Before the war the Southern man of leisure took to politics more as a pastime than as a serious business.
But as the pastime was agreeable, and as it gave additional weight and distinction, all those who could, strived to make it appear that they were men of importance in the Nation.

They were largely a nation of politicians, always brilliant, shallow, bellicose and dogmatic, as ready to decide an argument with the shotgun or saber as with reason and logic.
This was the temper of the people who rushed into the war with the confidence of a schoolboy and who limped out like a man overtaken in his gymnastic exercise by a paralytic stroke.

The war taught the South a very useful lesson, but did not sufficiently convince it that it was preeminently a supercilious, arrogant people, who did not and do not possess all the virtue, intelligence, and courage of the country; that its stock of these prime elements is woefully small considering the long years it had posed as America's own patrician class.
But when the war was over, and the Southern nobility turned its thoughts once more to social arrogance and political dominion, it found that Othello's occupation was entirely gone.

A revolution had swept over the country more iconoclastic and merciless than that which followed in the wake of the French revolution nearly a hundred years before.

The bottom rail had been violently placed upon the top; industrial adjustments had been so completely metamorphosed as to defy detection; while the basis and the method of political representation and administration had been so altered as to confound both the old and the new forces.
Aside from the ignorance of the black citizens and the insatiate greed and unscrupulousness of their carpet-bag leaders--a band of vultures more voracious and depraved than any which ever before imposed upon and abused the confidence of a credulous people--the white men of the South had been educated to regard themselves as, naturally, the factors of power and the colored people as, naturally, the subject class, no factor at all.