It was rather a
choice between suffrage and slavery, after endless blood and
gold had flowed to sweep human bondage away. Not a single
Southern legislature stood ready to admit a Negro, under any
conditions, to the polls; not a single Southern legislature
believed free Negro labor was possible without a system of
restrictions that took all its freedom away; there was scarcely
a white man in the South who did not honestly regard Eman-
cipation as a crime, and its practical nullification as a duty. In
such a situation, the granting of the ballot to the black man
was a necessity, the very least a guilty nation could grant a
wronged race, and the only method of compelling the South
to accept the results of the war. Thus Negro suffrage ended a
civil war by beginning a race feud. And some felt gratitude
toward the race thus sacrificed in its swaddling clothes on the
altar of national integrity; and some felt and feel only in-
difference and contempt.
Had political exigencies been less pressing, the opposition
to government guardianship of Negroes less bitter, and the
attachment to the slave system less strong, the social seer can
well imagine a far better policy,--a permanent Freedmen's
Bureau, with a national system of Negro schools; a carefully
supervised employment and labor office; a system of impar-
tial protection before the regular courts; and such institutions
for social betterment as savings-banks, land and building
associations, and social settlements.
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