442 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



and, that no greater harm has resulted is, because white intelligence 

 has been able to exert a controlling influence and shape legislation. 

 Certainly, while the whites were disfranchised, and the blacks polit- 

 ically supreme, the state of the South was intolerable. Had the Re- 

 publican party, devoting its entire energies to the moral and intellect- 

 ual elevation of the blacks, deferred their enfranchisement to a more 

 reasonable day, when the race, in the mass, would be less unworthy of 

 the ballot, the power of that party throughout the South would have 

 been otherwise than it is to-day. The issue of the war had practically 

 settled and silenced the old Democratic State-rights doctrine. Not- 

 withstanding the war-engendered bitterness, a large white minority, if 

 not a majority, at the South partly the remnants of the old-line 

 Whigs who antagonized the political tenets connected with the war's 

 beginning, partly converts to results which force had imposed, partly 

 recruits from moribund Democracy these were ready, in good faith, 

 to accept the new order of affairs, and act with Republicanism ; and if 

 the Republican party, rejecting the mistaken policy of seeking a foot- 

 hold in the South through negro suffrage, had fostered the friendly 

 white element, it could easily have developed this element, aided by 

 executive patronage extending through a series of terms, into over- 

 whelming Republican strength. Under the course pursued the almost 

 extinct Democratic }3arty at once revived, from a pressing sense among 

 the whites of self-preservation. The negroes voting as a body on one 

 side, the whites necessarily became politically massed on the other. It 

 made little difference under what name they rallied. The term " Dem- 

 ocrat " had been opposed to Republican in days gone by, and was 

 now adopted. Yet thousands, banded under this party title, had no 

 sympathy with leading and distinctive Democratic doctrines, such as 

 those regarding the tariff, finance, or State rights. They were against 

 negro political supremacy, as meaning disaster to the land. It had 

 prevailed for a short period (just after the war), and left desolation in 

 its course. The ignorance and inexperience of this unlettered mass, 

 fresh from slavery, were immensely unequal to the science of enlight- 

 ened governing. For the whites it was a matter of life or death. 

 They became a " solid South," as any other people, similarly circum- 

 stanced, would have become. "Wealth and intelligence gave them the 

 victory, as it ever will, where numbers approach an equality a vic- 

 tory that does not mean injury to the blacks, but which is the pledge 

 for good government and order the proof whereof is the present 

 peaceful and prosperous condition of the Southern States, for the 

 blacks no less than for the whites, compared with their state of wretch- 

 edness, under negro political rule, in the days following immediately 

 upon the close of the war. 



We must again ask the question, What, from this standpoint, will 

 the upshot be when the blacks numerically will so far exceed the 

 whites as to overcome the vantage that the superior wealth and in- 



