But, while the chieftains of the great Conspiracy--and of the armed
Rebellion itself--remained at their homes unpunished, through the
clemency of the American People; the active and malignant minds of some
of them were plotting a future triumph for the "Lost Cause," in the
overthrow, in consecutive detail, of the Loyal governments of the
Southern States, by any and all means which might be by them considered
most desirable, judicious, expedient, and effectual; the solidifying of
these Southern States into a new Confederation, or league, in fact--with
an unwritten but well understood Constitution of its own--to be known
under the apparently harmless title of the "Solid South," whose mission
it would be to build up, and strengthen, and populate, and enrich itself
within the Union, for a time, greater or less, according to
circumstances, and in the meanwhile to work up, with untiring devotion
and energy, not only to this practical autonomy and Sectional
Independence within the Union, but also to a practical re-enslavement of
the Blacks, and to the vigorous reassertion and triumph, by the aid of
British gold, of those pernicious doctrines of Free-Trade which, while
beneficial to the Cotton-lords of the South, would again check and drag
down the robust expansion of manufactures and commerce in all other
parts of the Land, and destroy the glorious prosperity of farmers,
mechanics, and laborers, while at the same time crippling Capital, in
the North and West.

In order to accomplish these results--after whatever of suspicion and
distrust that might have still remained in Northern minds had been
removed by the public declaration in 1874, by one of the ablest and most
persuasively eloquent of Southern statesmen, that "The South--prostrate,
exhausted, drained of her life-blood as well as of her material
resources, yet still honorable and true--accepts the bitter award of the
bloody arbitrament without reservation, resolutely determined to abide