The electoral campaigns of 1874-1876 returned the southern states to the control of the Democratic Party. The leadership was much the same as it had been prior to Reconstruction — primarily members of the elite classes who had never been sympathetic to public education. However, during Reconstruction people in the South had embraced the idea of public education, so in order to be elected the Democrats had to include maintenance of public schools, one system for each race, in their political platforms. The schools may have been maintained, but they did not prosper during the last twenty-five years of the century. Enrollments grew by more than 150 percent while educational revenues, derived primarily from taxes on property that had lost most of its value during the Civil War, plummeted. True values of property in the South averaged less than one-third of those of...