What about Black Reconstruction? How black was Black Reconstruction? To what extent did black Americans come to be influential or dominate in Southern state politics? Well, even with massive attempts at voter registration, by 1868, white voters dramatically outnumbered black voters in Georgia, Virginia, Texas, and in North Carolina. In those states in which blacks were elected to office, they rarely, if ever, got the political plumbs, the prize offices. Still, as might be expected, any African-American in any political office stirred the hatred, the anger, of many white Southerners. The one state in which black voting influence was very strong over a period of a few years was South Carolina. And, as a convention of whites in South Carolina put the matter in 1867, "the fact is patent to all that the Negro is utterly unfitted to exercise any of the highest functions of the citizen." Southern whites had certainly believed that before the war. Why should the loss of a few battles change that opinion?

A Northern view about the follies of Black Reconstruction in southern state legislatures revealed that prejudice against African-American participation in politics was not restricted to white southerners. source: www.harpweek.com

Many Southerners, nonetheless, and certainly the most vocal and strongest supporters of the former Confederacy, were hardly inclined to accept any military occupation, any black rule, any influence by outsiders, any Reconstruction at all. The pre-Civil War years of defensive propaganda about the moral virtues of the chivalrous South had convinced many Southerners that their way of life was the only proper way of life. If they were forced to accept the abolition of slavery, they were determined not to accept any change in the social or economic status of the freed slaves. Although in most areas the humiliation of local self-government had been slight, any humiliation was more than many Southerners were willing to tolerate. The "damn Yankee" became a more damnable nuisance than ever before. The question became, once again, as it had been before the war, a question of final victory between two nations and two different ways of life.

Southerners wedded themselves to a new myth they called the "Lost Cause." If slavery was no longer legal, a similar system of racial adjustment had to replace it. White civilization, said the "Lost Cause," must triumph in one way or another, North or no North, Radicals or no Radicals. The "Lost Cause" meant the restoration of the virtues, the economy, and, particularly, the social system of the Old South. Only the rhetoric, only a few of the words used, had changed from before the war. The "Lost Cause" was to be hugged to Southern bosoms like the prodigal son of scripture hugged by his father after returning home from a many year absence. The question, then, for both Northerners and Southerners, boiled down to one simple thing. Not short-run military victory. The question boiled down to larger, longer term social and economic visions of the nature of the region and the nature of the nation. It boiled down to, "Can the United States, should the United States, truly be united? Can black and white, should black and white, live together in equality and harmony?" For the South, Reconstruction, at least on Northern terms, was not to occur.