No such act of fatuity ever emanated from a nation. Justification it can have none; its best excuse must be that it was accomplished under a certain enthusiasm just after a bitter war, and before passion had cooled sufficiently for reason to reassert her sway. It was a people’s insanity. The “Reconstruction of the South” was, on the part of the people of the North at large, simply that which in national life is worse than a crime, a blunder; on the part of the leaders who planned it and carried it through, it was a cool, deliberate, calculated act, violative of the terms on which the South had surrendered and disbanded her broken armies, and perpetrated for the purpose of securing—not peace, not safety, not righteous acknowledgment of lawfully constituted authority, but personal power to the leaders of the party which at that time was dominant, power with all that it implied of gain and revenge. For this they took eight millions of the Caucasian race, a people which in their devotion and their self-sacrifice, in their transcendent vigor of intellect, their intrepid valor in the field, and their fortitude in defeat, had just elevated their race in the eyes of mankind, and placed them under the domination of their former slaves. There is nothing like it in modern history. Within two months after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox there was not a Confederate within the limits of the Southern States who had not accepted honestly the status of affairs. On the 18th of December, 1865, General Grant, who had been sent through the South to inspect and make a report on its condition, in his report to the President said: “I am satisfied the mass of thinking men in the South accept the present situation of affairs in good faith. The questions which have hitherto divided the sentiment of the people of the two sections—slavery and State-rights, or the right of the State to secede from the Union—they regard as having been settled forever by the highest tribunal, that of arms, that man can resort to.” Shortly after the assembling of Congress in December, 1865, the President was able to state that the people of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee had reorganized their State governments. The conventions of the seceding States had all repealed or declared null and void the ordinances of secession. The laws were in full operation, and the States were in reality back in the Union, with duly elected representatives, generally men who had been Union men, waiting to be admitted to Congress when it should assemble.[79]