Thus the worst elements and characteristics of every class were made prominent. Families bred in opulence, and accustomed to claim the unpaid toil of others as their rightful due, and to believe political leadership and oligarchal control their birth-right, and who, like their ancestors for generations, cherished contempt for all who worked for their own subsistence, found extreme humiliation in laboring for their own bread, and submitting to the legal restrictions imposed by the general government, controlled as it was by those they had formerly derided as the “mud-sills” of the North, even though those restrictions were equitable and generous. In resentment of the equal citizenship conferred upon their former chattled slaves, they committed, and defended in each other, such outrages upon the persons and property of the negroes and resident northern whites, as are not even admissable between civilized enemies at open war. Not a few planters who formerly owned thousands of acres of land, and from three to five thousand slaves, were, by the failure of the Rebellion, for the success of which they had staked all their possessions, as poor as the “cracker” families, which had formerly “squatted” like caterpillars and locusts upon the skirts of their plantations. They were even sometimes subjected to these as magistrates and officials, as they often were to their former slaves. This haughty planter-race, having utterly failed in its last great pretension in bitterness of spirit still cherished its disdain for those it could not conquer, into which disdain the education of two hundred and fifty years of _irresponsible ownership of laborers_ has concentrated the egotism, the selfishness and the cruelty thus engendered. The intelligence of this class was never commensurate with its wealth. Schools were necessarily few in the South during the existence of slavery, and family feuds and favoritisms notoriously controlled the distribution of the honors of those that did exist, and social and political distinction depended upon culture in no degree. Hence there was little to spur the laggard, or to encourage and inspire genius, and the actual ignorance, or at best, the superficial scholarship of “the first families” was astounding. Since the war, poverty and aversion to the North have materially lessened southern patronage of northern schools, and under the “carpet-bag” administration the higher schools of the State, and the common schools in country districts in which the aggregate number of pupils did not warrant the opening of more than one school, were accessible to colored students; a recognition of equality which the whites would not tolerate; and so they consigned themselves to ignorance.