Governor Andrew's scheme for the reconstruction of the rebel states included not only the extension of the suffrage to the blacks but the re-admission to their full citizenship of the class of old slaveholders who had carried those states out of the Union. They were needed as leaders in the work of restoration and reconstruction, he shrewdly argued. And he was right. They were indeed the natural leaders of the South, and had they turned their backs upon the past and faced patriotically the new problems and the new posture of their affairs they might have led both races into the promised land of freedom and peace and Southern industrial expansion and greatness. Had they seized their golden opportunity for progressive and constructive statesmanship, the sceptre of their ascendency in the governments of their section could not have been wrested from them by another class of whites, risen since the war, who distrust and hate them, but they might instead have transmitted their ascendency undiminished to their descendants, who ought to be today the leaders of the new South. The course laid down by Governor Andrew was not followed either by the South or by the North. The Southern leaders taking advantage of the opportunity given them by Andrew Johnson reconstructed their section along the lines of their old social system, reducing its changes to a minimum. They emerged out of their reconstruction operation with a Negro serf system to take the place of their old slave system. The Negro as a serf was just about as valuable as an industrial asset to the great landlords and to the small ones too for that matter, as had been the Negro as a slave. Just about as much unpaid and involuntary labor could be got out of the first as out of the last. Thus did the old master class perform their task without changing materially their old social system. But they likewise issued from their labors not less fortunate in another respect. Their old political power would not suffer any radical change in consequence of the abolition of slavery either. For whereas five slaves had counted for them in the ante bellum apportionment of representatives as three freemen, five serfs would count in the post-bellum apportionment as five free men--a pretty large gain for the new power over the old one in federal numbers. But in achieving this double success the old master class overreached itself. The return of the South into the newly restored Union stronger as a serf power than it had been as a slave power aroused the instant fear of the North and set Congress in motion to thwart such reappearance of that section into the arena of national politics.