John Harrison Wilson, The life of Charles Henry Dana

[446] convinced that the carpet-bag governments, based solely on the support of the colored voters, were not only intrinsically vicious, but that their existence and conduct were in opposition to the true principles of the Constitution and subversive of the best interests of the Southern people. His constant cry, so long as the Federal government undertook, under the authority of Congress, to control the provisional governments or to exercise any supervision whatever over State or federal elections was:

No force bill! No negro domination!

It is needless to add that the entire white vote of the South and a majority of the Northern vote supported him most heartily in the position he had taken on this important matter, and finally united in permitting a settlement in substantial accord with this terse and forcible formula. Obviously, if there is injustice in this settlement, it lies in the fact that the Southern people do not acknowledge the colored people as a constituent part of the body politic, and do not apply the principle by which they regulate the right of suffrage with impartiality to both the white and colored people as they should. It was perhaps too early to expect any community in which illiteracy, race prejudice, war memories, and social inefficiency play such an important part as they do in most of our Southern States to adopt a perfect political system.

From the beginning of Grant's second term to the end of Arthur's administration the Sun favored the reduction of the regular army to a minimum force of ten or twelve thousand men. Its argument was that, having become one of the richest and strongest nations of the world, and having no dangerous or aggressive neighbors, the United States have no use for a large and expensive army, and that a small one would not only be correspondingly