he Negro. The freedmen
were utilized at this juncture to effect the necessary changes in the
Southern situation which the exigency demanded. He was first raised to
citizenship, and when that proved inadequate to meet the emergency, he was
invested with the right to vote on equal terms with the whites. This great
constitutional revolution in the status of the Negro laid the basis for a
political revolution in the old slave states also. The solid South was
dissolved for the nonce and two-party governments made their re-entrance
upon the stage of Southern affairs. There followed prompt repeal of the
reactionary legislation hostile to the Negro, which had signalized the
rise to power of the solid South and its one-party governments. The North
received its share likewise of the gains incident to this revolution in
the increase of its partisan strength in both branches of the National
Legislature, and which in turn confirmed its political domination in the
Union.

The changes wrought in the South by the reconstruction measures did not
last. Those measures afforded temporary relief and that was all. They did
not go deep enough and besides the whites refused to cooperate with the
blacks to make them a success. They failed to moderate or abate Southern
opinions, race prejudice and passions and were therefore doomed to fail as
an experiment in social and political reconstruction. Social and political
reconstruction in those states it seems now must come from within and by
voluntary action not from without and by compulsory legislation. This is
true today whatever might have been possible in this regard immediately
after the overthrow of the Southern Confederacy. What was attempted then
and failed would certainly fail today if it were possible to repeat the
self same experiment. The repetition of such an attempt, however, being
wholly outside of the range of the probable in American politics makes all
speculation as to what might be its fate therefore nugatory.

After the Presidential election of 1876, the North abandoned its attempt
to reconstruct the South and to keep it reconstructed according to its
standard of justice and political proportion. The stream of reaction
against the Negro set in strongly from that time and it has gathered
volume each succeeding year since. The failure of the old master class to
seize the opportunity which had come to them a second time, following the
collapse of the Rebellion, for progressive and