ost numerous in Virginia,
North Carolina, Texas, Arkansas, and Tennessee. The better class,
however, rapidly left the radical party as the character of the new
regime became evident, taking with them whatever claims the party had to
respectability, education, political experience, and property.

The conservatives, hopelessly reduced by the operation of disfranchising
laws, were at first not well organized, nor were they at any time as
well led as in antebellum days. In 1868, about one hundred thousand
of them were forbidden to vote and about two hundred thousand were
disqualified from holding office. The abstention policy of 1867-68
resulted in an almost complete withdrawal of the influence of the
conservatives for the two years, 1868-70. As a class they were regarded
by the dominant party in state and nation as dangerous and untrustworthy
and were persecuted in such irritating ways that many became indifferent
to the appeals of civil duty. They formed a solid but almost despairing
opposition in the black districts of Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama,
and South Carolina. For the leaders the price of amnesty was conversion
to radicalism, but this price few would pay.

The new state governments possessed certain characteristics in common.
Since only a small number of able men were available for office, full
powers of administration, including appointment and removal, were
concentrated in the hands of the governor. He exercised a wide control
over public funds and had authority to organize and command militia and
constabulary and to call for Federal troops. The numerous administrative
boards worked with the sole object of keeping their party in power.
Officers were several times as numerous as under the old regime, and all
of them received higher salaries and larger contingent fees. The moral
support behind the government was that of President Grant and the United
States army, not that of a free and devoted people.

Of the twenty men who served as governors, eight were scalawags and
twelve were carpetbaggers, men who were abler than the scalawags and who
had much more than an equal share of the spoils. The scalawags, such as
Brownlow of Tennessee, Smith of Alabama, and Holden of North Carolina,
were usually honest but narrow, vindictive men, filled with fear and
hate of the conservative whites.

Of the carpetbaggers half were personally honest, but all were
unscrupulous in politics.' Some were flagrantly dishonest.* Gove