CHAPTER XVIII. Hits And Misses
In this sketch I do not attempt to follow chronological order,
except in so far as this is necessary to make clear the
connection between lines of policy, or to define the structural
growth of character. But in Roosevelt's life, as in the lives of
all of us, many events, sometimes important events, occurred and
had much notice at the moment and then faded away and left no
lasting mark. Let us take up a few of these which reveal the
President from different angles.
Since the close of the Civil War the Negro Question had brooded
over the South. The war emancipated the Southern negroes and then
politics came to embitter the question. Partly to gain a
political advantage, partly as some visionaries believed, to do
justice, and partly to punish the Southerners, the Northern
Republicans gave the Southern negroes equal political rights with
the whites. They even handed over the government of some of the
States to wholly incompetent blacks. In self-defense the whites
terrorized the blacks through such secret organizations as the
Ku-Klux Klan, and recovered their ascendancy in governing.
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