“The cause of the planters had gone down in irretrievable disaster. For forty years they had contended with their rivals of the North, and having staked all on the wager of battle they had lost. Just four years before they had entered with unsurpassed zeal and enthusiasm upon the gigantic task of winning their independence. They had made the greatest fight in history up to that time. Lost the flower of their manhood and wealth untold. They now renewed once and for all time their allegiance to the Union, which had up to that time been an experiment, a government of uncertain powers. More than three hundred thousand lives and not less than four billions of dollars had been sacrificed in the fight of the South. The planter culture, the semi-feudalism of the ‘Old South’ was annihilated, while the industrial and financial system of the East was triumphant. The cost to the North had been six hundred thousand lives and an expense to the governments, State and National, of at least five billion dollars. But the East was the mistress of the United States, and the social and economic ideals of that section were to be stamped permanently upon the country.”[346] The war having ended in a complete conquest of the South and a sentimental control of the vigorous West, expanded by the East as it exploited the broken South; through the destruction of the codes and the imposition of Congressional Reconstruction, the whites of the South were welded into a new mass, cruder and tougher and not unnaturally quite inimical to the Negro who had been made to rule over them, until by revolutionary methods they had overthrown such. That they, the Negroes, and the Western whites had all been subjected to the control of the East as thoroughly as economic laws could subject them to it, was not for decades appreciated in the South or West. Had Lincoln not been assassinated and had he remained true to his Western ideals, he would have been broken on the wheel of capitalism as relentlessly as was his great Southern successor, who struck down Germany in her hour of triumph. But Lincoln was spared that test and died without realizing the entire measure of his service to the Union and the whites who inhabited it; for to him the Negroes were a negligible quantity, despite all the phrases with which he utilized them, in his purpose of preserving the Union. Indeed it was not until the fountains of the great deep were broken in the World War, that the inevitable consequences of emancipation forced themselves upon public opinion, and, in this connection, a small episode, of the above related meeting of the American Historical Association in 1909, throws some light upon the state of mind of the East at that date.