of Governor Wade Hampton was formally recognized.  The new governments at once set about the abrogation of the election laws that had protected the Negro in the exercise of suffrage, and, having by 1877 obtained a majority in the national House of Representatives, the Democrats resorted to the practice of attaching their repeal measures to appropriation bills in the hope of compelling the President to sign them.  Men who had been prominently connected with the Confederacy were being returned to Congress in increasing numbers, but in general the Democrats were not able to carry their measures over the President’s veto.  From the Supreme Court, however, they received practical assistance, for while this body did not formally grant that the states had full powers over elections, it nevertheless nullified many of the most objectionable sections of the laws.  Before the close of the decade, by intimidation, the theft, suppression or exchange of the ballot boxes, the removal of the polls to unknown places, false certifications, and illegal arrests on the day before an election, the Negro vote had been rendered ineffectual in every state of the South.

When Cleveland was elected in 1884 the Negroes of the South naturally felt that the darkest hour of their political fortunes had come.  It had, for among many other things this election said that after twenty years of discussion and tumult the Negro question was to be relegated to the rear, and that the country was now to give main attention to other problems.  For the Negro the new era was signalized by one of the most effective speeches ever delivered in this or any other country, all the more forceful because the orator was a man of unusual nobility of spirit.  In 1886 Henry W. Grady, of Georgia, addressed the New England Club in New York on “The New South.”  He spoke to practical men and he knew his ground.  He asked his hearers to bring their “full faith in American fairness and frankness” to judgment upon what he had to say.  He pictured in brilliant language the Confederate soldier, “ragged, half-starved, heavy-hearted, who wended his way homeward to find his house in ruins and his farm devastated.”  He also spoke kindly of the Negro:  “Whenever he struck a blow for his own liberty he fought in open battle, and when at last he raised his black and humble hands that the shackles might be struck off, those hands were innocent of wrong against his helpless charges.”  But Grady also implied that the Negro had received too much attention and sympathy from the North.  Said he:  “To liberty and enfranchisement is as far as law can carry the Negro.  The rest must be left to conscience and common sense.”  Hence on this occasion and others he asked that the South be left alone in the handling of her grave problem.  The North, a little tired of the Negro question, a little uncertain also as to the wisdom of the reconstruction policy that it had forced on the South, and if concerned with this section at all, interested primarily in such investments as it had there, assented to this request; and in general the South now felt that it might order its political life in its own way.