te
radical action, and finally by a lineup of the great mass of the whites
in opposition to the Fourteenth Amendment and other radical plans of
Congress.

The Joint Committee on Reconstruction, appointed when Congress refused
to accept the work of President Johnson, proceeded during several months
to take testimony and to consider measures. The testimony, which was
taken chiefly to support opinions already formed, appeared to prove that
the Negroes and the Unionists were so badly treated that the Freedmen's
Bureau and the army must be kept in the South to protect them; that free
Negro labor was a success but that the whites were hostile to it; that
the whites were disloyal and would, if given control of the Southern
governments and admitted to Congress, constitute a danger to the nation
and especially to the party in power.

To convince the voters of the North of the necessity of dealing
drastically with the South a campaign of misrepresentation was begun
in the summer of 1865, which became more and more systematic and
unscrupulous as the political struggle at Washington grew fiercer.
Newspapers regularly ran columns headed "Southern Outrages," and every
conceivable mistreatment of blacks by whites was represented as taking
place on a large scale. As General Richard Taylor said, it would seem
that about 1866 every white man, woman, and child in the South began
killing and maltreating Negroes. In truth, there was less and less
ground for objection to the treatment of the blacks as time went on and
as the several agencies of government secured firmer control over the
lawless elements. But fortunately for the radicals their contention
seemed to be established by riots on a large scale in Memphis and New
Orleans where Negroes were killed and injured in much greater number
than whites.

The rapid development of the radical plans of Congress checked the
tendency toward political division in the South. Only a small party of
rabid Unionists would now affiliate with the radicals, while all
the others reluctantly held together, endorsed Johnson's policy, and
attempted to affiliate with the disintegrating National Union party.
But the defeat of the President's policies in the elections of 1866, the
increasing radicalism of Congress as shown by the Civil Rights Act, the
expansion of the Freedmen's Bureau, the report of the Joint Committee
on Reconstruction, and the proposal of the Fourteenth Amendment led
farsighted Southerners