Excerpt from Reconstruction and Negro Suffrage: Speech of Governor O. P. Morton, at Richmond, Indiana, on Thursday Evening, September 29th, 1865

Wve cannot expect that the people of the rebel States have come to love us, or that they will come to love us in a few years. We cannot expect that a people who have been so completely subju gated, that have so nearly lost everything they had, should come to love us, and live in harmony with us, in the length of time that has elapsed since the close of the war. But the great point now to be considered is the question whether there is any longer in the Southern States an intention to secede from the Union and resist the authority of the Government of the United States, or to estab lish a Southern Confederacy. I say I believe that that idea has been extinguished forever. Things have changed very much in the South from what they were before the war, and if there are those in the North who expect that parties will resume their old relations - that one of the parties of the North can ever sustain again to the South the relation which it sustained before the war began - if such expectations are cherished, they had better be ban ished at once and forever. Slavery, the tie that bound that party together, North and South, has gone, never to be restored, and in stead of being but one party in the South, substantially as we had before the war, we shall hereafter have divided parties in the South, as hitherto we have had in the North, and I should not be surprised myself, if, in the course of a few years, the Southern States, such as South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, and other States I might mention, should become the most radical States in the Union; and I should not be at all surprised if even the State of South Carolina should grant the right of suffrage to her colored population before Indiana does to hers.

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