done; but he refused to do so. He wished to act without restraint. He had no more doubt than Mr. Lincoln had had that the process of reconstruction, so far as it concerned the reorganization of the southern governments, was the function and the duty of the Executive,

whose power of pardon covered every offence committed against the Union upon which Congress had not passed sentence of impeachment. It rested with Congress, he knew, to determine for itself whether it would receive the senators and representatives chosen under the governments which the President should authorize

the southern conventions to set up; but the erection and recognition of those governments he conceived to be his own unquestionable constitutional prerogative. He filled the year, therefore, to the utmost with action and the rehabilitation of States. By the autumn every State of the one-time Confederacy had acted under his proclamation, had set up a new government, had formally agreed to the emancipation of the negroes, and had chosen senators and representatives ready to take their seats the moment Congress should admit them. Eleven of them had in due form adopted the Thirteenth Amendment, and their votes had been counted in its ratification.

But other things had happened which had touched Congress quite as nearly as these processes of reconstruction, and the houses came together in December in no temper either to accept Mr. Johnson's leadership or to admit the southern members who had come to Washington under his patronage. Critical matters touching the negroes had put opinion in the North in a mood to insist on radical measures of legislation in behalf of the helpless multitudes whom the war had set free. Had there been no question what should be done with the negroes, all might have gone smoothly enough, whether the leaders of Congress and of opinion liked the re-admission of the southerners to their place and privilege in the general government or not. But there was much more to be done, as it seemed to the radicals who now stood at the front of counsel, than merely to determine the processes by which the governments of the southern States were to be formally reconstituted and made safe within the Union: and it was no doubt necessary to do what was to be done before admitting southern men

to Congress, where their presence would reduce the Republican majorities from absolute mastery to mere preponderance. They were but "whitewashed rebels,' at best, and in nothing showed their unchanged temper more clearly than in their treatment of the freedmen. That, in the view of the radicals, was the crux of the whole matter; and they had the pity and the humane feeling of the whole country on their side.

They did not deem the southerners safe friends of the freed slaves. They had not noted how quiet, how unexcited, how faithful and steady at their accustomed tasks, how devoted in the service of their masters the great mass of the negro people had remained amidst the very storm and upheaval of war; they had noted only how thousands had crowded into their camps as the armies advanced and plantations were laid waste, homes emptied of their inmates; and how every federal commander had had to lead in his train as he moved a dusky host of pitiful refugees. It was a mere act of imperative mercy to care in some sort for the helpless creatures, to give them food, if nothing else, out of the army's stores; and yet to feed them was but to increase their numbers, as the news of bread without work spread through the country-sides. When the fighting neared its end, and it was likely that the whole South would be in the hands of the federal commanders through a long season of unsettled affairs, it became obviously necessary that, for a time at least, Congress should take the negroes under the direct supervision and care of the government. On the 3d of March, 1865, therefore, while Mr. Lincoln still lived, an Act had been passed which created in the War Department a "Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands," whose

powers were most elastic and paternal. It was in every way to succor the negroes: to supply their physical needs when necessary, to act as their representative and guardian in finding employment and making labor contracts, to settle labor disputes and act as the next friend of negro litigants in all trials and suits at law, to lease to them tracts of abandoned land temporarily in the hands of the government because of the removal or disappearance or technical outlawry of their white owners,-in all things to supply them with privilege and protection.

It was such aid and providential succor the negroes had ignorantly looked for as the news and vision of emancipation spread amongst them with the progress of the war. They had dreamed that the blue-coated armies which stormed slowly southward were bringing them, not freedom only, but largess of fortune as well; and now their dream seemed fulfilled. The government would find land for them, would feed them and give them clothes. It would find work for them, but it did not seem to matter whether work was found or not: they would be taken care of. They had the easy faith, the simplicity, the idle hopes, the inexperience of children. Their masterless, homeless freedom made them the more pitiable, the more dependent, because under slavery they had been shielded, the weak and incompetent with the strong and capable; had never learned independence or the rough buffets of freedom.

The southern legislatures which Mr. Johnson authorized set up saw the need for action no less than Congress did. It was a menace to society itself that the negroes should thus of a sudden be set free and left without tutelage or restraint. Some stayed very

quietly by their old masters and gave no trouble; but most yielded, as was to have been expected, to the novel impulse and excitement of freedom and made their

way straight to the camps and cities, where the bluecoated soldiers were, and the agents of the Freedmen's Bureau. The country filled with vagrants, looking for pleasure and gratuitous fortune. Idleness bred want, as always, and the vagrants turned thieves or