ruthless piece of assumption on the part of a military man to
attempt to have any opinions after the war was over. Any settlement that
left the politicians out in the cold was not to be tolerated. Some of
these gentlemen had a very big and black crow to pick with the South.
Some of them, in the course of the long debate over slavery, had had
their feelings hurt by Southern men; and although these wrangles had
been purely personal and individual, the politicians felt that the whole
South ought to be humiliated still further.

The politicians would have been entirely harmless if the life of
President Lincoln had been spared. During the war, Mr. Lincoln was
greatly misunderstood even at the North; but it is now the general
verdict of history, that, take him for all in all, he was beyond all
comparison the greatest man of his time, the one man who, above all
others, was best fitted to bring the people of the two sections together
again, and to make the Union a more perfect Union than ever before. But
unfortunately Mr. Lincoln fell by the hands of an assassin, and never
had an opportunity to carry out the great policy of pacification which
could only have been sustained at that time by his great influence, by
his patience, that was supreme, and by his wisdom, that has proved to be
almost infallible in working out the salvation of the Union. After Lee's
surrender, the interests of the South could have sustained no severer
blow than the death of Lincoln. His successor, Andrew Johnson, was a
well-meaning man, but a very narrow-minded one in some respects, and a
very weak one in others. It is but justice to him to say that he did his
best to carry out Lincoln's policy of pacification, and his failure was
no greater than that of any other leading politician of his time would
have been.

It would be impossible to describe the condition of the people at this
time. There was no civil law in operation, and the military government
that had been established was not far-reaching enough to restrain
violence of any sort. The negroes had been set free, and were supported
by means of a "freedmen's bureau." They were free, and yet they wanted
some practical evidence of it. To obtain this, they left the plantations
on which they had been born, and went tramping about the country in the
most restless and uneasy manner.

[Illustration: The Negroes Freed 306]

A great many of them believed that freedom meant idleness, such as they
had seen