Virginia, Texas and Georgia had been in no great hurry, as we have seen, to exchange military government exercised by the white officers of the United States army for "State" government under the electorate proposed in the Reconstruction Acts. In this they were wise. The army officers did not, as a rule, sympathize with the radical {248} movements of the Republicans in Congress, and they so executed the duties imposed upon them as to cause the least suffering and inconvenience. Their rule, though exercised under a repellent title, was in fact far milder than, and far preferable to, the civil government of the adventurer and the negro. They mingled socially with the old families, and, in many cases, married their fair daughters. The common soldiers from the Northern "States" also fraternized with their race relatives in the South. They did not fancy the black soldiers either of the regular army or the "State" militia, and many were the cases in which they intervened between the defenceless ex-Confederates and the brutal blacks in blue. It is even said by men who have every opportunity to know that many of them doffed their uniforms on election day, went to the polls, and voted the Democratic ticket. In spite of the threats of Congress, and the ever-increasing conditions imposed by that body upon the permission to resume the "State" status, these three communities held out under military rule until so many of their leading citizens had been amnestied by Congress and made again eligible to office and mandate, and until so much better provisions concerning the enfranchisement of the ex-Confederates had been secured, as to put them in a far better position to resume "State" government than was the case two years before. Moreover, these communities had larger white than black populations. After their full restoration, consequently, Virginia and Georgia escaped largely the suffering experienced by most of the others, and Texas also managed to pull through the years from 1870 to 1874 with only about a four-fold increase of taxation, and the creation of a debt of only about 5,000,000 of dollars, when she reached the period of union of almost all her best citizens in the {249} Democratic party, which, in the election of Richard Coke as Governor in 1874, and of a majority of the legislative members, permanently triumphed in Texas. Mississippi also had held back in 1868 and 1869, as we have seen, in order to secure better terms for the ex-Confederates in the enfranchising and disfranchising provisions of the "State" constitution, and by doing so had accomplished this result. But Mississippi was one of the three Southern communities in which the negro population far outnumbered the white. Mississippi was not, for this reason chiefly, so fortunate as Virginia, Texas and Georgia. She was obliged, with South Carolina and Louisiana, to pass through the fiery furnace in order to fuse the respectable white elements in her population into a single political