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 18th, 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 opposed 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 Representativeselect 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 Thirty-ninth 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 storm-cloud 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

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. Presidential plan was to be disregarded. Congress, in the language of Mr. Thad. Stevens, 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, 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.*

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 to representation in Congress under the Presidential plan, without any changes in the basis of representation, these states, with the Democrats "that would be

* 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."

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 ascendency 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 endorse the extreme measures that were being mooted at Washington.

What Congress would do was an interesting problem. Mr. Thad. 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 36, under the previous question, without debate, a resolution to provide for a joint committeee 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' 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' 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 defence of the President's policy. Mr. Shellabarger, of Ohio, to break the force of Mr. Raymond's argument, talked thus:

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They framed 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., etc.

The Honorable Henry Wilson, in his "History of Reconstruction," quotes this and quotes this and many other similar passionate appeals, intending them, of course, as fair specimens of the arguments which brought about the re-construction of Federal and state Constitutions.

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,

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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., 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 offence that those, who were in arms against the Government when Congress adjourned 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 II., which apportioned Representatives in Congress upon the basis of the voting population; and Section III., 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 inhabit