The question of negro suffrage was not a live issue in the South until the middle of 1866. There was almost no talk about it among the negroes; they did not know what it was. President Lincoln in 1864 and President Johnson in 1865 had merely mentioned the subject, though Chief Justice Chase and prominent radical members of Congress, as well as numerous abolitionists, had framed a negro suffrage platform. But the Southern whites, considering the matter an impossibility, gave it little consideration. There was, however, both North and South, a tendency to see a connection between the freedom of the negroes and their political rights and thus to confuse civil equality with political and social privileges. But the great masses of the whites were solidly opposed to the recognition of negro equality in any form. The poorer whites, especially the "Unionists" who hoped to develop an opposition party, were angered by any discussion of the subject. An Alabama "Unionist," M. J. Saffold, later prominent as a radical politician, declared to the Joint Committee on Reconstruction: "If you compel us to carry through universal suffrage of colored men ... it will prove quite an incubus upon us in the organization of a national union party of white men; it will furnish our opponents with a very effective weapon of offense against us." There were, however, some Southern leaders of ability and standing who, by 1866, were willing to consider negro suffrage. These men, among them General Wade Hampton of South Carolina and Governor Robert Patton of Alabama, were of the slaveholding class, and they fully counted on being able to control the negro's vote by methods similar to those actually put in force a quarter of a century later. The negroes were not as yet politically organized, were not even interested in politics, and the master class might reasonably hope to regain control of them. Whitelaw Reid published an interview with one of the Hamptons which describes the situation exactly: