If it is a question of mere perverse imposition by the white on the black, by the stronger on the weaker, a refusal to recognize his just rights, then the advocates of that side are right. If, however, it be the other, then the stronger race should be sustained, or else the people of the North are guilty of the fatuity which destroys nations. The chief complication of the matter has arisen from the possession of the elective franchise by the newly emancipated Negro, and the peculiar circumstances which surround this possession. The very method of the bestowal of this franchise was pregnant with baleful results. It was given him not as a righteous and reasonable act; not because he was considered capable of exercising the highest function of citizenship: the making of laws, and the execution of laws; not with the philosophic deliberation which should characterize an act by which four millions of new citizens of a distinct and inferior race are suddenly added to the nation; but in heat, in a spirit of revenge, and chiefly because the cabal which then controlled the Republic thought that with the Negro as an ally it could dominate the South and perpetuate its own power. The South, just emerging from the furious struggle of war, physically prostrate, but with its dauntless spirit unbroken, confiding in its own integrity of purpose, and vainly believing that as the Constitution was the ægis under which the North had claimed to fight, the constitutional rights for which it had itself contended would be observed and respected, accepted the emancipation of the Negro, but not unnaturally found itself unwilling, indeed unable, to accept all that this emancipation might import. The North, partly in distrust of the sincerity of even the measure of acceptance which the South avowed; partly in the belief in the minds of a considerable portion of its people that the Negro might thus be elevated, and that he would, at least, be enabled to protect himself; but mainly to govern the intrepid and difficult South, at the instance of the partisan leaders who then directed the destinies of the Republic, struck down constitutional government throughout the South, and restored it only when it had placed it in the Negro’s hands.