uestion answered itself.
The million or so of new voters were most of them ignorant in a sense of
which illiteracy gives but a hint. They were unversed even in genuine
family life; skilled only in manual industry; unpracticed in
citizenship; utterly untaught in the principles, the facts of history,
the theory and art of self-government, which make up the proper
equipment of the voter. A great part of them, field hands on the great
cotton and sugar plantations, were rude and degraded, trained to live
solely under close and constant control.

How were the whites to deal with these new-made voters? From the
standpoint of expediency, three courses offered,--to conciliate and
educate them; to outvote them by massing the whites together; or to
suppress them by force or fraud. From the standpoint of unregenerate
human nature, the whites as a body at first took none of these
courses,--they stood apart from the whole business of politics, in wrath
and scorn. Unregenerate perhaps, but most natural, most human! At first,
some crude policy mingled with the sentiment that kept them aloof; there
was the hope that if the whites generally abstained from voting, at the
elections held in November, 1867, to pass on the question whether to
hold constitutional conventions, the proposal might fail for want of the
requisite majority of the registered voters. It was a fallacious hope;
suppose the conventions were to fail, what better terms were now to be
expected from Congress? But the conventions were all held; and as in the
same spirit most of the whites refused to vote for delegates, these were
chosen from the negroes, their friends from the North, and the few
Southern whites who accepted the inevitable.

Is it not the wisest, the manliest course, to accept the inevitable? So
asked General Longstreet, in a letter to a friend, June 3, 1867. He had
just listened to Senator Wilson, and had been surprised by his fairness
and frankness. For himself he says, "I will be happy to work in any
harness that promises relief to our discomfited people, whether bearing
the mantle of Mr. Davis or Mr. Sumner." Negro suffrage is for the
present an established fact; if after a fair trial it works
disastrously, we will appeal to Congress to repeal it. "If every one
will meet the crisis with proper appreciation of our condition and
obligations, the sun will rise to-morrow on a happy people." But his
words fell on deaf ears, and when he acted with the Republica