. Planters had begun
already to break up their estates and entrust small holdings to cash
renters, or share tenants, known as "croppers." Their financial burdens
were heavy, but with intelligent government and reasonable commercial
credits from the North, the problems of labor and capital might be met.
But the men who must control the economic future of the South were
excluded from the Government as traitors. Their places were filled by
Northern adventurers and by negroes. The Mississippi convention included
seventeen negroes, and was called the "black and tan." Inexperience and
incompetence were in control, leading to extravagance and dishonesty,
but the conventions were generally superior to the legislatures which
followed them.

Framing new constitutions, most of the States had met the demands of
Congress by the summer of 1868, with the respectable portion of the
South looking on in desperate silence. The war had left no grievances
equal to those now being suffered. Seven of the new constitutions were
adopted in time for the radicals to give to their States votes in the
election of 1868. Alabama, making the eighth, was allowed to vote under
a constitution which Congress had forced upon her after it had failed of
ratification by the people. Only Georgia and Louisiana, of these eight,
did not give their votes to Grant. Only Virginia, Mississippi, and Texas
remained without the pale when Grant was inaugurated in 1869.

The completion of reconstruction in its formal sense was reached during
Grant's first Congress. Mississippi completed her process in February,
1870. She had in 1868 voted down the reconstruction constitution, taking
courage in the leadership of a conservative governor, Humphreys. When he
was removed, and replaced by a Northern governor, the conservatives lost
heart and ratified the constitution that they had rejected. Their delay
cost the State one more humiliation, since in the interval the
Fifteenth Amendment had been submitted by Congress and made a condition
of readmission for the recalcitrant States. A Republican legislature,
the first fruit of reconstruction, accepted this and sent to Washington
as the new Mississippi Senators the Northern military governor, Ames,
and a negro preacher named Revels.

Virginia was readmitted in January, 1870. Her original loyal government
under Pierpont, which Lincoln had respected, had been supplanted by a
military regime, having lost its last chance for recognitio