The fear of Negro freedom in the South was increased by its own consciousness of guilt, yet it was reasonable to expect from it something more than mere repression and reaction toward slavery. To some small extent this expectation was fulfilled: the abolition of slavery was recognized and the civil rights of owning property and appearing as a witness in cases in which he was a party were generally granted the Negro; yet with these went such harsh regulations as largely neutralized the concessions and gave ground for the assumption that once free from Northern control the South would virtually re-enslave the Negro. The colored people themselves naturally feared this and protested, as in Mississippi, “against the reactionary policy prevailing and expressing the fear that the Legislature will pass such proscriptive laws as will drive the freedmen from the State or practically re-enslave them.”[158] As Professor Burgess (whom no one accuses of being Negrophile) says: “Almost every act, word or gesture of the Negro not consonant with good taste and good manners as well as good morals was made a crime or misdemeanor, for which he could first be fined by the magistrates and then be consigned to a condition of almost slavery for an indefinite time if he could not pay the bill.” All things considered, it seems probable that if the South had been permitted to have its way in 1865 the harshness of Negro slavery would have been mitigated so as to make slave trading difficult and to make it possible for a Negro to hold property if he got any and to appear in some cases in court; but that in most other respects the blacks would have remained in slavery. And no small number of whites even in the North were quite willing to contemplate such a solution. In October, the democratic platform of Louisiana said “This is a government of white people,” and although Johnson reported in December that Reconstruction was complete in North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas and Tennessee, yet everyone knew that the real problems of Reconstruction had just begun. The war caused by slavery could be stopped only by a real abolition of slavery.