Adam Badeau, Grant in peace: from Appomattox to Mount McGregor, a personal memoir

[58] had been brought about not only by his deference to the decision of the North, and his indignation at the chicanery of Johnson, but in a great degree by the action of the Southerners themselves. The President's course had aroused a temper at the South which Grant believed dangerous to the safety of the country. Acts had been committed and a disposition manifested which he considered should be repressed by stringent means. The population that had been subdued, he thought, was excited again. The reports from his subordinates assured him that the Union people at the South were not safe without Northern over-rule, that the blacks were massacred, in short that the results he had fought to secure were endangered; and believing as he now did that the clemency extended to the conquered had been abused, he approved of restraining those who had shown themselves unworthy of milder treatment. He agreed fully with Congress that the only practical means of securing what had been won in the field was in the extension of the suffrage to the freedmen.

Abstractly he did not favor this step, but he looked upon it, as he had regarded emancipation during the war, as rendered necessary by events. He was not a man much governed by sentiment, or apt to be led away by theories; he saw the unfitness of the freedmen at this time for the ballot; he recognized the danger of admitting them to the suffrage; but he felt that this danger was less than that of allowing those who had been the nation's enemies to return untrammelled to their former position, to provoke new dissensions and possibly arouse another war. He was gradually brought to the conviction that in order to secure the Union which he desired and which the Northern people had fought for, a voting population at the South friendly to the Union was indispensable, and that until the South was willing to concede the ballot to the blacks, it must be kept under military rule. The process of conversion was slow, and the convert unwilling—but