e Union,--and gave
opportunity to a new type of intense, patriotic, narrow mind. Men of
this type dominated in the reconstruction days. As the sixties advanced,
their number was recruited by men who had won prominence and popularity
on the battlefield, who used military fame as a step into politics, and
who came into public life with qualifications adapted to an issue that
was closed.

Few of the leaders of the period 1861 to 1876 ever grew into an
understanding of problems other than those of the Civil War. The most
eminent of them were gone before the latter year. Lincoln was dead;
Grant had had two terms; Stevens was gone; Sumner had been driven from
party honor before his death; Chase had died Chief Justice, but unhappy.
With these men living, lesser men had remained obscure. As they dropped
out, a host of minor leaders, trained to a disproportionate view of the
war and ignorant of other things, controlled affairs.

About these men the scandals of the Grant Administrations clustered, and
their standards came to be those of the Republican party organization.
They represented a dead issue, which they had never directed when it
was alive, and were chosen by voters whose choice had become automatic.
In their hands office tended to become a thing to be enjoyed for its own
sake, not a trust to be fulfilled.

If the Republican organization was drifting into the control of
second-rate men who misrepresented the rank and file, the status of the
opposition was no better. At the South the Democratic party was openly
founded on force and fraud. In the deliberate judgment of the white
population of the South, negro control was intolerable and worse than
any variety of political corruption that might be necessary to prevent
it. The leaders of the party in this section had borne so important a
part in the Confederacy that it was hopeless to think of them for
national leaders, while they could meet the Northern charge of fraud
only by the assertion of a greater alternate evil, which their opponents
would not recognize as such. The South could be counted on for
Democratic votes, but not as yet for leaders.

In the North and West the Democratic party was still weakened by its
past. Its leaders of the early sixties, where they had not joined the
Union party, were Copperheads, and were as little available as
ex-Confederates. One of them, Seymour, whose loyalty, though he was in
opposition to Lincoln, is above question, had been nom