314

SUPERFLUOUS PROVISIONS.

With few exceptions, these had readily acquiesced in the settlement of the questions in dispute, which had been made. Many, who, if the amendment was ratified, would be disabled from holding office, were among the most prominent and excellent citizens of the State and had always opposed secession. Their services would be greatly needed in the work of restoring prosperity. But if these and other degrading disabilities must be imposed upon so many citizens of the State, how, with any sense of honor or self-respect, could North Carolina assist in imposing them? It could not be expected that the people of the State would desire their representatives to assist in the work of their own degradation. What the people of North Carolina had done, they had done in obedience to her own behest, and if penalties had been incurred and punishments must be inflicted, it was not magnanimous or reasonable, much less honorable, to require them to become their own executioners.

As the federal debt was already sufficiently secured by the honest intention of the people to pay it, the fourth section of the proposed amendment was therefore useless. It was a noticeable fact, that the people of North Carolina, though taxed without representation and depressed and impoverished by the war, had cheerfully paid their internal revenue taxes. By seeking further to bind the people of the whole country to the payment of the public debt, by means of a constitutional provision, the Government at Washington betrayed a lack of confidence, not more in the people of the South than in those of the North. The Confederate debt was equally certain to remain unpaid. Indeed, most of it could never fall due, by reason of the terms on which it was contracted,1 and the impoverishment

1 Most of it was payable at a fixed period of time after a treaty of peace between the United States and the Confederate States of America.

of the whole South and the acts of repudiation which had already been passed would undoubtedly cause the remainder to be repudiated also. The refusal of the Federal Government to pay for slaves emancipated was a great injustice, continued the committee, especially to those citizens who had not favored secession, but it expressed the opinion that the people of North Carolina had never hoped seriously for its reparation.

In the final section of the amendment, which empowers Congress to enforce all its provisions by appropriate legislation, the committee detected a wide door open for the interference of Congress with subjects hitherto regarded beyond its range; and the extent to which this interference might be carried it was impossible to conceive. Here was a vast addition to the powers of the General Government confirming the tendency to centralization and consolidation which had been developed in late years. The overshadowing influence and prestige, far beyond what it had ever before possessed, which, in the nature of things, the war had given to the General Government, had been increased by the overwhelming defeat of those States which had always stood forth as the peculiar advocates of State rights, and by this term is to be understood State sovereignty. Everyone must perceive, therefore, and this was the conclusion of the whole matter, that even with the new constitutional grants of authority, the federal government was no longer what it once was, but that it had expanded into a mighty giant, threatening to swallow up the States and to concentrate all power and dignity in itself. If North Carolina were to accept the amendment and thus yield up her honest convictions of duty and of principle, in her most anxious desire for the restoration of her former relations with the General Government, and the admission of her representatives into Congress, what

316

NORTH CAROLINA REJECTS.

guarantee, or even hope, would she have that her act of ratification would thus restore her? The unmistakable record of the last Congress, as well as of the indication of tone and temper since exhibited, proved, to the satisfaction of the committee, and as immediate events showed, to that of both Houses of the North Carolina legislature, that this humiliation and surrender of right and principle, would not be likely to facilitate, much less to effect, restoration. For these reasons, it was the advice of the committee that the general assembly refuse to ratify the proposed amendment,' and for these reasons both Houses adopted its advice.2

At the same time the legislature of Florida was in session and on the fourteenth it listened to Governor Walker's message which discussed the amendments somewhat at

1 This report was signed by J. W. Leach, Chairman, Henry T. Clarke, H. M. Waugh, Jos. J. Davis, Thos. S. Kenanm, J. P. H. Russ, Arch. McLean, Phillip Hodnett, Jno. M. Perry, J. Morehead, Jr., D. A. Corrington, W. D. Jones. P. A. Wilson of the Committee dissented from its report "believing it would be to the interest of the State of North Carolina, considering all the circumstances, to ratify the amendment.

2 The unconstitutionality of the Reconstruction Acts and of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments had ever been maintained by a strong party in the South. The opinion is frequently brought to light as in the opening address of Robert Aldrich, Temporary Chairman of the Constitutional Convention of South Carolina which met September 10, 1895: "The Convention of 1868 was the fruit of the Reconstruction Acts which were notoriously unconstitutional, of which one of the most prominent men in Congress, a leader of the party in power at the time, had the hardihood to say, there were only two fools in the United States who considered them constitutional, and if they were unconstitutional they were invalid. That the Constitution (of 1868) was made by aliens, negroes and natives without character, all the enemies of South Carolina, was designed to degrade our State, insult our people and overturn our civilization. It is a stain upon the reputation of South Carolina, that she has voluntarily lived for 18 years under that instrument after she had acquired full control of

length. By the principles of the Constitution, said he, federal representation and taxation were based upon the census and the exercise of suffrage was regulated by State laws; therefore, it was for a State and not for the United States to determine whether the basis of representation should be the census or the number of voters. But whatever basis a State might adopt, it had no right to demand that another State should adopt the same; much less had the Federal Government the right to make such a demand. To adopt the amendment would be to vote for the destruction of the State government of Florida; for it would disfranchise the best men in the State and leave no one capable of filling its offices; thus a military government would then be a necessity. The response of the legislature was in the same spirit. The State, it said, was willing to be taxed without representation; quietly to endure the government of the bayonet and to submit to threats of fire, sword and destruction, but it would not bring as a peace offering the conclusive evidence of its own self-created degradation. Other than its postal service, its people derived no benefit from being a State in the Union. They were recognized as a State for the purpose of working out their own destruction and dishonor and for ratifying this discriminating amendment but not for any of the benefits resulting from federal relations. In these resolutions the House unanimously concurred.1

Similar was the message sent, on the fifteenth of November, to the legislature of Alabama by its governor.

every department of her government; but is a lasting honor to the people of the State that when they took control of their own affairs, they set to work to do away with this instrument of their humiliation in the day of their defeat, and in its place to have an organic law which shall be the work of their own hands." Convention Journal, South Carolina, 1895, p. 2.

1 Annual Cyclopaedia, 1866, 325-326.

318

ALABAMA REJECTS.

The civil rights clause of the amendment, he said, injured the liberties of the people of the whole country. Its second section changed the basis of representation, raised a question which had never been a source of trouble or inconvenience, and could not be legitimately claimed as forming any part of the results of the war. The disqualifying clause "would bring no possible good to the represented States, while it would reduce the unrepresented to utter anarchy and ruin." The amendment was proposed when nearly one-third of the States were unrepresented, and all of its harsh features were aimed directly at the South. Its ratification could not accomplish any good to the country "and might bring upon it irretrievable disaster." But discerning the probable course of affairs, he, three weeks later in a special message to both Houses, urged its adoption; his views, he explained, remained unchanged, but as there was an unmistakable purpose on the part of the majority in Congress "to enforce at all hazards their own terms of restoration," and favorable action upon the amendment must be the price of restoration to the Union, he advised its ratification. But it was rejected in both Houses, almost unanimously.1

In transmitting the amendment to the legislature of Arkansas, Governor Murphy recommended its ratification, and, on the tenth of December, a resolution thus "to calm the troubled waters of the political atmosphere," was offered in the House. But the Committee on Federal Relations, to whom it was referred on the same day, set forth their reasons why the amendment should be rejected. In addition to objections already advanced by Georgia and Florida, it was said that it had never been submitted to the President for his sanction, that it would confer on Congress under the guise of appropriate legislation, a 1 Id., pp. 11-12.