Mary - Journeytohistory

264 From Slavery to Freedommade president, but the bank was already a failure, although neither he nor thepublic was aware of the fact. When Douglass realized the truth, he resorted todesperate means to save the bank, using his own money and appealing to theSenate Finance Committee for more. The bank was placed in liquidation byCongress so that it could be reorganized, but it was too late. Confidence in thebank had been completely shattered, and on June 28, 1874, it closed. Thousandsof black depositors suffered losses they could ill afford. Black leaders,some of whom were blameless, were castigated by their fellows, while theCookes and others, who benefited most, escaped without public censure.Perhaps the greatest failure of Reconstruction was economic. At the end ofthe period both white and black workers in the South were suffering from wantand privation. In the North, where their lot was substantially better, workershad not yet learned to cope with the powerful industrialistsEconomic failureof Reconstructionwho were using political agencies as their most reliable alliesand bribing officials with greater regularity than they paidtheir employees. \Vhile the white leaders of the South werepreoccupied with opposing black suffrage and civil rights, Northern financiersand industrialists took advantage of the opportunity to impose their economiccontrol on the South, and much of it endured for generations. The inability ofblacks to solve their problems was not altogether to their discredit. It wasmerely a symptom of the complexity of the new industrial America, which bafnedeven the most astute of its citizens.POLITICAL CURRENTSThe Reconstruction Act of 1867 imposed on the white South a regime more difficultto bear than defeat. Vast numbers of white Southerners were to be disfranchised;blacks and their allies, loyal whites and those from the North whoapparently had come to stay, were to enjoy the ballot. Constitutional conventionswere called for the express purpose of eradicating the last vestiges of theold order. From the white Southerners' point of view all power was to be placedin the hands of those least qualified to control their destiny. Two years of whitehome rule were discredited because it was said that white Southerners hadtried to turn the clock back to the years before the war. White Southernersthought the clock was now being turned back to the days of barbarism.The constitutional conventions called in pursuance of the ReconstructionAct all contained black members. Only in South Carolina did they make up amajority of delegates, and in Louisiana they were equal to the whites, each havingforty-nine delegates. In some states the ratio of blacks to whites was small,as in Texas where only nine out of ninety members of the convention wereblack. In most states blacks constituted only a respectable minority of the delegates.In six states native white Southerners were in the majority. Some blackmembers had been slaves, but others had always been free, and among them