that the whites were hostile to it; that the whites were disloyal and would,
if given control of the Southern governments and admitted to Congress,
constitute a danger to the nation and especially to the party in power.

To convince the voters of the North of the necessity of dealing drastically
with the South a campaign of misrepresentation was begun in the summer of
1865, which became more and more systematic and unscrupulous as the political
struggle at Washington grew fiercer. Newspapers regularly ran columns headed
"Southern Outrages," and every conceivable mistreatment of blacks by whites
was represented as taking place on a large scale. As General Richard Taylor
said, it would seem that about 1866 every white man, woman, and child in the
South began killing and maltreating Negroes. In truth, there was less and less
ground for objection to the treatment of the blacks as time went on and as the
several agencies of government secured firmer control over the lawless
elements. But fortunately for the radicals their contention seemed to be
established by riots on a large scale in Memphis and New Orleans where Negroes
were killed and injured in much greater number than whites.

The rapid development of the radical plans of Congress checked the tendency
toward political division in the South. Only a small party of rabid Unionists
would now affiliate with the radicals, while all the others reluctantly held
together, endorsed Johnson's policy, and attempted to affiliate with the
disintegrating National Union party. But the defeat of the President's
policies in the elections of 1866, the increasing radicalism of Congress as
shown by the Civil Rights Act, the expansion of the Freedmen's Bureau, the
report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction, and the proposal of the
Fourteenth Amendment led farsighted Southerners to see that the President was
likely to lose in his fight with Congress.

Now began, in the latter half of 1866, with some cooperation in the North and