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state of Georgia owned the Western & Atlantic Railroad... a state property, built with the state's money before the war. It had an earning capacity of about fifty thousand dollars a month. The Radical state government pondered over this situation. The railroad could be robbed by making extravagant purchases of material in its name, and forcing the sellers to divide their profits. That was one way of going about itbut such an arrangement might come to an end at any time. Who could tell how long the Radicals would remain in power?

A better plan would be to lease the road to some private concern. Excellent idea. Twenty-year lease. Why should the state be in the railroad business, anyway?

The Western & Atlantic road was leased to a corporation formed for the purpose, at a rental of twenty-five thousand dollars a month for twenty years. Behind the leasing corporation, composed principally of Northern financiers, one sees the dim shapes of Georgia carpet-baggers and scalawags.

Henry C. Warmoth, the unscrupulous leader of the Louisiana carpet-baggers, went over to the side of the conservative Republicans in 1872, after he had accumulated a fortune during his four years as Radical governor of the state. During his term of office the state debt had risen from $7,000,000 to $50,000,000, and there was nothing to show for it. Warmouth saw the end of Radical Republican rule approaching, and he wanted to be safe when the house began to fall.

During the whole of the Reconstruction period a sort of intermittent civil war went on in Louisiana . . bloody riots in New Orleans . . . the slaughter of a whole community of negroes at the village of Colfax by white men . . . and numerous murders in every part of the state. In the last few weeks of the campaign of 1868 more than two thousand persons were killed, wounded or assaulted.

Both the conservatives and the Radical Republicans claimed the election of 1872, and Grant sent troops to the state to enforce order. He decided that Kellogg, the Radical candidate for governor, had won. This was obviously an offhand decision, for the conduct of both sides was so fraudulent that there was no telling what the actual results were. But despite this rather overwhelming doubt the Kellogg faction was installed under the protection of Federal troops.

The Georgia legislature eventually found itself with a Democratic majority. Flushed with triumph, the legislature expelled twenty-four negro Republican members. Thereupon the Washington authorities ordered the negroes reinstated. This was done by Federal soldiers, who entered the legislative chamber and dragged the white men out. Negroes took their seats while soldiers stood guard over them.

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During these feverish years the Southern white men carried on a campaign of intimidation. They frightened negroes away from the polls by strange and comical devices. In one county they rode about the polling places with coils of rope on their saddles and asked one another when the hanging was going to begin. "As soon as the polls open," was the reply. "Then we'll start the hanging in about fifteen minutes, I guess." The negroes went back home without voting.

On another occasion the Ku-Klux scattered pigs' blood and scraps of negro clothing along the roads for a mile in every direction from the voting place. Negroes going to the village to vote saw these portents of disaster and turned around in their tracks.

One wonders why the Southern whites did not succeed in aligning the negro voters on the Democratic side, instead of

Ku-Klux Act

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trying to keep them from voting. They did make many attemps to turn the negroes into Democrats, but these efforts were frustrated by the Radical leaders, who told the freedmen that a Democratic victory would send them all back to slavery.

To meet the situation Congress passed in May, 1870, an Enforcement Act, which was designed to make the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendment effective. Later on another section of the Enforcement Act came into being. As it applied directly to the Ku-Klux outrages it was commonly known as "the KuKlux law." Under the acts the President was empowered to K set aside the writ of habeas corpus and put states or counties under military law. In October, 1871, Grant declared nine counties of South Carolina to be in a state of rebellion and put them under martial rule. During the next two years more than a thousand people in the South as a whole were tried and convicted under the Ku-Klux Act. Ten years later the Supreme Court declared it to be unconstitutional.

Grant was bewildered by these complications and unavailing measures, yet his bewilderment did not appear to disturb his peace of mind. The laws had been passed by Congress, and his plain duty-it seemed to him-was to enforce them. He remarked, in a conversation when some one told him that the whole procedure was a mistake, that "the best way to treat a bad law was to execute it." This was the extent of his political philosophy in relation to the South.

Many causes contributed to bring an end to Radical rule in the Southern states. After a few years people of sense and standing in the North grew sick of the whole adventure. It interfered with business. The Southern communities were in chaos; taxes were outrageously high; the bonds of all the exConfederate states were at a low level; Southern merchants could not pay their bills. These facts percolated through the Northern mind, and gradually changed its attitude.

Even the old-time abolitionists-some of them, at any rateexperienced a change of heart. James Russell Lowell wrote: