episode and every development appeared to be calculated to add to the excitement. In all this, Shady Dale had as large a share as any other community. The whites had witnessed many political outrages that seemed to have for their object the renewal of armed resistance. And it is impossible, even at this late day, for any impartial person to read the debates in the Federal Congress during the years of 1867-68 without realising the awful fact that the prime movers in the reconstruction scheme (if not the men who acted as their instruments and tools) were intent on stirring up a new revolution in the hope that the negroes might be prevailed upon to sack cities and towns, and destroy the white population. This is the only reasonable inference; no other conceivable conclusion can explain the wild and whirling words that were uttered in these debates: unless, indeed, some charitable investigator shall establish the fact that the radical leaders were suffering from a sort of contagious dementia. It is all over and gone, but it is necessary to recall the facts in order to explain the passionate and blind resistance of the whites of the South and their hatred of everything that bore the name or earmarks of Republicanism. Shady Dale, in common with other communities, had witnessed the assembling of a convention to frame a new constitution for the State. This body was well named the mongrel convention. It was made up of political adventurers from Maine, Vermont, and other Northern States, and boasted of a majority composed of ignorant negroes and criminals. One of the most prominent members had served a term in a Northern penitentiary. The real leaders, the men in whose wisdom and conservatism the whites had confidence, were disqualified from holding office by the terms of the reconstruction acts, and the convention emphasised and adopted the policy of the radical leaders in Washington--a policy that was deliberately conceived for the purpose of placing the governments of the Southern States in the hands of ignorant negroes controlled by men who had no interest whatever in the welfare of the people. But this was not all, nor half. When the military commandant who had charge of affairs in Georgia, found that the State government established under the terms of Mr. Lincoln's plan of reconstruction, had no idea of paying the expenses of the mongrel convention out of the State's funds, he issued an order removing the Governor and Treasurer, and "detailed for duty as Governor of Georgia," one of the members of his staff.