But while the physical straits to which the inhabitants of these States were driven almost exceeded belief, and challenged the sympathies of Christendom, they were met at this time with a yet more incorrigible evil, as we have already prevised, and one from which all attempts at escape seemed likely to plunge them into deeper miseries. Despite the generous policy inaugurated by the commanders of the Federal forces at the close of the civil conflict, and the good intentions of President Johnson, who had lately succeeded to the chief magistracy, the Congress of the United States at this time resolved upon a system of oppressions towards this people whose parallel is not to be found in modern history. This work was inaugurated by the passage of laws whose effect was a virtual dismemberment of the Union; all the efforts of these States to participate in the administration of the affairs of the general government being in pursuance thereof promptly discountenanced. The movement which followed was in keeping therewith, and involved the withdrawal from the State governments of all their prerogatives as such. The civil power was vested in military satraps, who were commissioned to govern these provinces (for such they had become); or where the work of reconstructing or radicalizing the populace was more advanced, and it was necessary to preserve the form of the civil machine, State elections were improvised and conducted under the shadow of overawing bayonets. The administration of justice was as summarily withdrawn from the legal functionaries, and given over to the Federal judicatories; or, what was far worse, placed in the hands of that most ignorant and despotic of all judiciary systems--military courts-martial. The law-making power, in its turn, was farmed out to dummy legislatures, which in their constitution, if not in the modus of their creation, were _fac-similes_ of the great "rump" model which had made laws before them, and which, with its two-thirds majority and grand faculty for caucusing, was quite equal to all the devices of vetoing chief magistrates. The provision disfranchising the white men of the South had been contemporaneously declared, and was a part of that remarkable series which had empanoplied the negro race with all the political belongings of freedom.