Many Northern Democrats had indeed given the assurance that if any attempt at coercion should be made by the Republican National Administration, they would themselves meet it with force, and that, if war should come, it would be in the free States and not in the slave States.

The South, in 1865, had apparently forgotten these baseless assurances; they had forgotten that, in the hour of conflict, the Democrats who did not become loyal, at once became silent, and that the few--scattering exceptions to a general rule--who were demonstrative and loud in their sympathy for the rebels were compelled to flee or accept imprisonment in Fort Lafayette.

They seemed again ready and eager to believe all the unsupported assertions which the Northern Democrats, in a spirit of effrontery and not without gasconade, ventured to put forth.

It might be difficult to determine which displayed the greater folly--those who made false representations, or those who, warned by previous deception, appeared so ready to be influenced anew by deception equally gross.
The truth was that the Republicans of the North, constituting, as was shown by the elections of 1865, a majority in every State, were deeply concerned as to the fate and fortune of the colored population of the South.

Only a minority of Republicans were ready to demand suffrage for those who had been recently emancipated, and who, from the ignorance peculiar to servitude, were presumably unfit to be intrusted with the elective franchise.