ect wrought, we shall
briefly examine the negative issue which it introduced into the great
campaign. And in doing this, we shall not attempt to penetrate its
motives, nor inquire how far it was responsible for acts which but
reflected an evil tendency. The reader has, doubtless, anticipated us in
the statement that it alienated the political mind of the North, reopened
the dead issues of secession and war, and licensed a political persecution
which, in extent and malignity of design, has not been equalled since the
Roman empire dictated government to its conquered dependencies.
Reconstruction, having been inaugurated under favorable auspices, was not
to be pretermitted, nor even abated, while this sage Ahithophel occupied a
voice in Southern counsels (rendering a war of races possible); and who
will affect to say that this policy had no basis of sound reason? The
society, a mystery to itself, and sorely misinterpreted by the people
among whom it was domesticated, became, of course, a monster of blended
secretiveness and iniquity to those who had small means of becoming
acquainted with even its aims through unprejudiced sources. Added to this,
the most unprincipled plagiaries of its actual history--perpetrated by
those local enemies who had most to fear from the movement--found their
way constantly into the news mediums of the country, awakening, in the
North at least, that dangerous sentimentalism which, more than politics
and religion combined, influences the mind of the nation.

Atrocities of which the body could not have been guilty, even in
thought--horrors from which it would have shrunk with the same symptoms of
dismay that clouded the brow of the Northern reader at their bare
relation--were rescued from the carpet-bagger dialect, and rendered into
the imaginative prose of the news-reporter, with the design of securing
enemies, not for the Ku-Klux movement, but the cause of Conservatism in
the South. Many of these slanders never reached the individuals or
communities who would have been authorized to refute them, and when their
disclaimers were uttered they were either unheard or unheeded.

We do not, of course, affect to say how long the evils of reconstruction
were prolonged in the South by means of this influence, but there can be
no doubt that it excited such a tendency, and for a long time proved the
forlorn hope of the enemies of good government in this section. Many of
the wise and good men who had joined