THE REMINISCENCES OF CARL SCHURZ
submitted to the President. In them the enthusiast, the cool man of affairs, as well as the pessimist and the cynic had their say. The historian of that time will hardly find more trustworthy material. They all substantially agreed upon certain points of fact. They all found that the South was at peace so far as there was no open armed conflict between the Government troops and organized bodies of insurgents. The South was not at peace inasmuch as the different social forces did not peaceably co-operate, and violent collisions on a great scale were prevented or repressed only by the presence of the Federal authority supported by the government troops on the ground ready for immediate action. The “results of the war” were recognized in the South by virtue of necessity in so far as the restoration of Union and the Federal government were submitted to, and the emancipation of the slaves and the introduction of free labor were accepted in name; but the Union was still hateful to a large majority of the white population of the South, the Southern Unionists were still social outcasts, the officers of the Union were still regarded as foreign tyrants ruling by force; and as to the abolition of slavery, emancipation, although “accepted” in name, was still denounced by a large majority of the former master class as an “unconstitutional” stretch of power to be reversed if possible, and that class, the ruling class among the whites, was still desiring, hoping, and striving to reduce the free negro laborer as much as possible to the condition of a slave. And this tendency was seriously aggravated by the fact that the South, exhausted and impoverished, stood in the most pressing need of productive agricultural labor, while the landowners generally did not yet know how to manage the former slave as a free laborer, and the emancipated negro was still unused to the rights and duties of a free man. In short, Southern society was still in that most
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