The consciousness of this political wrong and danger was at the bottom of the bitter opposition on the part of the North to the admission of Missouri as a slave state, to the annexation of Texas, and to the Mexican War. It was at the bottom of the fierce cry which rose all over that section at the close of that war, "No more slave territory, no more slave states." It was the soul of the great movement which beat back the slave tide from Kansas and saved that state to freedom. It was, in fact, this struggle of the free states to reduce to a minimum the peril to its industrial democracy which grew out of the slave representation clause of the Constitution, and the resistance of the slave states to such a movement, which produced the war between the sections. This war ended in the destruction of slavery and as the North supposed and intended, in the total destruction of this right of the South to count five slaves as three freemen in the apportionment of representatives among the several states in the newly restored Union. But wrong does not die under a single stroke. It has a strange power of metamorphosis, i. e. ability to change its form without losing its identity. The slave power, which everybody at the North imagined to be dead, re-appeared almost at once as the Southern serf power, in consequence of legislation enacted in the then lately rebellious states by the old slave masters. They had lost their slaves, to be sure, and the political power incident under the Constitution to such ownership, but they had not lost the political cunning and determination to create a similar power out of the social forces and material which lay in disorder about them. The reconstruction of the South by the old slave oligarchy resulted in the threatened rise in national affairs of an African serf power more formidable to the North than was the old slave power than five is greater than three in federal numbers. This threatened rise in national politics of an African serf power aroused the North to the danger which girt afresh the supremacy of its industrial democracy in the Union. It thereupon set about the work of removing this peril forever. In doing this work it unfortunately limited itself exclusively to the use of political agencies. But there is no doubt that what it did in reconstructing the old slave states was meant to be thorough. It meant to extirpate root and branch, from the Constitution the right of the South to count five slaves as three freemen, or five serfs as five freemen in the apportionment of representatives among the states. This was the plain purpose of the whole body of congressional legislation looking to southern reconstruction. It is the plain purpose likewise of the 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution.