Just what might have been the effects of the attempt made by the Southern States to readjust the Negroes to the changed conditions of 1865 must now always remain a matter of surmise; for the differentiations of color, race and condition, which they attempted then to establish, were ruthlessly swept out of existence by military control and universal suffrage followed by the Civil Rights Bill. But before considering that era of frantic sentimentality concerning the African people in the United States, the period of Congressional Reconstruction, a little more light should be thrown upon the struggle made by the surviving soldiery of the Confederacy, led by Wade Hampton of South Carolina and others less well remembered, as Wright of Georgia, to support the policy of Seward and President Johnson. Not unnaturally in so doing attention will be concentrated to a very great degree upon the Scape Goat, The Hot Bed of Secession, The Prostrate State, although it was from without, if upon her borders, the record was preserved by one of her sons, an almost forgotten soldier and scholar of the Old South, in his tireless, patriotic and absolutely sincere and highly intelligent effort to mentally avert the overthrow of the remnants of Southern civilization, threatened in the advance of the black horde of freedmen marching to plunder, under the leadership of Sumner, Stevens and Wilson and the half averted countenance of Grant. This description by a Southern man may seem possibly too comprehensive and severe, until we read the declaration of that American Negro most generally esteemed in the North in his day, the leader of the Negro race in America: “I felt that the Reconstruction policy, so far as it related to my race was in a large measure on a false foundation, was artificial and forced. In many cases it seemed to me that the ignorance of my race was being used as a tool with which to help white men into office and that there was an element in the North which wanted to punish the Southern white men by forcing the Negro into positions over the heads of Southern whites.”[200] How can the characterization be doubted when we remember Senator Wilson’s speech in Charleston and the fact that with such a record as he had and such a field to choose from, he was made Grant’s running mate, the Aaron for that Moses.