and have endeavored to practice it myself."

Southerners of the Confederacy everywhere, then, accepted the destruction of
slavery and the renunciation of state sovereignty; they welcomed an early
restoration of the Union, without any punishment of leaders of the defeated
cause. But they were proud of their Confederate records though now legally
"loyal" to the United States; they considered the Negro as free but inferior,
and expected to be permitted to fix his status in the social organization and
to solve the problem of free labor in their own way. To *embarrass the easy
and permanent realization of these views there was a society disrupted,
economically prostrate, deprived of its natural leaders, subjected to a
control not always wisely conceived nor effectively exercised, and, finally,
containing within its own population unassimilated elements which presented
problems fraught with difficulty and danger.



CHAPTER II. WHEN FREEDOM CRIED OUT

The Negro is the central figure in the reconstruction of the South. Without
the Negro there would have been no Civil War. Granting a war fought for any
other cause, the task of reconstruction would, without him, have been
comparatively simple. With him, however, reconstruction meant more than the
restoring of shattered resources; it meant the more or less successful attempt
to obtain and secure for the freedman civil and political rights, and to
improve his economic and social status. In 1861, the American Negro was
everywhere an inferior, and most of his race were slaves; in 1865, he was no
longer a slave, but whether he was to be serf, ward, or citizen was an
unsettled problem; in 1868, he was in the South the legal and political equal,
frequently the superior, of the white; and before the end of the