fined; and any freedman exercising the functions of a minister of the Gospel without a license from some regularly-organized church was to be liable to a fine and imprisonment. The only provision for educating freedmen was in Florida, where schools were to be established in counties in which the number of children would warrant it and the fund derived from the tax of one dollar on each male freedman between 21 and 55, and the tuition fee, would be sufficient to meet expenses.

The codes of South Carolina and Virginia were such that General Sickles and General Terry set them aside in orders. These deliberate enactments of the purposes of the Confederate South created, outside of that jurisdiction, a mixed feeling of surprise and horror. When considered in connection with the previous action on Emancipation, Rebel Debt, Secession, and Qualified Suffrage, they cast a lurid shadow over the situation, and convinced both the Congress and the country that the measures of the President had wholly failed to bring safety or to do justice, and that before the offending States could prudently be re-clothed with the power of local control and national representation new guards against the abuse of both must be put up.

ACTION OF THE THIRTY-NINTH CONGRESS.

The new measure was the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution. It passed Congress finally on the 13th of June, 1866, and had four principal features:

I. The citizenship of all persons born or naturalized in the United States.

II. Apportioning representatives according to population in the States; but when the right to vote is denied by any State to any of its male inhabitants being twenty-one years of age and citizens of the United States, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such State.

III. Disqualifying for office those participants in the Rebellion who formerly had taken an oath to support the Consti

tution of the United States-Congress reserving the right, by two thirds vote, to relieve the disability.

IV. The public debt shall not be questioned; but no debt incurred in aid of rebellion, nor any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave, shall be paid.

This amendment was intended to broaden the basis of American citizenship, by admitting into it the whole colored population of the country-the stirring declaration of its first. section being the answer of the Union to the Freedmen's Codes described, and the formal repudiation of the principle which underlay the Dred Scott "opinion."

The two stand in strong and significant contrast. The Confederate South proposed to hold the late slaves as an exceptional, separate and dependent class, and to keep them a homeless and landless one. The Union proposed to make all of them American citizens, sharers with their late owners in the equal right to life, liberty, and property. But the amendment touched suffrage only negatively. It reduced the representation of a State in the proportion in which the State disfranchised male adults. In so far, and only so far, it operated to induce the States to confer the suffrage upon all male adults.

THE MILITARY RECONSTRUCTION ACT.

The amendment went to the people in the fall of 1866. It was rejected by the legislatures of but three of the twentyseven adhering States, viz., the Democratic States of Delaware, Kentucky, and Maryland. It was rejected also by the legislatures then existing under President Johnson's authority in the ten insurrectionary States. The eight-ninths vote of the adhering States was thus overborne by the solid negative of the Confederate South, with three allies. What was to be done? Acquiesce in the defeat; maintain the status; or apply the only remaining remedy of which the case admitted? Congress got the answer of the last of the Confederate States in February, 1867. It gave its answer in March, 1867, in the prompt passage by overwhelming vote of the Military Reconstruction Act; and manhood suffrage became at once an operative force.

By it, ratification, ,restoration, and representation soon came, and the" Freedmen's Codes" and the other debris of the President's plan were swept aside by the application of equal principles embodied in new governments and enforced by new agents.

This act applied to the "rebel States of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Texas, and Virginia," and was justified on the ground that no legal State governments, or adequate protection for life or property, existed in them. The bill was passed, by much more than a two-thirds vote, over the veto of President Johnson, who was in no mood to enjoy seeing his "Restoration" swept aside.

This act disfranchised those who, having previously taken an oath to support the Constitution of the United States, had engaged in the Rebellion. It gave suffrage to the "male citizens of those States, 21 years old and upward, of whatever race, color, or previous condition." These were authorized to vote at elections for delegates to conventions to frame constitutions of gov ernment, to be "in conformity with the constitution of the United States in all respects." And the presence in those constitutions of provisions conferring the franchise as fixed in the act, the adoption of those constitutions by a majority of the persons voting thereon, and the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment by the legislatures elected under said constitutions, were made the conditions on the fulfillment of which said States should become entitled to representation in Congress. This act the parent of manhood suffrage in the United States-created between 700,000 and 800,000 voters and doubled the electorate in those States. The new voters were up to that time without experience in either national, State, county, or municipal affairs. Entirely untrained, they were at the moment of enfranchisement, and had been for centuries without their consent, a "laboring, landless, and homeless class." Clothing them suddenly with the large power which their numbers represented was, and was conceded by those who did it, to be a portentous step. But it was taken. upon great deliberation, in full view of its probable and possi

ble results, and only after it had been incontestably proved that the form of reconstruction agreed upon, with remarkable unanimity, by the law-making power of the Union could not be obtained in any other way.

Events previously noted had limited that Congress to one of three courses:

(1) An indefinite military occupation and administration of those States now become sullenly resistant; or

(2) An abandonment of effort to secure the guaranties which the adhering States believed to be both wise, just, and indispensable; or

(3) The creation of the only local power which was capable of controlling the political action and giving the assent of those States to the terms offered by the triumphant Union.

The first was for many reasons offensive and objectionable, and if ever seriously entertained was soon abandoned as a policy.

The second was impossible to the men who had seen and felt the coming of the War and the War itself, who realized what produced it, what it threatened, what it cost, and what was due to the rights which the struggle had created.

The third was slowly and reluctantly accepted as the only solution yet possible after the refusal of the then dominant interest in those States to accept the principles touching citizenship and suffrage which distinguished the Fourteenth Amendment. It is not uncommon to hear that colored suffrage was "forced upon a patient, submissive, and powerless South." This is historically untrue. It was forced upon a Confederate South united to defeat, having actually defeated, the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment as a basis of re-union.

THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION OF 1868.

The Military Reconstruction Act was enforced during the summer of 1867, and during the next twelve months the States. of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, and South Carolina were admitted to representation in Congress, they having ratified the Fourteenth Amendment and complied with the conditions required in the act.

Pending the execution of this measure, the Presidential election approached. The Republicans nominated Ulysses S. Grant, the Democrats Horatio Seymour. The Republicans, in their platform, congratulated the country on the assured success of the reconstruction policy of Congress, and pledged themselves to sustain that policy and prevent anarchy in the lately rebellious States. The Democracy, become by training skillful in complaint, denounced "the Reconstruction Acts (so called) of Congress, as such, as usurpation and unconstitutional, revolutionary, and void." They declared that under repeated assaults by the Republican party "the pillars of the government are rocking on their base," and that "should the Republican party succeed in the election and inaugurate its President, we will meet as a subjected and conquered people, amid the ruins of liberty and the scattered fragments of the Constitution."

These words were intended to be an overwhelming assault. upon the party and policy of Lincoln and Grant. But they created rather amusement than indignation.

The last time the Democratic party had been heard from— four years before-it was clamoring for a convention in order to permit our Constitution to be cut into such fragments as armed enemies might dictate-for a convention to submit our institutions of "liberty" to such mutilations as avowed defenders of slavery might demand as the price of peace.

The pillars of the government were at that time actually rocking on their base; and then it was that the Democratic organization declined to help hold them up, but insisted on first seeing whether those who were trying, with their assent, to batter them down would think they were any longer, under any circumstances, worth supporting. The professions of 1868 were thus rather ridiculous in the light of the surrender of 1864. The people properly rated as trash this magniloquence; as fretters and fumers these pretenders. And they gave Grant a popular majority of 309,584, and an electoral majority of 134. In this count is included for Seymour the State of New York, which, it was suspected then and is believed now, was given to Seymour, not by the actual will of the voters, but by the un