“There is danger today that between the intense feeling of the South and the conciliatory spirit of the North grave injustice will be done the Negro American in the history of Reconstruction. Those who see in Negro suffrage the cause of the main evils of Reconstruction must remember that if there had not been a single freedman left in the South after war the problems of Reconstruction would still have been grave. Property in slaves to the extent of perhaps two thousand million dollars had suddenly disappeared. One thousand five hundred more millions representing the Confederate war debt, had largely disappeared. Large amounts of real estate and other property had been destroyed, industry had been disorganized, 250,000 men had been killed and many more maimed. With this went the moral effect of an unsuccessful war with all its letting down of social standards and quickening of hatred and discouragement—a situation which would make it difficult under any circumstances to reconstruct a new government and a new civilization. Add to all this the presence of four million freedmen and the situation is further complicated.”[324] That the training and the treatment of these ex-slaves became a central problem of Reconstruction, he admits; yet claims that three agencies, the Negro church; the Negro school and the Freedmen’s Bureau undertook the solution, without which, he maintains, it would have been far graver. But he absolutely disregards that product of ante-bellum Southern civilization then in the South, 132,819[325] free persons of color, many of whom were morally and mentally well fitted for what the Black Codes designed to give them, the suffrage. This element of the Southern population together with the majority of the House slaves would have probably furnished a base of about ten per cent of the total Negro population on which the new civilization would have been reared, had the South been permitted to test its plan. Having declared that the economic condition of the eleven States at the close of the war was “pitiable, their fear of Negro freedom genuine,” Dr. DuBois maintains, “yet it was reasonable to expect from them something less than repression and utter reaction toward slavery.” Admitting that: “To some extent this expectation was fulfilled: the abolition of slavery was recognized and the civil rights of owning property and appearing as a witness in cases in which he was a party were generally granted the Negro.”[326]— he promptly contradicts his own admission, with the assertion: “The Codes spoke for themselves. They have often been reprinted and quoted. No open minded student can read them without being convinced that they meant nothing more nor less than slavery in daily toil.”[327]