middle of 1866. There was almost no talk about it among the Negroes; they did
not know what it was. President Lincoln in 1864 and President Johnson in 1865
had merely mentioned the subject, though Chief Justice Chase and prominent
radical members of Congress, as well as numerous abolitionists, had framed a
Negro suffrage platform. But the Southern whites, considering the matter an
impossibility, gave it little consideration. There was, however, both North
and South, a tendency to see a connection between the freedom of the Negroes
and their political rights and thus to confuse civil equality with political
and social privileges. But the great masses of the whites were solidly opposed
to the recognition of Negro equality in any form. The poorer whites,
especially the "Unionists" who hoped to develop an opposition party, were
angered by any discussion of the subject. An Alabama "Unionist," M. J.
Saffold, later prominent as a radical politician, declared to the Joint
Committee on Reconstruction: "If you compel us to carry through universal
suffrage of colored, men . . . it will prove quite an *incubus upon us in the
organization of a national union party of white men; it will furnish our
opponents with a very effective weapon of offense against us."

There were, however, some Southern leaders of ability and standing who, by
1866, were willing to consider Negro suffrage. These men, among them General
Wade Hampton of South Carolina and Governor Robert Patton of Alabama, were of
the slaveholding class, and they fully counted on being able to control the
Negro's vote by methods similar to those actually put in force a quarter of a
century later. The Negroes were not as yet politically organized were not even
interested in politics, and the master class might reasonably hope to regain
control of them. Whitelaw Reid published an interview with one of the Hamptons
which describes the situation exactly:

"A brother of General Wade Hampton, the South Carolina Hotspur, was on board.
He saw no great objection to Negro suffrage, so far as the whites were