testimonial."[107]

Of the colored treasurer of South Carolina the white Governor Chamberlain
said, "I have never heard one word or seen one act of Mr. Cardoza's which
did not confirm my confidence in his personal integrity and his political
honor and zeal for the honest administration of the state government. On
every occasion, and under all circumstances, he has been against fraud and
robbery and in favor of good measures and good men."[108]

Jonathan C. Gibbs, a colored man and the first state superintendent of
instruction in Florida, was a graduate of Dartmouth. He established the
system and brought it to success, dying in harness in 1874. Such men--and
there were others--ought not to be forgotten or confounded with other
types of colored and white Reconstruction leaders.

There is no doubt that the thirst of the black man for knowledge, a thirst
which has been too persistent and durable to be mere curiosity or whim,
gave birth to the public school system of the South. It was the question
upon which black voters and legislators insisted more than anything else,
and while it is possible to find some vestiges of free schools in some of
the Southern States before the war, yet a universal, well-established
system dates from the day that the black man got political power.

Finally, in legislation covering property, the wider functions of the
state, the punishment of crime and the like, it is sufficient to say that
the laws on these points established by Reconstruction legislatures were
not only different from and even revolutionary to the laws in the older
South, but they were so wise and so well suited to the needs of the new
South that, in spite of a retrogressive movement following the overthrow
of the Negro governments, the mass of this legislation, with elaborations
and development, still stands on the statute books of the South.[109]

The triumph of reaction in the South inaugurated a new era in which we may
distinguish three phases: the renewed attempt to reduce the Negroes to
serfdom, the rise of the Negro metayer, and the economic disfranchisement
of the Southern working class.

The attempt to replace individual slavery had been frustrated by the
Freedmen's Bureau and the Fifteenth Amendment. The disfranchisement of
1876 was followed by the widespread rise of "crime" peonage. Stringent
laws on vagrancy, guardianship, and labor contracts were enacted and large
discretion given judge and jury in cases of pett