and resulted in evil as
well as in good. Free schools failed in reconstruction because of
the dishonesty or incompetence of the authorities and because of the
unsettled race question. It was not until the turn of the century that
the white schools were again as good as they had been before 1861.
After the reconstruction native whites as teachers of Negro schools were
impossible in most places. The hostile feelings of the whites resulted
and still result in a limitation of Negro schools. The best thing for
Negro schools that came out of reconstruction was Armstrong's Hampton
Institute program, which, however, was quite opposed to the spirit of
reconstruction education.

CHAPTER X. CARPETBAG AND NEGRO RULE

The Southern States reconstructed by Congress were subject for periods
of varying length to governments designed by radical Northerners and
imposed by elements thrown to the surface in the upheaval of Southern
society. Georgia, Virginia, and North Carolina each had a brief
experience with these governments; other States escaped after four
or five years, while Louisiana, South Carolina, and Florida were not
delivered from this domination until 1876. The states which contained
large numbers of Negroes had, on the whole, the worst experience. Here
the officials were ignorant or corrupt, frauds upon the public were the
rule, not the exception, and all of the reconstruction governments were
so conducted that they could secure no support from the respectable
elements of the electorate.

The fundamental cause of the failure of these governments was the
character of the new ruling class. Every state, except perhaps Virginia,
was under the control of a few able leaders from the North generally
called carpetbaggers and of a few native white radicals contemptuously
designated scalawags. These were kept in power by Negro voters, to
some seven hundred thousand of whom the ballot had been given by the
reconstruction acts. The adoption of the Fifteenth Amendment in March
1870, brought the total in the former slave states to 931,000, with
about seventy-five thousand more Negroes in the North. The Negro voters
were most numerous, comparatively, in Louisiana, Mississippi, South
Carolina, Alabama, and Georgia. There were a few thousand carpetbaggers
in each State, with, at first, a much larger number of scalawags. The
latter, who were former Unionists, former Whigs, Confederate deserters,
and a few unscrupulous politicians, were m