William Harrison, President
Levi Morton, Vice-President
William Windom, Secretary of the Treasury

Radical reconstruction was NOT
Lincoln's plan for restoration

Mr. Herbert [Hilary Abner Herbert (1834-1919), Alabama, D; studied law, admitted to the bar;  colonel in the Confederate army].  Mr. Speaker, there is one chapter in our political history so full of bitter memories that every American would gladly forget it forever if be could, the era of reconstruction.  But it must be opened now for the lessons it teaches.  The passions of the war were then still burning and the people of the North were driven to approve of reconstruction by just such fierce declamation as the advocates of this bill indulge in.  Under the reconstruction laws the negroes and their allies got possession of every one of the reconstructed States except Virginia and West Virginia.  Let me give you some of the results.

In Alabama daring six years the debt of the State was increased $17,148,000.  During the same time millions were added to the debts of counties, cities, and towns.  In North Carolina, during three years, the State debt, including railroad indorsements, was increased by $23,800,000, the assessed valuation of taxable properties being only $120,000,000.  Bonds to the extent of $14,000,000 were issued for railroads, not one mile of which was built.

Of the South Carolina debt I find myself unable to give the exact figures.  But the debt soon got so large that it could not be managed and the carpet-baggers themselves repudiated it in part.  Then they proposed to take a fresh start.  But while there was "still left five years of good stealing in the State" they were turned out of power.  And then they left the debt at over $6,000,000.  Bonds to the amount of $6,000,000 were issued to two railroads, both of which roads passed into the hands of the carpet-baggers.  The printing expenses of the State in one year, 1872, amounted to $450,000, which was $171,000 more than the State had paid for the same work in twenty-five years of the past.  Fraud, force, corruption, and bribery prevailed to such an extent that the Republican governor, Chamberlain, found himself unable to leave even to attend a dinner of the New England Society, and said, in his letter declining the invitation, "The civilization of the Puritan and the Cavalier, the Roundhead and the Huguenot is in peril."

Georgia had only one Republican governor, Bullock.  During his two years' administration the State debt was increased by $6,623,000, and bonds were indorsed amounting to $5,733,000.

In the little State of Florida $4,000,000 of bonds were issued that were subsequently declared unconstitutional;  and in addition, the increase of the State debt was nearly $1,000,000;  and here, as everywhere else, taxation was oppressive, and every resulting dollar was spent or stolen.

In Tennessee the annual expenses of the State government were more than doubled and a bonded debt created of $16,565,546.60.

In Arkansas, during the six years from 1868 to 1874, the average annual expenses of the State government, exclusive of schools and public buildings, were $1,242,000.  During the six years from 1880 to 1886, under Democratic rule, the same expenses of the State government averaged annually $278,000.  Carpet-bag government cost more than four times as much as Democratic administration, and $5,350,000 of bonds were issued by the Republican State government to railroads.  More than three times as many bonds were issued to each road as were allowed by the terms of the law.  County debts were piled up in the same manner.

In Mississippi, in six years, the State debt ran up from practically nothing to several millions of dollars, and enormous sums, raised by State taxation, were all expended.  In 1871 the tax rate was four times as much as under Democratic administration;  in 1873, eight and a half times as much;  in 1874, fourteen times as much.  Sixty-four million acres of lands were forfeited for taxes ---one-fifth of the lands of the State.

In Texas, during four years of Republican rule, the rate of taxation was three and a half times greater than it had been under Democratic administration.  All the proceeds of this taxation were expended;  the State that owed practically nothing at the beginning of this period was left with a debt of $4,414,095.45.

In Louisiana the State tax was found at three and one-quarter mills on the dollar.  It was raised successively in 1869, 1870, 1871, and 1872, until it reached 21½ mills, where it remained for years.  Governor Warmoth found the State debt $8,700,000.  January 1, 1872, it had risen to $48,029,349.95.  Adding parish and municipal obligations, the debt of Louisiana in 1872 was $76,095,056.78.

The cost of public printing for the State during the first two and one-half years of Warmoth's administration was $1,140,881.70.  In previous years the cost of the same printing was, for the same length of time, $92,500.  The increase was over eleven-fold.

The assessed value of property in the city of New Orleans, when Warmoth was inaugurated, was $146,718,790.  When Kellogg went out, eight years after Warmoth went in, the assessed value of the same property was $88,613,930.  Real estate in the country parishes had shrunk in value from $99,266,839.85 to 47,141,696.  City property had depreciated 40 per cent.;  country property, 50 per cent.

The question is often asked why the Southern people, knowing the negro well and having so long exercised power over him when he was a slave, did not take control of the colored vote and use it for the purposes of good government.  If Mr. Lincoln's plan had been carried out and suffrage had been left under the control of the States this would have been possible.  Suffrage under Mr. Lincoln's plan would in time have come to the colored man from the States gradually and as he was fitted to exercise it.  Then he would have been the friend of the white men who conferred upon him the right to vote.  Then there would have been no race troubles, no color line in politics.  The trouble comes from outside interference.  The color line was a necessary result of the reconstruction laws and the manner of their enforcement.

As soon as these laws were passed Messrs. Wilson of the Senate and Kelley of the House went down to the State of Alabama to tell the negroes there that the Republican party had freed them, that the Republican party had given them the ballot, and that to the Republican party they all owed their allegiance.  These and other eminent statesmen went to other States carrying the same message.  And everywhere throughout the Southern States was the Freedmen's Bureau agent, looking forward to office for himself, poisoning the mind of the negro against the Southern white man, swearing him into the Union League, and teaching him there that he could only preserve the liberties the Republican party had given him by voting the Republican ticket.  There was no chance then for the Southern man to divide the negro vote and there was no chance to lead it, for the negro trusted only the man that wore the blue.

Under these circumstances what was left for the white man to do but to unite.  He was forced to forget the prejudices of the past and assert his natural superiority.  In no other manner could he restore good government.  He did so, and now the Republican party, on the claim that in certain small sections of the South there is a fraudulent counting of votes, proposes to seize for itself the power to do all the counting.  That claim proceeds upon the idea that the Republican party alone can be trusted.

Sir, I challenge a comparison between Republican and Democratic election methods and results everywhere, and especially in the South.  The Republican governments in the South were not only born of the bayonet, but were, most of them, baptized in fraud;  and they subsequently sustained themselves by the most flagitious election methods ever known in the history of republican government.  All the elections that inaugurated these governments were held under Republican auspices.

Alabama led off.  The election for the ratification of her new constitution was in February, 1868.  It continued for five days.  Under the law of March 23, 1867, this constitution could only be ratified on two conditions:  First, that a majority of all the registered vote should be cast;  secondly, that a majority of this majority vote so cast should be for the constitution.  At the same election officers were to be voted for to carry on the new government.  The Republicans had put out a full ticket.  The opposition offered no candidates.  They thought to defeat the new constitution by registering and not voting, as they might do according to the law as it was written;  and they did defeat it.  General Meade, who held the election, reported that the constitution was beaten by 8,114 votes.  This, of course, defeated all the Republican candidates;  but Congress overrode the general in command, overrode its own law, and legislated into office, by one act, all the defeated candidates.

Practically every office in the State, legislative, executive, and judicial, was thus stolen by a single act of Congress, passed by this party which is now so anxious for the purity of elections.  I venture to say that no gentleman on this floor not familiar with the facts can guess the ground the House committee here took in its report upon this Alabama election case.  It is in print and speaks for itself.  The Congress, after the Alabama election was over, had amended the law under which the election was held, and the House Committee on Reconstruction said that though the amending law had not passed the Senate before the election, yet, as it had passed the House before that time, "your committee can see no reason why it," the new law, "should not govern in this case."  And this was the ground that Congress took.  In the preamble to the act admitting Alabama under this constitution and installing these defeated officials it was recited that the act of admission passed because the constitution had received a "majority of the votes cast."  Congress did not dare to take issue with General Meade or to assume that the Alabama constitution had received "a majority of the votes of the registered voters," as was required by the law passed by that identical Congress at its first session.

Mr. Speaker, have we any reliable evidence that the Republican party in control of this Congress is any less anxious to control the country than were the Republicans of the Fortieth Congress ?  Is there anything in this treatment of the people of Alabama that should induce the people of the country at large to give this party full control over the count of votes in every district in the United States, with the Army to back up that count, and then to let them select every juryman that is to try persons charged with election crimes ?  Is this Alabama case enough to satisfy us that we may safely entrust the power to count themselves into office to the Republican party ?

Now let me give you some specimens of the election laws enacted by the States themselves that Congress had set up in the South.

In Alabama there was a heavy penalty imposed upon any one who challenged a vote, and an elector could vote anywhere in the county.

In South Carolina the law left it to commissioners of election to fix the places of election, and they could fix them at any time, even on the day of the election.  These commissioners, by law, might keep the box ten days before declaring the result.

In Georgia no registration was required, and there was the fullest opportunity to repeat in a three-day election, no challenges being allowed.  The governor appointed a majority of the managers at every box in the State, and often they were all of his party.

In Arkansas the governor appointed the board of registrars;  this board appointed all clerks and judges of election, and the courts were forbidden by law to interfere.

In Louisiana the governor appointed the board of registration;  this board appointed the supervisors, and the supervisors were not required to live in the parish where they served.  Many of them went from New Orleans to serve as judges of election in parishes where they had never set foot before, and sometimes they returned themselves elected to office.  The supervisors were liberally paid to make it an inducement for them to carry out the will of their master, and to further insure their conduct Governor Warmoth habitually required them, when appointed, to file with him their resignations, with blanks for dates.  When a registrar failed to please him he could fill in the date and accept the resignation.

These laws and all these practices were all right then, for they were in the interest of the Republican party.  There was no movement then for a national election law, and there would not have been till this day if these methods had continued to be successful.  The Republican party was profiting then by these fraudulent laws and fraudulent methods.

The tax-payers of the South were humiliated and degraded;  legislative bodies in the South, a majority of whose members were not taxpayers and many of whom could not read and write, were robbing States of their credit abroad while they plundered the citizen at home.  In South Carolina alone there were two hundred trial justices who could not write;  in other States there were justices and constables and even judges of commissioners' courts, courts that had full control of county finances, that could not write their names.  But the net results were in favor of the Republican party.  These were that in the Forty-first Congress, from March 5, 1871, to March 5, 1873, when the twelve Southern States, including West Virginia, had all been gathered in, these States were represented by twenty-two Republican and two Democratic Senators and by forty-eight Republican and thirteen Democratic Representatives.

You were satisfied, gentlemen, with this monstrous misrepresentation.  Nearly all the property, intelligence, and capacity for self-government were on the side of the Democrats;  and, divided by the color line, which you forced, we find that the combined majorities of the white population in these States in 1870 were 2,829,262.  Now that these majorities have asserted their natural superiority by restoring honest governments to all these States and reversing the representation here, you seek to reconstruct us again.

This bill is to revitalize and solidify again the negro majorities that once dominated and plundered the Southern people;  it is to put these colored people into line again under Republican officials and march them again to the polls with the Army behind them.  But before I come to discuss the provisions of the bill, let me speak of what Democratic governments have accomplished in the South since the negro went out of power.

Under Republican rule in these States taxable values had everywhere gone down, while taxes and debts went up.  Except into Texas, where an immense white majority insured good government, immigration had ceased, public credit was destroyed, and civilization itself was in peril.  Under Democratic rule public credit has been everywhere restored.  Peace reigns supreme where everything was turmoil and violence.  Taxable values in the twelve reconstructed States, including West Virginia, increased from 1880 to 1889 by the sum of $1,112,315,000;  and these twelve States, in agriculture, in mining, in manufactures, in railroad mileage, in railroad tonnage, in banking capital, and bank deposits, have increased by a percentage far greater than the other States of the Union combined.  Figures already at hand show this and the census now being taken will demonstrate it.

Northern and Western capital, that for a time was timid and held back, is pouring into every Southern State.  From one to two hundred millions of dollars have already gone there for investment, and still it goes.  There it finds natural resources unequaled elsewhere, and there it finds honest and stable governments.  The lives, liberty, and property of all, white and black, are protected alike, and taxes are low.  In the building of towns and cities the South is eclipsing the West.  Public-school systems are everywhere improving.  The money to support these schools comes mostly from the whites, who own most of the property, but it is expended for the education of whites and blacks alike.  The negroes are enjoying more school facilities and accumulating more property than they ever did under the Republican governments they controlled.  There is no large body of negroes anywhere in the world making such progress as the colored people now are in the South.  And the governing classes are everywhere demanding, as the recent Democratic convention did in Alabama, greater appropriations for the public schools.  The negro will soon be in condition, if these States are let alone, to take care of himself, as he ought to do, both as a taxpayer and a voter.

And these are the conditions with which you propose to interfere:  by this bill you propose that the Federal Government, or rather that the Republican party, now in charge of the Federal Government, shall go into these States and, by its officials, array again the blacks against the whites, that it shall back them up with the Army of the United States and march them solidly to the polls.  You know, gentlemen, full well that when the moneys appropriated by this bill get into these Southern districts, the colored men will be told that it is all sent by the Republican party for their benefit;  you know that when the Army arrives there they will be told that it was sent to see that they vote the Republican ticket, and when that shall be told to the colored men they will recognize the fact that it is the truth and nothing but the truth.  If you gentlemen did not believe that the Republican party was to profit by this bill, not one dollar would you vote to carry out its provisions, not one soldier would you send to the South.

Gentlemen, you are not even as consistent or as considerate as your predecessors were who passed the original reconstruction laws.  Before they reconstructed the Southern States they reconstructed the District of Columbia.  They thought it would be a shame to give the negro the right to vote away a Southern man's property and not give him at the same time the right to vote in the District at the Capital.  So Mr. Henry Wilson says, in his history of reconstruction, that "both as a right and an example" they first enacted negro suffrage in the District of Columbia.  Then they gave the District a Legislature and a governor, all to be elected by universal suffrage.  But many Republican legislators had then, as they have now, property in this District, and they soon concluded that the example would not do;  they soon concluded that the negro did not have an inalienable right to vote away their property in the District, and in 1874 a Republican Senate and a Republican House, without ever calling the yeas and nays, took away from the negro and the white man, too, the right to vote in the District of Columbia.  A Republican President approved the bill and for sixteen years not a ballot has been cast in this District.

Why do you not now, when you seem to be so anxious about the rights of the negro, first give back the right that Mr. Wilson said and your party said was his, the right to vote here around this Capitol ?

Gentlemen, you know that this arraying of race against race in the South will tend again to bring about race conflicts.  You must know that it will endanger again the peace and prosperity of the South, and you know that the frequent use of the military at the polls will tend to destroy free government.  If you do not, you are ignorant of the fundamental conditions of the problem with which you are dealing.  If you do know this and nevertheless insist on the bill, then you are reckless of the consequences.  It is no answer to say that we have no carpet-baggers in the South now.  Unprincipled and vicious men are confined to no State and no section of this Union.  The North never sent forth a greater scoundrel than Swepson, of North Carolina, than Moses and Crews, of South Carolina, or than many others I could mention.

There are men in every State in the South now ready to put themselves at the head of negro majorities wherever you may muster them together by your supervisors and your Army;  yes, ready to cater to their cupidity, to pander to their prejudices, and to lead them, as Moses and Crews did, in any scheme of plunder that may be devised.  Is it kindness to the negro of the South to array him against the white man ?  Is it kindness to the white man, is it justice to the Northern man who has invested his property in that section ?  Is it in the interest of good government ?

That frauds are sometimes committed in Congressional elections in the South no candid man can deny;  neither can any honest man deny that frauds are often committed in the North.  But I utterly deny that frauds there have been perpetrated to the extent or to anything like the extent claimed by the authors of this bill.  If frauds are committed there, this House has the remedy in its own hands.  It is the judge of the elections and returns of its own members.

Everybody knows, and knew, as soon as the elections of 1888 were over, that this House was to be Republican, and that a Republican House, after all that had been said in the canvass, would be ready and anxious to turn out every Southern Democrat who it could be made to appear was not fairly elected;  there was an effort made to get up contests from the South, yet there were comparatively few contested cases from that region.  The number does not begin to compare with what the public had been led to expect from the complaints that were made on the hustings.  From those States of the South as to which most complaints are made you have tried six cases, and two of them have been decided in favor of Democrats by this Republican House.

This House has turned out more Democrats from the State of West Virginia than from any other State in the Union, and there has been no complaint that the negro question made any figure in any of these cases.  No, Mr. Speaker, when the Republican governments died in the South they left us a fearful legacy of debt and bitter memories.  It could not but be that now and then frauds would be resorted to for the prevention of what was deemed to be even worse than fraud.  I am not here to deny that this was so.  But the South is naturally as much in favor of fair elections as any other portion of our country, and if left to ourselves we will soon solve in the only rational and effectual manner the problems that are upon us.  As we are educating our white people so we are educating the negro.  We want him to know how to vote intelligently.  We wish him to learn that it is not his interest to array himself solidly against the white man;  that he is interested in legislation that shall be fair to all, just as the white man is who lives under the same laws and cultivates the same fields.  It is a lesson the negro is learning and will learn thoroughly, if the national Republican party will only cease to interfere by outside legislation between the races.

Gentlemen, I beg you to pause and consider.  Do not put upon your consciences all the evils that are to come from this bill, that is to perpetuate strife between your fellow-citizens of the South.  We want fair elections, but, sir, we know we can never have them under this bill.

Now let us look at it for a moment.

It proposes to repeal the present jury law, which provides that Democratic and Republican names alike shall be put into the jury-box.  I had the honor of proposing that law.  It was passed because marshals were packing juries whenever and wherever they desired.  When it is repealed, Republican officials can pack juries again.  The possibility and even probability that this is to be done will encourage Republican election officials and intimidate Democrats.  It gives to the Republican party complete supervision over registration of voters.  It gives special supervisors the same power over naturalization that was exercised by Davenport in New York in 1873, when he had one Moshen to swear out in packages three thousand warrants to terrorize and frighten voters from the polls, and it gives in cities just as many supervisors at $5 a day as the Republican chief supervisor and marshal may decide on, to make a house-to-house canvass and report as to the occupation, naturalization, age, and of course on the politics, venality, etc., of the residents.  A more ingenious scheme to aid the Republican party in carrying the Democratic cities of the North could not possibly be devised.

The bill gives power to appoint any number of deputy marshals, ten thousand and even more in one city, provided only the marshal and the supervisor shall in conferences agree on them.  And here let me say I was glad to hear my friend from Pennsylvania [Mr. Buckalew] say that Johnny Davenport wrote the bill, and I am willing to believe he did, for I do not like to attribute to the gentlemen from Massachusetts and Illinois [Mr. Lodge and Mr. Rowell] the motives that must have actuated the real author of the bill when he penned certain sections of it.

I knew the gentleman from Illinois was not the author of it, for he did not know that it provided for an unlimited number of deputy marshals.  I am satisfied the gentleman from Massachusetts did not know everything that was in it or he could not have used such honeyed words when discussing it.  The truth is, time enough has not been given for anybody to understand it.  The gentleman from Maryland [Mr. McComas] made a long speech about it, or rather about the laws of Maryland, and showed that he had not read it carefully, for he said there was not a blue-coat in it.

It was rushed into a caucus before the Republicans had time to read it;  it was pushed in here before Democrats had time to study it, almost before the minority could report upon it, and it is to be rushed through the House without sufficient time to debate it and without one minute's consideration in the Committee of the Whole.  Under the bill the supervisor can employ five hundred deputy marshals and supervisors at $5 a day each for twelve days before an election in one city to make this house-to-house canvass.  At whatever door they knock it must be opened unto them;  the inquiries they can legally make are without number and they can use as bribes the moneys furnished as fees by the Government with absolute immunity.  They have only to arrange with such Democrats as are willing for $5 per diem to go as deputy marshals into distant counties where they can not vote and thus keep them away from the polls.  And while visiting officially they can electioneer for the party that pays them.

The executive officer of the system is to be a chief supervisor for every Congressional district.  This chief supervisor is to put the machinery into play and manipulate it.  He is to be chosen from the United States circuit court commissioners.  There is no class of officials in the Government more complained of to-day and for years past by the accounting officers of the Treasury ---Democratic and Republican, and by the Attorneys-General, Democratic and Republican--- than these commissioners.  The complaint now is that they surround themselves with spies and informers, harass the citizens that they may multiply fees and rob the Government.  From this class the chief supervisors are to be taken, and the bill gives opportunities for making fees without limit.  Whenever this officer receives a petition from 100 citizens he shall apply to the court and the court shall appoint three supervisors for each polling place in a district.

The words are mandatory on the court and on the chief supervisor.  They must act when petition is made, and, as the pay is $5 per day, the petition will be made in every district.  The court is to have no power to appoint except from the names handed in by the chief supervisor.  He will hand in and the court is to appoint one Democratic and two Republican supervisors for each box.  That he may have opportunity to select Republicans who will be active and Democrats who will be subservient, the law provides that the chief may receive applications for supervisorships at any time between one election and another.  This will give ample scope for consultations between this chief and the applicants for trading and dickering.  The bill seems to be all improvement even on the methods of Warmoth.  It allows the chief to send his hirelings from any one portion of the district to another, just as Warmoth sent his registrars from New Orleans to hold elections in distant parishes.  But Warmoth, in order to secure the subservience of his registrars, felt himself obliged to take from each, when appointed, a resignation with date in blank;  and whenever the registrar failed to serve his interest the capet-bag governor filled in the date of the resignation and accepted it.  Then the pay stopped.

This law, however, saves all necessity of resorting to such devices.  It gives on its face power to the chief supervisor to suspend at any time, whether engaged in registering voters or holding an election, and for reasons resting in his own breast, any supervisor whatever, and then the pay stops.  Could control over election officers or over registration be more absolutely and completely vested in one man than by giving this power of instantly stopping pay ?  Certainly the carpet-bag governor of Louisiana did not think so, and I think this House will agree that he was an expert in devising fraudulent election machinery.  It does not better the case to say that one supervisor at each poll is to be a Democrat.  He may be called a Democrat, but he is not to be selected by a Democrat;  he is to be such a Democrat as will suit the views of the Republican chief supervisor ---that is to say, a Democrat who will vote the Republican ticket for the $5 a day he is to get.  Mr. Speaker, this is not surmise, but actual fact, proven by experience with Republican officials in the South since the days of the carpet-bagger.

Only a few years ago there was a contest here for a seat in the House between my friend General Wheeler, the Democratic candidate, and Mr. Lowe, who was an Independent, run by the Republicans.  In that contest about twenty supervisors were examined who had been pointed nominally as Democrats and to represent the Democratic Party.  Every one of them swore he voted for Lowe.  Could that have been accident ?  Impossible.  It was design.  Either these Democrats were all bought with the fees, or they were selected because in that election it was known they would not vote the Democratic ticket.  So it will be under this bill if it becomes a law.  Two zealous partisan Republicans, and one Democrat working for the money and working to suit his employer, may be sent off to hold an election in a county they never set foot in before.  When they get there they are supreme, supported by two deputy marshals of the same ilk, and, if need be, by a section of the Army;  and if they should be charged by the citizens of that county with any fraud of whatever nature no county court or State court can try them.

The bill provides in the most abundant manner for the removal of every possible case against them to the United States courts, where Republican officials can select the juries that are to try them.  Whatever count is made by these supervisors or the majority of them, backed by their deputy marshals and United States soldiers, is to be, unless overruled by a court for errors on the face of the papers, final and conclusive, anything that may be said or done by State officers of election to the contrary notwithstanding.  It was by a similar process to this that Louis Napoleon held the election, the plebiscite, at which the French Republic ceased to be and the President of France became Napoleon III, Emperor of the French.

When the supervisors at the boxes make their returns they are to be counted by a United States board of canvassers of the Congressional vote for each State.  This board is to be composed of two Republicans and one Democrat.  This board is to give the certificate of election upon which the Clerk of the House is to put members upon the roll.  If the Clerk of this House does not follow the Republican board of commissioners he is made guilty of felony.  It may be, sir, that the complexion of the next House may depend upon the rejection of the returns from some one box in the State, say, of New York, by this board of canvassers, and that every court in that State and the governor of that State may declare that return to be legal and valid.

State authority will stand for naught.  Representatives are to be counted in by the officials appointed under this bill, and when once the majority has been determined here by that process that majority will stand throughout that Congress, for I believe there has never been a certified majority here virtuous enough to turn itself out of power.

If this bill passes and if it shall prove effectual to preserve the hold of the Republican party on this Government, if the people do not rebuke it at the first election, what power will they ever have to reverse the policy of the Republican leaders ?  How shall they ever relieve themselves from unjust taxation, how protect themselves from oppressive legislation ?

It is the great virtue of our system of separate State governments that each State makes its own returns.  Divided, as we always are, into two great parties, neither of these parties is ever in possession of all the power over the final returns.  Napoleon's nephew would not have found it so easy to have himself declared Emperor of France if there had been separate returns from independent states as he did when all the provinces were all subject to one central control from Paris.  That is why Paris is France.  Pass this bill, gentlemen, put all the election machinery of the United States and the Army to back it, in control of the Republican party, and you may paraphrase that saying and declare that the national Republican executive committee is the Government of the United States.

It has often been said, Mr. Speaker, that the greatest danger to be apprehended in this country is from the decision of closely contested Presidential elections.  You all remember the discontent arising from the seating of Hayes over Tilden.  A majority, or, if any of you say not a majority, then you will all admit that a large portion of the people of the United States believed they had been cheated in the count.  That belief, whether well founded or not, arose from the fact that the returning boards of the three contested States, South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana, were all in the hands of the Republican party and that it was these Republican boards that certified to the election of the Republican electors.  The chairman of the national Republican executive committee did not announce the result for some three days after the election.

Even Mr. Hayes gave it up at one time.  But messages flew thick and fast over the wires between New York and South Carolina, Florida and Louisiana.  Then Mr. Chandler claimed the election of Hayes, and then "visiting statesmen" went in troops to the contested States.  The result so arrived at did not and could not give satisfaction.  And I tell you gentlemen on the other side of this Chamber that no closely contested Congressional election in this country will ever give satisfaction if you put all the power over the returns everywhere in the hands of one party.  The people love fair play, and that is not fair play.

There are many unfair things done in politics and the people submit, because somewhere in our complex system there is a set-off or a compensatory advantage.  The Republicans gerrymander Pennsylvania in a manner that is unfair.  They gerrymander New York in a manner that is exceedingly unfair.  But the Democrats gerrymander, when they get the power, Ohio and Indiana, and that is in some sense a set-off.  So if members are returned unfairly from any State, the fair-minded voter reconciles himself by the thought that, after all, the return was made by the party that controls that State and has the power there, and the other party that has other States probably does the same in them.  It may be that now and then one party improperly certifies more members than another.  For the sake of argument admit that to be so, and admit, which I do not by any means, that now it is the Democratic party that has the advantage.  If you convince the people of that fact they will in the other States more than make it up to you at the polls.

I believe that is the situation to-day.  I believe you convinced the people at the North, who do not understand the situation, that we were committing frauds at the South by the wholesale, while you yourselves were entirely innocent, and that by this means you beat us in 1888.  But if you pass this bill, if you violate the traditions of the past, if you break down State lines, if you take away power from the State boards that are in the hands of the two parties in almost equal numbers, and take all this power into the hands of the party that is in control here, with the Army to back them, you destroy all hope of fair play in the future, all confidence in the freedom of elections, which lies at the very base of the Government.

The boards of canvassers that are to do the counting are, under the bill, to meet on the 15th of November, or in certain cases a week later.  Suppose that next fall the House is in doubt, and that twenty districts are close and doubtful.  Long before the 15th of November your national committee will know the situation.  In addition to the millions of Government money authorized by the bill, it will have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars raised from private subscription.  Do you suppose that after the election its chairman, while the House is still in doubt, will sit still and spend no more money ?  To ask the question is to answer it.  The wires would be hot again, as in 1876, and "visiting statesmen" would be on the road again, as in 1876.  And then the laborer was worthy of his hire in 1876;  why should he not be now ?  The members of the returning boards of 1876 nearly or quite all got offices;  why should not those of 1890 also get their reward ?  Gentlemen, you are blind to suppose the people will sustain such a law as this.  If they do, it seems to me that the end of free elections and of free government in America is not far away.

Another odious feature of this bill, Mr. Speaker, is that it is so devised as to draw within the jurisdiction of the United States supervisors the Presidential election also.  You do not pretend to have any power over that.  But by the laws of most of the States Presidential electors are voted for on the same tickets as members of Congress.  By letting the State machinery stand, you supervise the vote for President and the vote for Congressmen at one and the same time.  Is that accidental or intentional ?

I have not had time to say much about the use of the Army at the polls.  Let me conclude what I have to say with one remark.  Abraham Lincoln said, in December, 1863, writing to General Shepley about a forthcoming election in Louisiana, and that was in time of war, that to send members of Congress to Washington elected at the point of the bayonet would be disgraceful and outrageous.  Is there not left in this House enough of the spirit of Abraham Lincoln to defeat a bill that expressly gives power to elect members, not only in the South, but in every district of the United States, at the point of the bayonet ?  Is not such a bill, in the language of Lincoln, "disgraceful and outrageous" ?

APPENDIX.
why the solid south ?  or, reconstruction and its results.
reconstruction at Washington under Abraham Lincoln.

The death of Abraham Lincoln was an appalling calamity, especially to the South.  Had the crazy assassin withheld his hand, reconstruction could never have been formulated as it was in to the acts of March 2 and March 23, 1867.  Mr. Lincoln's leading thought in the conduct of the war was the preservation of the Government of the fathers;  and he took issue squarely with those who, like Mr. Sumner, were seeking to take advantage of the times and "change this Government from its original form and make it a strong centralized power."  (Nicolay and Hay's Lincoln. ---Century, October, 1889.)

He believed the Government to be, as Chief-Justice Chase afterwards defined it in Texas vs. White, "an indestructible union composed of indestructible States."  Upon this idea of the Constitution he based his theory of restoration, a theory which, at the time of his death, was well known, though it appears to have since been industriously forgotten.  This theory was, that the insurrectionary States, notwithstanding the war, still existed as States;  that they were never out of the Union and were always subject to the Constitution.  Hence it followed that those people of these several States who were entitled to vote by the laws existing at the date of the attempted acts of secession had, when they returned to their allegiance and were pardoned, the power of reconstruction in their own hands.

On this theory President Lincoln aided the people to set up State governments in Tennessee, Louisiana, and Arkansas, all without any aid from Congress.  But from the beginning there were eminent Republicans in Congress who denied the authority of the President to "intermeddle," as they called it, in this business.  As early as 1861, Mr. Stevens, of Pennsylvania, had announced the doctrine that the Constitution and laws were suspended where they could not be enforced;  that those who had defied them could not invoke their protection, and that Congress could legislate for such rebellious territory outside of and without regard to the Constitution.

Mr. Sumner laid down the proposition, in resolutions introduced February 11, 1862, that, by attempting to secede, a State had committed suicide, and its soil had become territory subject to the supreme control of Congress.  Both of these theories, which did not differ in result, denied to the President any power whatever in the premises.

But Mr. Lincoln seems always to have stood on the declaration made by Congress in July, 1861, that the war was being waged "to defend the Constitution and all laws in pursuence thereof, and to preserve the Union, with all the dignity, equality, and rights of the several States unimpaired;  that as soon as these objects were accomplished the war ought to cease," etc.  Pursuing steadily the spirit of these resolutions, even down to the day of his unhappy death, reconstruction as practiced by him was, simply, restoration of civil authority in the insurgent, but still existent, States, by the people thereof, aided by the military power of the United States.

More than two years after this question of power had begun to be mooted in Congress, the President formulated and communicated to that body, in his message of December 8, 1863, the plan he proposed thereafter to follow.  In no material particular did it differ from the theory upon which he had theretofore acted.  He said:  "Looking now to the present and future, and with reference to a resumption of the national authority within the States wherein that authority has been suspended, I have thought fit to issue a proclamation, a copy of which is herewith transmitted."

In the proclamation embracing the plan, he offers pardon to all who will swear "henceforth" to support the Constitution of the United States, etc., and proclaims that when those who, accepting this amnesty, shall have taken the oath of allegiance, each "being a qualified voter by the election laws of the State existing immediately before the so-called act of secession, and excluding all others, shall re-establish a State government, which shall be republican and in nowise contravening said oath, such shall be recognized as the true government of the State," etc.

This was President Lincoln's plan for restoring the insurgent States to the Union.  It left the question of suffrage entirely in the hands of those who were qualified to vote under the laws existing at the date of secession.  It was precisely this proposition, namely, that each insurgent State, at the time of rehabilitation, must decide for itself whether it would adopt negro suffrage, that angered the Republicans in Congress when acted on by Andrew Johnson, and culminated in the impeachment proceedings.

But Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson were two different persons.

Johnson was pugnacious ---seeking always to beat down his adversary and never to conciliate.  Lincoln, on the other hand, never needlessly antagonized those who could be won to his views, though he was accustomed to adhere to his matured opinions with inflexible purpose, as we shall see he did in this case, in the face of the fiercest opposition.

When this message of December, 1863, went in, many of the Republican leaders were claiming for Congress exclusive jurisdiction over the question of reconstruction under the clause of the Constitution which declares that "The United States shall guaranty to every State in this Union a republican form of government."  The counter-claim by the President, that he could aid the people to set up governments for themselves, seemed a challenge.  Congress debated the question at length, and finally, in July, 1864, passed, by a small majority in each House, a bill "to guaranty to certain States a republican form of government."

This bill did not meet the wishes of extremists, because it did not give the ballot to the negro;  but, if it became law, it would be a step gained for the extremists.  It asserted the jurisdiction of Congress and provided expressly that the President should recognize by proclamation the State governments established under it, only "after obtaining the consent of Congress."  The President refused to approve the bill and defeated it by a "pocket veto."  July 9 he made a public statement, giving reasons for his course.  The bill, he said, was received by him only one hour before the adjournment of Congress, and, among other things, he thought that the system of restoration it provided was "one very proper for the loyal people of any State choosing to adopt it."  But he clearly was opposed to forcing it on any State by law, as he went on to say that he would at all times be prepared to give the Executive aid and assistance to any such people," that is, people who should "choose to adopt it," the Congressional plan, "when the insurrection should be suppressed," etc.

Senator Wade and Representative Henry Winter Davis responded in an angry protest.  To the admirers of Mr. Lincoln this document, dated in July, 1864, contains charges that are astounding.  After stating that the signers had read the proclamation "without surprise, but not without indignation," the protest contends that want of time for examination was a false pretense.  "Ignorance of its contents is out of the question," says the manifesto;  and then argues that Mr. Lincoln was cognizant of a plan by which "the bill would be staved off in the Senate to a period too late in the session to require the President to veto it in order to defeat it, and that he," the President, "would retain the bill if necessary, and thereby defeat it."

The protest further says:  "The President, by preventing this bill from becoming a law, holds the electoral votes of the rebel States at the dictation of his personal ambition," and complains that the will of Congress is to be held for naught unless the loyal people of the rebel States choose to adopt it."  It also calls Mr. Lincoln's action "a studied outrage on the legislative rights of the people."

Here the issue is squarely made whether the President was to restore or the Congress to reconstruct the insurgent States.  The President went on his way.

Long after his plan of restoration had been published to the world, his party, in convention assembled, had approved his "practical wisdom," "unselfish patriotism," and "unswerving fidelity to the Constitution," and now, in November, 1864, on this platform, Mr. Lincoln received 212 electoral votes to 21 for George McClellan.

On the 5th of December, 1864, the President sent in his last annual message, which was without any allusion to the question of reconstruction, unless it was in his mind when, speaking of the insurgents, he said:  "They can at any moment have peace simply by laying down their arms and submitting to the national authority under the Constitution;"  and its closing words possibly had reference to the same subject:  "In stating a single condition of peace, I mean to say that the war will cease on the part of the Government whenever it shall have ceased on the part of those who began it."

It is very clear that up to this point Mr. Lincoln was determined never to become a party to any political war upon the Southern States waged for the purpose of compelling them to range under a political banner.

Congress, during the session that ended 1864-'65, either did not care or did not dare to insist on any reassertion of its right to reconstruct.  On the contrary, seeing, as it undoubtedly did, that the Confederacy was about to collapse, it adjourned on the 4th of March, leaving Mr. Lincoln an open field for his policy of restoration.  Every member of that Congress knew what that policy was.  It meant the promptest possible restoration of civil authority in the States by the aid of Executive power.  And so, now, shortly before his death, the President went on to prepare, or cause to be prepared, the proclamation for the restoration of North Carolina, which was issued by his successor, Andrew Johnson, May 29, 1865, and was the basis of all Mr. Johnson's subsequent work in that field.

Mr. McCulloch, Secretary of the Treasury during the last few weeks of Lincoln's and throughout the whole of Johnson's Administration, says, in his Men and Measures of Half a Century, page 378:  "The very same instrument for restoring the national authority over North Carolina and placing her where she stood before her attempted secession, which had been approved by Mr. Lincoln, was by Mr. Stanton presented at the first Cabinet meeting which was held at the Executive Mansion after Mr. Lincoln's death, and, having been carefully considered at two or three meetings, was adopted as the reconstruction policy of the Administration."

On the 18th day of July, 1867, General Grant, before the reconstruction committee, said that according to his recollection "the very paper (the North Carolina. proclamation) which I heard read twice while Mr. Lincoln was President, was the one which was carried right through" by President Johnson.  In the face of these facts it is remarkable that intelligent public opinion should seem to have since settled down to the conclusion that the restoration policy of Andrew Johnson was a departure from that of Abraham Lincoln.  Upon the all-important and controlling point that the people of each State were to settle for themselves the question of suffrage, this being a constitutional right they had not lost, the views of Lincoln and Johnson were identical.

It would seem that Mr. Blaine holds a different opinion. ---[But we know that Mr. Blaine wasn't a good person and that lying wasn't alien to him]  He says, in discussing the North Carolina proclamation as issued by Johnson, volume 2, page 77, Twenty Years in Congress:

"It was specially provided in the proclamation that in choosing delegates to any State convention no person shall be qualified as an elector or eligible as a member unless he shall have previously taken the prescribed oath of allegiance and unless he shall also possess the qualifications of a voter as defined under the constitution and laws of North Carolina, as they existed on the 20th May, 1861, immediately prior to the so-called ordinance of secession.  Mr. Lincoln had in mind, as was shown by his letter to Governor Hahn, of Louisiana, to try the experiment of negro suffrage, beginning with those who had served in the Union Army and who could read and write;  but President Johnson's plan confined the suffrage to white men, by prescribing the same qualifications as required in North Carolina before the war."

Not only was this North Carolina proclamation approved by Mr. Lincoln;  not only was it consistent with the theory he had so long maintained against such fierce opposition;  not only did it leave the question of suffrage exactly where it was left by the message of December 8, 1863, but the very letter referred to by Mr. Blaine, to show a difference between the views of the two statesmen, conclusively proves, when quoted fully, that they both believed that, as was provided in the proclamation Mr. Blaine was discussing, suffrage was a matter for the States to regulate.

Mr. Lincoln's letter to Governor Hahn says:

"Now you are about to have a convention which, among other things, will probably define the elective franchise, I barely suggest, for your private consideration, whether some of the colored people may not be let in, as, for instance, the very intelligent, and especially those who have fought gallantly in our ranks.  But this is only a suggestion not to the public, but to you alone."

Andrew Johnson made a similar suggestion when he wrote, August 15, 1865, to Governor Sharkey, of Mississippi:  "If you could extend the elective franchise to all persons of color who can read the Constitution of the United States in English, and write their names, and to all persons of color who own real estate valued at not less than $250, and pay taxes thereon, you would completely disarm the adversary and set an example that other States will follow."

The difference was that Andrew Johnson did not say:  "This is only a suggestion not to the public, but to you alone."

The letter to Governor Hahn does show that Mr. Lincoln would have been glad to have the States, in regulating the suffrage, make certain exceptions in favor of the negro ---exceptions that would not probably embrace 10 per cent. of the colored male adults in any Southern State, and could therefore have done no harm--- but the letter also clearly shows that he thought it would be an unwarrantable interference with the rights of the State for the President of the United States to do more than make a private suggestion about the matter.  That the writer of this Jetter would ever have consented to put negro suffrage upon the States by a law of Congress is inconceivable, unless there had come some radical change in his opinions;  and this can not be shown.

If no better evidence can be adduced than this offered by Mr. Blaine to show a difference between the plans of two Presidents, and we have seen none, then we are authorized to conclude that the Presidential plan remained the same from the time it was inaugurated by Mr. Lincoln, in 1862, down to the date when, in March, 1867, Congress concluded to destroy the State governments which the people, acting in accordance with that plan, had set up for themselves ---some of them under Lincoln's and others under Johnson's supervision.

In discussing the motives which influenced Congress in refusing to recognize and in finally overthrowing these governments and demanding constitutional amendments, a great American law writer, Judge Clark Hare, himself a Republican in politics, in his recent work on American Constitutional Law, page 747, says:  "When the South was prostrated by the rebellion, the dominant party resolved on measures that would tend to keep them in power and might be necessary for the protection of the colored race."

The author, pursuing, as he declares in his preface, "jurisprudence with an eye single to truth," here affirms that the controlling motive of Congress in reconstructing the States and the Constitution was partisan, with as much confidence as if his statement were based on a decision of the Supreme Court.

Andrew Johnson and Restoration.

Congress adjourned March 4, 1865, not to convene again until the first Monday in December, unless called to meet in extra session.  Johnson was inaugurated President on the 14th of April, 1865, just as the Confederacy fell.  As he intended to carry on the work of restoration upon the lines laid down by his great predecessor, he needed no aid from Congress;  and so it seemed to be a happy contingency that it was not in session.  In his Cabinet were Seward, McCulloch, Stanton, Welles, Dennison, Harlan, and Speed, the same strongmen gathered around his council board by the late President, and all still in favor of the Lincoln plan of restoration.

The sudden collapse of the Confederacy was remarkable.  Within forty days from the date when General Johnston gave up his sword there was not a single Confederate soldier in arms.  The surrender was complete.  Submission to the authority of the United States was everywhere absolute.  Courts were established;  the postal service rehabilitated;  tax collectors and tax assessors went about their business.

On the 29th of May, President Johnson issued the proclamation that had been approved by President Lincoln for the restoration of civil government of North Carolina.  William Holden was appointed provisional governor, with authority to call a convention to frame a constitution of government for the State.  Proclamations, similar to that for North Carolina, followed for South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Florida and other States.

The people of the late Confederate States accepted with readiness the Presidential policy of reconstruction.  In fact, the unanimity with which those who had waged such a desperate conflict against the Union now took again the oath of allegiance to the Constitution of the United States was a phenomenon that startled the Republican politicians;  and it must have inspired distrust in the minds of many honest Northern voters.

But it was all in the utmost good faith;  and it was not strange.

From the days when the agitation of the slavery question began to divide the country into two sections, the South always talked more about and cared more for the Constitution, which it looked to for the protection of its property rights in slaves, than did the North, which relied on its majority of voters to maintain whatever views of public policy it might happen to entertain.  Thus it came about that the South was as devoted to the Constitution as was the North uncompromising for the Union.  When, therefore, the Southern States had seceded, the Constitution of the United States became the Constitution of the Confederate States, with such changes only as would emphasize and make still clearer the reserved powers of the States.

It is simply history to say that the people of the Confederate States looked upon themselves during the late war as fighting to perpetuate the Constitution of their fathers.  Slavery they deemed merely an incident.  Secession they regarded simply as a method by which they could place themselves in position to forever maintain inviolate the Constitution of 1789.  Nothing but the spirit of liberty, however mistaken it may have been, could have animated slaveholder and non-slave-holder to make side by side that terrible struggle of four years for the Confederacy, just as similar noble impulses animated the people of the Northern States to pour out so much of their blood and treasure for the Union.

When the Confederacy had died and independence was no longer possible, slavery, it was apparent, had gone down forever.  Secession. too was dead.  These two obstacles removed, the pathway to progress in the Union seemed open, and Southern people were invited now by Johnson, as they had been by Lincoln, to come back and claim the protection of the Constitution under which they were born.  They had never, in fact, lived under any other.

And now it is quite clear how the Southern people could and did attempt to resume their places in the Union with far greater unanimity than prevailed among them when attempting to go out.

Shortly after the assembling of Congress in December, 1865, the President was able to report that the people of North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Tennessee had reorganized their State governments.  The thirteenth amendment to the Constitution of the United States, abolishing slavery, had been adopted by twenty-seven States, the requisite three-fourths of the whole number, the reconstructed government of five of the seceding States having been counted as part of the twenty-seven.

The conventions of the seceding States had all repealed or declared null and void the ordinances of secession.  Every office in North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia, and Louisiana, legislative, executive, and judicial, was filled either by an original Union man or by one who, having been pardoned, had taken the oath of allegiance to the United States.

The laws were in full operation.  Senators and Representatives from most of these States were already in Washington asking to be seated in Congress and the work of restoration, so far as it lay in the hands of the people of these States, was completed.  The report to the President made by General Grant December 18, 1865, was a fair statement of the condition at that time of public sentiment in the South.

"I am satisfied the mass of thinking men in the South accept the present situation of affairs in good faith.  The questions which have hitherto divided the sentiment of the people of the two sections, slavery and State rights, or the right of the State to secede from the Union, they regard as having been settled forever by the highest tribunal, that of arms, that man can resort to.  I was pleased to learn from the leading men whom I met that they not only accepted the decision arrived at as final, but now the smoke of battle has cleared away and time has been given for reflection, that the decision has been a fortunate one for the whole country, they receiving like benefits from it with those who proposed them in the field and in the council."

But by the new State constitutions, which the Southern people had made for themselves, suffrage was confined to white men, just as it was in Connecticut, Ohio, Michigan, and other Northern States;  and, too, the Senators and Representatives-elect now asking to represent these late Confederate States were mostly Democrats.

This was the situation when Congress convened in December, 1865.  That body was largely Republican in both branches.  Would this Republican Congress admit these Democratic States ?  If not, upon what ground would the refusal be based ?

Congress ---1865-'66--- Politics.

The first session of the 39th Congress began December 4, 1865.  The Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mr. Schuyler Colfax, upon accepting the office, said:

"The Thirty-eighth Congress closed its constitutional existence with the stormcloud of war still hovering over us;  and after nine months' absence, Congress resumes its legislative authority in these council halls, rejoicing that from shore to shore in our land there is peace."

The people of the Southern States had reconstructed their governments upon the idea that peace had come;  but this very same House of Representatives, which now began with this declaration of its Speaker, that peace reigned supreme, was to make war upon the State governments of the South, justifying itself upon the theory that the war was not over.  The Presidential plan was to be disregarded.  Congress, in the language of Mr. Thaddeus Stevens ---[the piece of garbage bank-lawyer], henceforth its accepted leader, was to "take no account of the aggregation of white-washed rebels who, without any legal authority, have assembled in the capitals of the late rebel States and simulated legislative bodies."

However completely this generation may have forgotten that Johnson's policy was Lincoln's policy, that Congress knew it well, for early in that session Mr. Sherman said in debate:

"When Mr. Johnson came into power he found the rebellion substantially subdued.  What did he do ?  His first act was to retain in his confidence and in his councils every member of the Cabinet of Abraham Lincoln;  and, so far as we know, every measure adopted by Andrew Johnson has had the approval and sanction of that Cabinet."

There can be but little doubt that if Mr. Lincoln had lived he would, during 1865, have progressed at least as rapidly with his plan of reconstruction as did President Johnson;  he was always anxious to put an end to military control, and the successful ending of the war would have left him the most popular man this country has ever seen since Washington.  Yet even Mr. Lincoln could not have avoided a struggle with Congress.*

* Mr. Stanton, near the close of his life, looking back over those exciting times, declared that "if Mr. Lincoln had lived, he would have had a hard time with his party, as he would have been at odds with it on reconstruction."  McCulloch, "Men and Measures."

In December, 1865, Republican leaders felt that a crisis in the history of their party had come;  and many of them were ready to go to any extreme.  Mr. Stevens said on the floor of the House of Representatives that if the late Confederate States were admitted under the Presidential plan, without any changes in the basis of representation, these States, with the Democrats "that would be elected in the best of times at the North," would control the country;  and he said, on the 14th December, 1865:

"According to my judgment, they (the insurrectionary States) ought never to be recognized as capable of acting in the Union or of being counted as valid States until the Constitution shall have been so amended as to make it what its makers intended, and so as to secure perpetual ascendancy to the party of the Union."

Mr. Stevens had two plans:  first, to reduce the representation to which the late slave-holding States were entitled under the Constitution;  secondly, to enfranchise blacks and disfranchise whites.  But the mind of the Northern voter was not yet ready for negro suffrage.  Pennsylvania, Ohio, and other States still denied it.  Connecticut, in 1865, gave a majority against it of 6,272.  Even in October, 1867, Ohio gave a constitutional majority against colored suffrage of 50,629;  and so late as November, 1867, Kansas was against negro suffrage by a majority of 8,938;  while Minnesota adhered to the white basis by a majority of 1,298.  It was perfectly clear that the people were not now, in the winter of 1865-'66, prepared to indorse the extreme measures that were being mooted at Washington.

What Congress would do was an interesting problem.  Mr. Thaddeus Stevens, however, seems never to have doubted how it would be solved.  He predicted that public sentiment within less than two years would come up to his position. But to the accomplishment of such a result time and work were necessary.  As a first step, on the 4th of December, 1865, the very day the Thirty-ninth Congress was organized, Mr. Stevens introduced and passed in the House, by a party vote of 133 to 35, under the previous question, without debate, a resolution to provide for a joint committee of fifteen to report on the condition of "the States which formed the so-called Confederate States of America."  The Senate assented at once to the formation of the joint committee, and afterwards, on the 23d of February, 1866, finally agreed to a concurrent resolution, which had been the second proposition of Mr. Stevens's original resolution, that neither House should admit any member from the late insurrectionary States until the report of the joint committee on reconstruction, thereafter to be made, should be finally acted on.

Thus it was settled that the people most vitally interested in the two great problems, the basis of representation and the qualification of voters were to have no part, in Congress, at least, in their solution.  But more than that, here was time gained within which the effort could be made to bring the Northern mind up to Mr. Stevens's position.

The joint resolution refusing admittance to Southern Representatives and Senators was not passed without strenuous opposition.  It was an open declaration of war upon the Presidential plan.  Mr. Raymond, of New York, a distinguished Republican, made a great speech in defense of the President's policy.  Mr. Shellabarger, of Ohio, to break the force of Mr. Raymond's argument, talked thus:

"They framed in iniquity and universal murder into law.  Their pirates burned your unarmed commerce upon every sea.  They carved the bones of your dead heroes into ornaments, and drank from goblets made out of their skulls.  They poisoned your fountains, put mines under your soldiers' prisons;  organized bands whose leaders were concealed in your homes;  and commissions ordered the torch and yellow fever to be carried to your cities, and to your women and children.  They planned one universal bonfire of the North from Lake Ontario to the Missouri," etc.

Early in this session Congress sent to the President a civil-rights bill conferring many rights, not including suffrage, however, upon emancipated slaves.  This Mr. Johnson vetoed on the ground that it was unconstitutional;  and, according to decisions since made by the Supreme Court, it was.  The veto of this bill greatly aggravated the quarrel, which was already open and bitter, between the President and Congress.  It also lost Mr. Johnson the support of Messrs. Dennison, Harlan, and Speed, who resigned from the Cabinet.  Mr. Stanton, too, became an avowed enemy of the President and his policy.  But he did not resign.  He was advised by Mr. Sumner and others to "stick;"  and he remained in the Cabinet as an obstructionist.  This was utterly without precedent, and serves well to illustrate the height to which party passion had risen.

Another reason for the break in the Cabinet, in all probability, was that Southern Democrats very naturally were supporting President Johnson's policy.

Senator Wilson's History of Reconstruction is full of eloquent invectives launched in the House and Senate at Andrew Johnson because he was supported by Democrats, "rebels," "copperheads," "traitors," "importers of poisoned clothing," etc.

The memorable words of Mr. Lincoln in his last annual message were:  "The war will cease on the part of the Government whenever it shall have ceased on the part of those who began it."  But Mr. Lincoln had passed away and his words had lost their power.  Mr. Blaine, in his Twenty Years, even mentions it as a cause of offense that those who were in arms against the Government when Congress adjournment in March, 1865, were, some of them, at the hotels in Washington, demanding to be admitted to seats in the Congress which met in December.  The inflammatory debates in the first session of the Thirty-ninth Congress were preliminary to the canvass for members of Congress to be elected in the autumn of 1866.  No factor in those elections proved more potential than the rejection by Southern Legislatures of the pending fourteenth amendment to the Constitution of the United States.  The clauses on which its acceptance or rejection turned in these assemblies were:  section 2, which apportioned Representatives in Congress upon the basis of the voting population;  and section 3, which provided that no person should hold office under the United States who, having taken an oath as a Federal or State officer to support the Constitution, had subsequently engaged in the war against the Union.

It was claimed by the friends of the amendment to be especially unfair that the South should have representation for its freedmen and not give them the ballot.  The right, however, of a State to have representation for all its free inhabitants, whether voters or not, was secured by the Constitution, and that instrument even allowed three-fifths representation for slaves.  New York, Ohio, and other States denied the ballot to free negroes, some States excluded by property qualifications and others by educational tests, yet all enjoyed representation for all their peoples.

The reply to this was that the Constitution ought to be amended because the South would now have, if negroes were denied the ballot, a larger proportion of non-voters than the North.  Southern people were slow to see that this was good reason for change in the Constitution, especially as they believed they were already entitled to representation, and conceived that they ought to have a voice in proposing as well as in the ratification of amendments.  Five of the restored States had already ratified the thirteenth amendment, and such ratification had been counted valid.  If they were States, they were certainly entitled to representation.  So they claimed.

It was perhaps imprudent for Southern people at that time to undertake to chop logic with their conquerors, or indeed to claim any rights at all, as the net results of their insistence were that they were called "impudent claimants" by the Republican convention at Pittsburgh, and indeed everywhere in the Republican press.

The insuperable objection, however, to the ratification of the fourteenth amendment was to be found in the clause which required the people of the late Confederate States to disfranchise their own leaders, to brand with dishonor those who had led them in peace and in war.  The rejection of this amendment at the South greatly strengthened the Republican position, because the North, looking at it from a different standpoint, thought the proposition a fair one.  If any among those who proposed the amendment intended it should be rejected, it was shrewdly devised;  if it was not intended to procure its own rejection, then it was clumsily contrived.

The Freedmen's Bureau.

Even before the close of the war public sentiment had demanded some provision for the protection of the liberated slaves, who everywhere came flocking the Union lines.  The result was the establishment by law, March 3, 1865, of a Freedmen's Bureau, which was speedily extended, after hostilities had ceased, into all the late Confederate States.  The law made the agents of this bureau guardians of freedmen, with power to make their contracts, settle their disputes with employers, and care for them generally.  The position of bureau agent was one of power and responsibility, capable of being used beneficently, and sometimes no doubt it was;  but these officials were subjected to great temptation.

Many people, who believed that the newly emancipated slave needed a guardian to take care of him, believed also that if he only had the ballot he could take care of himself and the country too.  In fact the sentiment in favor of universal suffrage was already strong, even in the spring of 1865, and it was natural for every bureau agent who might have a turn for politics to conclude that, with the bureau's help, Mr. Stevens and his friends might eventually succeed in giving the nergro the ballot.  The bureau agent was "the next friend" of the negro.  With negro suffrage this official's fortune was made.  Without it, of course, this stranger had no hope of office in the South.  It was not, therefore, to his interest, if he had political aspirations, that there should be peace between the races.

From conscientious men connected with this bureau General Grant obtained the information upon which he based the opinion, given to the President in the report already quoted from, that "the belief widely spread among the freedmen of the Southern States that the lands of their former owners will, at least in part, be divided among them, has come from the agents of this bureau.  This belief is seriously interfering with the willingness of the freedmen to make contracts for the coming year."  And he further said:  "Many, perhaps the majority, of the agents of the Freedmen's Bureau advise the freedmen that by their own industry they must expect to live.  In some instances, I am sorry to say, the freedman's mind does not seem to be disabused of the idea that he has a right to live without care or provision for the future.  The effect of the belief in the division of lands is idleness and accumulation in camps, towns, and cities."

The first lesson in the horn-book of liberty for the freedman obviously was, that in the sweat of his face he must earn his bread ---a law unto all men since the days of Adam.  It is a sad commentary on the workings of the bureau that the best thing General Grant could say of its agents was, that "many, and perhaps a majority of them," did so advise.  If these officials were really responsible, as General Grant believed, for the demoralized labor condition at the South ---and their power over the freedman is beyond all question--- then they were, in fact, organizing chaos where their mission was peace and good order.

Nearly every one of these agents who remained South after reconstruction, was a candidate for office;  and many actually became governors, judges, legislators, Congressmen, postmasters, revenue officers, etc. ---[aliens transplanted, to lord over conquered people in their own homeland]

Such a situation as confronted Southern Legislatures in the fall and early winter of 1865 was never before witnessed in America.  Prior to 1861 the laws to compel people to industrious habits were not generally so stringent in the South as in the North.  This resulted partly from slavery and partly from the easy conditions of life in a mild climate.  There were no laws that met the new situation.  New and stringent statutes were passed to prevent vagrancy and idleness.  There is not space here to discuss these laws.  They will be treated of in a subsequent chapter and compared with statutes then in force in Northern States.  Suffice it to say now, they did not merit the odium visited upon them by many honest Northern voters, who, not understanding the situation, were led to believe them nothing short of an effort to re-enslave the negro, when their purpose was simply to counteract the teachings that had demoralized the freedman and compel him to industrious habits.

The Committee of Fifteen.

The passage of the concurrent resolution in December, 1865, to inquire into the condition of the late Confederate States meant open hostility to the Presidential plan.  Having declared war, the dominant party of course exercised great care in selecting members to serve on the committee which was to make this inquiry.  Mr. Blaine (volume 2, page 127) says:

"It was foreseen that in an especial degree the fortunes of the Republican party would be in the keeping of the fifteen men who might be chosen."

Speaker Colfax [of Credit Mobilier fame] and the appointing power in the Senate put on the committee twelve Republicans and only three Democrats, one from the Senate and two from the House.  The field from which testimony was to be drawn was the unrepresented South.  On the subcommittee which took testimony as to Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas, there was not a Democrat to call or to question a witness.  The only hope of fair play lay in the magnanimity or sense of justice of men who had already voted to refuse admission to the Southern members and who were placed upon the committee with the expectation, as Mr. Blaine has indicated, that they would take care of the Republican party.  There is not space here to discuss the evidence of the witnesses, who chose or were chosen to come before these gentlemen.  It consists of hundreds of pages of speculative testimony, hearsay, etc.

The crimes committed, in the most peaceful times, within eighteen consecutive months, among any population of 8,000,000, would, if industriously arrayed, make a fearful record.  To make that arraignment of the late Confederate States was the task to which this able committee addressed itself in 1866.  The situation in these States was peculiar.  When the surviving soldiers returned from the field, around their desolated homes they found 4,000,000 of slaves suddenly manumitted.  The returning soldiers were themselves more or less affected by that demoralization which is an unfailing consequence of protracted war.  The negroes were demoralized by their newly found freedom.  They turned, for the most part, a deaf ear to the advice of their old masters and listened with avidity to the tales that were bruited about, said to have come from the stranger friends who had freed them, to the effect that the lands of their rebel masters were to be confiscated and divided among them. It is impossible that, under such circumstances, however earnestly all good citizens might strive for the general good, there should not have been friction between the races.  Yet, notwithstanding the extraordinary and unprecedented conditions, there was, to General Grant, nothing, as his report already quoted shows, in the situation there in the fall of 1865 that was not creditable to the masses of the people.

General Grant was not in politics.  The gentlemen of the committee of fifteen were;  and a few words as to the treatment of one State, as a sample, will suffice to show that the methods employed were such as to allow no rational expectation of reaching correct conclusions.  As to the condition in Alabama only five persons who claimed to be citizens were examined.  These were all Republican politicians.  The testimony of each was bitterly partisan;  under the government of the State as it then existed no one of these witnesses could hope for official preferment.  In his testimony each was striving for the overthrow of his existing State government and the setting up of some such institutions as followed under Congressional reconstruction.  When this reconstruction had finally taken place, the first of these five witnesses became governor of his State;  the second became a Senator in Congress;  the third secured a life position in one of the Departments at Washington;  the fourth became a circuit judge in Alabama, and the fifth a judge of the supreme court of the District of Columbia, all Republicans.

There was no Democrat in the subcommittee which examined these gentleman to cross-examine them;  and not a citizen of Alabama was called before that subcommittee to answer or explain their evidence.  Of the report of this committee, based upon evidence taken by such methods, Mr. Blaine permits himself to say (Vol. II, p. 9):  "That report is to be taken as an absolutely truthful picture of the Southern States at that time."

The first session of tho Thirty-ninth Congress now came to a close.  Besides the passage, over the President's objections, of a still more radical Freedmen's Bureau bill than that defeated by his first veto, it had accomplished little else than to drive most of the moderate Republicans into the ranks of the extremists.  On adjournment members went in to the canvass at home.  The late Confederate States were held out of the Union, and their status was to be determined by elections at the North.  The rejection of the fourteenth amendment, the report of the joint committee of fifteen, the testimony taken by that committee, the evidence furnished by agents of the Freedmen's Bureau, the vetoes and the alleged treachery to the Republican party of Andrew Johnson ---these were the material of the canvass.  Mr. Johnson had adhered rigidly to Abraham Lincoln's theory of restoration.  That theory the Republicans now were assailing and Johnson was on trial as an apostate.

Congress, 1866-'67.

The Republicans came back to the last session of the 39th Congress, which began on the first Monday in December, 1866, exulting in a great victory.  Never since the beginning of the Government had there been such a campaign during an "off year."  Though no President was to be elected, four national conventions had been held;  the air was filled with inflammatory speeches, and the dying embers of the passions engendered by the civil war were fanned into flames.

The result of the election was a majority, in the 40th Congress, of 31 for the Republicans in the Senate and 94 in the House.  The republicans were greatly elated.  President Johnson, who was still ready with his vetoes, was the only obstacle in their path.  It was proposed to remove him by impeachment.  As put by Mr. Shuckers, himself a Republican, in his Life of C.J. Chase (page 547), the Republican leaders at this juncture "felt the vast importance of the Presidential patronage;  many of them felt, too, that according to the maxim that to the victors belong the spoils, the Republican party was rightfully entitled to the Federal patronage;  and they determined to get possession of it.  There was but one method and that was by impeachment and removal of the President."

On the 7th of January, 1867, Mr. Loan offered a resolution that, "for the purpose of securing the fruits of the victories gained," impeachment of the President was necessary.  On the same day Mr. Kelso, also "for the purpose of securing the fruits of the victories gained," introduced impeachment resolutions.  Then Mr. Ashley moved and carried resolutions for the appointment of a committee to inquire for grounds on which the President could be impeached.  No proof was offered;  the committee was to hunt for proof.  The President's "bank account was examined.  His private conduct in Washington was carefully scrutinized.  Men were employed to investigate his public and private character in Tennessee.  But nothing was found to his discredit." (McCulloch, page 394.)

Notwithstanding the futility of this effort, in one form or another the impeachment programme survived until the next winter, when President Johnson furnished an excuse in the removal of Mr. Stanton from the Secretaryship of War, and the impeachment proceedings were then pressed to a conclusion.

It is now well understood that no legal grounds for the impeachment existed;  and even at that day, in the height of party passion, there were seven Republican Senators the exact number necessary to save the President, who, in spite of party pressure, voted "not guilty" at the trial.

The excitement prevailing in the country at large at the time of the impeachment may be judged of by the following editorial paragraph from the Harrisburg (Pa.) State Guard:  "Just as sure as we believe the blood of Abraham Lincoln is on the soul of Andrew Johnson, just so certain are we that he contemplates drenching the country once more in the blood of civil war."

The effort to impeach the President was not allowed to delay the programme of Congress.  Universal suffrage having been decided on, obviously the first step was, in the language of Mr. Henry Wilson, in his History of Reconstruction (p. 267), "the extension of suffrage to the colored race in the District of Columbia both as a right and an example."  The bill to this effect was before the Senate.  Mr. Buckalew, of Pennsylvania, presented thus the grounds upon which Democrats opposed it:  "Our ancestors placed suffrage upon the broad common-sense principle that it should be lodged in and exercised by those who could use use it most wisely and most safely and most efficiently to serve the ends for which Government was instituted," and "not upon any abstract or transcendental notion of human rights which ignored the existing facts of social life."  And, he said:  "I shall not vote to degrade suffrage.  I shall not vote to pollute and corrupt the foundation of political power in this country, either in my own State or in any other."

The debate took a wide range.  It was understood that the late Confederate States were to share the fate of the District.  One question was whether the right of suffrage should be confined to those who could read and write.  Mr. Sumner stated his position thus:  "Now to my mind nothing is clearer than the absolute necessity of suffrage for all colored persons in the disorganized States.  It will not be enough if you give it to those who read and write;  you will not, in this way, acquire the voting force which you need there for the protection of Unionists, whether white or black.  You will not secure the new allies, who are essential to the national cause [central government over all]."

The bill granting suffrage passed without qualification.  On January 7, 1867, the President returned it with his objections.  Mr. Sherman, discussing the veto, said:  "The President says this is not the place for this experiment.  I say it is the place of all others because, if the negroes here abuse the political power we give them, we can withdraw the privilege at any moment."

It is curious glancing forward a few years, to see the result of this initial experiment.  In 1871 while the Republicans were still in power in both Houses, a law was passed allowing the District of Columbia to elect its own Legislature and governor.  The newly enfranchised voters, who were given the ballot "both as a right and as an example," had thus full opportunity to show their capacity.  What was occurring at that time in the Southern Sates was always a matter of partisan dispute, but the noon-day sun was shining full upon the capital District, and the whole country saw that the political power conferred was being "abused."  As Senator Sherman had indicated it might be, it was, in 1874, promptly "withdrawn" by a law which took away, not only from the black man, but also from the white man, the right, which the latter had long enjoyed, of voting in the District of Columbia.  The new law provided that the District should be governed by three commissioners appointed by the President.  There has not been a ballot cast in the District since 1874.

Congress had the right to enact universal suffrage in the District of Columbia.  It has exclusive jurisdiction there, under the Constitution;  but that instrument might have been searched in vain, in 1867, for any power over the elective franchise in the States.  Mr. Justice Nelson, of the Supreme Court of the United States, on the circuit had decided, in the case of Egan, that South Carolina was entitled, after her civil government had been restored under the Presidential plan to all the rights of a State in the Union.  In a carefully prepared opinion he said:  "A new constitution had been formed, a governor and Legislature elected under it and the State placed in the full enjoyment of all her constitutional rights and privileges."  What was true of South Carolina was true of others of the late Confederate States, and if these States were States, as Mr. Justice Nelson held, then Congress had no power over suffrage within their borders.

But this view of the Constitution did not suit the majority in Congress.  The victory at the polls in the fall had put them abreast with Mr. Stevens, and now, in the winter of 1866-'67, they claimed full power over the late insurrectionary States on the ground that it was for Congress to decide when the war had ceased, and they decided it was not yet over.  Mr. Fessenden put it thus:  "Is there anything more certain than that the conqueror has a right, if he chooses, to change the form of government, that he has the right to punish ?" etc.  On the 15th of March, 1867, Senator Howard, of Michigan, said:  "They took their own time to get out of the Union, let them take their own time to return.  They took their own time to initiate he war;  we took our time to close the war."  Mr. Maynard, of Tennessee, seemed to think it necessary to show that the continued existence of the war was a fact, really existing, and not a fiction assumed for jurisdictional purposes, and he said, on the floor of the House, in February, 1867:

"It is not quite accurate to say that we are at peace;  that there is no war.  What peace is it ?  The peace of Vesuvious at rest, the peace of the slumbering volcano;  the fires banked up, not extinguished;  the strength of the combatants exhausted, but their wrath not appeased;  no longer able to continue the conflict, but awaiting a favorable opportunity to renew it."

The facts were that for eighteen months prior to Mr. Maynard's speech there had not been nor has there been during the nearly a quarter of a century since, any offer or thought, in any of the late Confederate States, of resistance to the General Government, unless one may denominate such the occasional shooting, by a moonshiner, of a revenue officer;  and this has occurred, oftener than elsewhere, in the Republican district of East Tennessee, represented, the writer believes, by Mr. Maynard when he claimed to be standing on a volcano.

Nevertheless Congress solemnly adjudged, for itself, that the war was not over and so, on the 2d of March, 1867, in order, as was recited in the preamble, "to protect life and property in the rebel States of Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Florida, Texas, and Arkansas," "until loyal and republican State governments can be legally established," it was enacted that those States should be divided into military districts and placed under military rule.

On the 23d of March, 1867, a supplemental act was passed completing the plan of reconstruction.  These acts annulled the State governments then in operation;  enfranchised the negro;  disfranchised all who participated in the war against the Union, whether pardoned or not, if they had previously held any executive, legislative, or judicial office under the State or General Government;  provided for the calling of conventions, the framing and adopting of State constitutions, the election of State officers;  and, in fact, pointed out all the machinery necessary to put into operation new governments upon the ruins of the old.  Until the several States should be admitted under these new governments into the Union the military officers in command were to have absolute power over life, liberty, and property, with the sole exception that death sentences were subject to approval by the President.

Several ineffectual efforts were made to get the question of the validity of these laws before the Supreme Court of the United States.  At last the case of McCardle from Mississippi seemed to present it fairly.  McCardle, basing his denial of the power of a military court to punish him on the ground that the reconstruction laws conferring that authority were unconstitutional, appealed to the Supreme Court.  That court denied a motion to dismiss the appeal.  The case was then argued on its own merits.  The argument was concluded on March 9, 1868, and the court took the case under advisement.  While it was being so held, to prevent a decision of the question, a bill was rushed through both Houses, and finally passed March 27, 1868, over the President's veto, depriving the court of jurisdiction over such appeals.  This act, of course, implied the fear that the decision would be adverse to the validity of the laws, as a favorable decision would have been of immense value to the Republican party.

Considering all the circumstances, it is indeed natural to conclude that this hasty action was based upon positive information that the decision, if made, would declare null and void the reconstruction laws.

After the passage of these laws and the muzzling of the Supreme Court, the careful observer of existing conditions, looking at the many adventurers who had followed in the wake of the Army, at the numerous employees of the Freedmen's Bureau, so long in training for their now fast ripening opportunities, might easily have predicted that the legislation of Congress would inevitably result in what Mr. Lincoln had feared and deplored as far back as 1862.  Just before the election for members of Congreas, which had been ordered by Governor Shepley in Louisiana, President Lincoln addressed him a letter, November 21, 1862, saying that only "respectable citizens of Louisiana," voted for by "other respectable citizens," were wanted as Representatives in Washington.  "To send," he says "a parcel of Northern men here, elected, as would be understood, and perhaps justly so, at the point of the bayonet, would be disgraceful and outrageous."

But party spirit had now gotten far away from that lofty plane on which Lincoln, the statesman, had stood.

Even Mr. Garfield, usually generous and conservative, had become so much excited as to say in the discussion of these measures on the 18th February, 1867, and seemingly with exultation:

"This bill sets out by laying its hands on the rebel governments and taking the very breath of life out of them;  in the next place it puts the bayonet at the breast of every rebel in the South;  in the next place it leaves in the hands of Congress utterly and absolutely the work of reconstruction."

In other words, Mr. Garfield meant that if the results were not satisfactory, Congress might, at will, modify or change its plans.  But happily, as it no doubt appeared, there was only need for a few more changes in the law.

The reconstructors builded even better than they knew.  The results exceeded even the sanguine prediction of Mr. Henry Wilson, who said, March 15, 1867, on the floor of the Senate:  "With the exercise of practical judgment, with good organization, scattering the great truth and the facts before the people, a majority of these States will.  Within a twelvemonth, send here Senators and Representatives who think as we think, speak as we speak, and vote as we vote, and will give their electoral votes for whoever we nominate for President in 1868."

In a little more than a "twelvemonth" from the date of Mr. Wilson's prediction ---by the close of June, 1868--- eight of the eleven Confederate States were represented in both branches of Congress.  Of these Representatives all but two were Republican and among the sixteen Senators there was not a single Democrat.

About one-half of these Senators and Representatives were Northern men, elected when, as Mr. Garfield said, "the bayonet was at the breast of every rebel in the South" ---a thing Mr. Lincoln had characterized as "disgraceful and outrageous."  The "fruits of the war" were being gathered.  Nothing remained but to perpetuate existing conditions.

Not only did these newly set up States ratify with alacrity the fourteenth amendment, but by the 30th of March, 1870, with their assistance, the fifteenth amendment was also declared part of the Constitution.  Suffrage had been granted to the negro in the Southern States by Congress.  This amendment provided that "the right to vote should not be abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude."  The net results of these reconstruction measures were, that in the 41st Congress, beginning March 5, 1871, when the twelve Southern States, including West Virginia, had all been gathered into the fold, there were represented by 22 Republicans and 2 Democratic Senators and 48 Republican and 13 Democratic Representatives.  The national Republican party had, in the language of Mr. Sumner, secured the "new allies" it needed in the South.