"Up to the commencement of hostilities between the North and the South, there were in the South millions of people employed directly or indirectly in the honest and wholesome avocation of agriculture, and by its great encouraging system, sustained in a condition of existence, both moral and physical, equally as prosperous and independent as any other agricultural people in any other region of the earth. They were white men who piece by piece built up the whole superstructure, and thereby reinforced the country with so much labor and skill; furnished so much mutual employment for that skill and labor, aided as they were by so many instrumentalities of toil and agents of production. What a country it was--supplied by this system from the labor of our own hands and workshops, with all the machinery, fruits of the earth, and all the needful fabrics of human skill. This great system comprehended every class and every source of material wealth. Under this system our people prospered. The white population of the South came by descent from a parent stock, that from the foundation of society had governed in wisdom and moderation the most enlightened countries of the world; who had written every constitution, fought every battle, endowed every charity, established every government, introduced every reform that has given to the world its christian development and progress. "When these extra-hazardous reconstruction acts were submitted to the Legislature of the South, they refused to "chop logic" with the Reconstruction party. It would have been contrary to the experience of mankind, and an exception to all the teachings of history, if in the high excitement then prevailing--the exasperation of the people--the outrages threatened and inflicted, the South had yielded one jot or tittle or swerved from its honest, patriotic convictions. The transition was from a state in which the integrity and intelligence of the white race, ennobled by centuries of meritorious service, had ruled; to a government by a black race that less than five generations before had been hunted like wild beasts in the jungles of the dark continent; who were handcuffed and decoyed into slave ships, and who had been slaves until the proclamation of President Lincoln emancipated them in the territory protected by the U. S. Army. The transition was to a condition of things in which white men to the number of three hundred thousand were disfranchised and deprived of the right to vote and to hold office, and the enfranchisement of more than a corresponding number of benighted negroes with the right to vote and hold office. The transition of the slave, was too sudden--too alarming--too degrading. No people who were proud of their traditions, their institutions, could have looked upon such a change with complacency; nor seen their local government pass into the hands of their slaves--irresponsible, illiterate, brutish, rapacious, without being goaded into violent resistance.