"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 old Whigs who could not yet bring themselves to affiliate with the Democrats.
At first it seemed that a respectable number of whites might be secured for the radical party, but the rapid organization of the Negroes checked the accession of whites.In the winter and spring of 1866-67, the Negroes near the towns were well organized by the Union League and the Freedmen's Bureau and then, after the passage of the reconstruction acts, the organizing activities of the radical chieftains shifted to the rural districts.The Union League was greatly extended; Union League conventions were held to which local whites were not admitted; and the formation of a black man's party was well on the way before the registration of the voters was completed.Visiting statesmen from the North, among them Henry Wilson of Massachusetts and "Pig Iron" Kelley of Pennsylvania, toured the South in support of the radical program, and the registrars and all Federal officials aided in the work.
* See "The Day of the Confederacy", by Nathaniel W.Stephenson (in "The Chronicles of America"), p.121, footnote.
The whites, slow to comprehend the real extent of radicalism, were finally aroused to the necessity of organizing, if they were to influence the Negro and have a voice in the conventions.The old party divisions were still evident.With difficulty a portion of the Whigs was brought with the Democrats into one conservative party during the summer and fall of 1867, though many still held aloof.The lack of the old skilled leadership was severely felt.In places where the white man's party was given a name, it was called "Democratic and Conservative," to spare the feelings of former Whigs who were loath to bear the party name of their quondam opponents.
The first step in the military reconstruction was the registration of voters.
In each State a central board of registrars was appointed by the district commander and a local board for every county and large town.Each board consisted of three members--all radicals--who were required to subscribe to the "ironclad" oath.In several states one Negro was appointed to each local board.The registrars listed Negro voters during the day, and at night worked at the organization of a radical Republican party.The prospective voters were required to take the oath prescribed in the Reconstruction Act, but the registrars were empowered to go behind the oath and investigate the Confederate record of each applicant.This authority was invoked to carry the disfranchisement of the whites far beyond the intention of the law in an attempt to destroy the leadership of the whites and to register enough Negroes to outvote them at the polls.For this purpose the registration was continued until October 1, 1867, and an active campaign of education and organization carried on.
At the close of the registration, 703,000 black voters were on the rolls and 627,000 whites.In Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina, Florida, and Mississippi there were black majorities, and in the other States the blacks and the radical whites together formed majorities.The white minorities included several thousand who had been rejected by the registrars but restored by the military commanders.Though large numbers of blacks were dropped from the revised rolls as fraudulently registered, the registration statistics, nevertheless, bore clear witness to the political purpose of those who compiled them.
