scalawags, who were
numerous enough to fill practically all the offices. These
men were often able leaders and skillful managers, and they
did not intend to surrender control; and the black race was
obedient and furnished the votes. In 1868, with Virginia,
Mississippi, Georgia, and Texas unrepresented, the first
radical contingent in Congress from the South numbered 41,
of whom 10 out of 12 senators and 26 out of 32
representatives were carpetbaggers. There were two lone
conservative Congressmen. A few months later, in 1869, there
were 64 radical representatives from the South, 20 senators
and 44 members of the House of Representatives. In 1877 this
number had dwindled to two senators and four
representatives. The difference between these figures
measures in some degree the extent of the undoing of
reconstruction within the period of Grant's Administration.

How the Southern whites escaped from Negro domination has often been
told and may here be sketched only in outline. The first States regained
from radicalism were those in which the Negro population was small and
the black vote large enough to irritate but not to dominate. Although
Northern sentiment, excited by the stories of "Southern outrage," was
then unfavorable, the conservatives of the South, by organizing a "white
man's party" and by the use of Ku Klux methods, made a fight for social
safety which they won nearly everywhere, and, in addition, they gained
political control of several States--Tennessee in 1869, Virginia in
1869-1870, and North Carolina and Georgia in 1870. They almost won
Louisiana in 1868 and Alabama in 1870, but the alarmed radicals came
to the rescue of the situation with the Fifteenth Amendment and the
Enforcement Laws of 1870-1871. With more troops and a larger number of
deputy marshals, it seemed that the radicals might securely hold the
remaining states. Arrests of conservatives were numerous, plundering was
at its height, the Federal Government was interested and was friendly
to the new Southern rulers, and the carpetbaggers and scalawags feasted,
troubled only by the disposition of their Negro supporters to demand a
share of the spoils. Although the whites made little gain from 1870 to
1874, the states already rescued became more firmly conservative; white
counties here and there in the black states voted out the radicals; a
few more representatives of the wh