It would be a grateful balm to his outraged feelings,
and would incline him to forget, much more readily than he otherwise
would, what he regards to be the injustice of emancipation. It will
lead him to consider whether he has not been wrong in supposing
that the emancipation and enfranchisement of the blacks proceeded
from a feeling of resentment, and was intended as a punishment
merely. It will incline him to consider whether the people of the
North, the controlling power of the Government at that time, did
not act from a better motive than he has given them credit for.
But even if this plan should meet with disapproval, instead of
approval, from the white voters of the South, it would still be
the true and wise policy for the Nation to pursue."
"So you really think," said the Northerner dubiously, "that such
a measure would produce good results even in the present generation?"
"Unquestionably," was the reply. "Perhaps the chief incentive to
the acts which have disgraced our civilization--which have made
the white people of the South almost a unit in opposing by every
means, lawful and unlawful, the course of the Government in
reconstruction, has been a deep and bitter conviction that hatred,
envy, and resentment against them on the part of the North, were
the motives which prompted those acts. Such a measure, planned upon
a liberal scale, would be a vindication of the manhood of the North;
an assertion of its sense of right as well as its determination to
develop at the South the same intelligence, the same freedom of
thought and action, the same equality of individual right, that
have made the North prosperous and free and strong, while the lack
of them has made the South poor and ignorant and weak.
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