When the institution of slavery was attacked in the early thirties and during the years of controversy which followed, and still more when it was finally overthrown in the sixties, race prejudice began to manifest itself in the manner of treatment accorded negro criminals. By the emancipation of the slaves in 1863, under the existing conditions, absolutely no restriction was left upon its manifestation, for the property right in the negro had been swept away and the great mass of the negroes, finding all the old restraints suddenly removed, naturally mistook liberty for license and committed many excesses. Large numbers of negroes ceased to work. “The worst instincts of the negro came to the front; the percentage of criminals among negroes increased to an alarming extent; many were guilty of crimes of violence of the most heinous and repulsive kind.”[240] The result of emancipation had not been fully anticipated and no adequate legal provision was made for the control of the freedmen. The foundation had been removed from the old legal system and no new system was established in the place of the old one which to any degree could cope with the condition of affairs. Further, not only did the emancipation of the slaves leave no restriction upon the manifestation of race prejudice in the form of summary procedure against negro criminals, but the sudden elevation of the negroes to political equality with the whites directly encouraged its display. “Two hundred years or more of slavery educated both the white and the black to a fixed order of society, in which the negro was the servant and the white man the master. In one generation, through as devastating a war as any country ever experienced, slavery was abolished, the vast property interests in the slave destroyed, the structure of society reversed, the master put at the bottom and the slave at the top.”[241] In the light of subsequent history a greater mistake could scarcely have been made than that of giving the elective franchise to the newly emancipated slave. He was far from being a fully developed man capable of exercising the duties of citizenship in a democratic government, but in the legal institutions which were established in the South during the period of Reconstruction it was assumed that he was entitled to an equal share in the government with his former master. A legal system was established which had no basis in the order of society then existing. The result was enmity and bitterness between whites and blacks at a time when there should have been sympathy and forbearance, and summary and illegal measures were adopted by the whites to prevent negro domination.