Emancipation gave to the Negroes a new economic status—the status of free wage-laborers, competing with other wage-laborers for work. They who had worked to create wealth for others were now turned loose without wealth or land to shift for themselves in a world already hostile to them. The mental attitude of the white south had been shaped by three centuries of slavery and was hard to get rid of. It was difficult for them to think of black labor under any form but that of slavery and they naturally turned to compulsion as the proper mode of obtaining work from their former slaves. This attitude was well expressed in the Black Codes of the southern states during the fall and winter of 1865–66. As soon as the end of the hostilities gave them a free hand at home they began to give legislative expression to the new conditions. They framed new constitutions and new laws. "But it was seen that the Negro had no privilege of voting in the first instance, and it was not to be expected that the right would be accorded him under the new state constitutions; no guarantee that justice should be done him was exacted. These new constitutions were formed, the legislatures met, laws were made, senators and representatives to Congress were chosen; but the Negro was not only not admitted to any participation in the government, but the new legislatures shocked the northern sense of justice by the cruel and revengeful laws which they enacted. The barbarity of the most odious slave-code was, under various disguises, applied to the Negro in his new condition of freedom". Even before the resentment of the national legislature had taken form, the Ku-Klux Klan, the Knights of the White Camelias, the Society of the Pale Faces, and other bands of organized representatives of culture had begun to do their bloody work of terrorizing Negroes into economic and social subjection. And all this before any steps had been taken to extend the suffrage to Negroes. When the northerners investigated these conditions they met with such fierce and unreasoning hostility on the part of the south that they found it necessary to arm the Negro with the ballot in his own defense. And yet, professional southerners like Tom Dixon, Tom Watson, Ben Tillman Vardaman and Blease pretend to their ignorant or forgetful countrymen that the present attitude of the south was caused in the first instance by a reaction against "Negro domination", social and political which the north had forced upon it.