Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 7.djvu/655

1865] Northern and Southern problems. 623 Confiscation Acts ; but the thirteenth amendment, abolishing slavery, had not yet been ratified, and apparently could not be so without the votes of some of the seceded States. The freedmen in 1865 were an element in the South utterly unlike anything previously dealt with by the country. Entirely ignorant, untrained, as a rule, except for servile occupations, lacking any civilised customs of domestic or public morality, and devoid of economic instincts, the former slaves formed an alien race fitted in no single respect for citizenship. Childlike in mind and habits, they interpreted their new liberty to mean simply release from restraint ; and they began in 1865 to wander away from their home-plantations, to enjoy the delights of idleness, to indulge any thievish or immoral propensities to the full, and to work no more and no longer than they found agreeable. What should be done for these unfortunate people ? Should the task of controlling them and attempting to improve their lot be left to their former masters, or should it be assumed by the Federal government? For the time being, at the close of hostilities, military supervision answered these questions. Federal armies kept order, and Federal generals exercised an unlimited authority over the Southern people ; while a Freedman's Bureau, also under military direction, devoted endless time and patience and large sums of money to protecting, helping, and even feeding the negroes. But this system was obviously temporary : what was to follow it as a permanent policy on the part of the North ? A farther complication in the problem of Southern reconstruction was the uncertainty as to the legal basis for any action proposed. The Federal Constitution made no provision for secession or restoration ; and the powers of the central government over the conquered communities, which from the necessities of the case ought to be as wide as possible, were left to be inferred from a few meagre clauses open to various interpretations. Military control for an unlimited period, which would have been the obvious policy for a European government, was impossible under such a constitution as that of the United States. Moreover the habit of legal action and constitutional procedure was ingrained in the American mind; and the moment the clash of arms ceased this tendency asserted itself. The only possible way of attacking the Southern problem, in the opinion of most American leaders, was by some legal, constitutional, federal process. Scarcely less difficult than the Southern question appeared the financial problem. It involved the reduction of heavy war taxes, the readjustment of the revenue, the refunding of an enormous debt, and the restoration of an inflated and depreciated paper currency to a specie basis. During the war the country had become used to extravagant expenditure by the Federal and State governments, and to reckless speculation ; now, on the arrival of peace, it was at the height of an era of industrial and agricultural expansion. Could the return to CH. XX.