e radicals, one House or the other of Congress in many instances
sent an investigation committee to ascertain the reasons. The Committees
on the Condition of the South or on the Late Insurrectionary States
were nearly always ready with reports to establish the necessity of
intervention.

Besides the army there was in every state a powerful group of Federal
officials who formed a "ring" for the direction of all good radicals.
These marshals, deputies, postmasters, district attorneys, and
customhouse officials were in close touch with Washington and frequently
dictated nominations and platforms. At New Orleans the officials acted
as a committee on credentials and held all the state conventions under
their control in the customhouse.

Such was the machinery used to sustain a party which, with the gradual
defection of the whites, became throughout the South almost
uniformly black. At first few Negroes asked for offices, but soon the
carpetbaggers found it necessary to divide with the rapidly growing
number of Negro politicians. No Negro was elected governor, though
several reached the office of lieutenant governor, secretary of state,
auditor, superintendent of education, justice of the state supreme
court, and fifteen were elected to Congress.* It would not be correct
to say that the Negro race was malicious or on evil bent. Unless
deliberately stirred up by white leaders, few Negroes showed signs
of mean spirit. Few even made exorbitant demands. They wanted
"something"--schools and freedom and "something else," they knew not
what. Deprived of the leadership of the best whites, they could not
possibly act with the scalawags--their traditional enemies. Nothing was
left for them but to follow the carpetbagger.

* Revels, Lynch, and Bruce represent the better Negro
officeholders; Pinchback, Rainey, and Nash, the less
respectable ones; and below these were the rascals whose
ambition was to equal their white preceptors in corruption.

CHAPTER XI. THE KU KLUX MOVEMENT

The Ku Klux movement, which took the form of secret revolutionary
societies, grew out of a general conviction among the whites that the
reconstruction policies were impossible and not to be endured. Somers,
an English traveler, says that at this time "nearly every respectable
white man in the Southern States was not only disfranchised but under
fear of arrest or confiscation; the old foundations of authority were
utterly razed before