Every effort was made by the radicals to encourage the negro to claim full equality with the whites, political and social, until by 1868 they were demanding not only the franchise, but mixed schools, a share in public affairs and even social rights. The Southerner, as has been said so many times, did not hate the negro, but he did not believe that he could rise in the scale of civilization. He felt that most of the negroes had not sufficient intelligence to desire the franchise, and hence that it was superimposed upon him. Nordhoff declares that “without whites to organize the colored vote--which means to mass it, to excite it, to gather the voters at barbacues, to carry them up with a hurra to the polls, to make ‘bolting’ terrible, to appeal to the fears of the ignorant and the cupidity of the shrewd; without all this the negro will not vote.” And it was a well-known fact that the “organizers”[39] were Federal officers with little else to do. And, in addition, the campaigns did interfere with the work rendered. The following passage from Nordhoff, the words of the bitterest Democrat he met in the State, shows how direct this was: “And they work just about as well (as in slavery), except when some accursed politician comes up from New Orleans with a brass band, and sends word, as was done last fall, that General Butler had ordered them all to turn out to a political meeting.”[40] Nowhere, perhaps, is this sentiment more accurately reflected than in a speech of Senator Ogden’s in the State Assembly: “Do you not know as well as I that all the disgust, all the anger and bitterness that arose between these different political factions was engendered by the ill voices of certain politicians, who haranguing the ignorant and superstitious, in private and in public, poured into their ears voices as poisonous as nightshade.”[41]