The fanatic who murdered Lincoln in doing so struck the whole of his own people. The planters who burned the runaway slaves, the soldiers who during the war put to death the Negro prisoners who fell into their hands, the actions generally of the embittered, brought the calamity of retaliatory spite not only upon themselves but upon the innocent and the just and the kind. A policy of punishment and not of reconciliation ruled at Washington, and the white South suffered. The Negroes and the Negro cause suffered also. The ex-slaves were given votes and put on an electoral equality with white men. This was a palpable injustice and indignity. The Negroes in 1863 were not prepared in mind or in soul or in knowledge for the exercise of the franchise. Neither were they gifted with the power of will and physical strength necessary to hold the suffrage when it was given them. There was the same exaltation nationally when the victory was won as there had been locally when Sherman marched through, and the same disillusion and the same destruction of bridges was to take place also. Where the white man went the black man could not follow. For a brief space of time the ex-slave dominated the white South. The black vote was exploited by political charlatans; Negroes did not vote, they were voted, and then a way was made out of injustice to put the white man and ex-master of slaves in the right again. For wrong though the South had been, the war should still have left the educated white man in authority and not put him under the heel of the illiterate. The poor slaves just freed, but not educated, not blown upon by the winds of culture, not sunned in America’s bright moral sun, were in no position to vote upon America’s destiny or to take a directing hand in her affairs. As is usual after a war, the victors wanted a revolution in the land where they had won. The white North revenged itself on the white South. But a black revolution was a thing that could not be. Racial instinct came to the help of the Whites, and through general tacit understandings and organized conspiracies the new black masters were ousted from their places. Then fear of what might be, and once more, revenge born of the brief black dominion, went as far the other way in injustice. Nigger baiting arose, mob violence took the place of the justice of the courts. The central authority was flouted, first covertly and then openly. The Negro was hustled back to peonage and servility, and one might be tempted to think that the cause for which all the blood of the Civil War had been shed was lost. It would have been lost had not slavery become a complete anachronism in world society. The yoke could not be reimposed upon the Negro’s neck. His freedom has persisted, it has grown.