It was made easy for political-fortune hunters from the North, with little concern for the good of either the whites or the blacks of the South, to gain position and power through cultivating the friendship of the ignorant, credulous, newly enfranchised Negroes. This they assiduously did from the start. At the same time they left nothing undone which might create and foster among the Negroes a feeling of ill will against and distrust of the Southern whites. If their former masters came into power, the Negroes were sometimes told, they would be reduced to slavery. The Negroes’ love of display was appealed to by encouraging them to form secret societies, to make public parades, and hold celebrations which tended to create a race consciousness and race solidarity. This, of course, was for the purpose of helping the carpet-baggers in perpetuating their power. If one considers the conditions, what else could be expected but riots and lynchings? If the control of the Negroes in slavery times, with all the advantages to such end embodied in the institution of slavery, had often been one of anxiety to the South, how fearful must have been the conditions now that they were not only free from such control but enfranchised and taught by their new friends to be self-assertive, even if not sometimes encouraged in acts of violence against the Southern white people? It does, indeed, seem that a great part of the Negroes almost ran wild—for they were free, but did not understand how to use their freedom. So, lazy, worthless, robbing, murdering gangs of them went prowling through the South. For it is as natural for the Negro to sit in idleness, or shoot crap, to go on marauding expeditions or connive at insurrections, as it is for the white man to establish courts, collect libraries, and found schools. Can History prove that the Negro, during his thousands of years of contact with superior races, has ever yet risen to the dignity of stable and progressive self-government? Even Liberia, with all the help that has been given her, is gradually sinking to the level of the surrounding barbarism. And what of San Domingo? Indeed, everywhere the tendency of the pure Negro is to fall when the white man’s props are removed. To return: If there ever was a time when the best elements in a society were justified in taking the law into their own hands, that time was during carpet-bag rule. The wonder now is that such a people as those of the South should have acted with even the moderation that appears.