trous misunderstanding might have been avoided. The North knew as
little of the South as the South did of the North, but the North was
eager for news. Able newspaper correspondents like Sidney Andrews of
the Boston Advertiser and the Chicago Tribune, who opposed President
Johnson's policies, Thomas W. Knox of the New York Herald, who had given
General Sherman so much trouble in Tennessee, Whitelaw Reid, who wrote
for several papers and tried cotton planting in Louisiana, and John
T. Trowbridge, New England author and journalist, were dispatched
southwards. Chief of the President's investigators was General Carl
Schurz, German revolutionist, Federal soldier, and soon to be radical
Republican, who held harsh views of the Southern people; and there were
besides Harvey M. Watterson, Kentucky Democrat and Unionist, the
father of "Marse" Henry; Benjamin C. Truman, New England journalist and
soldier, whose long report was perhaps the best of all; Chief Justice
Chase, who was thinking mainly of "How soon can the Negro vote?"; and
General Grant, who made a report so brief that, notwithstanding its
value, it attracted little attention. In addition a constant stream of
information and misinformation was going northward from treasury agents,
officers of the army, the Freedmen's Bureau, teachers, and missionaries.
Among foreigners who described the conquered land were Robert Somers,
Henry Latham, and William Hepworth Dixon. But few in the South realized
the importance of supplying the North with correct information about
actual conditions. The letters and reports, they thought, humiliated
them; inquiry was felt to be prying and gloating. "Correspondents have
added a new pang to surrender," it was said. The South was proud and
refused to be catechized. From the Northern point of view, the South,
a new and strange region with strange customs and principles, was of
course, not to be considered as quite normal and American, but there
was on the part of many correspondents a determined attempt to describe
things as they were. And yet the North persisted in its unsympathetic
queries when it seemed to have a sufficient answer in the reports of
Grant, Schurz, and Truman.

Grant's opinion was short and direct: "I am satisfied that the mass of
thinking men of the South accept the present situation of affairs in
good faith.... The citizens of the Southern States are anxious to return
to self-government within the Union as soon as possible." Tru