It was not wholly unnatural that the men who, in dealing
with each other, were men of scrupulous honor and of undoubted
courage should have brought themselves to do such things,
or at any rate to screen and sympathize with the more hot-
headed men who did them. The proof in the public records
of those public crimes is abundant. With the exception of
Reverdy Johnson of Maryland there is no record of a single
manly remonstrance, or expression of disapproval from the
lips of any prominent Southern man. But they had persuaded
themselves to believe that a contest for political power with
a party largely composed of negroes was a contest for their
civilization itself. They thought it like a fight for life
with a pack of wolves. In some parts of the South there were
men as ready to murder a negro who tried to get an office
as to kill a fox they found prowling about a hen roost. These
brave and haughty men who had governed the country for half
a century, who had held the power of the United States at
bay for four years, who had never doffed their hats to any
prince or noble on earth, even in whose faults or vices there
was nothing mean or petty, never having been suspected of
corruption, who as Macaulay said of the younger Pitt, "If
in an hour of ambition they might have been tempted to ruin
their country, never would have stooped to pilfer from her,"
could not brook the sight of a Legislature made up of ignorant
negroes who had been their own slaves, and of venal carpet-
baggers.
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