klessly. For negroes,
only a few months out of the cotton-field, there was an irresistible
attraction in the plush carpets, the mahogany desks, and the imported
cuspidors that the taxpayers might be forced to provide for the comfort
of their servants. A free and continuous lunch, with ample food and
drink, was set up in one of the capitols. Gratuitous waste was the least
of the burdens inflicted upon the South.

It is unreasonable to lay all the corruption of the Reconstruction
Governments to the account of the congressional policy. The period of
the Civil War was one of abuse of power by local officials everywhere.
It took a Tweed in New York to drive a Northern public to revolt, and a
Nast to focus public attention upon the crime. In other States, where
rogues were less brutal in their methods, or prosecutors less acute, the
evil ran, not unnoticed but unchecked. In the South the same phenomena
were resented with greater vigor than in the North because the crimes
were more openly and clumsily committed, and because they were the work
of "outsiders."

Deliberate theft of public money was so common as to occasion no
surprise. In no State were books so kept that the modern student can be
sure he knows where all the money went. Graft in contracts, fraud in the
administration of schools and negro-relief schemes, sale of charters and
votes, illegal issues of bonds, improvident loans to railroads, combined
to enrich the office-holder and to increase the volume of public debts.
A long series of repudiations of these debts injured Southern credit for
many years. South Carolina occasioned the most vivid description of the
orgy in a book entitled _The Prostrate State_, by a Maine abolitionist
and Republican, named Pike; but several other States would have
furnished similar materials to a similar historian.

So far as law was concerned, the South was helpless in those regions in
which the negroes approached a majority. The military garrisons which
Congress kept on duty saw to it that the freedmen were protected, yet
were unable in the long run to control the white population. It is a
vexed question whether negro violence or white was the first to appear,
but by 1867 events had begun to point the way to the elimination of
negro control by force or fraud. By law it could not be destroyed unless
the whites struggled and argued for negro votes, treating the negroes as
citizens and equals, which was generally as impossible as an acc