ithout a master. The Greeley campaign, disastrous though it was,
had started a contagious spirit of independence. During Grant's second
administration, 1873-7, there was shown in the House, on important
questions, a degree of independence rare in American politics. It was
the growing Republican opposition to Federal interference in the South
that hastened its end, and prepared the way for the consummation of that
result under President Hayes.

We now return to the individual cases of three Southern States. To South
Carolina fell the bitterest experience of misgovernment. Its black
majority was organized and led by a group of white men of the worst
character, who were resisted for a time without success by a better
element in the party. Under four years' administration of Governor R. K.
Scott, a Northerner, and two of F. J. Moses, Jr., a South
Carolinian--who later disappeared from public view in a
penitentiary,--money was lavished in profligate expenditure; hundreds of
thousands spent for legislative furniture and luxuries; franchises were
corruptly sold; bogus enterprises enriched; debt piled up by millions,
and thrown off by millions. (Repudiation, be it said, always came easily
to the South,--before the war and after; during reconstruction and
after; whether the borrowed money had been spent for railroads or
squandered by thieves; and the ghost of an unpaid $300,000,000 still
scares Southern Senators when a general arbitration treaty is
discussed.) South Carolina went from bad to worse for six years.

When, in 1872, the honest Republicans bolted, under an unimpeachable
candidate, Reuben Tomlinson, a Philadelphia Quaker, and gave him 35,000
votes, the Democrats stood scornfully aloof--"better a native thief than
an honest Yankee!" But in 1874 came a revolution in the Republican
ranks. Honesty triumphed, under the lead of the elected governor, Daniel
H. Chamberlain, of Massachusetts birth and education,--a remarkable
man; shrewd, long-headed, a past master in political management; with
high aims; by no means indifferent to personal success, but generally
succeeding in combining personal and public service. With a Legislature
in which two-thirds were Republicans, and whites and blacks were about
equal in number, he achieved a surprising reversal of the evil
tendencies that had prevailed. In the Legislature the best of the
Democrats backed him, together with the best of the Republicans, and
overmatched the corruptionist