The conservative wait-and-see policy toward the Radical adminis-
tration fell apart in April, 1874, when the legislature adjourned
without enacting the sweeping reform program that Ames had
seemingly promised when he became governor. In view of the
decline of Republican authority in other southern states and the
fact that the masses of Mississippi whites had only acquiesced
in the New Departure of their leaders -- they had never really
embraced the principles embodied in congressional reconstruction
-- probably nothing that Ames and the Republican lawmakers
could have done in 1874 would have appeased conservatives indef-
initely. On the other hand, the failure of the Ames Radicals to
meet the broad demands for relief and reform, in addition to their
narrow partisanship and tolerance of corruptionists, ensured an
early revival of the Bourbon spirit of belligerence and intolerance.

All along Bourbons had railed out at the moderate tactic of
compromise with the "desperate plunderers" of the state, and in
early 1874, they had warned sanguine whites that Ames's promises
of retrenchment and reform were "merely thrown out to make a
great pretence, when in fact nothing [was] to be done." ¹.
When
the reforms did not materialize many moderates joined the Bour-
bons in denouncing the Ames regime, though the Bourbon goal
of rallying whites to a militant, color-line standard fell short of
success in 1874.

As in the past, when the Republican hegemony was secure be-
hind its black ballots and federal might, self-appointed conserva-
tive spokesmen seemed to be talking to themselves in arguing the
old issue of whether or not to court black support in their efforts
to defeat the Radicals. Most conservative leaders still rejected out-
right the Bourbon demand for a direct assault on the bastion of
Republican power in the state -- the black vote Led by former
Democrat Albert Gallatin Brown in the south and old Whig John

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