lowed from the contest now about to ensue--a contest that had
many elements of provocation and of wrong on both sides--one of the
most remarkable features was the complete control which the white men
from the North, entire strangers to the negro, to his habits and to
his prejudices, so readily obtained over him. The late slave-masters
did not adapt themselves to the new situation. They gave way to
repining and regretting, to sulking and to anger, to resentment and
revenge, and thereby lost a great opportunity for binding together the
two races in those ties of sympathy and confidence which must be
maintained as an indispensable condition of prosperity, or even of
domestic order and the reign of law, in the Southern States. The lack
of moral courage among the physically brave men of the South has
already been indicated and illustrated. It was something of this
same defect that held back the slave-masters from the condescension, as
they esteemed it, of establishing any relation whatever with the negro
in his new condition of freedom. Such action was frowned upon by the
public opinion of this class throughout the South, and for lack of
bold leadership at the critical period, for lack of that consideration
which in many subsequent instances has been lavished upon the colored
man, the current of fatal prejudice was set strongly against the old
master in the mind of his former slave. Events, as they developed in
the stirring and sorrowful years that followed, were but a continual
proof of that form of original blunder on the part of the Southern
whites, which in affairs of civil administration is worse than a crime.

In excuse, or at least in explanation, of this unfortunate blunder on
the part of Southern men, the obstinacy and wrong-headed course of
President Johnson must be pleaded. It was his causeless, voluntary,
unpardonable quarrel with his party which misled Southern men at the
time when they most needed lessons of wisdom and moderation. The
different result which we may well conceive might have followed in the
South under the considerate and kindly spirit which Mr. Lincoln would
have brought to the problem, gives us by contrast some faint
appreciation of the enormity of Johnson's conduct and of the evil
effects flowing from it. At the very moment when the President should
have stood as a generous mediator, calming the irritation of the South
--an irritation inevitably incident to defeat--and restraining
some