But while the Southern whites were becoming desperate under oppression, public opinion in the North was at last beginning to affect politics. The elections of 1874 resulted in a Democratic landslide of which the Administration was obliged to take notice. Grant now grew more responsive to criticism. In 1875 he replied to a request for troops to hold down Mississippi: "The whole public are tired out with these annual autumnal outbreaks in the South and the great majority are ready now to condemn any interference on the part of the Government." As soon as conditions in the South were better understood in the North, ready sympathy and political aid were offered by many who had hitherto acted with the radicals. The Ku Klux report as well as the newspaper writings and the books of J. S. Pike and Charles Nordhoff, both former opponents of slavery, opened the eyes of many to the evil results of negro suffrage. Some who had been considered friends of the negro, now believing that he had proven to be a political failure, coldly abandoned him and turned their altruistic interests to other objects more likely to succeed. Many real friends of the negro were alarmed at the evils of the reconstruction and were anxious to see the corrupt political leaders deprived of further influence over the race. To others the constantly recurring Southern problem was growing stale and they desired to hear less of it. Within the Republican party in each Southern State there were serious divisions over the spoils. First it was carpetbagger and negro against the scalawag; later, when the black leaders insisted that those who furnished the votes must have the larger share of the rewards, the fight became triangular. As a result, by 1874 the Republican party in the South was split into factions and was deserted by a large proportion of its white membership. The conservative whites, fiercely resentful after their experiences under the enforcement laws and hopeful of Northern sympathy, now planned a supreme effort to regain their former power. Race lines were more strictly drawn; ostracism of all that was radical became the rule; the Republican party in the South, it was apparent, was doomed to be only a negro party weighed down by the scandal of bad government; the state treasuries were bankrupt, and there was little further opportunity for plunder. These considerations had much to do with the return of scalawags to the "white man's party" and the retirement of carpetbaggers from Southern politics. There was no longer anything in it, they said; let the negro have it!