The greater positiveness of General Blair, the keener popular interest in the Southern question and the broader realization of its possible dangers, made the issue on Reconstruction overshadow the other.

The utterances of Southern leaders confirmed its superior importance in the public estimate.

The jubilant expressions of Wade Hampton at Charleston have already been given.

In a speech at Atlanta, Robert Toombs declared that "all these Reconstruction Acts, as they are called, these schemes of dissolution, of violence and of tyranny, shall no longer curse the statute-book nor oppress the free people of the country; these so-called governments and legislatures which have been established in our midst shall at once be made to vacate.

The convention at New York appointed Frank Blair specially to oust them." Howell Cobb and Benjamin H.Hill also made incendiary speeches during the canvass, proclaiming their confidence in the practical victory of those who had waged the Rebellion; and Governor Vance of North Carolina boasted that all they had lost when defeated by Grant they would regain when they triumphed with Seymour.
It is not probable that the Democrats could, by any policy, have achieved success in this contest.