the educational work, and volunteers shouldered other benevolences.
But no power and no organization could take the place of the national
authority. If the Freedmen's Bureau could have been stripped of those
evil-intentioned persons who used it for private gain, been so
organized as to enlist the support of the Southern white population,
and been continued until a new generation of blacks were prepared for
civil life, the colossal blunders and criminal misfits of that bitter
period of transition might have been avoided. But political
opportunism spurned comprehensive plans, and the negro suddenly found
himself forced into social, political, and economic competition with
the white man.

The social and political struggle that followed was short-lived. There
were a few desperate years under the domination of the carpetbagger
and the Ku Klux Klan, a period of physical coercion and intimidation.
Within a decade the negro vote was uncast or uncounted, and the
grandfather clauses soon completed the political mastery of the former
slave owner. A strict interpretation of the Civil Rights Act denied
the application of the equality clause of the Constitution to social
equality, and the social as well as the political separation of the
two stocks was also accomplished. "Jim Crow," cars, separate
accommodations in depots and theaters, separate schools, separate
churches, attempted segregations in cities--these are all symbolic of
two separate races forcibly united by constitutional amendments.

But the economic struggle continued, for the black man, even if
politically emasculated and socially isolated, had somehow to earn a
living. In their first reaction of anger and chagrin, some of the
whites here and there made attempts to reduce freedmen to their former
servitude, but their efforts were effectually checked by the Fifteenth