But it is not right to make slaves of white men even though they may have been former masters of blacks.

This is but a change in a system of bondage that is rendered the more odious and intolerable because it has been inaugurated in an enlightened instead of a dark and uncivilized age." The political parties rapidly grouped themselves for the coming struggle.

The radical Republican party indeed was in process of organization in the South even before the passage of the reconstruction acts.

Its membership was made up of Negroes, carpetbaggers, or Northern men who had come in as speculators, officers of the Freedmen's Bureau and of the army, scalawags or Confederate renegades, "Peace Society" men,* and Unionists of Civil War times, with a few old Whigs who could not yet bring themselves to affiliate with the Democrats.

At first it seemed that a respectable number of whites might be secured for the radical party, but the rapid organization of the Negroes checked the accession of whites.