rate, the most charitable judgment on Garfield's character in the affair reflects seriously on his intelligence. If he was honest, both his memory and his reasoning were pitiably weak.

The Congress which had been laboring through the mire of the Crédit Mobilier exposures did nothing to redeem its reputation when, on the last day of the session (March 3, 1873), it passed a bill for generous increases in salaries. The added remuneration for the president, the vice president, the cabinet officers, and the justices of the Supreme Court was approved by the public as necessary and proper, but that part of the act which raised the pay of the senators and representatives from $5000 to $7500 a year roused an indignant protest. For not only had the legislators voted themselves an increase of 50 per cent, but they had made the bill retroactive, carrying a bonus of $5000 for each member of the Congress about to expire. This raid on the Treasury was denounced as the "salary grab" and the "back-pay steal." It was the work of the notorious Benjamin F. Butler. The pressure of public opinion forced the repeal of that part of the act referring to the legislators when the Forty-third Congress met in December, 1873.1

On the day after the passage of this act Grant delivered his second inaugural address. He spoke in a tone of modest, but firm justification of his policies; pledged himself to labor for various good causes, such as "the restoration of good feeling between the different sections of our common country," the rehabilitation of our currency upon a specie basis, the correction of abuses in the civil service; and closed with a grateful acknowledgment of the "vindication" which his countrymen had given him at the polls. "I have been the subject of abuse and slander scarcely ever equaled in political history, which today I feel that I can afford to disregard," he said, not realizing, perhaps, to what extent that verdict was a vote of lack of confidence in

1 The president's salary was increased from $25,000 to $50,000 by the act. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court was to receive $10,500, and the associate justices $10,000 each. At present the president receives $75,000 (with $25,000 for traveling expenses), the Chief Justice $15,000, and the associates $14,500. In 1907 the salary of the senators and representatives was raised from $5000 to $7500.

Horace Greeley and the Democratic party, rather than an indorsement of the term just ended. Whether the vote of 1872 signified the indorsement of Grant as a good executive or the retention of Grant as a choice of evils may be open to question. The mid-term congressional vote of 1874, however, and the presidential vote of 1876 are subject to no ambiguity of interpretation. They were a decisive rebuke to an administration which, instead of using its renewed lease of power for the correction of the abuses of which it had received signal warning, only allowed the public life of the Republic to sink to lower levels, until it reached "the nadir of national disgrace."

President Grant devoted only a few lines of his inaugural to the South. "The states lately at war with the General Government," he said, "are now happily rehabilitated, and no executive control is exercised in any of them that would not be exercised in any other state under like circumstances." How "happy" the rehabilitation of the South was might be judged from the President's special message to Congress just a week earlier (February 25), in which he respectfully invited the attention of the members to the condition of affairs in the state of Louisiana. The election of the previous November had been a contest between the radical Republicans, who were determined to hold the state under carpetbag-negro domination, and the Liberals, who supported a ticket which would restore the state to native white rule. William P. Kellogg and John McEnery were the respective candidates for governor. Both claimed the victory, and two competing governments were set up in the state. "So many frauds and forgeries" had developed in the investigation of the election, said Grant, "as to make it doubtful what candidates received a majority of the votes actually cast." Nevertheless, Grant himself was not doubtful which candidate he should support. He allowed the United States Marshal, Packard, to use Federal troops to seize the statehouse and install the Kellogg government, while the radical Senator Morton blocked a bill for a new and fair election in Louisiana. Had it not been for this interference of the administration in behalf of a faction hateful to a vast majority of

the white inhabitants of the state, the McEnery government (according to the report of the investigating committee) "would have been peacefully inaugurated," and the people of Louisiana would have been spared two more years of anarchy—including massacres at Colfax in April, 1873, and at Coushatta in August, 1874; a revolt at New Orleans in September, 1874, quelled by a second intervention of United States troops to restore the Kellogg government; and a "Pride's Purge" of the legislature in January, 1875, to turn out the conservative members-before the state, which had "been converted into a South American republic," finally reached a peaceful truce that paved the way for its actual "happy rehabilitation" under President Hayes.

Conditions in several other Southern states were only less distressful than in Louisiana. The negroes in the Mississippi legislature increased from 36 in 1869 to 64 in 1873, and in the same period the state tax rate rose fourteenfold. In Vicksburg, where the blacks comprised over 50 per cent of the population, an armed conflict took place in December, 1874, to reinstate a carpetbag sheriff who had been forced to resign; and the usual slaughter of negroes occurred before General Sheridan sent troops up from New Orleans to restore order. The next summer there was rioting again at Vicksburg, and a brutal massacre at Yazoo City. Governor Ames (a carpetbagger from Maine and a son-in-law of Benjamin F. Butler) wired to Grant in September, 1875, that "domestic violence in its most aggravated form" existed in Mississippi, and begged the President to send him troops; but Grant, with a belated appreciation of the folly of the policy of coercion, refused the request. "The whole people," he wrote to the Attorney-General, "are tired out with these annual autumnal outbreaks in the South, and the great majority are ready now to condemn any interference on the part of the government." The Democrats, left with a free hand in Mississippi, carried the state by a large majority in the November election of 1875, by the drastic suppression of the negro vote. Ames was impeached by the new legislature, but the charges were removed on condition of his resignation and departure from the state. Then Mississippi was restored to

home rule-a rule which Grant, in the summer of 1876, regretting, perhaps, his refusal of the previous autumn, called one of "violence and fraud such as would be scarcely accredited to savages, much less to a civilized and Christian people."

South Carolina was perhaps the worst sufferer of all the states under the reconstruction régime. Though actual riot and massacre were not so evident as in Louisiana and Mississippi, the general tone of public life was debased beyond belief. The state legislature was almost completely "Africanized." The 85,475 colored men of voting age (82 per cent of whom were illiterate) were represented by 94 members in the lower House of 1872, while the 62,547 whites had but 30 representatives. The travesty on popular government enacted by such a legislature would have been as ludicrous as a ministrel show had it not been so disastrous to the credit of the state. Huge sums of money were voted for the purchase of swamp lands to be distributed to the freedmen, for the alleged rehabilitation of railroads, for fraudulent public contracts, for elaborate furnishings for the statehouse, and for a hundred other crazy objects, even to the appropriation of $1000 to reimburse a governor who had lost that amount on a horse race. The value of the taxable property in the state shrank rapidly, while the taxes mounted steadily. Governor Scott (from Ohio) plundered the state for four years, and he was succeded by a notorious scalawag named Moses, who led his people into a deeper bondage of debt. It was during the régime of "robber Moses" (the man who lost the money on the horse race) that James S. Pike of Maine visited Columbia and witnessed the antics of the colored legislature in the early spring of 1873. He may have been gazing on the scene at the very moment when Grant was delivering his inaugural remarks on the "happy rehabilitation" of the South. Pike has left us in his book on "The Prostrate State" the harrowing picture of the humiliation of South Carolina, whose people of culture and property he found "gloomy, disconsolate, and hopeless," feebly struggling to avert "complete confiscation." The tide turned in South Carolina with the election of an honest governor in the autumn of 1874. Daniel H. Chamber

lain of Massachusetts, although a carpetbagger, won the gratitude and esteem of the South Carolinians by his single-minded devotion to the rescue of the state. He vetoed bills of plunder, appointed honest and intelligent men to office, curbed the "lawless behavior of the colored militia," and labored for the restoration of good feeling between his native state and his adopted state. With all his virtues, however, Chamberlain was a Northerner, a Republican, and a believer in negro suffrage. On these counts he could not hope to be acceptable for long to a people bent on the recovery of home rule and white supremacy. After a single term he gave place reluctantly to General Wade Hampton, to whose election by the better element of the state his own reforming administration had largely contributed.

Of course, for those people of the North who believed that no punishment could be too severe for the sin of secession, the suffering of the Southern states under reconstruction rule awoke no sympathy, but only a grim determination to enforce the coercive legislation of 1867-1871 to the last syllable. Their position, if cruel and unwise, was not the position of President Grant; and the pity was that he allowed himself to be influenced by a few intransigent advisers, like Morton, Conkling, and Butler, to pursue a policy which counteracted his own better promptings and his repeated professions of conciliatory intent. He undoubtedly wished to have the Southern states "happily rehabilitated"; but, after all, as Rhodes justly remarks (Vol. VII, p. 112), "it was due to him more than to any other man" that they had to pass through varying periods of unregenerative humiliation before that desirable end was reached.'

1 Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, and Texas had been restored to home rule before the end of Grant's first term. Of the fortunes of Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina during the second term we have spoken briefly in the text. The other three states of the secession were Alabama, Arkansas, and Florida. Alabama and Arkansas both escaped from carpetbag rule in the election of 1874, and stayed "redeemed" in spite of the intervention of United States troops at the polls in Alabama and the ill-advised attempt of the radicals at Washington to oust Governor Garland of Arkansas in favor of the Republican claimant, Brooks. Florida, like Louisiana and South Carolina, was not delivered from the rule of the carpetbagger until the close of the Grant administration.