But, while the chieftains of the great Conspiracy--and of the armed Rebellion itself--remained at their homes unpunished, through the clemency of the American People; the active and malignant minds of some of them were plotting a future triumph for the "Lost Cause," in the overthrow, in consecutive detail, of the Loyal governments of the Southern States, by any and all means which might be by them considered most desirable, judicious, expedient, and effectual; the solidifying of these Southern States into a new Confederation, or league, in fact--with an unwritten but well understood Constitution of its own--to be known under the apparently harmless title of the "Solid South," whose mission it would be to build up, and strengthen, and populate, and enrich itself within the Union, for a time, greater or less, according to circumstances, and in the meanwhile to work up, with untiring devotion and energy, not only to this practical autonomy and Sectional Independence within the Union, but also to a practical re-enslavement of the Blacks, and to the vigorous reassertion and triumph, by the aid of British gold, of those pernicious doctrines of Free-Trade which, while beneficial to the Cotton-lords of the South, would again check and drag down the robust expansion of manufactures and commerce in all other parts of the Land, and destroy the glorious prosperity of farmers, mechanics, and laborers, while at the same time crippling Capital, in the North and West. In order to accomplish these results--after whatever of suspicion and distrust that might have still remained in Northern minds had been removed by the public declaration in 1874, by one of the ablest and most persuasively eloquent of Southern statesmen, that "The South--prostrate, exhausted, drained of her life-blood as well as of her material resources, yet still honorable and true--accepts the bitter award of the bloody arbitrament without reservation, resolutely determined to abide the result with chivalrous fidelity"--these old Rebel leaders commenced in good earnest to carry out their well organized programme, which they had already experimentally tested, to their own satisfaction, in certain localities.