make prominent the issue against the Reconstruction measures of the Republicans. This wing added to the platform and declaration that these acts were unconstitutional and void, and the demand that the Southern states should be restored to their former rights and given control over their own elective franchise.
301. Although the followers of Pendleton had shaped the financial plank of the platform, they could not nominate their National Democratic Convention; Seymour Nominated for the Presidency. leader. The opposition was at first divided between the various candidates. New York, which feared the effect upon the conservative financial interests of the East if Pendleton were nominated, attempted to break the deadlock by proposing an Ohio man, Chief Justice Chase. But eager as Chase was for the presidency he had flatly refused to abandon the views which he held in favour of negro suffrage. Ohio was, therefore, able to retaliate by stampeding the convention in favour of Horatio Seymour, of New York, chairman of the convention. As the war governor of his state he had been a consistent critic of the extremes to which the Federal administration had carried its interpretation of the war power. For vice-president the convention nominated Francis P. Blair, jun., of Missouri, who had denounced the unconstitutionality of the Reconstruction acts in unmeasured terms.
302. But the popularity of Grant in the North, together with the Republican strength in the states of the South which Grant Elected. had been reconstructed under negro suffrage, gave an easy victory to the Republicans in the election of 1868. Seymour carried only Delaware, New Jersey, New York and Oregon, of the North; and Maryland, Kentucky, Georgia and Louisiana of the South. Tennessee, and five of the former Confederate States, upon which negro suffrage had been imposed under military Reconstruction (North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida, Alabama and Arkansas) voted for Grant. Virginia, Mississippi and Texas had not yet been restored.
303. This decisive victory and the knowledge that it had been won by the advantage of the negro vote in the restored states Fifteenth Amendment. led the Republican leaders to ignore their recent platform declaration in regard to negro suffrage. Shortly after Congress assembled propositions were made to place the freedman's right to vote beyond the power of the states to change. To do this by constitutional enactment it was necessary to make the provision universal, and Congress, therefore, submitted for ratification the Fifteenth Amendment declaring that “the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude.” Congress was given power to enforce the amendment by appropriate legislation. By the 30th of March 1870 the amendment had been ratified; but it is doubtful whether this could have been accomplished by legislatures chosen on the issue. As it was, the states of Virginia, Mississippi, Texas and Georgia were required to ratify it as a condition of their readmittance to representation in Congress, and the three former states, having been permitted to vote separately on the obnoxious provisions of their constitutions in regard to the disfranchisement of former Confederates, rejected those clauses, adopted the Fifteenth Amendment and were restored in 1870. Georgia Readmitted. Georgia, after a new experience of military rule, likewise ratified the amendment, and her representatives were likewise admitted to Congress.
304. As soon as the Fifteenth Amendment was proclaimed in effect, and the military governments of the South were New Congressional Measures. superseded, the dominant party proceeded to enact measures of enforcement. These seemed especially necessary in view of the fact that, partly by intimidation of the coloured vote, Louisiana (1868) and Tennessee (1869) broke away from the Republican column; while in the election of 1870 Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia, Virginia and Alabama went Democratic. The enforcement legislation of 1870 provided penalties for violating the Fourteenth and Fifteenth amendments and re-enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1866. Jurisdiction was given to the Federal courts to maintain the equality of the races before the law. The underlying doctrine of the acts was that the amendments guaranteed the freedmen against invasion of their rights by the acts of individuals as well as by explicit legislation of the states. In the next two years (1871 and 1872) acts were passed providing for effective Federal supervision of Congressional elections, and the “Ku-Klux Acts” (1871 and 1872) still further increased the power of the Federal courts to enforce the amendments and authorized the president to suspend the writ of habeas corpus and use military force to suppress the public disorders occasioned by the attempts to intimidate negro voters. But these stern measures were accompanied by some efforts to restore harmony, such as the repeal of the “ironclad oath” for ex-Confederates, in 1871, and the passage of the General Amnesty Act of 1872. The North was becoming restive under the long continued use of the Federal military arm within state borders in time of peace, and especially with the results of negro rule under “carpet-bag” leadership.
305. In any case the cost of rehabilitating the public works and providing education and the political and judicial Extravagance of Reconstruction Governments. institutions which should equally apply to the hitherto non-political class of the blacks, would have been a heavy one. But the legislatures, especially of Louisiana, South Carolina, Tennessee, Arkansas and Alabama, plunged into an extravagance made possible by the fact that the legislatures contained but few representatives who paid considerable taxes, and that they were controlled by Northern men who were sometimes corrupt, and often indifferent to the burdens laid upon the propertied classes of the South. In 1872 it was estimated that the public debts of the eleven reconstructed states amounted to nearly $132,000,000, two-thirds of which was composed of guarantees to corporations, chiefly railway companies. Legislative expenses were grotesquely extravagant, the coloured members in some states engaging in a saturnalia of corrupt expenditure. Gradually this alienated from the so-called Radical party the support of Southern whites, because they resented the concessions of the carpet-bag leaders to the negro vote, because they suffered from the burden of taxation, and above all because race friction increased, drawing the whites together, in spite of former antagonisms between localities and classes.
306. By 1872 a coalition had been formed under the name of Conservatives. But the control of electoral machinery in the strongly centralized state executives chosen by negro votes, and coercion by the Federal authority, still upheld Republican rule in various Southern states. Virginia and North Carolina were practically bankrupt, the capitals of Louisiana. Arkansas and Alabama, where rival state officers claimed possession, were occupied by Federal troops, and many of the governments were so corrupt that only the contemporaneous revelations of rottenness in New York City and in certain branches of the Federal government afford a parallel.
307. It was a time of lax public morals after war, which was ill suited to the difficult experiment of transferring political power to a race recently enslaved. Only the strong arm of the Federal authority sufficed to prevent the whites of the South from overthrowing a condition of things which it was impossible under American political ideas permanently to maintain.
308. An important economic reorganization was in progress in the South. White districts were recovering from the war Economic Changes in the South. and were becoming the productive cotton areas by the use of fertilizers and by the more intelligent white labour. Cities were rising, and the mines and manufactures of the southern Appalachians were developing. In the black belt, or region of denser negro settlement, the old centres of cotton production and the citadels of the Southern political aristocracy, the blacks became tenant farmers, or workers on shares, but the white farmer in other areas raised his cotton at less cost than the planter who lived in the rich soils of the former cotton areas. The effective and just direction of negro labour was a difficult problem and was aggravated by
