In recent discussions of the merits and wisdom of Negro suffrage, this period is as a rule strangely overlooked. The assertion so commonly made, that the conferring of the right to vote upon the Negro was a colossal blunder, evinces the extent to which this period has been ignored by those who make it, or else their remarkable ignorance of the history of Negro suffrage. Political prejudices and the blind zeal and opportunism of those who have discovered some "sure cure," for the Negro's ills have aided much in the work of discrediting Negro suffrage. Some have ignored the facts to such an extent as to assert that Negro suffrage was the result of vindictiveness on the part of the Northerners, who wished both to humiliate the South and to perpetuate the power of the Republican Party. The trouble with this assertion is that it imputes too much to Northern sagacity. What the nation, through the agency of the Republican party, did was to enact the Thirteenth Amendment and thus to make President Lincoln's conditional proclamation of freedom an unconditioned part of the organic law. The extent of its revenge was to insist upon the incorporation of this principle of freedom into the old Slave Constitutions of the South. This was the terms of surrender and having accepted this, the South was left alone (the boon it has always craved) with full power to deal with the Negro as tenderly as it saw fit. The Negro was left a "sojourner on sufferance" in the great republic which he had assisted in saving, and to the sweet charity of those who had sought to destroy it for the purpose of binding him with unbreakable chains. By the acceptance of the terms imposed, the rebellious states placed themselves in a position of great responsibility and great opportunity. The responsibility of the old South, the South of slavery and rebellion, was to properly adjust itself to the new conditions of freedom and inseparable union, its opportunity was to prove to the nation the claim it so often and so boastfully makes that it is the Negro's best friend and is disposed to treat him fairly. Did the South rise to its opportunity? Did it treat liberally and kindly those freedmen who as slaves had created its material wealth and many of whom as soldiers had with the irony of fate helped to keep it from separating from the Union of which it is now proud of being an integral part? Did it hold out to them the promise of gradual citizenship, and, in order that this citizenship should be intelligent, establish schools for their education? Was it jealous or in any way solicitous about the economic and industrial freedom of these people? In its bearing upon the present disfranchising enactments of the South, the answer to these questions is important.