in a state of recognized inferiority, especially when during the eighties
and nineties there were many evidences that economic as well as political
conditions would become worse. The exodus treated in the previous chapter
was productive of better treatment for the Negroes and an increase in
their wages in certain parts of the South but the migration, contrary to
the expectations of many, did not become general. Actual prosperity was
impossible even if the whites had been willing to give the Negro peasants
a fair chance. The South had passed through a disastrous war, the effects
of which so blighted the hopes of its citizens in the economic world that
their land seemed to pass, so to speak, through a dark age. There was then
little to give the man far down when the one to whom he of necessity
looked for employment was in his turn bled by the merchant or the banker
of the larger cities, to whom he had to go for extensive credits.[10]

Southern planters as a class, however, had not much sympathy for the
blacks who had once been their property and the tendency to cheat them
continued, despite the fact that many farmers in the course of time
extricated themselves from the clutches of the loan sharks. There were a
few Negroes who, thanks to the honesty of certain southern gentlemen,
succeeded in acquiring considerable property in spite of their
handicaps.[11] They yielded to the white man's control in politics, when
it seemed that it meant either to abandon that field or die, and devoted
themselves to the accumulation of wealth and the acquisition of education.

This concession, however, did not satisfy the radical whites, as they
thought that the Negro might some day return to power. Unfortunately,
therefore, after the restoration of the control of the State governments
to the master class, there swept over these commonwealths a wave of
hostile legislation demanded by the poor white uplanders determined to
debase the blacks to the status of the free Negroes prior to the Civil
War.[12] The Negroes have, therefore, been disfranchised in most
reconstructed States, deprived of the privilege of serving in the State
militia, segregated in public conveyances, and excluded from public places
of entertainment. They have, moreover, been branded by public opinion as
pariahs of society to be used for exploitation but not to be encouraged to
expect that their status can ever be changed so as to destroy the barriers
between the races in th