him, and we had better stand by the Administration

and bring it right."

Of the military commanders in the South, one of the most sagacious was General John M. Schofield, who years later became Lieutenant-General of the Army on the death of Sheridan. He had attributes of statesmanship, and might with great advantage have been consulted by the civilians who had to solve in Washington the grave problems of Reconstruction, With regard to the proposal of Chase, Sumner, and other radicals, that the negro should be given the immediate right to vote, a step which he contended rightly was unconstitutional — he wrote on May 10, 1865:

66

...

My second reason for objecting to the proposition is the absolute unfitness of the negroes as a class for any such responsibility. They can neither read nor write. They have no knowledge whatever of law or government. They do not even know the meaning of the freedom that has been given them, and are much astonished when they are informed that it does not mean that they are to live in idleness and be fed by the government. . . . I have yet to see a single one among the many Union men in North Carolina who would willingly submit for a moment to the immediate elevation of the negro to political equality with the white man. They are all,

or nearly all, content with the abolition of slavery. Many of them are rejoiced that it is done. But to raise the negro in his present ignorant and degraded condition to be their political equals would be in their opinion to enslave them (the white citizens). If they did not rebel against it, it would only be because rebellion would be hopeless. A government so organized would in no sense be a popular government."

If Reconstruction could have been left to soldiers like Grant and Schofield, who had fought the South, knew its leaders, and held their respect, the result would have been infinitely better than that which came from the unseemly quarrels of civilian politicians.

If there was ever a time when a military government might have proved beneficent in the United States, this was that timé. No soldier could have made a sorrier mess of Reconstruction than the political leaders who wrangled it into shape, and almost any one of the great Union generals could have been trusted to do a better job. Under a military government the country would have been spared the miserable squabbles in Washington, the bungling attempts of Johnson to force upon the country policies the good features of which he inadequately comprehended and the bad features of which were bound to

raise impossible expectations among the Southern people, the persistence of the radicals in Congress in imposing indiscriminate negro suffrage upon resentful communities, the appointment of provisional civilian governors, the letting loose of a devastating swarm of carpet-baggers upon a proud and helpless people, the imposition of proscriptive qualifications which debarred the best men in the South from holding office, thus limiting those who exercised the suffrage to a choice of carpet-baggers and negroes for places of political and judicial responsibility.

But it is idle to conjecture what might have happened if Grant or Sherman or Thomas or Schofield had been in supreme control. With all their fame the military leaders of the Civil War were in positions of hopeless subordination, taking orders from civilians. far less familiar than they with Southern necessities, in most cases wholly ignorant of the Southern temper, many of them actuated by vindictiveness or personal ambition, the best of them obsessed with the delusion that for the negro there could be no middle ground between the suffrage and slavery, that there could be no charm in liberty without a vote.

CHAPTER XXV

LESSONS IN POLITICAL INTRIGUE

GRANT would have been far better off if he had kept away from Washington, but it was ordered otherwise, and he who had commanded all the Union armies in the field was at the beck and call of men who could not lead a regiment. True, he was learning something of the devious ways of politics in preparation for the baffling tasks before him; but what he learned was at a heavy cost. "Do not stay in Washington," Sherman had written him in affectionate warning when he was made Lieutenant-General. "Halleck is better qualified than you to stand the buffets of intrigue and policy. ... For God's sake and for your country's sake, come out of Washington!"

And four years later, in his letter to the President, after Grant's wretched fray with Johnson, Sherman returned to the same theme, this time not as a seer of evil but as its chronicler:

"I have been with General Grant in the midst of death and slaughter, when the howls of people reached him after Shiloh; when messengers were speeding to and from his army bearing slanders to

induce his removal before he took Vicksburg; in Chattanooga when the soldiers were stealing the corn of the starving mules to satisfy their own hunger; at Nashville when he was ordered to the 'forlorn hope' to command the Army of the Potomac so often defeated and yet I never saw him more troubled than since he has been in Washington, and been compelled to read himself a 'sneak and deceiver' based on reports of four of the Cabinet, and apparently your knowledge.”

The period between these letters had been packed with incident. Grant had come out of war triumphantly, and with the death of Lincoln found himself a giant plagued by pygmies, a figure looming higher in the estimation of the people than he himself quite realized, yet led about by an ill-bred, accidental President, and subject to humiliating treatment by a domineering Secretary, only to be entangled at the end in a dispute between these two which raised with partisans of each a question of his own veracity.

If at the close of war, when conditions were nearly ripe for a real welding of spirit North and South, Grant had been in supreme control, that work might have gone on to a complete fruition, for even Johnson, in spite of all his truculence and the instinctive prejudice against him, commanded for a time a measure of support. Johnson perversely managed