out for better terms. During the autumn and winter of 1866-7 the lately seceded States, except Tennessee, rejected the amendment. So failed the first congressional plan of reconstruction, as the President's earlier plan had failed. And now there was small hesitation or delay in framing and enforcing the final plan.

CHAPTER XXXII

RECONSTRUCTION: THE FINAL PLAN

THE Congress which met in December, 1866, was the same body as in the previous winter; but the prolonged contest, the President's misbehavior, the South's rejection of the offered terms, and the popular verdict at the November election, had strengthened the hands of the Republicans and intensified their temper. Thaddeus Stevens brought in, February 6, 1867, a bill which was trenchant indeed. It superseded the governments of the ten unreconstructed States, divided their territory into five military districts, placed their commanders under the orders, not of the President, but of the general of the army, and suspended the habeas corpus. It was military rule in its barest form, and for an indefinite period. Blaine moved an amendment, specifying the terms on which the States might be released from this military control and restored to their normal status. But Stevens's despotic sway shut out the amendment and carried the bill through the House. In the Senate, Sherman successfully carried a substitute, much the same as the Blaine amendment. This went back to the House, where a majority of Republicans favored the change, but Stevens still opposed it, and had enough followers to make together with the Democrats a majority that threw out the whole measure. But success by such allies was undesired by the radicals and alarming to the moderate Republicans.. There was reconsideration, minor concessions to Stevens, and the bill finally passed February 20, not at all as he had. designed it, but in a form due either to Blaine or Sherman,

It is singular that so important a measure should be of doubtful paternity. It seems more like a production of Sherman, who in constructive ability was far ahead of Blaine and of most of his congressional colleagues. In its substance it represents apparently the judgment and purpose of the great majority of the Republicans in Congress. It is remarkable that so vital and momentous a law should have been enacted with so little discussion. It was hurried through, in order that its passage twelve days before the close of the session might prevent the President from "pocketing" it-letting it fail for want of his signature, without risking a veto. The debate, as Blaine reports it in his Twenty Years of Congress, seems to have been mainly for the scheme, and against the far more drastic proposal of Stevens and Boutwell,-in opposing which Blaine himself seems to have done service certainly as creditable as any in his checkered career. But the radical character of the bill as passed, its great advance on all earlier proposals, seems to have called forth hardly any challenge among the Republicans.

In a word, the law put the whole unreconstructed South, -all of the old Confederacy except Tennessee,-under temporary military government, subject to the President; and the commanders were at once to initiate measures for new State organizations. They were to enroll all adult males, white and black, as voters, except only such as the Fourteenth Amendment would shut out from office; these voters were then to elect delegates in each State to a convention; this body was to frame a constitution incorporating permanently the same conditions of suffrage; this constitution was then to be submitted to popular vote; and if a majority ratified it,—if Congress approved it,-if the Legislature elected under it ratified the Fourteenth Amendment,-and if and when that amendment received enough ratifications to enact

it, then, at last, each State was to be fully restored to the Union.

On this plan the States were rapidly and finally reconstructed. Its central feature was the enforcement of suffrage for the negroes throughout the South. Of this tremendous measure, but small discussion appears in the debate over the bill. But it seems to have had behind it the prevailing sentiment of the North. A good witness on this point is the Springfield Republican. That paper had strongly advocated the adoption of the Massachusetts plan, a reading and writing qualification for suffrage-the State's only good legacy from the Know-nothing period. Of such a provision it said January 9: "It would be a most potent stimulus to education, and once made the national rule there would be such a studying of spelling books as never was seen before.

There can be no sure reliance on the votes of blacks any more than of whites who cannot read their ballots." But this plan found little popular favor. The objection to it which we now recognize,—that the Southern States might probably have forborne to educate the freedmen, and so left them disfranchised,-was not then prominent. But there had not come to be a general recognition at the North of the danger of ignorant suffrage. Of the actual drift of opinion the Republican said, March 3, that equal suffrage is "the sole condition about which there is any approach to unanimity among our people."

To understand this opinion we must look back a little. The belief in universal male suffrage was part of the Democratic movement that swept almost unchallenged from Jefferson's time till Lincoln's. The mass of ignorant immigrants gave some alarm, but they seemed to be successfully digested by the body politic. Beecher, we have seen, thought suffrage a “natural right," and that was a common doctrine. Besides, it was assumed at the North that the negroes

were naturally the friends of the national government and of the party that had given them freedom. There were politicians in plenty who looked to the negro vote to keep the Republicans in control of the national government. Many of these doubtless valued the party organization mainly as a means of self-advancement; while others like Sumner devoutly believed that in the Republican party lay the sole hope of justice and freedom. To the North generally, the convincing argument for negro suffrage was that the ballot would give the black man the necessary weapon for self-protection. On this ground Mr. Schurz favored it in his report of 1865, and in reviewing the situation in 1904 he holds the same opinion. The assumption in this view was that the freedmen and the former master class were, and were to remain, natural enemies. Looking back to slavery, which really combined an element of oppression with an element of protection, the North saw only the oppression. Viewing the present, it was not merely the State laws, but the frequent personal abuse of the negroes which confirmed the idea that they must have the ballot for selfprotection.

On broader grounds, the question was reasoned thus: "The logical, the necessary ultimate step in the negro's elevation to full manhood is his possession of the vote. By far the most desirable road to this consummation would be a gradual and educational introduction of the body of freedmen to the franchise. But toward such a course the South shows no inclination. The alternative remains-in the brief period during which the national authority can be applied to organic reconstruction-of establishing universal manhood suffrage; with the drawback of a present admixture of a large ignorant and unfit element; with the great disadvantage, too, of further alienating the two races for the present; but with the possibility and hope that