ngs of over three
millions of dollars. They have never been reimbursed.

Many Negroes were undoubtedly venal, but more were ignorant and deceived.
The question is: Did they show any signs of a disposition to learn to
better things? The theory of democratic government is not that the will of
the people is always right, but rather that normal human beings of average
intelligence will, if given a chance, learn the right and best course by
bitter experience. This is precisely what the Negro voters showed
indubitable signs of doing. First they strove for schools to abolish
ignorance, and second, a large and growing number of them revolted against
the extravagance and stealing that marred the beginning of Reconstruction,
and joined with the best elements to institute reform. The greatest stigma
on the white South is not that it opposed Negro suffrage and resented
theft and incompetence, but that, when it saw the reform movements growing
and even in some cases triumphing, and a larger and larger number of black
voters learning to vote for honesty and ability, it still preferred a
Reign of Terror to a campaign of education and disfranchised Negroes
instead of punishing rascals.

No one has expressed this more convincingly than a Negro who was himself a
member of the Reconstruction legislature of South Carolina, and who spoke
at the convention which disfranchised him against one of the onslaughts of
Tillman. "We were eight years in power. We had built school houses,
established charitable institutions, built and maintained the penitentiary
system, provided for the education of the deaf and dumb, rebuilt the jails
and court houses, rebuilt the bridges, and reestablished the ferries. In
short, we had reconstructed the state and placed it upon the road to
prosperity, and at the same time, by our acts of financial reform,
transmitted to the Hampton government an indebtedness not greater by more
than two and a half million dollars than was the bonded debt of the state
in 1868, before the Republican Negroes and their white allies came into
power."[105]

So, too, in Louisiana in 1872, and in Mississippi later, the better
element of the Republicans triumphed at the polls and, joining with the
Democrats, instituted reforms, repudiated the worst extravagance, and
started toward better things. Unfortunately there was one thing that the
white South feared more than Negro dishonesty, ignorance, and
incompetency, and that was Negro honesty,