ABSTRACT
The South, beaten in war, and socially and economically disorganized, was knocking at the doors of Congress with increased political power and with a determination to restore land monopoly, and to reorganize its agrarian industry, and to attempt to restore its capital by reducing public taxation to the lowest point. As a result of the legislation of the 39th and 40th Congresses, the United States in 1867 took a portentous forward step in democracy. For the mass of the nation, it was a step taken under compulsion of fear, without deep forethought and with a rather didactic following out of certain conventional principles which made universal suffrage seems natural and inevitable. To the South, it was the price of that disaster of slavery and war which spelled its history from 1830 to 1865; and it was the only price adequate to that fatal mistake. Democracy for the first time in at least a century succeeded oligarchy in the South.
