military authorities and save all they could out of the situation. General
Beauregard, for instance, wrote in 1867: "If the suffrage of the Negro is
properly handled and directed, we shall defeat our adversaries with their own
weapons. The Negro is Southern born. With education and property
qualifications he can be made to take an interest in the affairs of the South
and in its prosperity. He will side with the whites."

Northern observers who were friendly to the South or who disapproved of this
radical reconstruction saw the danger more clearly than the Southerners
themselves, who seemed not to appreciate the full implication of the
situation. In this connection the New York "Herald" remarked:

"We may regard the entire ten unreconstructed Southern States, with possibly
one or two exceptions, as forced by a secret and overwhelming revolutionary
influence to a common and inevitable fate. They are all bound to be governed
by blacks spurred on by worse than blacks - white wretches who dare not show
their faces in respectable society anywhere. This is the most abominable phase
barbarism has assumed since the dawn of civilization. It was all right and
proper to put down the rebellion. It was all right perhaps to emancipate the
slaves . . . . But it is not right to make slaves of white men even though
they may have been former masters of blacks. This is but a change in a system
of bondage that is rendered the more odious and intolerable because it has
been inaugurated in an enlightened instead of a dark and uncivilized age."

The political parties rapidly grouped themselves for the coming struggle. The
radical Republican party indeed was in process of organization in the South
even before the passage of the reconstruction acts. Its membership was made up
of Negroes, carpetbaggers, or Northern men who had come in as speculators,
officers of the Freedmen's Bureau and of the army, scalawags or Confederate
renegades, "Peace Society" men,* and Unionists of Civil War times, with a few