o Northern sagacity. What the nation, through
the agency of the Republican party, did was to enact the Thirteenth
Amendment and thus to make President Lincoln's conditional proclamation
of freedom an unconditioned part of the organic law. The extent of its
revenge was to insist upon the incorporation of this principle of
freedom into the old Slave Constitutions of the South. This was the
terms of surrender and having accepted this, the South was left alone
(the boon it has always craved) with full power to deal with the Negro
as tenderly as it saw fit. The Negro was left a "sojourner on
sufferance" in the great republic which he had assisted in saving, and
to the sweet charity of those who had sought to destroy it for the
purpose of binding him with unbreakable chains.

By the acceptance of the terms imposed, the rebellious states placed
themselves in a position of great responsibility and great opportunity.
The responsibility of the old South, the South of slavery and rebellion,
was to properly adjust itself to the new conditions of freedom and
inseparable union, its opportunity was to prove to the nation the claim
it so often and so boastfully makes that it is the Negro's best friend
and is disposed to treat him fairly.

Did the South rise to its opportunity? Did it treat liberally and kindly
those freedmen who as slaves had created its material wealth and many of
whom as soldiers had with the irony of fate helped to keep it from
separating from the Union of which it is now proud of being an integral
part? Did it hold out to them the promise of gradual citizenship, and,
in order that this citizenship should be intelligent, establish schools
for their education? Was it jealous or in any way solicitous about the
economic and industrial freedom of these people? In its bearing upon the
present disfranchising enactments of the South, the answer to these
questions is important.

Unaccustomed to free schools, trained to despise and punish the
intellectual aspirations of the slave, these recently rebellious states
not only refused to educate the freedmen, but actually burned many
schools that were built by men and women of the North, who in obedience
to genuine Christian charity followed in the wake of the armies of
freedom. Then as now, it proceeded to fix the Negro's status by hostile
legislation in the shape of Black codes. These laws reveal the
deliberate purpose of the South to reduce the freedmen to a state of
serfdo