was proud and refused to be catechized. From the Northern point of view, the
South, a new and strange region with strange customs and principles, was of
course, not to be considered as quite normal and American, but there was on
the part of many correspondents a determined attempt to describe things as
they were. And yet the North persisted in its unsympathetic queries when it
seemed to have a sufficient answer in the reports of Grant, Schurz, and
Truman.

Grant's opinion was short and direct: "I am satisfied that the mass of
thinking men of the South accept the present situation of affairs in good
faith . . . . The citizens of the Southern States are anxious to return to
self-government within the Union as soon as possible." Truman came to the
conclusion that "the rank and file of the disbanded Southern army . . . are
the backbone and sinew of the South . . . . To the disbanded regiments of the
rebel army, both officers and men, I look with great confidence as the best
and altogether the most hopeful element of the South, the real basis of
reconstruction and the material of worthy citizenship." General John Tarbell,
before the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, testified that "there are, no
doubt, disloyal and disorderly persons in the South, but it is an entire
mistake to apply these terms to a whole people. I would as soon travel alone,
unarmed, through the South as through the North. The South I left is not at
all the South I hear and read about in the North. From the sentiment I hear in
the North, I would scarcely recognize the people I saw, and, except their
politics, I liked so well. I have entire faith that the better classes are
friendly to the Negroes."

Carl Schurz on the other hand was not so favorably impressed. "The loyalty of
the masses and most of the leaders of the southern people," he said, "consists
in submission to necessity. There is, except in individual instances, an
entire absence of that national spirit which forms the basis of true loyalty