Whitelaw Reid: “If there “ought not to be any politics among a people so unhappily situated,” neither ought there to be the farce of a…”

Public sentiment was against the sale of lands to the Yankees; “Get white laborers,” they urged, “and in a year you’ll make enough to be able to hold on to your lands.

I would rather give up my crop to the negroes than the lives of my wife and children.

In November nothing could exceed the hatred which seemed everywhere felt to the freedmen.

They appeared at times when public men often seemed to be groping in the dark on an unknown road, but it is now evident that the road which has been taken is substantially the road they marked out.