they wanted.

Personally, Littlefield seems to have been a likable, picturesque sort of character, suave but never quite too obviously the slick operator; but he is important, not as a person, but as a type. He was the sort of person (that is to say) bound to move into the vacuum which the war left in the South, and the vacuum was there chiefly because no one had bothered to do much thinking about what would be done with the victory after it had been won. North and South alike, all anyone wanted to do with the Civil War was win it; what might come afterward was something that could be taken up later, and the tragedy was that it opened the way for the sharpshooters, who had the help not only of northerners who wanted political power and a quick dollar but also of southerners who had exactly the same ends in view.

And it is this point that Mr. Daniels makes very clear in a book which stands out as one of the most readable, provocative, and smoothly written works ever devoted to the whole miserable Reconstruction era. The carpetbagger was not merely the creation of greedy and conscienceless Yankees, although these were behind him in full measure; he also dealt with equally greedy and conscienceless southerners, and what gave him his destructive leverage was the fact that, as Mr. Daniels puts it, he discovered the latent possibilities in “the indissoluble union of Americans meeting with a profit motive.” There was money to be made in the reconstructed South by the corruption of legislatures, the inflated use of the credit of bankrupt states, the creation of new corporations which some day, somehow, would make money for someone other than the trusting stockholders—and the carpetbagger rode to wealth on the discovery of this truth. In his ride he had allies in the South as well as in the North.

Mr. Daniels tells a significant story—possibly apocryphal, probably in its essentials true. After the crash came—after the South had regained control of its affairs and the carpetbaggers had retreated once and for all—a former Confederate who had at last become a trusted emissary of the state of North Carolina went North and sought Littlefield out in his home to urge him to go back to North Carolina and stand trial for his innumerable misdeeds. Littlefield, according to the story, gave the former Confederate a huge stack of papers on his desk, which showed just what he had been up to during the Reconstruction period and whom he had been up to it with. Then Littlefield said:

“Read the papers. Read them, and afterwards, if you will give me North Carolina’s guarantee that all those others involved with me in these matters will be brought to justice with me, I’m ready to go back and stand trial.”

The North Carolinian, says this story, read the papers, and then got up sadly and said:

“General,

I respect your condition. I do not think we will trouble you any more.”

As Mr. Morison says, we won the war with Japan in jig-time and left an all but insoluble problem for the postwar generation to deal with. It was in the grand tradition. We did the same thing in the Civil War. The strategy that brings victory is fine, but now and then a nation at war ought to think about the strategy that will help make the ensuing peace worth its cost.