Chapter XI…

Chapter XI

The rejoicing over the result of the elections throughout the free States had scarcely died away when the Thirty-ninth Congress met in its second session (December 3, 1866). There was no little curiosity to hear what the President would say in his message, in regard to the issue upon which he had sustained so conclusive a defeat. He was known to be in a state of great indignation, and as he had broken forth during the campaign in expressions altogether unbecoming his place, there was some apprehension that he might be guilty of the same indiscretion in his official communication to Congress. But he was saved from such humiliation by the evident interposition of a judicious adviser. The message was strikingly moderate and even conciliatory in tone. The President re-argued his case with apparent calmness and impartiality, repeating and enforcing his position with entire disregard of the popular result which had so significantly condemned him. After rehearsing all that had been done in the direction of reconstruction, so far as his power could reach it, and so far as the Thirteenth Amendment of the Constitution was an essential part of it, the President expressed his regret that Congress had failed to do its duty by re-admitting the Southern States to representation.

"It was not," said he, "until the close of the eighth month of the session that an exception was made in favor of Tennessee by the admission of her senators and representatives." "I deem it," he continued, "a subject of profound regret that Congress has thus far failed to admit to seats loyal senators and representatives from the other States, whose inhabitants with those of Tennessee had engaged in the Rebellion. Ten States, more than one-fourth of the whole number, remain without representation. The seats of fifty members in the House and twenty members in the Senate are yet vacant, not by their own consent, nor by a failure of election, but by the refusal of Congress to accept their credentials. Their admission, it is believed, would have accomplished much towards the renewal and strengthening of our relations as one people, and would have removed serious cause for discontent upon the part of the inhabitants of those States." The President did not discuss the ground of difference between his policy and that of Congress, simply contenting himself with a restatement of the case, in declaratory rather than in argumentative form. He did not at all seem to realize, or even to recognize, the vantage ground which Congress had obtained by the popular decision in the recent elections. He apparently did not understand that every issue dividing the Executive and Legislative Departments of the Government had been decided in favor of the latter by the masters of both--decided by those who select and control Presidents and Congresses.

The President's position in pursuing a policy which had been so pointedly condemned, excited derision and contempt in the North, but it led to mischievous results in the South. The ten Confederate States which stood knocking at the door of Congress for the right of representation, were fully aware, as was well stated by a leading Republican, that the key to unlock the door had been placed in their own hands. They knew that the political canvass in the North had proceeded upon the basis, and upon the practical assurance (given through the press, and more authoritatively in political platforms), that whenever any other Confederate State should follow the example of Tennessee, it should at once be treated as Tennessee had been treated. Yet, when this position had been confirmed by the elections in all the loyal States, and was, by the special warrant of popular power, made the basis of future admission, these ten States, voting upon the Fourteenth Amendment at different dates through the winter of 1866-67, contemptuously rejected it. In the Virginia Legislature only one vote could be found for the Amendment. In the North-Carolina Legislature only eleven votes out of one hundred and forty-eight were in favor of the Amendment. In the South-Carolina Legislature there was only one vote for the Amendment. In Georgia only two votes out of one hundred and sixty-nine in the Legislature were in the affirmative. Florida unanimously rejected the Amendment. Out of one hundred and six votes in the Alabama Legislature only ten could be found in favor of it. Mississippi and Louisiana both rejected it unanimously. Texas, out of her entire Legislature, gave only five votes for it, and the Arkansas Legislature, which had really taken its action in the preceding October, gave only three votes for the Amendment.

This course on the part of the Southern States was simply a declaration of defiance to Congress. It was as if they had said in so many words: "We are entitled to representation in Congress, and we propose to resume it on our own terms; and therefore we reject your conditions with scorn. We will not consent to your Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. We will not consent that the freedom of the negro shall be made secure by endowing him with citizenship. We demand that without giving negroes the right to vote, they shall yet be counted in the basis of representation, thus increasing our political power when we re-enter Congress beyond that which we enjoyed before we rebelled, and beyond that which white men in the North shall ever enjoy. We decline to give any guarantee for the validity of the public debt. We decline to guarantee the sacredness of pensions to soldiers disabled in the War for the Union. We decline to pledge ourselves that the debts incurred in aid of the Rebellion shall not in the future be paid by our States. We decline, in brief, to assent to any of the conditions or provisions of the proposed amendment to the Constitution, and we deny your right to amend it without our consent."

The madness of this course on the part of the Southern leaders was scarcely less than the madness of original secession; and it is difficult, in deliberately weighing all the pertinent incidents and circumstances, to discover any motive which could, even to their own distorted view, justify the position they had so rashly taken. Strong as the Republican party had shown itself in the elections, it grew still stronger in all the free States, as each of the Confederate States proclaimed its refusal to accept the Fourteenth Amendment as the basis of their return to representation. The response throughout the North, in the mouths of the loyal people, was in effect: "If these rebel States are not willing now to resume representation on the terms offered, let them stay out until their anger ceases and their reason returns. If they are not willing to concede the guarantee of the Fourteenth Amendment, and to give that pledge to the country of their future loyalty and their common sense of justice, they shall find that we can be as resolute as they, and we shall insist on the right as stubbornly as they persist in the wrong." These were not merely the declamations of statesmen, or of the press, or of the popular speakers of the Republican party. They came spontaneously, as if by inspiration, from the mass of the people, and were based on that instinctive sense of justice which the multitude rarely fails to exhibit.

It was naturally inferred and was subsequently proved, that the Southern States would not have dared to take this hostile attitude except with the encouragement and the unqualified support of the President. He was undoubtedly in correspondence, directly and indirectly, with the political powers that were controlling the action of the insurrectionary States, and he was determined that the policy of Congress should not have the triumph that would be implied in a ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment by those States. Telegraphic correspondence clearly establishing the President's position, subsequently came to light. Governor Parsons of Alabama telegraphed him indicating that the rejection of the Fourteenth Amendment might be reconsidered by the Alabama Legislature, if in consequence thereof an enabling Act could be passed by Congress for the admission of the State to representation. Johnson promptly replied on the same day: "What possible good can be obtained by reconsidering the Constitutional Amendment? I know of none in the present posture of affairs, and I do not believe the people of the country will sustain any set of individuals in attempts to change the whole character of our Government by enabling Acts or otherwise. I believe on the contrary, that they will eventually uphold all those who have patriotism and courage to stand by the Constitution and who place their confidence in the people. There should be no faltering on the part of those who are honest in a determination to sustain the several co-ordinate Departments of the Government in accordance with the original design." It was evident from this disclosure that Johnson's hand was busy throughout the South, secretly as well as openly, and that he inspired the resolute obstinacy with which the insurrectionary States resisted the fair and magnanimous offers of Reconstruction made by Congress. The Rebel element of the South had gradually come to repose implicit confidence in Johnson, and this fact increased his power to sow dissension and produce discord. His stubborn and apparently malicious course at this time, was inspired in large part by a desire to be avenged on the Northern States and Northern leaders for the stinging rebuke administered to him in the recent election.

Sustained by the same popular sentiment which had given offense to the President, Congress did not doubt its duty or hesitate in its action. Its course, indeed, was firm to the point of severity. It met the spirit of defiance on the part of the South with an answer so decisive, that the misguided people of that section were rapidly undeceived as to their power to command the situation, even with all the aid the President could bring. The principal debates for the first two months of the session related wholly to the condition of the South, and on the 6th of February (1867) Mr. Stevens, from the Committee on Reconstruction, reported a bill which after sundry amendments became the leading measure of the Thirty-ninth Congress. In its original form the preamble declared that "whereas the pretended State governments of the late so-called Confederate States afford no adequate protection for life or property, but countenance and encourage lawlessness and crime; and whereas it is necessary that peace and good order should be enforced in said so-called Confederate States, until loyal State governments can be legally established; therefore be it enacted that said so-called Confederate States shall be divided into military districts, and made subject to the military authority of the United States, as hereinafter prescribed; and for that purpose Virginia shall constitute the first district, North Carolina and South Carolina the second district, Georgia, Alabama and Florida the third district, Mississippi and Arkansas the fourth district, and Louisiana and Texas the fifth district."

It was made the duty of the General of the Army to assign to the command of each of said districts an officer not below the rank of Brigadier-general, and to detail a sufficient force to enable such officer to perform his duties and enforce his authority within the district to which he was assigned. The protection of life and property, the suppression of insurrections, disorders, and violence, and the punishment of all criminals and disturbers of the public peace, were entrusted to the military authority, with the power to allow civil tribunals to take jurisdiction and try offenders; and if that was not sufficient in the officer's judgment, he was authorized to organize military commissions, "any thing in the constitutions and laws of these so-called Confederate States to the contrary notwithstanding." It was further declared that all legislative acts or judicial processes to prevent the proceedings of such tribunals, and all interference by "said pretended State governments with the exercise of military authority under this Act, shall be void and have no effect." The courts and judicial officers of the United States were forbidden to issue writs of habeas corpus, except under certain restrictions which further established the military authority over the people. Prompt trials were guaranteed to all persons arrested, cruel and unusual punishments were forbidden, and no sentence could be executed until it was approved by the officer in command of the district.

Mr. Stevens, in his speech upon introducing the bill, did not attempt to conceal its positive and peremptory character. "It provides," said he, "that the ten disorganized States shall be divided into five military districts; that the Commander of the Army shall take charge of them, through his officers not below the rank of Brigadier-general, who shall have the general supervision of the peace, quiet and protection of the people, loyal and disloyal, who reside within those precincts; and that to do so, he may use, as the law of nations would authorize him to do, the legal tribunals whenever he may deem them competent; but these tribunals are to be considered of no validity per se, of no intrinsic force, of no force in consequence of their origin; the question being wholly within the power of the conqueror, and to remain until that conqueror shall permanently supply their place with something else. That is the whole bill. It does not need much examination. One night's rest after its reading is enough to digest it."

Mr. Brandegee of Connecticut followed Mr. Stevens in a speech strongly supporting the measure. "Mr. Speaker, something must be done," said he. "The American people demand that we shall do something, and quickly. Already fifteen hundred Union men have been massacred in cold blood (more than the entire population of some of the towns in my district), whose only crime has been loyalty to your flag. . . . In all the revolted states, upon the testimony of your ablest generals, there is no safety to the property or lives of loyal men. Is this what the loyal North has been fighting for? Thousands of loyal white men, driven like partridges over the mountains, homeless, houseless, penniless, to-day throng this capital. They fill the hotels, they crowd the avenues, they gather in these marble corridors, they look down from these galleries, and with supplicating eye ask protection from the flag that hangs above the Speaker's chair--a flag which thus far has unfurled its stripes, but concealed the promise of its stars."

--Mr. Le Blond of Ohio declared that "the provisions of this bill strike down every important provision in the Constitution. You have already inaugurated enough here to destroy any government that was ever founded. . . . Now, Mr. Speaker, I do not predict any thing. I do not declare war, but as one American citizen I do prefer war to cowardly submission to a total destruction of the fundamental principles of our Government."

--He was followed by his colleague, Mr. Finck, who declared that "no member on this floor who understands the Constitution of the United States, and who is friend of our Government, will pretend to urge that we have any Constitutional power to pass this bill. . . . I declare it as my solemn conviction that no government can long continue to be free when one-third of its people and one-third of the States are controlled by military power."

--Mr. Bingham of Ohio, speaking for a more conservative type of republicanism than Mr. Stevens represented, begged gentlemen to "make haste slowly in the exercise of this highest possible power conferred by the Constitution upon the Congress of the United States. For myself, sir, I am not going to yield to the proposition of the chairman of the committee, for a single moment, that one rood of the territory within the line of the ten states enumerated in this bill is conquered territory. The Government of the United States does not conquer any territory that is under the jurisdiction of the Constitution."

--Mr. William Lawrence of Ohio said, "For myself I am ready to set aside by law all these illegal governments. They have rejected all fair terms of reconstruction. They have rejected the Constitutional amendments we have tendered them. They are engines of oppression against all loyal men. They are not republican in form or purpose. Let them not only be ignored as legal governments, but set aside because they are illegal." Mr. Lawrence suggested some amendments that would give to all the people the protection of the judiciary under National authority.

--Mr. Russell Thayer of Pennsylvania argued warmly for the bill, and said, "This measure will be of brief duration, and will be followed, as I am informed, by other measures, which will secure the permanent and peaceful restoration of these States to their proper and just position in the Union, upon their acceptance of such terms as are necessary for the future security of the country. When that is done, and when order is restored, and permanent protection is guaranteed to all the citizens of that section of the country, this measure will be abrogated and abandoned."

--Mr. Shellabarger argued in favor of the bill, and said in conclusion, "This measure, taken alone, is one which I could not support unaccompanied by provisions for the rapid and immediate establishment of civil government based upon the suffrages of the loyal people of the South. I could not support a military measure like this if it was to be regarded as at all permanent in its character. It is because it is entirely the initiative, because it is only the employment of the Army of the United States as a mere police force, to preserve order until we can establish civil government based upon the loyal suffrages of the people, that I can support this measure at all. If it stood by itself, I could not, with my notions of the possibility and practicability of establishing civil governments in the South, based upon loyal suffrage, vote for this bill."

--Mr. Dawes made the pertinent inquiry whether, "after the General of the Army has, under this bill, assigned a competent and trustworthy officer to the duties prescribed, there is any thing to hinder the President of the United States, under virtue of his power as Commander-in-Chief, from removing that officer and putting in his place another of an opposite character, thus making the very instrumentality we provide one of terrible evil?"

--Mr. John A. Griswold, who became the Republican candidate for governor of New York the ensuing year, earnestly opposed the bill. "By it," said he, "we are proceeding in the wrong direction. For more than two years we have been endeavoring to provide civil governments for that portion of our country, and yet by the provisions of this bill we turn our backs on our policy of the last two years, and by a single stride proceed to put all that portion of the country under exclusively military control. . . . For one, I prefer to stand by the overtures we have made to these people, as conditions of their again participating in the government of the country. We have already placed before them conditions which the civilized world has indorsed as liberal, magnanimous, and just. I regret exceedingly that those very liberal terms have not been accepted by the South, but I prefer giving those people every opportunity to exhibit a spirit of obedience and loyalty."

--Mr. Henry J. Raymond opposed the bill in a vigorous speech. "Because we cannot devise any thing of a civil nature adequate to the emergency," said he, "it is urged that we must fly to the most violent measure the ingenuity of man could devise. Let me remind gentlemen that this has been the history of popular governments everywhere, the reason of their downfall, their decadence, and their death."

--Mr. Garfield indicated his support of the measure if it could be amended. "But," said he, "I call attention to the fact that from the collapse of the Rebellion to the present hour, Congress has undertaken to restore the States lately in rebellion by co-operation with their people, and that our efforts in that direction have proven a complete and disastrous failure." Alluding to the fact that the Fourteenth Amendment had been submitted as the basis of reconstruction, Mr. Garfield continued, "The constitutional amendment did not come up to the full height of the great occasion. It did not meet all I desired in the way of guarantees to liberty, but if the rebel States had adopted it as Tennessee did, I should have felt bound to let them in on the same terms prescribed for Tennessee. I have been in favor of waiting to give them full time to deliberate and to act. They have deliberated. They have acted. The last one of the sinful ten has at last, with contempt and scorn, flung back in our teeth the magnanimous offer of a generous nation. It is now our turn to act. They would not co-operate with us in building what they destroyed. We must remove the rubbish, and build from the bottom. . . . But there are some words which I want stricken out of this bill, and some limitations which I wish added, and I shall at least ask that they be considered."

--Mr. Kasson objected that the bill was too sweeping in its provisions, that it affected the loyally disposed in the South with the same severity as it did the disloyally disposed. "Instead of erecting," said he, "this great military power over people of some portions of the South who are, in fact, at peace and observing law and order, our rule should be so flexible that we may apply martial law wherever peace and law and order do not prevail, without imposing it upon people whose subordination to the law renders military rule unnecessary."

--Mr. Boutwell said, "To-day there are eight millions and more of people, occupying six hundred and thirty thousand square miles of territory in this country, who are writhing under cruelties nameless in their character, and injustice such as has not been permitted to exist in any other country of modern times; and all this because in this capital there sits enthroned a man who, so far as the Executive Department of the Government is concerned, guides the destinies of the Republic in the interest of the rebels; and because, also, in those ten former States, rebellion itself, inspired by the Executive Department of this Government, wields all authority, and is the embodiment of law and power everywhere. . . . It is the vainest delusion, the wildest of hopes, the most dangerous of all aspirations, to contemplate the reconstruction of civil government until the rebel despotisms enthroned in power in these ten States shall be broken up."

--Mr. Banks asked for deliberation and delay in the discussion. He believed that "we might reach a solution in which the two Houses of Congress will agree, which the people of this country will sustain, and in which the President of the United States will give us his support. And if we should agree on a measure satisfactory to ourselves, in which we should be sustained by the people, and the President should resist it, then we should be justified in dropping the subject of reconstruction, and considering the condition of the country in a different sense." The allusion of General Banks, though thus veiled, was understood to imply the possible necessity of impeaching the President. It attracted attention because General Banks had been reckoned among the determined opponents of that extreme measure.

--Mr. Kelley of Pennsylvania declared that "the passage of this bill or its equivalent is required by the manhood of this Congress, to save it from the hissing scorn and reproach of every Southern man who has been compelled to seek a home in the by-ways of the North, from every homeless widow and orphan of a Union soldier in the South, who should have been protected by the Government, and who, despite widowhood and orphanage, would have exalted in the power of our country had it not been for the treachery of Andrew Johnson."

--Mr. Allison of Iowa said, "Believing as I do, that this measure is essential to the preservation of the Union men of the South, believing that their lives, property and liberty cannot be secured except through military law, I am for this bill."

--Mr. Blaine of Maine expressed his unwillingness to support any measure that would place the South under military government, if it did not at the same time prescribe the methods by which the people of a State could by their own action re-establish civil government. He therefore asked Mr. Stevens to admit an amendment declared that "when any one of the late, so-called, Confederate States shall have given its assent to the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution, and conformed its constitution and laws thereto in all respects, and when it shall have provided, by its constitution, that the elective franchise shall be enjoyed equally and impartially by all male citizens of the United States twenty-one years of age and upwards, without regard to race, color, or previous condition of servitude, except such as may be disfranchised for participating in the late rebellion, and when such constitution shall have been submitted to the voters of said State as then defined, for ratification or rejection, and when the constitution, if ratified by the popular vote, shall have been submitted to Congress for examination and approval, said State shall, if its constitution be approved by Congress, be declared entitled to representation in Congress, and senators and representatives shall be admitted therefrom on their taking the oath prescribed by law, and then and thereafter the preceding sections of this bill shall be inoperative in said State."

--Mr. Blaine added, "It happened, Mr. Speaker, possibly by mere incident, that I was the first member of this House who spoke in Committee of the Whole on the President's message at the opening of this session. I then said that I believed the true interpretation of the election of 1866 was that, in addition to the proposed constitutional amendment, impartial suffrage should be the basis of reconstruction. Why not declare it so? Why not, when you send out this military police through the lately rebellious States, send with it that impressive declaration?"

--Mr. Schenck of Ohio earnestly urged that before calling the previous question, Mr. Stevens would allow a vote upon the amendment offered by Mr. Blaine. Mr. Stevens declined, and a motion by Mr. Blaine to refer the bill to the Judiciary Committee with instructions to report back the amendment, was defeated by ayes 69, noes 94. The bill was then passed by a vote of 109 to 55. The Republicans who voted against it were Baker of Illinois, Banks of Massachusetts, Davis of New York, Defrees of Indiana, Dodge of New York, Kuykendall of Illinois, Loan of Missouri, Randall of Kentucky, Francis Thomas and John L. Thomas, jun., of Maryland.

The bill reached the Senate on the 13th of February. On the 14th Mr. Williams of Oregon gave notice that he would offer an amendment, which was almost literally the same as that offered by Mr. Blaine in the House, but fearing that it might obstruct the passage of the bill he withdrew it. Mr. Reverdy Johnson of Maryland renewed it, with the remark that if it should be adopted it would make the bill very much less objectionable than it then was, and upon the amendment debate proceeded.

Mr. Stewart of Nevada warmly sustained the amendment, regretting that the senator from Oregon had changed his mind with regard to it. Mr. Stewart said that the history of military bills was that they were always temporary in the beginning. "But suppose the President of the United States approved it, or the next President, if you please, should like the bill, and should veto your measure repealing it, or suppose a bare majority in either House of Congress should like it, then you could not repeal it. It may be years after you desire to get rid of it before you can. I say, when you use the military for temporary purposes you should give the people of the South a chance to comply with all the requirements which you propose to make. If in the Blaine Amendment, as it is called, there are not sufficient guarantees, not enough conditions, then put in more and make it sufficient."

--Mr. Henderson of Missouri said, "If I understand the extent and scope of this bill, it will simply to give the sanction of Congress to military administration in the Southern States by the President. If there is any thing else in it, I desire to have it understood now, before we proceed any further. I am not exceedingly favorable to military government anywhere, and if I can get along without it in the Southern States I am anxious to do so. I am not pleased with it anywhere." Mr. Henderson expressed the opinion that the President of the United States could command General Grant in making the assignments of officers to the respective districts.

--Mr. Willard Saulsbury of Delaware declared that "there is not a single provision in the bill that is constitutional or will stand the test in any court of justice."

--Mr. Buckalew and Mr. Hendricks pointed out that the amendment, as Mr. Johnson had submitted it, made suffrage universal, just as the amendment had been framed in the House.

--Mr. Johnson explained that he had taken it as prepared by the senator from Oregon.

--Mr. Howard of Michigan objected to the amendment because it would permit the increase of representatives in Congress, and of Presidential electors, from the Confederate States.

--After a prolonged debate on the amendment offered by the senator from Maryland, it was agreed to lay it aside by common consent, that Senator Sherman might offer a substitute for the entire bill, the fifth section of which substantially embodied the amendment offered by the senator from Maryland and which had been known as the Blaine Amendment in the House. Mr. Sherman's substitute gave to the President his rightful power to control the assignment of officers of the army to the command of the military districts in the South. After debate the substitute of Mr. Sherman was passed by a party vote,--twenty-nine to ten.

When the bill went to the House it was violently opposed by Mr. Stevens and Mr. Boutwell. Mr. Boutwell said, "My objection to the proposed substitute of the Senate is fundamental and conclusive, because the measure proposes to reconstruct the State governments at once through the agency of disloyal men."

--Mr. Stevens said, "When this House sent the bill to the Senate it was simply to protect the loyal men of the Southern States. The Senate has sent us back an amendment which contains every thing else but protection. It has sent us back a bill which raises the whole question in dispute as to the best mode of reconstructing the States, by making distant and future pledges which this Congress has no authority to make and no power to execute."

--Mr. Blaine argued against Mr. Stevens's proposition to send the measure to a Conference Committee, and he begged those "who look to any measure that shall guarantee a republican form of government to the rebel states, with universal suffrage for loyal men," to vote for this bill as it came from the Senate.

--Mr. Wilson of Iowa sustained the bill. "Although it does not attain," said he, "all that I desire to accomplish, it embraces much upon which I have insisted, and seems to be all that I can get at this session. It reaches far beyond anything which the most sanguine of us hoped for a year ago."

--Mr. Bingham declared that "the defeat of this bill to-day is really a refusal to enact any law whatever for the protection of any man in that vast portion of our country which was so recently swept over by our armies from the Potomac to the Rio Grande."

--General Schenck spoke with great force in favor of the bill, answering the somewhat reckless objections of Mr. Stevens in the most effective manner.

--General Garfield replied to those who objected to the Senate provision giving the command of officers in the South directly to the President. He said, "I want this Congress to give the command to the President of the United States, and then, perhaps, some impeachment hunters will have a chance to impeach him. They will if he does not obey." He rebuked the gentlemen "who, when any measure comes here that seems almost to grasp our purpose, resist and tell us that it is a surrender of liberty. I remember that this was done to us at the last session, when everybody knows that if the Republican party lived, it must live by the strength of the Constitutional amendment, and when we agreed to pass it the previous question was waived to allow certain gentlemen to tell us that it was too low and too unworthy, too mean and too unstatesmanlike."

--Mr. Russell Thayer of Pennsylvania supported the bill. He said, "I see in this provision, as I believe, what the deliberate judgment of the American people will regard as ample guarantees for the future loyalty and obedience of the South. Those conditions are: first, that the Southern States shall adopt a constitution in conformity with the Constitution of the United States; second, that it shall be ratified by a majority of the people of the States, without distinction of race, color, or condition; third, that such constitution shall guarantee universal and impartial suffrage; fourth, that such constitution shall be approved by Congress; fifth, that the States shall adopt the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution; and sixth, that the amendment shall become a part of the Constitution of the United States. All this is required to be done before representation is accorded to the States lately in rebellion, and then no representative presenting himself for admission, can be received unless he can take the test oath."

--Mr. Eldridge of Wisconsin denounced the whole measure as most wicked and abominable. "It contains," said he, "all that is vicious, all that is mischievous in any of the propositions which have come either from the Committee on Reconstruction or from any gentleman upon the other side of the House."

--Mr. Elijah Hise of Kentucky declared that, "under such a system as this bill proposes, the writ of habeas corpus cannot exist, because even if the civil tribunals are not entirely abolished, they will exist only at the will of the military tyrant in command."

--Mr. Davis of New York spoke of the danger of suddenly enfranchising the whole body of rebels. "The State of Kentucky," he said, "has enfranchised every rebel who has been in the service of the Confederate States. What to-day is the condition of affairs in that State? Why, sir, her political power is wielded by rebel hands. Rebel generals, wearing the insignia of the rebel service, walk the streets of her cities, admired and courted; while the Union officers with their wounds yet unhealed, are ostracized in political, commercial and social life."

--Mr. Niblack of Indiana, one of the leading Democrats of the House, thought the bill had been much improved by the action of the Senate. "Though," said he, "it still retains many of the first features to which I objected when it was before the House for discussion, it is not now properly a military bill, nor is it properly a measure of civil administration. It is a most extraordinary attempt to blend the two principles together."

When a vote was reached, the House rejected the Senate amendment--ayes 73, noes 98. This result was effected by a coalition of all the Democrats with a minority of extreme Republicans. But thirteen days of the session remained, and it looked as if by a disagreement of Republicans all legislation on the subject of Reconstruction would be defeated. Under the pressure of this fear Republican differences were adjusted, and the Senate and the House found common ground to stand upon by adding two amendments to the bill as the Senate had framed it. It was agreed, on motion of Mr. Wilson of Iowa, to add a proviso to the fifth section, in these words: "that no person excluded from the privilege of holding office by said proposed amendment to the Constitution of the United States, shall be eligible as a member of a convention to frame a constitution for any of said rebellious States, nor shall any such person vote for members of such convention." It was also agreed, on motion of Mr. Shellabarger, that "until the people of said rebel States shall be admitted to representation in the Congress of the United States, any civil governments which may exist therein shall be deemed provisional only, and in all respects subject to the paramount authority of the United States at any time to abolish, modify, control, or supersede. . . . All persons shall be entitled to vote, and none others, who are entitled to vote under the fifth section of this act; and no person shall be eligible to any office under such provisional government, who shall be disqualified from holding office under the provisions of the Third Article of such Constitutional amendment." With these modifications both Senate and House passed the bill by a party vote. During the discussion in the Senate Mr. Doolittle moved that "nothing in this act shall be construed to disfranchise any persons in any of said States from voting or holding office who have received pardon and amnesty in accordance with the Constitution and Laws." The proposition received but eight votes. The bill went to the President for approval on the 20th of February, leaving but a small margin of time for passage over his veto if as anticipated he should decline to sign it. The decisive character of the measure had evoked fierce opposition, and this in turn had stimulated Republican advocacy to a degree of great earnestness.

On the 2d of March the President sent to the House, in which branch the bill had originated, a long veto message of very comprehensive character. He had summed up all the arguments that had been made against the measure in both Houses, and he arrayed them with greater strength than when they were originally presented. His argument against placing the States under military government was cogently stated. "This bill," said he, "imposes martial law at once, and its operation will begin as soon as the general and his troops can be put in place. The dread alternative between its harsh rule and compliance with the terms of this measure is not suspended, nor are the people afforded any time for free deliberation. The bill says to them, 'Take martial law first, and then deliberate.' And when they have done all that this measure requires them to do, other conditions and contingencies, over which they have no control, yet remain to be fulfilled before they can be relieved from martial law. Another Congress must approve the constitutions made in conformity with the law of this Congress, and must declare these States entitled to representation in both branches. The whole question thus remains open and unsettled, and must again occupy the attention of Congress; and in the mean time the agitation which now prevails will continue to disturb all portions of the people."

The President's veto reached the House on the afternoon of Saturday. On Monday, March 4th, at noon, Congress would expire by Constitutional limitation. The President had communicated his veto on the last day permitted by the Constitution, and it was generally believed that his motive for the postponement was to give the minority in one branch or the other the power to defeat the bill either by dilatory motions or by "talking against time." Mr. Le Blond and Mr. Finck or Ohio, and Mr. Boyer of Pennsylvania, frankly indicated their intention to employ all means within their power to compass this end. A system of parliamentary delay was thus foreshadowed, but was prevented by Mr. Blaine moving that the rules be suspended and a vote immediately taken on the question required by the Constitution; namely, "Will the House, on reconsideration, agree to the passage of the bill, the President's objection to the contrary notwithstanding?" The Speaker decided that the motion in this form cut off all dilatory proceedings. Mr. Finck appealed from the decision of the Chair, but only four members sustained him. The rules were suspended, and the House, by a vote of one hundred and thirty-five ayes to forty-eight noes, passed the bill over the veto of the President. The Senate concurred in the action of the House by ayes thirty-eight, noes ten; and the famous Reconstruction law, from which flowed consequences of great magnitude, was thus finally enacted against every effort of the Executive Department of the Government.(1)

The successive steps of this legislation have been given somewhat in detail because of its transcendent importance and its unprecedented character. It was the most vigorous and determined action ever taken by Congress in time of peace. The effect produced by the measure was far-reaching and radical. It changed the political history of the United States. But it is well to remember that it never could have been accomplished except for the conduct of the Southern leaders. The people of the States affected have always preferred as their chief grievance against the Republican party, that negro suffrage was imposed upon them as a condition of their re-admission to representation; but his recital of the facts in their proper sequence shows that the South deliberately and wittingly brought it upon themselves. The Southern people knew, as well as the members of Congress knew, that the Northern people during the late political canvass were divided in their opinion in regard to the requirements of reconstruction, but that the strong preponderance was in favor of exacting only the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment as the condition of representation in Congress. It was equally plain to all who cared to investigate, or even to inquire, that if that condition should be defiantly rejected, the more radical requirements would necessarily be exacted as a last resort,--rendered absolutely necessary indeed by the truculence of the Southern States.

The arguments that persuaded the Northern States of the necessity of this step were simple and direct. "We are willing," said they, "that the Southern States shall themselves come gradually to recognize the necessity and the expediency of admitting the negro to suffrage; we are content, for the present, to invest him with all the rights of citizenship, and to except him from the basis of representation, allowing the South to choose whether he shall remain, at the expense of their decrease in representation, outside the basis of enumeration." It was the belief of the North that as the passions of the civil contest should die out, the Southern States, if not inspired by a sense of abstract justice, would be induced by the highest considerations of self-interest to enfranchise the negro, and thus increase their power in Congress by thirty-five to forty members of the House. It was the belief that when they should come to realize that the negro had brought to them this increased power and prestige in the National councils, they would treat him with justice and with fairness. It was, therefore, not merely with surprise, but with profound regret, and even with mortification, that the North found the South in an utterly impracticable frame of mind. They would do nothing: they would listen to nothing. They had been inspired by the President with the same unreasoning tenacity and stubbornness that distinguished his own official conduct. They believed that, even against the popular verdict in the North, the President would in the end prevail. They had unbounded faith in the power of patronage, and they constantly exhorted the President to turn every opponent of his policy out of office, and give only to his friends the honors and emoluments of the National Government. They had full faith that this would carry consternation to the Republican ranks, and would establish the President's power on a firm foundation.

Unless, therefore, the Loyal States were willing to allow the Rebel States to come back on their own terms, in a spirit of dictation to the Government of the Union, they were under the imperious necessity of providing some other basis of reconstruction than the one which the South had unitedly rejected. Congress was charged, in the name of loyalty, to see that no harm should come to the Republic, and the point was now reached where three ways were open: first, Congress might follow the Administration, and allow the States to come in at once without promise, without condition, without guarantee of any kind; second, it might adopt the plan of Mr. Stevens, which had just been narrowly defeated, and place the Southern States under military government, with no date assigned for its termination by National authority, and no condition held out by which the South itself could escape from it; third, it might place the Southern States temporarily under a military government, for the sake of preserving law and order and the rights of property, during the prescribed period of reconstruction--upon the basis that all loyal men, regardless of color or previous condition of servitude, should take part in the movement.

Reduced to the choice of these three methods, the considerate, well-pondered, conclusive judgment of the Republican party was in favor of the last named, and the last named was adopted. If, therefore, suffrage was prematurely granted to the negro; if, in consequence, harm came to the Southern States; if hardship was inflicted upon Southern people, the responsibility for it cannot be justly laid upon Northern sentiment or upon the Republican party. It is true, and was not denied, that the vast mass of the negroes thus admitted to suffrage were without property and without education, and that it might have been advantageous, if just treatment could have been assured them, that they should tarry for a season in a preparatory state. While it was maintained as an abstract proposition that the right of the negro to vote was well grounded, many thought it desirable, as Mr. Lincoln suggested, that at first only those who were educated and those who had served in the Union Army should be enfranchised. But the North believed, and believed wisely, that a poor man, an ignorant man, and a black man, who was thoroughly loyal, was a safer and a better voter than a rich man, an educated man, and a white man, who, in his heart, was disloyal to the Union. This sentiment prevailed, not without hesitation, not without deep and anxious deliberation; but in the end it prevailed with the same courage and with the same determination with which the party had drawn the sword and fought through a long war in aid of the same cause, for which the negro was now admitted to suffrage.

During the civil war the negro had, so far as he was able, helped the Union cause--his race contributing nearly a quarter of a million troops to the National service. If the Government had been influenced by a spirit of inhumanity, it could have made him terribly effective by encouraging insurrection and resistance on his part against his master. But no such policy was ever entertained in counsels controlled in the Cabinet by Seward and Chase and Stanton, or in operations in the field directed by Grant and Sherman and Sheridan. The negro was left to raise the crops that supplied the Confederate armies with bread, when a policy of cruelty, no worse than that of Andersonville and Belle Isle, might have made him a terror to the Southern population. The humane policy thus pursued would have been scorned by European warriors who have become the heroes of the world, but there is not a Northern man who does not look back with profound satisfaction upon the philanthropic determination that forbade the encouragement of a single insurrection, or the destruction of a single Southern life, except under the recognized and restricted laws of war.

Peace had now come, and the question was, whether the power of these four and a half millions of men should be continually used against the Northern States, against the loyalty which had saved the Union. Only three-fifths of their number, in the day when the Southern States were true to the Union, were admitted in the basis of representation. Should the disloyalty of the South which had failed to destroy the Government only by lack of power, be now rewarded by admitting the whole number of negroes into the basis of representation, and at the same time giving them no voice in the selection of representatives? Surely, if this were conceded, it would offer such a premium upon rebellion as no government guided by reason should confer; and, therefore, the question came by the instinct of justice, and with the precision of logic, to this point--the negro shall not be admitted into the basis of representation until he is himself empowered to participate in the choice of the representative. The North had hoped that the South would cordially accept the justice of this principle, but whether the South accepted it or not, the North resolved that it should become part of the organic law of the Republic.

As matter of historical truth which has been ingeniously and continuously, whether ignorantly or malignantly, perverted, this point cannot be too fully elaborated nor too forcibly emphasized:--The Northern states or the Republican party which then wielded the aggregate political power of the North, did not force negro suffrage upon the South or exact it as a condition of re-admitting the Southern States to the right and privilege of representation in Congress until after other conditions had been rejected by the South. The privilege of representation in Congress had in effect been tendered to the Southern States, upon the single condition that they would ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, which provided among other safeguards for the future, that so long as the negro was denied suffrage, he should not be included in the basis of Federal enumeration,--in other words, that the white men of the South should not be allowed to elect thirty-five or forty representatives to Congress, based on the negro population, in addition to the representatives duly apportioned to their own numbers. When all the Southern States--with the exception of Tennessee --declined to accept this basis of reconstruction by their rejection of the Fourteenth Amendment, they ought to have measured the consequences. The imperative question thenceforward was whether the loyal or the disloyal--the victorious Union or the defeated Confederacy --should prescribe the terms of Reconstruction.

The Northern States were thus compelled to consider whether they would unconditionally surrender to the Rebel element of the South or devise some other plan of reconstruction. At that point, in the order of time and in the order of events, and not until then, the just resolve was made by the Republicans to reconstruct the South on the basis of Loyalty, regardless or race or color. By refusing to co-operate with the Republicans in the work of rehabilitating their States, the Southern rebels forced the Northern States to make impartial suffrage the corner-stone of the restored Union. The South had its choice, and it deliberately and after fair warning decided to reject the magnanimous offer of the North and to insist upon an advantage in representation against which a common sense of justice revolted. The North, foiled in its original design of reconstruction by the perverse course of the South, was compelled, under the providence of the Ruler of Nations, to deal honestly and justly with the colored people. It was the insane folly of the South, in drawing the sword against the life of the Nation, that led irresistibly to the abolition of slavery. In a minor degree the folly was now repeated, in resisting the mode of Reconstruction first tendered, and thus forcing Congress to confer civil rights and suffrage upon the emancipated slave. A higher than human power controlled these great events. The wrath of man was made to praise the righteous works of God. Whatever were the deficiencies of the negro race in education, for the duties and responsibilities of citizenship, they had exhibited the one vital qualification of an instinctive loyalty, and as far as lay in their power a steadfast helpfulness to the cause of the National Union.

As the strife between the Executive and Legislative Departments had grown in intensity, President Johnson naturally sought to increase his own prestige by the use of the patronage of the Government. To this end he had already removed certain conspicuous Republicans from office, especially those who had been recommended and were now sustained by senators and representatives prominently engaged in frustrating his plan of reconstruction. The wonder in the political world was, that the President had not resorted to this form of attack more promptly, and pursued it more determinedly. His delay could be explained only by what was termed his talent for procrastination, and to a certain indecision which was fatal to him as an executive officer. But as the breach between himself and Congress widened, as the bitterness between the partisans of the Executive and of the Legislative Departments grew more intense, the belief became general, that, as soon as Congress should adjourn, there would be a removal of all Federal officers throughout the Union who were not faithful to the principles, and did not respond to the exactions, of the Administration. Outside of his Cabinet, the President was surrounded by the class of men who had great faith in the persuasive power of patronage, and the pressure upon him to resort to its use was constant and growing. Inside of his Cabinet, there were men of the same belief, but their power was somewhat neutralized by the attitude of Mr. Seward, whose faith always lay in the strength of ideas, and not in the use of force, or in the temptation of personal advantage. Mr. Seward's influence had constantly tended to hold the President back from a ruthless removal of the whole body of officers who declined to take part against the policy of Congress.

According to long-accepted construction of the Constitution, the President's power of removal was absolute and unqualified. Appointment to office could not be made unless the consent of the Senate was given in each and every case--but the consent of the Senate had not been held as requisite to the removal of an officer. The Constitution was silent upon the subject, and the existence or non-existence of power in the Senate to prevent a removal from office had been matter of dispute from the foundation of the Government. Those who contended for the right of the President to remove without consulting the Senate were fortified by the early legislation of Congress and the early practice of the Executive. The First Congress of the Union had provided for officers whose appointment depended upon confirmation by the Senate as required by the Constitution, but whose removal was left in explicit terms to the President alone. The decision to that effect was made after debate in which Madison had strenuously contended for that construction, and his high authority gave to the conclusion great weight with subsequent administrations of the Government. But there was undoubtedly a divided opinion in the Congress that conceded it, and that division has continued among Constitutional lawyers and statesmen to this day. In 1835 Mr. Webster, "after considering the question again and again," made this declaration in the Senate: "I am willing to say that, in my deliberate judgment, the original decision was wrong. I cannot but think that those who denied the power in 1789 had the best of the argument. It appears to me, after thorough and repeated and conscientious examination, that an erroneous interpretation was given to the Constitution in this respect by the decision of the First Congress. . . . I have the clearest conviction that the Convention which formed the Constitution looked to no other mode of displacing an officer than by impeachment or the regular appointment of another to the same place. . . . I believe it to be within the just power of Congress to reverse the decision of 1789, and I mean to hold myself at liberty to act hereafter on that question as the safety of the Government and of the Constitution may require."

Mr. Webster's words would have exerted a far wider influence upon public opinion if his argument had not been made under the pressure of a partisan excitement caused by General Jackson's removal of officers who were not in sympathy with the measures of his Administration. He was effectively though not directly answered by the venerable ex-President Madison. In October, 1834, in a letter to Edward Coles, Mr. Madison said, "The claim of the Senate on Constitutional ground to a share in removal as well as appointment of officers is in direct opposition to the uniform practice of the Government from its commencement. It is clear that the innovation would not only vary essentially the existing balance of power, but expose the Executive occasionally to a total inaction, and at all times to delays fatal to the due execution of the laws." A year later, and only a few months before his death, Mr. Madison in a letter to Charles Francis Adams thus repeated his views: "The claims for the Senate of a share in the removal from office, and for the Legislature an authority to regulate its tenure, have had powerful advocates. I must still think, however, that the text of the Constitution is best interpreted by reference to the tripartite theory of Government, to which practice had conformed, and which so long and uniform a practice would seem to have established. The face of the Constitution and the journalized proceedings of the Convention strongly indicate a partiality to that theory then at the zenith of favor among the most distinguished commentators on the organization of political power." Chief Justice Marshall fortified the position of Mr. Madison, by declaring that the action of the First Congress on this question "has ever been considered as a full expression of the sense of the Legislature on this important part of the American Constitution."

Of the thirty-nine members of the Convention of 1787 who signed the Constitution, thirteen, including Mr. Madison, were members of the first Congress; Alexander Hamilton was Secretary of the Treasury under the new Government; and above all, General Washington, who had presided over the deliberations of the Convention, had attentively listened to every discussion, and had carefully studied every provision, was President of the United States. More than one-third of the members of the Constitutional Convention were therefore engaged in the Executive and Legislative Departments of the new Government in applying the organic instrument which they had taken so large a part in creating. The cotemporaneous interpretation was by those facts rendered valuable if not authoritative. Cotemporaneous interpretations of organic law are not always, it is true, to be regarded as conclusive, but they are entitled to the most careful and respectful consideration, and cannot be reversed with safety unless the argument therefor is unanswerable and the motive which suggests the argument altogether patriotic and unselfish. The familiar rule laid down by Lord Coke is as pertinent to-day as when first announced: "Great regard ought, in construing a law, to be paid to the construction which the sages, who lived about the time soon after it was made, put upon it, because they were best able to judge of the intention of the makers at the time when the law was made. Contemporania exposito est fortissima in legem."

Against the early decision of the founders of the Government, against the ancient and safe rule of interpretation prescribed by Lord Coke, against the repeatedly expressed judgment of ex-President Madison, against the equally emphatic judgment of Chief Justice Marshall, and above all, against the unbroken practice of the Government for seventy-eight years, the Republican leaders now determined to deprive the President of the power of removing Federal officers. Many were induced to join in the movement under the belief that it was important to test the true meaning of the Constitution in the premises, and that this could be most effectively done by directly restraining by law the power which had been so long conceded to the Executive Department. To that end Mr. Williams of Oregon on the first Monday of December, 1866, introduced a bill "to regulate the tenure of civil offices." It was referred to the Committee on Retrenchment, and reported back with amendment by Mr. Edmunds of Vermont, who thenceforward assumed parliamentary control of the subject.

The bill came up for discussion on the 10th day of January. Its first section provided that every person except members of the Cabinet, "holding any civil office to which he has been appointed by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, and every person who shall hereafter be appointed to such office, shall be entitled to hold such office until a successor shall have been, in like manner, appointed and duly qualified, except as herein otherwise provided." The second section declared that "when any officer shall, during the recess of the Senate, be shown by evidence satisfactory to the President, to be guilty of misconduct in office, or crime, or for any reason shall become legally disqualified or incapable of performing the duties of his office; in such case, and in no other, the President may suspend such officer and designate some suitable person to perform temporarily the duties of such office, until the next meeting of the Senate, and until the case shall be acted upon by the Senate: and in such case it shall be the duty of the President, within twenty days after the first day of such meeting of the Senate, to report to the Senate such suspension, with the evidence and reasons for the same, and if the Senate shall concur in such suspension, and advise and consent to the removal of such officer, they shall so certify to the President, who shall thereupon remove such officer, and by and with the advice and consent of the Senate appoint another person to such office; but if the Senate shall refuse to concur in such suspension, such officer so suspended shall forthwith resume the functions of his office, and the powers of the person so performing its duties in his stead shall cease."

Mr. Howe wished to know why members of the Cabinet should be excepted. "Each one of those officers," he said, "is created by statute, and created not for the personal benefit of the Executive, but created for the benefit of the public service, just as much as a deputy postmaster or an Indian agent." Mr. Edmunds, in reply to Mr. Howe, said that the Committee, "after a great deal of consultation and reflection," had resolved to except members of the Cabinet from the scope of the proposed Act. He gave reasons therefor, which from the foundation of the Government have been considered conclusive--reasons founded on the personal and confidential relations necessarily existing between the President and his Constitutional advisers. The reasons did not satisfy Mr. Howe. He thought "the tenure of Cabinet officers should be under the control of law and independent of any undue exercise of Executive influence." He therefore moved to amend the bill so as to put the members of the Cabinet on the same basis as other civil officers--not removable by the President, except with the advice and consent of the Senate. But the Senate was decidedly averse to so radical a change in the practice of the Government, and Mr. Howe secured the votes of only eight senators to join him in support of his amendment.

Mr. Edmunds moved, subsequently, to amend the bill by the addition of several clauses, one declaring it a high misdemeanor for "any person, contrary to the provisions of this Act, to accept any appointment or employment in office, or to hold or attempt to hold, or exercise, any office or employment." The signing, sealing, countersealing, or issuing of any commission, or letter of authority, contrary to the provisions of the Act, was made punishable by a fine not exceeding ten thousand dollars, or by imprisonment not exceeding five years, or by both. Various other provisions of great severity were incorporated, and were adopted after brief debate.

When the bill reached the House, every provision of it was readily agreed to except that which excluded Cabinet officers from its operation. An amendment offered by Mr. Williams of Pennsylvania to strike that out was defeated--ayes 76, noes 78. Later in the day, just as the bill was passing its engrossment, Mr. Farquhar of Indiana, having voted with the majority, moved to reconsider the vote by which the amendment was rejected. The vote was taken the ensuing day, and by the zealous work of the intervening night, the motion to reconsider prevailed--ayes 75, noes 69--and the amendment was at once adopted. The bill was then passed by a party vote--ayes 111, noes 38. When it was returned to the Senate, that body refused, by a decisive vote, to concur in the amendment which placed members of the Cabinet on the same basis with other officers respecting the President's power of removal. Upon a conference between the two branches on this disagreement, a substitute was adopted, declaring that the members of the Cabinet "shall hold their offices, respectively, for and during the term of the President by whom they may have been appointed, and for one month thereafter, subject to removal by and with the advice and consent of the Senate." Both Houses agreed to the bill in this form. Mr. Farquhar's change of mind and his motion to reconsider led to the incorporation in the bill of the provision whose alleged violation by President Johnson was the direct cause of his impeachment by the House of Representatives a year later.

The final action on the measure by the Senate was on the 20th of February, so that the President had the opportunity to endanger its passage by postponing the veto, and it was generally anticipated that he would do so. He communicated it, as in the case of the Reconstruction Bill, on the 2d of March. In reviewing the measure Mr. Johnson said: "In effect it provides that the President shall not remove from their places any of the civil officers whose terms of service are not limited by law, without the advice and consent of the Senate of the United States. The bill conflicts, in my judgment, with the Constitution of the United States. The question, as Congress is well aware, is by no means a new one. That the power of removal is constitutionally vested in the President of the United States, is a principle which has been not more distinctly declared by judicial authority and judicial commentators, than it has been uniformly practiced upon by the Legislative and Executive Departments of the Government. . . . The question has often been raised in subsequent times of high excitement, and the practice of the Government has nevertheless conformed in all cases to the decision thus made. Having at an early period accepted the Constitution, in regard to the Executive office, in the sense in which it was interpreted with the concurrence of its founders, I have found no sufficient grounds in the arguments now opposed to that construction, or in any assumed necessity of the times, for changing those opinions. . . . For these reasons, I return the bill to the Senate, in which House it originated, for the further consideration of Congress which the Constitution prescribes. Experience, I think, has shown that it is the easiest, as it is also the most attractive, of studies to frame constitutions for the self-government of free states and nations; but I think that experience has equally shown that it is the most difficult of all political labors to preserve and maintain such free constitutions of self-government when once happily established."

The veto message was a very able document. In all official papers of importance the President appeared at his best. He had the inestimable advantage of Mr. Seward's calm temper and of his attractive and forcible statement of the proper argument. Few among the public men of the United States have rivaled Mr. Seward in the dignity, felicity, and vigor which he imparted to an official paper. No one ever surpassed him. In the veto message under consideration his hand was evident in every paragraph; and if it had been President Johnson's good fortune to go down to posterity on this single issue with Congress, he might confidently have anticipated the verdict of history in his favor. The delicate, almost humourous sarcasm in the closing words above quoted from the message, afford a good specimen of Mr. Seward's facility of stating the gravest of organic propositions in a form attractive to the general reader. He wrote as one who felt that in this particular issue with Congress, whatever might be the adverse votes of the Senate and House, time would be sure to vindicate the position of the President. But the message did not arrest the action, indeed scarcely the attention, of Congress, and the bill was promptly, even hurriedly, passed over the veto,--in the Senate by 35 ayes to 11 noes; in the House by 133 ayes to 37 noes.

The bill was not passed, however, without considerable misgiving on the part of many members of both Houses who voted for it. It was an extreme proposition,--a new departure from the long-established usage of the Federal Government, and for that reason, if for no other, personally degrading to the incumbent of the Presidential office. It could only have grown out of the abnormal excitement created by the dissensions between the two great Departments of the Government. The bitterness engendered resembled that which always distinguishes a family quarrel. The measure was resorted to as one of self-defense against the alleged aggressions and the unrestrained power of the Executive Department. But the history of its operation, and of its subsequent modification, which practically amounted to its repeal, is one to which the Republican party cannot recur with any sense of pride or satisfaction. As matter of fact, a Republican Congress, largely composed of the same members who had enacted the law, indirectly confessed two years later that it could not be maintained. Regarded only in the light of expediency at the time, it could readily be demonstrated (as was afterwards admitted by candid men among those who supported it) to be a blunder,--a blunder all the more censurable because the Act was not needed to uphold the Reconstruction policy of Congress, in aid of which it was devised. That policy relied for its vindication upon the judgment and conscience of the loyal people, and it was an impeachment of their good faith to say that either could be affected by the removal of one man, or of many men, from official position under the Federal Government. The Reconstruction policy stood upon a strong and enduring principle,--as strong and enduring as the question of human right,--and was sustained with vigor and enthusiasm by the great party which was responsible for the war measures that had saved the Union. The same sentiment did not attach to the Tenure-of-office Law, which indeed was only the cause of subsequent humiliation to all who had taken part in its enactment.(2)

It was part of the fixed policy of Mr. Lincoln's administration to increase the number of distinctively free States from that section of the public domain which had never been in any way contaminated by the institution of slavery. To this end he was anxious to encourage the settlement of the Territories already organized west of the Missouri river. To provide for the still more rapid creation of North-western States, two additional Territories, Idaho and Montana, were organized from the area which had been included in Dakota. Mr. Lincoln's evident motive was to place beyond the calculation, or even the hope of the disloyal States the possibility of ever again having sufficient political power to compete in the Senate for the mastery of the Republic. He was persuaded that the sectional contest would be fatally pursued as long as the chimerical idea of equality in the Senate should stimulate Southern ambition. He knew, moreover, that the war could not close with victory for the Union, without the proposal of certain changes in the Constitution, and to this end it was desirable that the loyal States should as early and as nearly as possible constitute three-fourths of the entire Union. With this motive, he had towards the close of his first term, somewhat prematurely it was believed by many, stimulated the desire of the settlers of Nevada for a State government. He had faith not only in the justice, but in the popularity, of this policy; for he took pains to issue the proclamation declaring Nevada a State in the Union only a week preceding the Presidential election of 1864, when the existence of his administration was at stake, and when every public measure was scanned with special scrutiny.

Nebraska had been organized as a Territory in the original Douglas bill repealing the Missouri Compromise, in 1854; and Colorado was made a Territory the week preceding Mr. Lincoln's first inauguration. After Nevada, these Territories offered the earliest promise of becoming States. They were both parts of the old Louisiana purchase from France, and had in popular estimation and in the classification of the earlier geographers been included within the borders of the Great American Desert. But settlers has swarmed upon the plains of Nebraska, and the waving fields of grain and the innumerable herds of cattle browsing on her rich pasture-land soon dispelled that misconception, and gave promise of the prosperous development which the State has since attained. Earlier than the farmer or the grazier could reach its soil, Colorado was settled by an intelligent mining population, whose industry has extracted from her mountains more than two hundred millions of the precious metals, contributed in the last quarter of a century to the wealth of the world. Encouraged by the policy of the Administration, and especially by the precedent of Nevada, both Territories sought an enabling Act from Congress in the winter of 1862-63. Neither succeeded at the time; but in the next Congress a bill "to enable the people of Colorado to form a constitution and State government, and for the admission of said State into the Union on an equal footing with the original States," passed both Houses, and was approved by Mr. Lincoln of the 21st of March, 1864. A month later (April 19, 1864) a similar bill for Nebraska was signed by the President.

It appeared that the citizens of each Territory who had been forward in asking an enabling Act from Congress were somewhat in advance of popular sentiment, for when the question of forming a State government was submitted to direct vote in Colorado it was rejected, and the same action was taken in Nebraska. But soon afterward (in the year 1865) the movement for a State government gained strength in both Territories. Through duly organized conventions and the formation and adoption of State constitutions, the people indicated a willingness, if not an active desire, to be admitted to the Union. In Colorado 5,895 votes were cast when the constitution was submitted, and the majority in favor of the new State was but 155. William Gilpin was elected governor, and John Evans and Jerome W. Chaffee were chosen senators of the United States. But when the new senators reached Washington (early in the year 1866) they found that the policy of the National Administration on the subject of new States had changed, and that instead of a friend in the White House, as Mr. Lincoln had steadily proved, they had a determined opponent in the person of Mr. Johnson. Congress with reasonable promptness passed the bill in both Houses for the admission of Colorado, though it was opposed by the more radical class of Republicans because negroes were excluded from the right of suffrage. It is a striking illustration of the rapid change of public sentiment, that in the winter and early spring of 1866 a bill containing that provision could pass a Congress in which the Republicans had more than two-thirds of the membership of each branch, whereas in less than a year negro suffrage was required as the condition of re-admission of the Southern States.

The Colorado bill passed the Senate by a vote of nineteen to thirteen, and the House by eighty-one to fifty-seven. It reached the President on the fifth day of May and was promptly vetoed. Mr. Johnson did not believe that the establishment of a state government was necessary to the welfare of the people of Colorado; "nor was it satisfactorily established that a majority of the citizens of Colorado desire, or are prepared for, an exchange of the Territorial for a State government." He thought that Colorado, instead of increasing, had declined in population. "At an election for a Territorial Legislature in 1861, 10,580 votes were cast; at an election in 1864 only 6,192 votes were cast; while at the election of 1865 only 5,905 votes have been cast." He said, "I regret this apparent decline of population in Colorado, but it is manifest that it is due to emigration which is going out from that Territory into other regions of the United States, which either are in fact, or are believed to be by the citizens of Colorado, richer in mineral wealth and agricultural resources." The President commented upon the injustice of creating from so small a population a State with senatorial strength equal to that of the largest State in the Union. He thought Colorado did not have a population of more than twenty thousand persons "whereas one hundred and twenty-seven thousand are required in other States for a single representative in Congress." The President did not neglect his one constant theme--the unrepresented condition of the Southern States. He insisted that "so long as eleven of the old States remain unrepresented in Congress, no new State should be prematurely and unnecessarily admitted to a participation in the political power which the Federal Government wields." The strong minority which had opposed the Colorado bill gave no hope of overriding the President's veto, which was simply laid on the table and ordered to be printed.

The bill for the admission of Nebraska came later in the session, not being introduced for consideration until the 23d of July. It passed very promptly by a vote of twenty-four to eighteen in the Senate, and by sixty-two to fifty-two in the House. As in the case of Colorado the constitution excluded the negro from the right of suffrage, and for that reason a very considerable proportion of the Republicans of each branch voted against the bill. The vote was so close in the House that but for a frank and persuasive statement made by Mr. Rice of Maine, from the Committee on Territories, it would have been defeated. He pictured the many evils that would come to the people of Nebraska, now more than sixty thousand in number, if they could not do for themselves, as a State, many things which the National Government would not do for them as a Territory. Under the influence of his speech a majority of ten was found for the bill, but Congress adjourned the day after it was finally passed by both branches, and the President quietly "pocketed" the bill; and thus the earnest and prolonged effort to create two new States came to naught for the time.

Nothing daunted by the President's veto of the bill admitting Colorado, and his pocketing the bill admitting Nebraska, Mr. Wade promptly introduced both bills anew, at the beginning of the second session of the Thirty-ninth Congress. The case of Nebraska was, in popular judgment, stronger than the case of Colorado. The population was larger, and being devoted to agriculture, was naturally regarded as more stable than that of Colorado, which was based principally upon the somewhat fortuitous discovery of mines of the precious metals. But there was an admitted political embarrassment in regard to both Territories, the principal debate on which occurred when the bill admitting Nebraska was under consideration. Congress was, at the time, engaged in passing the Reconstruction Act for the States lately in rebellion, and had made it imperative that negroes should be endowed with suffrage by those States. While insisting on this condition for the Southern States it was obviously impossible for Congress to admit two Northern States with constitutions prohibiting suffrage to the negro. In the months of the Congressional vacation public opinion in the North had made great strides on this question.

A minority of Republicans were intent on sending the bill back and having the question of negro suffrage submitted for popular decision, but in the opinion of the majority of the party this was a needless postponement of a pressing question, and all propositions looking to such postponement were rejected. A final compromise of views was reached, by inserting in the Act of admission an additional section declaring "that this Act shall not take effect except upon the fundamental condition that within the State of Nebraska there shall be no denial of the elective franchise or of any other right to any person, by reason of race or color, excepting Indians not taxed; and upon the further fundamental condition that the Legislature of said State, by a solemn public act, shall declare the assent of said State to the said fundamental condition and shall transmit to the President of the United States an authentic copy of said Act." When notified of this solemn public act by the Legislature, it was made the duty of the President to announce the fact by proclamation, and thereupon the admission of the State to the Union, without further proceedings of Congress, was to be considered complete. The objection to this compromise by those who opposed it and by others who reluctantly supported it, was that it did not have the force of Organic Law; that the proposed act of the Legislature would not be rendered any more binding by reason of being called a solemn act, and that it might be repealed by any subsequent Legislature. Much argument was expended upon this point, but the general judgment was that an act of the Legislature, made in pursuance of such an understanding with Congress, was in the nature of a compact which, without discussing the question of power, would certainly be regarded as binding upon the State. With this understanding, Congress passed a bill admitting the State, but the vote in both branches was divided on the line of party.

This action was accomplished late in January (1867), and on the 29th of that month the President vetoed the bill. He objected especially to the clause just referred to, because it was an addition to the enabling Act which Congress had no moral right to make, and because it required of Nebraska a condition not theretofore required of States, --contradicting flatly the declaration of the first section of the bill, in which the State was declared to be "admitted into the Union upon an equal footing with the original States in all respects whatever." He argued that the imposition of the condition prescribed in the bill, and its acceptance by the Legislature, was practically a change in the organic law of the State without consulting the people, which he regarded as an innovation upon the safe practice of the Government. But his arguments fell upon unwilling ears, and the bill was passed over the veto by a vote of thirty to nine in the Senate, and in the House by one hundred and twenty to forty-three.

Colorado did not fare so well. The bill was passed by both branches of Congress, though not with so full a vote nor with so much confidence in the propriety and necessity of the measure. Precisely the same condition in regard to suffrage was inserted as in the case of the Nebraska bill. It met with a prompt veto, more elaborately argued and presented with more confidence by the President than in the case of Nebraska. He said, "I cannot perceive and reason for the admission of Colorado that would not apply with equal force to nearly every other Territory now organized, and I submit whether, if this bill becomes a law, it will be possible to resist the logical conclusion that such Territories as Dakota, Montana, and Idaho must be received as States whenever they present themselves, without regard to the number of inhabitants they may respectively contain." He dwelt forcibly upon the necessity of requiring population enough to secure one representative. "The plain facts of our history," said he, "will attest that the leading States admitted since 1845, namely, Iowa, Wisconsin, California, Minnesota, and Kansas (including Texas, which was admitted in that year), have all come in with an ample population for one representative, and some of them with nearly, if not quite, enough for two."

There were really no facts before Congress tending to prove the existence of those great resources which have since advanced Colorado so rapidly in population and prosperity. Little was known of the Territory. It was several hundred miles beyond the Western border of continuous settlement, and the men who came from it were regarded as adventurous pioneers on the very outposts of civilization. Under this condition of affairs it is not strange that the Senate failed to pass the bill for the admission of the State over the veto of the President. Edmunds, Fessenden, Foster, Grimes, Harris, Morgan, and some other Republicans, less prominent, voted in the negative. The result was twenty-nine in favor of passing it over the veto, and nineteen against. Defeated in the Senate the bill did not go to the House, and the admission of Colorado was by this action postponed for several years.

The President gave specious reasons for his vetoes, especially in the case of Colorado, but they did not conceal the fact that his position was radically different from that which Mr. Lincoln had held--radically different from the position which he would himself had assumed if he had maintained in good faith the principles he had professed when he secured the suffrages of the Republican party for the Vice-Presidency. Having allied himself with the South and compromised his patriotic record by espousing the cause he had so hotly opposed, he naturally adopted all its principles and its worst prejudices. For nearly half a century the leading exponents of Southern sentiment had been envious of the growth of the free North-West, and so far as lay in their power they had obstructed it--being unwilling for a long period to admit one of its giant Territories to the Union until its power could be politically offset by one of less population and wealth in the South. Mr. Johnson in his new associations at once adopted this jealous and ungenerous policy--which had indeed lost something of its significance by the abolition of slavery, but was still stimulated by partisan considerations and was invariable hostile to the admission of a Republican State. The most bitter prejudices could not blind Mr. Johnson or the Southern leaders to the inevitable growth of free commonwealths in the North-West, but it seemed to be an object with both to keep them from participation in the government of the Union so long as possible, and to accomplish this end by every expedient that could be adopted.

An Act in relation to the President's power to grant pardon and amnesty, passed at this session, was more important in its spirit than in its results. By the thirteenth section of the Confiscation Act of July 17, 1862, the President was authorized, at any time, by proclamation, "to extend to any persons who may have participated in the existing rebellion in any state or part thereof, pardon and amnesty." Under a suspension of the rules, the House of Representatives, by a vote of one hundred and twelve to twenty-nine, repealed this section on the first day of the session (December 3, 1866). There was anxiety on the part of many, under the lead of Mr. Chandler of Michigan, to repeal it so promptly in the Senate, but it was referred to the Judiciary Committee and passed after discussion. Mr. Chandler said, "It is a notorious fact, as notorious as the records of a court, that pardons have been for sale around this town, for sale by women--by more than one woman. The records of your court in the District of Columbia show this. Any senator who desires this disgraceful business to go on, of course desired that this clause shall remain."

The repeal of the clause, however, would not take from the President his constitutional power of pardoning, but in the judgment of Mr. Trumbull, who had charge of the bill in the Senate, it took from him the power to pardon by proclamation and confined him to his right of issuing individual pardons. The difference between pardon and amnesty was defined by Mr. Trumbull. Pardon is an act of mercy extended to an individual. It must be by deed. It must be pleaded. According to Chief Justice Marshall, it is essential to its validity that it be delivered to the person pardoned. But an amnesty is a general pardon by proclamation. Mr. Trumbull thought the repeal would be a "valuable expression of opinion on the part of Congress that general pardons and restoration of property will not be continued, and if they President continues to pardon rebels and restore their property by individual acts under the Constitution, let him do so without having the sanction of Congress for his act."

Mr. Reverdy Johnson took issue with Mr. Trumbull. He maintained that the President's powers to grant pardons, as conferred by the Constitution, had not been affected by the provision of law whose repeal was now urged. He declared that the power of the President "to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States" was as broad, as general, as unrestricted as language could make it. He could find no logical ground for the distinction made by Mr. Trumbull between individual pardons and general amnesties by proclamation--in illustration of which he said President Washington had by proclamation pardoned the offenders engaged in the Whiskey Insurrection. The enactment of the provision had not, in Mr. Johnson's opinion, enlarged the President's pardoning power, and its repeal would not restrict it.

It was thought that a majority of the Senate concurred in Mr. Johnson's interpretation of the Constitution, but they passed the bill as a rebuke to the scandalous sale of pardons which Mr. Chandler had brought to the attention of the Senate. This vile practice had no doubt been pursued to some extent, but only by a class of "middle men" who had neither honor nor sensibility. They had in some form the opportunity to secure the interposition of men who could reach the ear of the President or the Attorney-General. It is hardly necessary to add that neither of those high officials was in the remotest degree reflected upon even by their bitterest opponents. However wrong-headed Mr. Johnson and Mr. Stanbery might have been considered on certain political issues, the personal integrity of both was unblemished. It was believed that the nefarious practice was stopped by Mr. Chandler's action in the Senate. Exposure made public men careful to examine each application for pardon before they would consent to recommend it to the President.

The President neither approved the bill nor objected to it, but allowed it to become a law by the expiration of the Constitutional limit of ten days. He obviously took the same view that had been advanced by Mr. Reverdy Johnson, and did not take the trouble to sign it, much less to veto it. It was brutum fulmen, and the President used his Constitutional power to pardon by proclamation just as freely after its enactment as before.

[NOTE.--"Pocketing a bill" is the phrase commonly used to describe the President's course when he permits a bill which reaches him within the last ten days of the session, to die without action on his part. It is frequently termed the "pocket veto."]

[(1) The original Reconstruction Act and the several supplementary Acts are given in full in Appendix A.]

[(2) The full text of the Act to regulate the tenure of certain civil offices, is given in Appendix B.]

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Chapter XII

The Fortieth Congress met at the very moment the Thirty-ninth closed--on the fourth day of March, 1867. The valedictory words of the presiding officers in both branches were followed immediately by the calling to order of the succeeding bodies. The contest between the President and Congress had grown so violent, the mutual distrust had become so complete, that the latter was unwilling to have its power suspended for the customary vacation of nine months between the 4th of March and the first Monday of the ensuing December; and therefore at the preceding session a law had been passed directing that each Congress should be organized immediately after the existence of its predecessor had closed. The Republican leaders felt that without the supervising and counteracting power of Congress, full force and effect might not be given to the Reconstruction laws by the President; that they might possibly be neutralized by hostile action from the office of the Attorney-General, and that for this reason it would be well, nay, it was imperatively demanded, that the legislative power should be kept ready to interpose with fresh enactments, the very moment those already in force should be dulled by adverse construction, or haltingly administered by Executive agents not in sympathy with the policy of Congress.

The membership of the Fortieth Congress was changed in some important respects in both branches. Simon Cameron, at sixty-eight years of age, returned from Pennsylvania as the successor of Edgar Cowan in the Senate. It was the third time he had entered that body, and now, as it proved, for a longer period than ever before.--Roscoe Conkling, who had been steadily growing in strength, with the Republican party of New York, was transferred from the House and took the seat of Ira Harris.--Justin S. Morrill of Vermont, after twelve years of useful and honorable service in the House, was now promoted to the Senate for a still longer and equally honorable and useful service in that body.--Oliver P. Morton, bearing his great reputation as the War Governor of Indiana, now took the seat of Henry S. Lane, whom, six years before, he had succeeded in the gubernatorial chair of his State.--James W. Patterson of New Hampshire had grown rapidly in favor by four years' service in the House and now entered the Senate as the successor of Daniel Clark.--Orris S. Ferry, who but for physical disability would have acquired wider fame, succeeded Lafayette S. Foster as senator from Connecticut.--James Harlan returned from Iowa after a somewhat extraordinary experience with the President during his two years' absence.--Charles D. Drake, fresh from bitter political controversies, entered from Missouri as the successor of B. Gratz Brown.--Cornelius Cole, who had already served in the House, came from California.--Henry W. Corbett, a successful merchant, came from Oregon. The Senate on the whole had received valuable accessions. Some of the men who entered that day became prominent and influential in the public councils for many years.

The House also received some noteworthy additions among the new members. Two marked men from the North-West, who had served as representatives in opposing parties, before the Rebellion, now returned as members of the same political organization, having in the four intervening years acquired great distinction in the war for the Union --John A. Logan of Illinois, and Cadwalader C. Washburn of Wisconsin.--Grenville M. Dodge, who had attained high rank in the volunteer service, entered from Iowa.--Norman B. Judd, who had gained much influence by his long membership of the State Senate of Illinois between 1844 and 1860, and by his service as minister to Berlin under Mr. Lincoln, now came from one of the Chicago districts.

The New-York delegation was strengthened by the advent of some new men. --Dennis McCarthy, an enterprising and successful merchant, with wide knowledge of public affairs, entered from the Syracuse district. He proved a most intelligent and useful member of the House, as he already had of the Legislature of New York. His ability, his industry, and his broadly liberal views have given him a high standing among the people of his State.--William H. Robertson entered at the same time from the Westchester district. He was a member of the House for only a single term, but he left a clear imprint of the high character which has since been put to severe tests and was never found wanting. Able and frank, conscientious and careful in the discharge of every trust, Mr. Robertson has established a reputation without spot or blemish.--Orange Ferriss, since of honorable repute as one of the Auditors in the Treasury Department, John C. Churchill, who had already attained a good standing at the Bar, and Addison H. Laflin, afterwards appointed to an important customs office in the city of New York, all entered at this session.

John Coburn, who had made a good record in the war, came from the State of Indiana. Firm and tenacious in his opinions, even to the point of obstinacy, he was for years an active and useful representative of the people. He could not be deflected from what he regarded as the line of duty and he soon acquired the respect of both sides of the House.--Morton C. Hunter, who had done good service in the Army of the Tennessee, as Colonel of an Indiana regiment, and afterwards commanded a brigade in Sherman's Atlanta campaign, now entered from the Bloomington district.--Austin Blair, who had won great praise as Governor of Michigan during the war, now entered as representative from the Jackson district. He exhibited talent in debate, was distinguished for industry in the work of the House and for inflexible integrity in all his duties. He was not a party man in the ordinary sense of the word, but was inclined rather to independence of thought and action. This habit separated him from many friends who had wished to promote his political ambition, and estranged him for a time from the Republican party. But it never lost him the confidence of his neighbors and friends, and did not impair the good reputation he had earned in his public career.--George A. Halsey, a successful manufacturer and a most intelligent, worthy man, entered from the Newark district of New Jersey, bringing to the House a thorough and valuable knowledge of the trade relations of the country, both domestic and foreign.--The New-Hampshire delegation, not present at the organization of the House, had been entirely changed by the late election. Aaron F. Stevens, a lawyer of high standing, Jacob H. Ela, afterwards for many years an Auditor in the Treasury Department, and Jacob Benton, well known in the politics of his State, were the new members.--Worthington C. Smith, an experienced man of affairs, entered from Vermont as the successor Justin S. Morrill.--Henry L. Cake, an enthusiastic representative of the Pennsylvania Germans and of the anthracite-coal minters, came from the Schuylkill district.--Green B. Raum, afterward for a considerable period Commissioner of Internal Revenue, entered from Illinois.--William A. Pile and Carman A. Newcomb, two active and earnest young Republicans, came as representatives of the city of St. Louis.

Benjamin F. Butler now took his seat in Congress for the first time. He was sent from a Massachusetts district of which he was not a resident, thus breaking a long established and approved custom. Though his military career had been the subject of adverse and bitter criticism, it had been marked by certain features which pleased the people, and he came out of the war with an extraordinary popularity in the loyal States. He engaged at once in political strife. During the canvass against the President's policy in 1866 he went through the country, it may with truth be said, at the head of a triumphal procession. He was received everywhere with a remarkable display of enthusiasm, and was fortunate in commending himself to the good will of the most radical section of the Republican party. He naturally affiliated with that side because it never was General Butler's habit to be moderate in the advocacy of any public policy. When he was a Democrat he sustained the extreme Southern wing of the party with all his force and zeal; and when the course of his political associates pointed to a disruption of the Government he turned upon them with savage hostility, declared without hesitation for the support of the Union, offered his services as a soldier, and was constantly in the vanguard of those who demanded the most aggressive and most destructive measures in the prosecution of the war. He entered Congress, therefore, with apparent advantages and in the full maturity of his powers, at forty-nine years of age.

--General Butler had long been regarded as a powerful antagonist at the bar and he fully maintained his reputation in the parliamentary conflicts in which he became at once involved. He exhibited an extraordinary capacity for agitation, possessing in a high degree what John Randolph described as the "talent for turbulence." His mind was never at rest. While not appearing to seek controversies, he possessed a singular power of throwing the House into turmoil and disputation. The stormier the scene, the greater his apparent enjoyment and the more striking the display of his peculiar ability. His readiness of repartee, his great resources of information, his familiarity with all the expedients and subtleties of logical and illogical discussion, contributed to make him not only prominent but formidable in the House for many years. He was distinguished by habits of industry, had the patience and the power required for thorough investigation, and seemed to possess a keen insight into the personal defects, the motives, and the weaknesses of his rivals. He was audacious in assault, apparently reckless in his modes of defense, and in all respects a debater of strong and notable characteristics. Usually merciless in his treatment of an aggressive adversary, he not infrequently displayed generous and even magnanimous traits. He had the faculty of attaching to himself, almost as a personal following, those members of the House who never came in conflict with him, while he regarded his intellectual peers of both political parties as natural foes whom he was destined at some time to meet in combat, and for whose overthrow he seemed to be in constant preparation.

Another marked character came from New England,--John A. Peters of Maine,--a graduate of Yale, a man of ability, of humor, of learning in the law. He had enjoyed the advantage of a successful career at the bar and was by long training and indeed by instinct devoted to his profession. In his six years' service in the House he acquired among his fellow-members a personal popularity and personal influence rarely surpassed in Congressional experience. He made no long speeches and was not frequently on the floor, but when he rose he spoke forcibly, aptly, attractively, and with that unerring sense of justice which always carried him to the right side of a question, with unmistakable influence upon the best judgment of the House. Since his retirement from Congress his career on the Supreme Bench of Maine, and more recently as its Chief Justice, has given roundness and completeness to a character whose integrity, generosity, and candor have attracted not only the confidence and respect of an entire State, but the devoted attachment of a continually enlarging circle of friends.

James B. Beck took his seat for the first time as representative from the Ashland District of Kentucky. He was born in Scotland in 1822, and though he came to the United States while yet a lad, he has retained in strength and freshness all the characteristics and peculiarities of his race. He has a strong mind in a strong body. Well grounded in the rudiments of education in his native land, he completed his intellectual training in Kentucky and bears the diploma of Transylvania University--in whose list of graduates may be found many of the ablest men of the South-West. Originally a Whig, Mr. Beck followed John C. Breckinridge into the Democratic party at a period when the pro-slavery crusaders had gone mad and were commanding, indeed morally coercing, the services of a great majority of the able and ambitious young men of the South. He became the law partner of Breckinridge, and was zealously and devoted attached to him to the end. Had Beck been a native of the South he would undoubtedly followed Breckinridge hastily and hot-headedly into the rebellion. He was saved from that fate by the abundant caution and the sound sense which he inherited with his Scotch blood.

--But Mr. Beck had all the sympathy with the Rebellion which was necessary to secure popular support in Kentucky--without which, indeed, a Democrat in that State has had no chance for promotion since the war closed. He has grown steadily in Congress from the day of his entrance. He is honest-minded, straightforward, extreme in his views on many public questions, and though a decided partisan of Southern interests has always had the tact and the good fortune to maintain kindly relations with his political opponents--a desirable end to which his generous gift of Scotch humor has essentially aided him. It is among the singular revolutions of political opinion and political power in this country, that the State and the very city made memorable by Mr. Clay's impassioned devotion to the National Union and his prolonged advocacy of protection, should be represented in Congress by a disciple of the extreme State-rights school and by a radical defender of free trade.

As soon as the Clerk of the House finished the calling of the roll and announced that a quorum had answered to their names, Mr. Brooks of New York rose and called attention to the fact that there were seventeen absent States, ten of which, belonging to the late Confederacy, were not called at all, and the remaining seven--New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Kentucky, Tennessee, Nebraska, and California--had presented no credentials of members, inasmuch as under their respective laws, Representatives to the Fortieth Congress had not yet been chosen. Among the absent were seven of the "old thirteen"--an absolute majority of the States which founded the Republic. The absentees in all amounted to eighty members; and on behalf of his political associates Mr. Brooks presented a formal protest, signed by every Democratic member present, "against any and every action tending to the organization of this House until the absent States be more fully represented." He asked that it be entered upon the Journal as the protest of the minority of the House. Under the rules the Clerk refused to receive or submit the paper for consideration, and the House immediately proceeded to the election of Speaker. Mr. Colfax was chosen for the third and last time. He received one hundred and twenty-seven votes against thirty cast for Mr. Samuel S. Marshall, a highly respectable Democrat member from Illinois. As before, Mr. Colfax, in his remarks when he took the chair, sought to present an embodiment of Republican policy on the current issues. He declared that "the freeman's hands should wield the freeman's ballot;" that "none but loyal men should govern a land which loyal sacrifices have saved;" that "there can be no safe or loyal reconstruction on a foundation of unrepentant treason or disloyalty."

The principal business of the session was to provide supplementary legislation to the Reconstruction Act which had been passed over the President's veto only two days before the new Congress assembled. That Act, from a variety of circumstances, had been forced through at the last under whip and spur. Upon close examination by the leading Republicans of both Senate and house it was found to be defective in many important respects, and especially to lack the detail necessary to give life and vigor to proceedings looking to the practical reconstruction of the Southern States. The two Houses therefore addressed themselves promptly to the task of supplying the necessary amendments and additions. On the 19th of March they sent to the President an Act prescribing in detail the mode for the registering of voters in the insurrectionary States, and for the summoning of a convention to frame a constitution preparatory to the re-admission of each State to representation. The Act declared that "if the constitution shall be ratified by a majority of the votes of the registered electors qualified to vote, at least one-half of all the registered voters voting upon the question, a copy of the same, duly certified, shall be transmitted to the President of the United States, who shall forthwith transmit the same to Congress and if it shall appear to Congress that the election was one at which all the registered and qualified electors in the State had an opportunity to vote freely and without restraint, fear, or the influence of fraud, and if Congress shall be satisfied that such constitution merits the approval of a majority of all the qualified electors in the State, and if the said constitution shall be declared by Congress to be in conformity with the provisions of the Act to which this is supplementary, and the other provisions of said Act shall have been complied with, and the said constitution shall be approved by Congress, the State shall be declared entitled to representation, and senators and representatives shall be admitted therefrom as therein provided."

The President promptly vetoed the bill. Among various objections he said, "This supplemental bill superadds an oath to be taken by every person, before his name can be admitted upon the registration, that he 'has not been disfranchised for participation in any rebellion or civil war against the United States.' It thus imposes upon every person the necessity and responsibility of deciding for himself, under the penalty of punishment by a military commission if he makes a mistake, what works disfranchisement by participation in rebellion and what amounts to such participation. . . . The question with the citizen to whom this oath is to be proposed must be a fearful one, for while the bill does not declare that perjury may be assigned for such false swearing nor fix any penalty for the offense, we must not forget that martial law prevails and that every person is answerable to a military commission, without previous presentment by a grand jury, for any charge that may be made against him, and that the supreme authority of the military commander determines the question as to what is an offense and what is to be the measure of punishment. . . . I do not deem it necessary further to investigate the details of this bill. No consideration could induce me to give my approval to such an election law for any purpose, and especially for the great purpose of framing the constitution of a State. If ever the American citizen should be left to the free exercise of his own judgment, it is when he is engaged in the work of forming the fundamental law under which he is to live. That is his work and it cannot properly be taken out of his hands."

The whole issue presented by this bill was but another of the countless phases of that prolonged and fundamental contest between those who believed that guarantees should be exacted from the rebel States, and those who believed that these States should be freely admitted, without condition and without restraint, to all the privileges which they had recklessly thrown away in their mad effort to destroy the Government. The strength of each side had again been well stated in the debates of the Senate and House and in the veto-message of the President, and no change of opinion was expected by either party from the reasoning or the protest of the other. The President's argument was therefore met by a prompt vote passing the bill over his veto, in the House by 114 ayes to 25 noes, and in the Senate by 40 ayes to 7 noes. The resistance was very slight, and the fruit of the great Republican victory of 1866 was now realized in the formidable strength which the President's opponents exhibited in both branches.

The session lasted until the thirtieth day of March, and though Congress had then completed all the business pressing upon its attention the Republican leaders would not permit an adjournment sine die. They decided to meet again in midsummer. The same necessity that had induced them to convene in March persuaded them that the President should not be allowed to have control of events for eight months without the supervision of the legislative branch of the Government. It was resolved therefore that Congress should meet on Wednesday, July 3d. The vigilance and determination evinced by this action did not prove useless or go unrewarded. Only a few weeks after Congress had taken its recess the danger anticipated by the Republican leaders, from hostile interpretation of the Reconstruction Acts by the Attorney-General, was made fully apparent. On the 24th of May and the 12th of June Mr. Stanbery gave two opinions to the President, which in many respects neutralized the force both of the original and supplementary acts of Reconstruction. His adverse views were elaborately and skilfully presented, and tended to embarrass the military commanders of the Southern districts in the administration of law, and to hinder the registration of voters and the holding of elections for constitutional conventions. Republican leaders therefore felt not only justified in the precautions they had taken to keep the power of Congress alive, but esteemed it peculiarly fortunate that they could so promptly prevent the evil effects which might otherwise flow from the unfriendly constructions of the Attorney-General. The principal business of the July session was to provide a second supplementary Act which effectually remedied all the objections and obstructions which Mr. Stanbery's acute legal knowledge had suggested. The bill passed both branches by the 13th of July and reached the President on the 14th--meeting at his hands the same fate that its predecessors had incurred. On the 19th he vetoed it--rehearsing the objections he had repeatedly stated on the same issues.

The President complained that within less than a year Congress had attempted to strip the Executive Department of the Government of some of its essential powers. "The military commander," said he, "is, as to the power of appointment, made to take the place of the President, and the General of the Army the place of the Senate, and any attempt on the part of the President to assert his own Constitutional power may, under pretense of law, be met by official insubordination. It is to be feared that these military officers, looking to the authority given by these laws, rather than to the letter of the Constitution, will recognize no authority but the commander of the district or the General of the Army. . . . If there were no other objection than this to the proposed legislation it would be sufficient. While I hold the chief executive authority of the United States, while the obligations rests upon me to see that all laws are faithfully executed, I can never willingly surrender that trust or the powers given for its execution. I can never give my assent to be made responsible for the faithful execution of laws, and at the same time surrender that trust and the powers which accompany it to any other executive officer, high or low, or to any number of executive officers."

Many of those who kept closest watch of the controversy between the President and Congress saw in the foregoing words something ominous. In their apprehensions of evil they construed it as a threat that the President would exercise his power as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy with which he was fully invested by the Constitution, to change the assignment of military officers at will. Should he stubbornly or capriciously assert this power he might seriously embarrass the entire administration of the Reconstruction Acts in the approaching registrations and elections in the Southern States. A change of officers at a single point might frustrate all the preparations for the reconstruction of a State, and a general change might produce chaos in the South and possibly develop a spirit of violence of which no man could measure the effect. The President's words made a deep impression on Congress. Mr. Boutwell saw in them a deadly intent "which provokes and demands the exercise of the highest and gravest duty of this House"--meaning that the President should be impeached. Mr. Randall of Pennsylvania taunted Mr. Boutwell with the declaration that all the talk of impeachment was "mere bluster;" while Mr. Thaddeus Stevens, though believing that Mr. Johnson deserved impeachment, considered it "a vain and futile thing." "There are," said he, "unseen agencies at work, invisible powers operating everywhere in the country, which will protect a man like Johnson when called upon." Debate, however, was very brief, and the House passed the bill over the veto by ayes 108, noes 25. In the Senate there was no discussion whatever on the President's message, that body being content to pass the bill against his objections by 30 ayes to 6 noes.

The Senate and the House were both ready to adjourn on the 20th of July, but Mr. Sumner, Mr. Howard of Michigan, and others of the most radical type in both branches, desired that Congress might remain in session for the summer and autumn, or at least have such short vacations as would practically amount to a continuous session. Their object was to keep constant watch of the course of the Administration and be at all times ready to neutralize its evil purpose. Aside from the great personal inconvenience which this would occasion to many members, the judgment of the majority was against so radical a step. The more conservative members of the Republican party feared that a continuous session of Congress would seriously increase the uneasiness and excitement in the country by creating the impression that the Senate and House were sitting as a committee of public safety, in the apprehension of a civil revolution. The reply of those who opposed the adjournment was that the condition of public affairs did actually tend to revolution, and that instead of fanning the popular excitement by remaining in session, Congress would be thus most wisely allaying the fears which had entered the minds of so large a number of the people. But this argument did not prevail, and the conservative view secured a majority in both Houses. The vote in the Senate however was very close, there being only one more Republican in the affirmative that in the negative, leaving to Democratic votes, really, the decision of the question. A very inconvenient compromise was made by an adjournment to the 21st of November--only a fortnight before Congress would convene in regular annual session on the first Monday of December. No good reason was assigned for so extraordinary a step, and no benefit resulted from it.

The Reconstruction Acts, both original and supplementary, were now in full operation throughout the South. The President did not interpose serious objection to the assignment of the Army officers whose names were suggested by General Grant, and the ten insurrectionary States not yet re-admitted to representation were remanded to military government with apparent quiet and order. General Schofield was directed to take charge of the district of Virginia; General Sickles was placed in command of the district of North Carolina and South Carolina; General John Pope was assigned to the district of Georgia, Alabama, and Florida; General Ord to the district of Mississippi and Arkansas; and General Sheridan to the district of Louisiana and Texas. These assignments were made with due promptness after the enactment of the laws, and the several commanders at once proceeded to their novel and responsible duties.(1)

Under the enlargements of suffrage in the direction of loyalty, and its restrictions in the direction of disloyalty, the Southern States once more turned their attention to the question of Reconstruction. They saw, as the law intended them to see, that military government would exist until the loyal inhabitants of those States should present themselves before Congress with a constitution adapted to the changed circumstances resulting from the war, and to the necessities superinduced by the abolition of slavery. The Southern men who had defiantly rejected the Fourteenth Amendment, and had with confidence relied upon the power of President Johnson to vindicate their position, now discovered their mistake, and were reluctantly but completely convinced that the only road to representation in Congress for their States was through submission to the conditions imposed by the Acts of Reconstruction,--conditions far more exacting than those which had been required by the preceding Congress and which they had so unwisely refused to accept.

The assignments of Army officers to the Southern districts were made early in the spring of 1867. From that time onward it was hoped that the preservation of order would be secured in the South, and that the rights of all classes would be adequately protected. But notwithstanding the anticipation of this desirable result, there was throughout the summer and autumn of 1867 a feeling of great anxiety concerning the condition of the Southern States,--a constant apprehension that some outbreak similar to that in New Orleans the preceding year might lead to deplorable consequences, among the least of which would be the postponement of the organization of State governments. The cause of this solicitude among Northern people was the novel experiment in the South of allowing loyal men regardless of race or color to share in the suffrage and to participate in the administration of the Government. Under any less authoritative mandate than that which is conveyed in a military order with the requisite force behind it, the Southern communities would never have accepted or submitted to the conditions thus imposed. But the sympathy which their condition under other circumstances might have evoked in the North, was stifled by the pertinent consideration that they had refused other forms of Reconstruction, and had wilfully drawn upon themselves all that was unwelcome in the one now about to be enforced. It was to be noted moreover that the feature which was most unwelcome --impartial suffrage--was the one especially founded upon justice, abstract as well as practical.

Conventions were held successively in all the States, the elections being conducted in good order, while every man entitled to vote was fully secured in his suffrage. The conventions were duly assembled, constitutions formed, submitted in due time, and approved by popular vote. State governments were promptly organized under these organic laws, Legislatures were elected, and the Fourteenth Amendment ratified in each of the States with as hearty a unanimity as in the preceding winter it has been rejected by the same communities. The proceedings were approximately uniform in all the States, and the constitutions, with such minor differences and adaptations as circumstances required, were in all essential points the same. All were ordained in the spirit of liberty, all prohibited the existence of any form of slavery, and all heartily recognized the supreme sovereignty of the National Government as having been indisputably established by the overthrow of the Rebellion which was undertaken to confirm the adverse theory of State-rights.

These proceedings in the South were in full progress when the second or long session of the Fortieth Congress began, on the first Monday of December, 1867. While President Johnson had not interposed any obstructions to the working of the Reconstruction Act which had not been effectively cured by the two supplementary Acts, he had neither concealed nor abated his utter hostility to the policy of Congress,--a form of hostility that grew in rancor in proportion as he had been thwarted and rendered powerless by the enactment of the laws over his veto. When Congress came together he seemed to have gathered all his strength for a final assault upon its Reconstruction work and for a final vindication of his own policy. His message was laden with every form of attack which ingenuity could devise to throw discredit upon Congress, and if possible to affright the people by the dismal consequences destined in his judgment to follow the flagrant violation of the Constitution which he saw in the Reconstruction policy. He appealed to the people on the ground of patriotism, public safety, and personal interest. He pictured anew the advantage and the grandeur of having the old Union fully restored; he warned the people of the danger of sowing the seeds of another rebellion by allowing continued maltreatment of the Southern people; and he appealed to the commercial and financial interests of the country by pointing out how every form of property was endangered by the chaotic conditions of affairs to which, in his belief, the policy of Congress was steadily tending. Beyond these considerations he endeavored to arouse among the people all possible prejudice against negro suffrage. He declared that "of all the dangers which our Nation has yet encountered, none are equal to those which must result from the success of the effort now making to Africanize the half of our country." "We must not," said he, "delude ourselves. It will require a strong standing army, and probably more than two hundred millions per annum, to maintain the supremacy of negro governments after they are established,--a sum thus thrown away which would, if properly used, form a sinking-fund large enough to pay the whole National debt in less than fifteen years."

The argument of the President however was not merely a twice-told tale. It had been repeated many times and though never more artfully stated than now, it fell upon unlistening ears, making no impression whatever upon Congress and very little upon the country. The process of Reconstruction went on, and its first fruit was the presentation of a constitution from Arkansas, framed in exact accordance with the requirements prescribed by Congress, and accompanied by proof that the State had ratified the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution. A bill was introduced in the House by Mr. Stevens, on the 7th of May (1868), to admit the State of Arkansas to representation in Congress. The question of Reconstruction had been debated so elaborately and for so long a period of time that there was little disposition now to open the subject afresh, and with far less resistance than had been anticipated the Arkansas bill was passed in both branches, and the State declared entitled to all those rights in the Union which she, with her sisters in rebellion, had so flippantly thrown aside in 1861. A fundamental condition was attached to the admission, declaring "that the Constitution of Arkansas shall never be so amended or changed as to deprive any citizen or class of citizens of the United States of the right to vote, who are entitled to vote by the Constitution herein recognized, except as a punishment for such crimes as are now felonies at common law, whereof they shall have been duly convicted under laws equally applicable to all the inhabitants of said State."

The Act re-admitting Arkansas to the right of representation was followed immediately by one of the same general scope with respect to the States of North Carolina, South Carolina, Louisiana, Georgia, Alabama, and Florida. The same fundamental condition already cited as imposed on Arkansas was imposed on all these States, and the further condition was exacted from Georgia that certain provisions in her Constitution should be a solemn Act of her Legislature be declared null and void. The provision to be thus annulled related to the collection of debts, and their spirit and intent may be inferred from the opening declaration that "no court in the State shall have jurisdiction to try or determine any suit against any resident of this State upon any contract or agreement made or implied prior to the first day of June, 1865, or upon any contract made in renewal of any debt existing prior to the date named." The provision as the Georgia convention had framed it would have wrought great injury to a large number of creditors in the North. It was a complete outlawry of thousands of dollars legally and equitably due to honest creditors, and Georgia was compelled to agree to its nullification before her senators and representatives could be admitted to seats in Congress.

The bills admitting these States to representation did not secure Executive approval. On the 20th of June (1868) the President sent a message to the House of Representatives with his objections to the Arkansas bill. "The approval of this bill," said he, "would be an admission on the part of the Executive that the Act for the more efficient government of the rebel States, passed March 2, 1867, and the Act supplementary thereto, were proper and constitutional. My opinion however in reference to these measures has undergone no change, but on the contrary has been strengthened by the results which have attended their execution." He then proceeded to state his objections as he had so often done before, with no variation of argument, without the production of new facts.--Five days later, on the 25th of June, the President communicated his objections to the bill admitting the other Southern States to representation. He had apparently become fatigued with the reiteration of his arguments, and he frankly stated that he would not "undertake at this time to re-open the discussion upon the grave Constitutional question involved in the Reconstruction Acts." He declared that "the bill assumed authority over the States which has never been delegated to Congress," and "imposes conditions which are in derogation of equal rights." The vetoes did not evoke long debate in either House, and both bills were promptly passed over the objections of the President by a party vote, amounting indeed to more than three to one in both Senate and House.

In the arguments which the President had found such frequent occasion to submit, he quietly ignored the facts of secession, the crime of rebellion, the ruthless sundering of Constitutional bonds which these States had attempted. He took no note of the immense losses both of life and property which they had inflicted upon the Nation, and gave no consideration to the suffering which they had causelessly brought upon the people. If the President's logic should be accepted as indicting the true measure of Constitutional obligation imposed on the different members of the Union, then any State might rebel at any time, seize and destroy the National property, levy war, form alliances with hostile nations, and thus subject the Republic to great peril and great outlay, her citizens to murder and to pillage. If the rebellious State be finally subdued, the National Government must not attach the slightest condition to her re-admission to the Union; must not impose discipline or even administer reproof. The fact that the rebellion fails is the full warrant for its guilty authors to be at once repossessed of all the rights and all the privileges which in the frenzy of anger and disobedience they had thrown away. Such was in effect the argument of the President throughout the Reconstruction contest; such was the demand of the leaders of the Rebellion; such was the concession which the Democratic party constantly urged in Congress, through the press, and in all the channels through which its great power was exerted.

The position of the Republicans was steadily the opposite of that described. They held that the States which had rushed into a rebellion so wicked, so causeless, and so destructive, should not be allowed to resume their places of authority in the Union except under such conditions as would guard, so far as human foresight could avail, against the outbreak of another insurrection. They should return to the Union on precisely the same terms as those on which the loyal States held their places; they should have the same privileges and be subjected to the same conditions. As slavery had been the chief inciting cause of disunion, slavery should die. As the vicious theory of State-rights had been constantly at enmity with the true spirit of Nationality, the Organic Law of the Republic should be so amended that no standing-room for the heresy would be left. As the basis of representation in the Constitution has always given the slave States an advantage, these States, now that slavery was abolished, should not be permitted to oppress the negro population and use them merely for an enlarged Congressional power to the white men who had precipitated the rebellion. As the war to maintain Union and Liberty had cost a vast treasure and sacrificed countless lives, the States that had forced the bloody contest should agree by solemn amendment to the Constitution that the National debt and the pension to the soldier should be secured. Those conditions--applying to all the States alike, to the loyal and the disloyal in the same measure--must be honorably agreed to by the States that had gone into Disunion before they should be permitted to resume and enjoy the blessings of Union. History and the just judgment of mankind will vindicate the wisdom and the righteousness of the Republican policy, and that vindication will always carry with it the condemnation of Andrew Johnson.

The long contest over Reconstruction, so far as it involved the re-admission of the States to representation, was practically ended. Eight of the eleven Confederate States, at the close of June 1868, had their senators and representatives in Congress. Three--Virginia, Mississippi, and Texas--were prevented by self-imposed obstacles from enjoying the same privilege until after President Johnson had retired from office. Of the representatives on the floor of the Fortieth Congress from the eight states lately in rebellion, only two were Democrats. The senators were unanimously Republican. Of the aggregate number about one-half were natives of the South. The war upon the "Carpet-bagger" had not yet reached the era of savage atrocity, but the indignation pervading the governing classes of the South, as they were termed, was poured forth in unstinted measure upon the heads of all native Southerners who consented to accept offices conferred by negro votes. It was evident that the admission of the States to representation was to be taken as the signal for a new contest in the South--embittered in its character and sanguinary in its results. The men who had been foremost in plunging their States into the vortex of rebellion were determined to rule them--their determination being of that type which disregards the restraint of law and considers that the end justifies the means.

With all the advantages of old association and in numberless instances of kindly relation with the colored race, the former masters showed themselves singularly deficient in the tact and management necessary to win the negroes and bind them closely to their interest, in the new conditions which emancipation had created. Of the evil results that flowed from the contest now about to ensue--a contest that had many elements of provocation and of wrong on both sides--one of the most remarkable features was the complete control which the white men from the North, entire strangers to the negro, to his habits and to his prejudices, so readily obtained over him. The late slave-masters did not adapt themselves to the new situation. They gave way to repining and regretting, to sulking and to anger, to resentment and revenge, and thereby lost a great opportunity for binding together the two races in those ties of sympathy and confidence which must be maintained as an indispensable condition of prosperity, or even of domestic order and the reign of law, in the Southern States. The lack of moral courage among the physically brave men of the South has already been indicated and illustrated. It was something of this same defect that held back the slave-masters from the condescension, as they esteemed it, of establishing any relation whatever with the negro in his new condition of freedom. Such action was frowned upon by the public opinion of this class throughout the South, and for lack of bold leadership at the critical period, for lack of that consideration which in many subsequent instances has been lavished upon the colored man, the current of fatal prejudice was set strongly against the old master in the mind of his former slave. Events, as they developed in the stirring and sorrowful years that followed, were but a continual proof of that form of original blunder on the part of the Southern whites, which in affairs of civil administration is worse than a crime.

In excuse, or at least in explanation, of this unfortunate blunder on the part of Southern men, the obstinacy and wrong-headed course of President Johnson must be pleaded. It was his causeless, voluntary, unpardonable quarrel with his party which misled Southern men at the time when they most needed lessons of wisdom and moderation. The different result which we may well conceive might have followed in the South under the considerate and kindly spirit which Mr. Lincoln would have brought to the problem, gives us by contrast some faint appreciation of the enormity of Johnson's conduct and of the evil effects flowing from it. At the very moment when the President should have stood as a generous mediator, calming the irritation of the South --an irritation inevitably incident to defeat--and restraining somewhat, at least in the manner of preferring them, the demands and requirements which the Government in its hour of victory was justified in making, Johnson committed the grievous fault of espousing the Southern cause and quarreling with the party which had confided to him the power he was abusing.

Under the patronage and protection of the President, Southern men would have been more or less than human if they had not grown arrogant and defiant towards the men of the North. The chivalric sympathy which always moves the magnanimous in their treatment of a fallen foe, was therefore drowned in the indignation to which Northern men were naturally moved by provocations as unexpected as they were extraordinary. Stimulated by the protection of the President and encouraged by his contumacious quarrel with Congress, the South was driven from one unwise step to another, until the entire situation became hopelessly entangled, and every movement affected by anger and passion;--the North resolving more and more to insist on the fruits of victory, the South resolving more and more to act as though they had conquered in the contest. It was not unnatural, under the anxieties and discouragements of the crisis, that the South should have clung to Mr. Johnson for protection; but in the calm review which the lapse of twenty years affords, the most ardent Southern partisan must see that the President's policy was at enmity with the interest and happiness of his section.

It is not to be forgotten, however, that Mr. Johnson's course was marked by the inherent qualities of his mind. He had two signal defects, either of which would impair his fitness for Executive duty; united they rendered him incapable of efficient administration:--he was conceited and he was obstinate. Conceit without obstinacy may be overcome by the advice of judicious counselors; united with obstinacy it carries its possessor beyond the bounds of prudence, almost beyond the control of reason. Obstinacy united with good judgment is softened into the virtue of firmness. It has often been said that self-made men, as they are termed, are necessarily conceited. Like all aphorisms, this must be taken with numberless exceptions, but it was singularly applicable to Johnson, who was in all respects a self-made man. His great career was never absent from his thoughts, and he was always looking at himself as he fancied he would appear in history. He came to regard himself as the hero upon a remarkable stage of action, and naturally made the reflection that if he could have had in his early years the advantages which so many possess without improving, he would have made strides in life which would have left him without rivals. It would be impossible to gain a full and correct apprehension of Mr. Johnson's character without taking into account these qualities --qualities which were both the remote and immediate cause of his extraordinary career as Chief Magistrate.

The earlier Presidents, filled with the spirit of the convention that formed the Constitution, were extremely careful in the use of the veto-power. In eight years Washington used it but twice. Neither John Adams nor Thomas Jefferson used it even once. Madison resorted to it three times, Monroe only once, John Quincy Adams in not a single instance. Under the first six Presidents, the veto-power had been used but six times in all; unless there should be included some private bills sent back for correction and not in any sense furnishing matter of contest between parties. The country had thus been educated by the sages of the era of the Constitution in the belief that only an extraordinary occasion justified a resort to what, in the popular dislike of its character, had received the name of "the one-man power." President Jackson, therefore, surprised the country and shocked conservative citizens by his frequent employment of this great prerogative. During his term he thwarted the wish and the expressed resolve of Congress no less than eleven times on measures of great public consequence. Seven of these vetoes were of the kind which, during his Presidency, received the name of "pocket-vetoes."

In Madison's administration a bill which reached the President during the last ten days of the session failed by accident or inadvertence to receive the President's signature, and did not become a law. Mr. Webster is authority for saying that there was not a single instance prior to the administration of General Jackson in which the President by design omitted to sign a bill and yet did not return it to Congress. "The silent veto," said he, "is the executive adoption of the present administration." There had been instances in which, during a session of Congress, a President, unwilling to approve and yet not prepared to veto a measure, suffered it to become a law by the lapse of the Constitutional period of ten days; but it was an entirely new device, to defeat a bill by permitting the period of less than ten days to expire at the close of the session--defeat it without action, without expression of opinion, without the responsibility which justly attaches to the Executive office. Commenting with great power, at the time, upon the new use of the veto-power in all its forms by President Jackson, Mr. Webster declared its tendency was "to disturb the harmony which ought always to exist between Congress and the Executive, and to turn that which the Constitution intended only as an extraordinary remedy for extraordinary cases, into a common means of making Executive discretion paramount to the discretion of Congress in the enactment of laws." It was literally making the extreme medicine of the Constitution its daily bread.

An example set by so strong a ruler as Jackson, especially in the establishment of a practice so congenial to man's natural love of power, was certain to be followed by other Presidents. It was followed so vigorously indeed that the forty years succeeding Jackson's advent to power presented a strong contrast with the forty years that preceded it. The one began with Washington, the other ended with Andrew Johnson. Mr. Van Buren, though in all respects a lineal heir to the principles of Jackson, did not imitate him in the frequent use of the veto-power. But Mr. Tyler on nine different occasions ran counter to the action of Congress by the interposition of his veto. Mr. Polk resorted to it in three signal instances, but neither General Taylor nor Mr. Fillmore came in conflict with Congress on a single measure. President Pierce almost rivaled General Jackson in the ten vetoes with which he emphasized his own views as distinct from those of Congress. Mr. Buchanan used his arbitrary power on four occasions during his term. Mr. Lincoln permitted one bill to be defeated, as already noted in these pages, by expiration of Congress, and arrested the passage of another by direct use of his veto. President Johnson, who in many features of his career has been suspected of an attempted imitation of Jackson, far surpassed his great prototype in the use of the veto-power, employing it directly in no less than twenty-one instances, besides pocketing at least two bills of public importance. The aggregate number of vetoes, therefore, in the forty years that followed General Jackson's first election exceeded fifty, as against six for the forty years preceding it.

It will not escape observation that the most frequent resort to the veto has been by those Presidents who were chosen by the political organization which has always declared its hostility to Executive power. The Democratic party had its origin and its early growth in the cry against the overshadowing influence of the Presidential office --going so far in their denunciations as to declare that it was aping royalty in its manners and copying monarchy in its prerogatives. The men who made this outcry defeated John Quincy Adams who never used the veto, and installed Jackson who resorted to it on all occasions when his judgment differed from the conclusion of a majority of Congress. Neither Taylor nor Fillmore--both reared in the Whig school --ever attempted to defeat the will of Congress, though each wielded Executive power at a time when questions even more exciting than those of Jackson's era engaged public attention. Mr. Lincoln presents a strong contrast with his predecessors,--Pierce and Buchanan,--illustrating afresh the contradiction that the party declaiming most loudly against Executive power has constantly abused it. Mr. Tyler and Mr. Johnson were both chosen by the opponents of the Democracy, but they were both reared in that school, and both returned to it--exhibiting in their apostasy the readiness with which the Democratic mind turns to the tyranny of the veto.

The success of reconstruction in the South carried with it the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment by the requisite number of States. The result was duly certified by Mr. Seward as Secretary of State, on the twenty-eighth day of July, 1868, and the Amendment was thenceforward a part of the organic law of the nation. It had been carried, from first to last, as a party measure--unanimously supported by the Republicans, unanimously opposed by the Democrats. Its grand and beneficent provisions failed to attract the vote of a single Democratic member in any State Legislature in the whole Union. Wherever the Democrats were in majority the Legislature rejected it, and in every Legislature where the Republicans had control the Democrats in minority voted against it. Not only was this true, but the States of Ohio and New Jersey, which had ratified it in 1866-67 when their Legislatures were Republican, formally voted in 1868, when the Democrats had come into power, to recall their assent to the Amendment and to record their opposition to its adoption. It is very seldom in the history of political issues, even when partisan feeling is most deeply developed, that so absolute a division is found as was recorded upon the question of adopting the Fourteenth Amendment. It has not been easy in succeeding years to comprehend the deep-seated, all-pervading hostility of the Democratic party to this great measure. Even on the Thirteenth Amendment, containing the far more radical proposition to abolish slavery, a few Democrats, moved by philanthropic motives, broke from the restraint of party and honored themselves by recording their votes on the side of humanity and justice; but on the Fourteenth Amendment the line of Democratic hostility in Nation and in State was absolutely unbroken.

It seems incredible that Democrats can be satisfied with the record made by their party on this most grave and important question. Every one of the many objects aimed at in the Fourteenth Amendment is founded upon a basis of justice, of liberty, of an enlarged and enlightened nationality. Its minor provisions might be regarded as temporary in their nature, but its leading provisions are permanent and are essential to the vitality of a true republic. Even those which may be held as temporary deeply affect more than one generation of American citizens, and are of themselves sufficiently important to justify a great struggle for their adoption.

It was certainly of inestimable concern to the honor of the country that those who had shed their blood and those who had given their treasure for its defense, should have their claims upon the national justice placed beyond the whim, or the caprice, or the malice of an accidental majority in Congress. Nor would it have been wise to leave open to those who in the conflict of arms had lost their slaves, the temptation to besiege Congress and the Legislatures of their States for compensation. Such an opportunity would have been a menace to the public credit, and would have proved a constant source of corruption. The Republican therefore said, "We shall incorporate the right of the soldier to repayment, in the very Constitution of the Republic; and shall in the same solemn manner decree that as slavery instigated the drawing of the sword against the life of the nation, and justly perished by the sword, its assumed value shall not be placed upon the free people of the United States as a mortgage whose payment may be exacted from their property and their toil." Against these just provisions, which in their nature are limited as to time, the Democrats in Congress and in every Legislature of the Union recorded an absolutely unanimous vote.

Another provision of the Fourteenth Amendment, temporary in its application, indeed necessarily limited to the existing generation, was demanded by the Republicans. The great mass of those engaged in the Rebellion were pardoned the moment their arms were laid down. But the leaders who, in official position before the war, had solemnly sworn to support the Constitution, were held to be far more guilty than the multitude who followed them. They deliberately rebelled against a government to which, on their consciences and on their oaths, they had given their personal pledge of fidelity. The Republicans did not propose to visit even these chief offenders with pains and penalties; but they resolved to place in the Constitution a prohibition upon their holding office under the National government until after two-thirds of both branches of Congress, satisfied of their good intentions, should remove their disabilities. The Democrats unanimously voted against even this mild discipline to those who precipitated the desperate war, thereby declaring their willingness, if not their desire, that the most guilty should fare as well as the innocent; that for example Mr. Toombs might resume his seat as a senator from Georgia, Mr. Breckinridge as a senator from Kentucky, Mr. Benjamin as a senator from Louisiana, Mr. Jefferson Davis as a senator from Mississippi.

Still another provision of the Amendment which might prove temporary in its application, or might prove permanent, as the South should decide, was that relating to representation in Congress. On this point the Republicans held, as has been so often repeated, that the negro should not be included in the basis of representation until he was admitted to suffrage. There is such absolute justice and fair dealing in this proposition, that no reply which deserves to be called an argument has ever been made to it. The original provision in the Constitution by which three-fifths of the slaves were enumerated in the basis of representation, agreed to originally as a compromise in connection with the subject of direct taxation, had lost its relevancy by reason of emancipation as decreed in the Thirteenth Amendment. The question now before Congress was therefore a new one. It affected the rights of States and the equality of citizens. To concede four and a half millions of negroes to the basis of Southern representation, and at the same time to confine the suffrage to the whites, was not merely a harsh injustice to the colored race, but it was an insulting discrimination against Northern white men. It gave, as was well said at the time, a far greater influence in National affairs to the vote of the Confederate solider in the South than to the vote of the Union soldier in the North. In Congressional districts where the colored race constituted one-half of the total population (and in many instances the proportion was even larger), the vote of one white man offset the vote of two in a Northern district where suffrage was impartial. This ratio of influence went into the Electoral College, and gave to the white men of South Carolina, Mississippi and Louisiana double the power of that enjoyed by white men in New York, Illinois and California. The loss of Representatives to the Northern States, or more properly speaking the gain to the Southern States on existing numbers, would be nearly one-eighth of the entire House, and fully one-quarter of those likely to occupy seats on the Democratic side of the chamber. In the Electoral College, the loss to the North and the gain to the South would be nearly in the same ratio. In the rapid increase of the negro race the offensive discrimination against the North would be continually enlarging in its proportions. The corrective provision in the Fourteenth Amendment was designed to prevent this grave injustice both to the negro and to the white man--but every Democrat in Congress and in the State Legislatures voted against it through all the stages of its enactment and its ratification, and thereby expressed a willingness to give an unfair advantage to the Southern white man, and to establish an unfair discrimination against the Northern white man.

Important and essential as are the provisions of the Fourteenth Amendment just cited, indispensable as they have proved in the system of Southern Reconstruction, they are relatively of small consequence when compared with that great provision which is for all time:--that provision which establishes American citizenship upon a permanent foundation, which gives to the humblest man in the Republic ample protection against any abridgment of his privileges and immunities by State law, which secures to him and his descendants the equal protection of the law in all that relates to his life, his liberty, and his property. The first section of the Constitutional amendment which includes these invaluable provisions is in fact a new charter of liberty to the citizens of the United States; is the utter destruction of the pestilent heresy of State-rights, which constantly menaced the prosperity and even the existence of the Republic; and is the formal bestowment of Nationality upon the wise Federal system which was the outgrowth of our successful Revolution against Great Britain.

Before the adoption of this Amendment citizenship of the United States was inferred from citizenship of some one of the States, for there was nothing in the Constitution defining or even implying National citizenship as distinct from its origination in or derivation from a State. It was declared in Article IV, Section 2, of the Federal Constitution, that "Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all the privileges and immunities of citizens in the several States;" but nothing was better known than that this provision was a dead letter from its very origin. A colored man who was a citizen of a Northern State was certain to be placed under the surveillance of the police if he ventured south of the Potomac or the Ohio, destined probably to be sold into slavery under State law, or permitted as a special favor to return at once to his home. A foreign-born citizen, with his certificate of naturalization in his possession, had prior to the war no guarantee or protection against any form of discrimination or indignity, or even persecution, to which State law might subject him, as has been painfully demonstrated at least twice in our history. But this rank injustice and this hurtful inequality were removed by the Fourteenth Amendment. Its opening section settled all conflicts and contradiction on this question by a comprehensive declaration which defined National citizenship and gave to it precedence of the citizenship of a State. "All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States and of the States wherein they reside." These pregnant words distinctly reversed the origin and character of American citizenship. Instead of a man being a citizen of the United States because he was a citizen of one of the States, he was now made a citizen of any State in which he might choose to reside, because he was antecedently a citizen of the United States.

The consequences that flowed from this radical change in the basis of citizenship were numerous and weighty. Nor were those consequences left subject to construction or speculation. They were incorporated in the same section of the Amendment. The abuses which were formerly heaped on the citizens of one State by the legislative and judicial authority of another State were rendered thenceforth impossible. The language of the Fourteenth Amendment is authoritative and mandatory: "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty or property without due process of law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." Under the force of these weighty inhibitions, the citizen of foreign birth cannot be persecuted by discriminating statutes, nor can the citizen of dark complexion be deprived of a single privilege or immunity which belong to the white man. Nor can the Catholic, or the Protestant, or the Jew be placed under ban or subjected to any deprivation of personal or religious right. The provision is comprehensive and absolute, and sweeps away at once every form of oppression and every denial of justice. It abolishes caste and enlarges the scope of human freedom. It increases the power of the Republic to do equal and exact justice to all its citizens, and curtails the power of the States to shelter the wrong-doer or to authorize crime by a statute. To Congress is committed the authority to enforce every provision of the Fourteenth Amendment, and the humblest man who is denied the equal protection of the laws of a State can have his wrongs redressed before the Supreme Judiciary of the Nation.

It is perhaps not strange that the Democrats of the South were hostile to the great results wrought for freedom, for justice, and for popular rights by the Fourteenth Amendment. Their education, their prejudices, their personal interests had all been in the opposite direction, and it was doubtless too much to hope that all these would be overcome by a victory for the Union--a victory which carried to their minds a sense of personal humiliation and of remediless ruin. If their course was unwise it is not altogether unintelligible. But the action of the Northern Democrats cannot be accounted for and cannot be excused. They stood stubbornly, solidly, without reason, without justification, against a great enlargement of popular rights. It is a matter of wonder that a political organization which claims Jefferson for its founder and Jackson for its exemplar, should have surrendered to its rival the sole glory of an achievement which may well be compared with that increase of liberty attained by our ancestors, when the dependence of Colonies was exchanged for the independence of States.

Two eminent judges of the Supreme Court who died after the close of the war are entitled to the admiration and gratitude of the loyal citizens of the United States. When Mr. Lincoln was inaugurated there were three judges on the Supreme Bench from the States which afterwards formed the Confederacy,--James M. Wayne of Georgia, John Catron of Tennessee, and John A. Campbell of Alabama. The last-named was placed upon the bench in 1853, and was undoubtedly the choice of Jefferson Davis, who as the leading Southern member of President Pierce's Cabinet exerted large influence, if not absolute control, over appointments from the slave-holding States. The personal and political associations of Judge Campbell led him to resign his position on the Supreme Bench, and to give the weight of his name and his learning to the Confederate cause.

Judge Wayne was appointed by President Jackson in 1835, and Judge Catron by President Van Buren immediately after his inauguration in 1837, under a bill enlarging the Court, which had been approved by General Jackson. Judge Catron had long been a favorite of General Jackson in Tennessee, and it was understood that in appointing him to the Bench Mr. Van Buren was carrying out the expressed wishes of his predecessor. Both judges came from that earlier and better school of Southern Democracy which resisted the injurious heresies of State-rights and Nullification, sustained the Force Bill under President Jackson, and stood loyally by the Union of the States. They were allied to the South by birth, by education, and by the associations of a lifetime. Their friends, their kindred, even members of their own families, joined in the Rebellion. But these patriotic men, one of whom was born during the Revolutionary war and the other during the first term of Washington's Presidency, maintained their judicial positions and were unshaken in their loyalty to the Union. Their example was followed by few officials from the states that seceded, but the steadfastness of their faith was a striking illustration of the difference between the South of Jefferson and Jackson and the South of Calhoun and Davis. They sat on the Bench throughout the entire civil struggle,--Judge Catron dying in May, 1865, in the eighty-seventh year of his age, and Judge Wayne in July, 1867, in his seventy-eighth year.

The conduct of these venerable judges is all the more to be praised because they did not personally sympathize in any degree with the Republican leaders. They did not believe in the creed or the policies of the party, and feared the result of its administration of the National Government. Their views in regard to the Constitutional rights of the slave-holders were the same as those held by the Confederate chieftains. They had both concurred with Chief Justice Taney in the Dred Scott decision. But it was enough for them now to know that Mr. Lincoln had been Constitutionally chosen President of the United States, and had been Constitutionally installed in his great office. It was not for them as Justices of the Supreme Court to know any thing of his Executive acts, except as they might properly come for review before their high tribunal. They illustrated the honorable line of duty for a Judge under the Government of the United States. Off the Bench, his right to political opinions is no more to be questioned than that of any other citizen. On the Bench, he falls short of the full measure of his exalted duty if by any way or any expression he discloses his sympathy with one political party or his prejudice against another.

It is a tribute of honor to the Supreme Court that through all the mutations of its existence only a single Justice has proved unfaithful to the Union of the States; and prior to the war three-fifths of all the Justices were appointed from the South. Southern men in all other departments of the Public Service--those eminent in our Congressional annals, in the Army, in the Navy, in the field of Diplomacy, and even one who had occupied the Presidential chair--followed the lead of their States in rebellion against the Union; or rather it may with truth be said, they led their States into rebellion against the Union. Judge Campbell, in furnishing the sole exception to the record of judicial loyalty, did not yield without a struggle. He was surrounded with peculiar embarrassments, and was not strong enough to overcome them. He realized his position, and did what he could to avert war; but when war was inevitable, he upheld the Confederate cause and became one of its directing minds. In contrast with the fall from his high estate and over against all the evil influences which forced Judge Campbell to his fate, the names of Catron and Wayne will shine in history as examples of the just judge and the incorruptible patriot.

[(1) The President's personal hostility to some of the officers thus assigned was well known, and surprise was expressed that he did not countermand or qualify the order of General Grant when first issued. He was especially unfriendly to General Sheridan, and late in the summer of 1867 relieved him from his command. General Hancock was gazetted as Sheridan's successor, but he did not reach his post until late in November, the district meanwhile being under the command, first, of General Charles Griffin, and, second, of General Joseph A. Mower. General Hancock's order assuming command, issued on the 29th of November, had a certain political significance. He expressed gratification "that peace and quiet reign in the Department," and that in his purpose to preserve this condition of things, he regarded "the maintenance of the civil authorities in the faithful execution of the laws as the most efficient under existing circumstances." He said that when insurrectionary force had been overthrown and peace established, "the military power should cease to lead, and the civil administration resume its natural and rightful dominion." "Solemnly impressed with these views," the General announced that "the great principles of American liberty are still the lawful inheritance of the people and ever should be. The right of trial by jury, the habeas corpus, the liberty of the press, the freedom of speech, the natural rights of persons, and the rights of property, must be preserved."

General Sheridan had issued an order defining the qualifications of those who might sit on juries during the period of Reconstruction. One of the first acts of General Hancock was to annul this order. He declared "that the determination of who shall and who shall not be jurors appertains to the legislative power," and he indicated his intention of carrying out the existing law of Louisiana in regard to the selection of juries. General Sheridan had distributed certain memoranda of disqualification, together with questions to be proposed, for the registrars. Their effect in substance was to disqualify all persons who, having acted, prior to January 26, 1861, as United-States senators and representatives, electors, officers of the Army and Navy, civil officers of the United States, and State officers provided for by the Constitution of the State, had afterwards engaged in the Rebellion; and also all those who in 1862 and 1864 claimed the protection of foreign powers. General Hancock set aside this action, declaring that he dissented from the construction given to the Reconstruction laws therein, and ordered the registrars to be guided by their own interpretation of the laws and of the Fourteenth Amendment. It was the popular understanding that General Hancock, in these successive steps, was acting in full sympathy with the wishes and designs of the Administration, in all of which he readily concurred as a Democrat.

The appointment of General Pope for the District of Georgia, Alabama, and Florida, had not been agreeable to the President. General Pope's political convictions were of a very positive character, and they were not at all in sympathy with the National Administration. He administered the Reconstruction laws, therefore, in their full spirit and with an entire belief in their justice and equity. He insisted on fair dealing, and suppressed all interference with voters by violence or threats of violence on the part of the late rebels. He would not permit the menace of military organizations, and expressly refused to allow any parading of armed men, except of United-States troops. It was General Pope's opinion that the South had seen quite enough of men in arms within the past four years, and he believed that safety and order would be best maintained by having no uniform worn except that of the Army of the United States, and no other flag shown than the flag of the Union. Holding these pronounced views, aggressively loyal in every thought and action, General Pope was naturally in antagonism with the policy of the President. Towards the close of the year he was relieved of his command and General Meade ordered to take his place.

General Sickles, of the District of North Carolina and South Carolina, was relieved of his command early in September (1867), and General E. R. S. Canby appointed as his successor. General Sickles had been very energetic in the administration of affairs in his department, and had shown remarkable aptitude and efficiency in the discharge of his peculiar duties,--exhibiting in his administration the very qualities most likely to prove offensive to the President. He had perhaps the most difficult command of any of the generals on duty in the South, as the State of South Carolina had from the beginning of the Rebellion presented certain phases of disobedience to Federal authority peculiar to her population and naturally arising from her antecedent history. General Sickles had some trouble with Attorney-General Stanbery, and asked for a court of inquiry, that he might vindicate himself from the accusations of that official.

General Schofield and General Ord alone of the original commanders in the Southern military districts were left to carry through the work of Reconstruction. They both discharged their duties with intelligence and fidelity. Nor was the work of Reconstruction essentially hindered by the changed in other departments. It is the trained habit of the officers of the United-States Army to carry out their orders with implicit faith, and there is seldom a conflict as to the line of duty to be followed. If there was any exception, it was in regard to the course pursued by General Hancock. His conduct became a subject of controversy, and the popular division respecting its merits was on the political line. The National Administration and the Democratic party, both North and South, applauded every thing which General Hancock said and did in Louisiana. The Republican party throughout the country, and the General commanding the army, who was about to be nominated for the Presidency, united in strong disapproval of his course. But General Hancock's construction of the laws under which he was acting was the same as that held by the Attorney-General of the United States, and he thus felt abundantly justified and fortified in his position. He disobeyed no specific order of the General commanding the army, and, even if there had been a difference between them, General Hancock was sure of the sympathy and support of their common superior--the President of the United States.

It was however the subsequent opinion of General Grant that much of the disorder and bloodshed in the State of Louisiana during the national election of 1868 had resulted from the military government of General Hancock. It was not his belief that General Hancock had the slightest desire or design to produce such results, but that they were the outgrowth of the encouragement which the rebels of Louisiana received from the changes which General Hancock inaugurated in the manner of administering the Reconstruction Laws. Aside however from the conduct of General Hancock, the removal of General Sheridan from the Louisiana District was unqualifiedly offensive to General Grant in a personal sense, and contrary to his best judgment on ground of public policy and safety. His attachment to Sheridan was very strong, and a wrong against the latter was sooner or later sure to be resented by General Grant. His feelings of the question were promptly and significantly shown when he became President. Inaugurated on the 4th of March, he caused an army order to be issued on the morning of the 5th, restoring General Sheridan to his former command in Louisiana, and ordering General Hancock to the remote and peaceful Department of Dakota.]

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Chapter XIII

The financial experience of the Government of the United States in the years following the war is without precedent among nations. When Congress first met after the close of hostilities (December, 1865), it was as a ship sailing into dangerous and unknown seas without chart of possible channels. The Reconstruction problem before the country seemed at the time to be less difficult than the financial problem. Other nations had incurred great expenditures for war purposes, but had always left them in chief part as a heritage for the future. Great Britain will probably never pay the total principal of her public debt. France will be burdened perhaps as long as her nationality endures by the debts heaped upon her through the ambition of her sovereigns, and in her own struggles to enlarge the liberty of her people. But in this country the purpose was early formed, not simply to provide for the interest upon the debt incurred in the war for the Union, but to begin its payment at once, and to arrange for its rapid liquidation. In view of the magnitude of the sum involved this was a new undertaking in the administration of Government finances.

The difficulties of the situation were undoubtedly aggravated and complicated by the questions which arose from the condition of the Southern States. Could Congress expect at once that the populations in those States would begin to contribute to the revenue, would cease to require large expenditures for the maintenance of the National authority, would again add to the volume of our exports, to our commerce, and our general prosperity? Serious re-action had in other lands followed the financial expansion created by great wars, even without complications similar to those which the disturbed condition of the South seemed to render unavoidable. Ought Congress to accept such a re-action as the necessary condition of the restoration of our currency, of return to a normal situation, of adjustment of expenditure to revenue on a peace footing? Could the possibility be entertained of such a return and such an adjustment, without panic, without paralysis of industry, without temporary interruption and prostration of commerce? Grave apprehensions were felt as to the possible effect upon production and trade of the legislation required to maintain the National credit. These apprehensions derived force and peculiar seriousness from the growing conflict between President Johnson and Congress upon measures of Reconstruction and upon removals from office.

In spite however of all suggested fears and doubts, a feeling of confidence pervaded the country, and was fully shared by Congress, that the power which had saved the Union could re-establish its credit without panic and without dangerous and prolonged depression. Faith in the resources which had equipped and supported the National armies, now embraced the plainer and less exciting duties of funding and paying the debt and of protecting the notes of the United States. The loans had been placed, the money borrowed, under the excitement of war,--sometimes under the pressure of defeat, sometimes in the exaltation of victory. Without this pressure, without this exaltation, could money be secured at a rate adequate to build up a National credit worthy to be compared with that of the older and richer nations beyond the Atlantic?

The intrepidity with which Congress met its task will always compel the admiration of the student of American history. While the war lasted, the contributions by taxes and by loans had been on a munificent scale. The measures adopted at the close of the Thirty-eighth Congress, after four years of desperate struggle and on the very eve on National victory, showed as great readiness to make sacrifices, as little disposition to count the cost of saving the Union, as had marked previous legislation. Less than six weeks before the surrender of Lee the internal taxes were increased, the duties on imports were adjusted to that increase, and a new Loan Bill was enacted. The bill provided for borrowing, in addition to the authority given by previous Acts, any sum not exceeding $600,000,000 in bonds, or treasury notes convertible into bonds, at six per cent interest in coin or seven and three-tenths per cent interest in currency. This provision was found to be so comprehensive that it not only provided a strong instrumentality for meeting the immense demands incident to the disbanding of the armies and the final settlement of claims connected with that momentous change in our affairs, but also laid the foundation for the policy of funding the debt at a reduced rate of interest. These results testify to the magnificent proportions of the financial legislation during the period of hostilities.

When the Thirty-ninth Congress met in December, 1865, gold stood at 147-7/8 @ 148½. A month later, on the 1st of January, 1866, the legal-tender notes and fractional currency amounted to $452,231,810; notes bearing 7-3/10 per cent interest, to $830,549,041; compound-interest notes payable three years from date (a considerable proportion of which time had elapsed), to $188,549,041; certificates of indebtedness, payable at various dates within the current year, to $50,667,000; and the temporary loan, practically payable on demand, had reached the large sum of $97,257,194. These might all be called floating and pressing obligations, and their grand aggregate was $1,618,705,045. At the same time the amount represented by bonds (6's of 1861, 5-20's, and 10-40's) was $1,120,786,700,--showing a total National debt on New-Year's Day, 1866, of $2,739,491,745. If the National credit was to be maintained these sixteen hundred millions of floating obligations must be promptly placed on a basis that would give time to the Government to provide means for their ultimate redemption. President Johnson, in his message at the opening of the session, spoke of the debt not as a public blessing, but as a heavy burden on the industry of the country, to be discharged without unnecessary delay. This was the popular sentiment in all sections of the country, although in financial circles arguments were frequently heard in favor of creating interminable obligations and of adjusting the debt on a basis of permanency, after the European fashion. The reduction had indeed already begun, since the maximum of debt had been attained in the preceding August.

The Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. Hugh McCulloch, estimated that for the fiscal year ending with June, 1867 (for which Congress was about to provide), the revenue would exceed the expenditures by $111,682,818, and that the whole of our vast debt could be liquidated by annual payments within thirty years. Mr. McCulloch's plans were to take from the compound-interest notes their legal-tender quality, from the date of their maturity, and to sell six per cent bonds, redeemable at the pleasure of the Government, for the purpose of retiring both the compound-interest notes and the plain legal-tenders. He believed that the entire debt might be funded at five per cent, while the average of the annual interest now stood at 6-62/100 per cent. He pointed to harmony between the different parts of the Union and to the settlement of the relations of labor in the Southern States, as essential conditions to the best management of the National obligations.

The leading feature of Mr. McCulloch's financial policy was the immediate and persistent contraction of the currency. His argument in support of the policy, as given in his annual report, was not accepted by the country or by Congress without serious reservation; but his belief in the theory was strong and determined, and so far as the laws permitted he went on reducing the volume of paper in circulation until on the 12th of April, 1866, the sum of legal-tenders was brought down to $421,907,103. Financiers of the Eastern cities favored the policy of contraction, although the logical plea was urged against them that the country would grow up to the volume of currency if not harried and disturbed by new legislation. Manufacturers and the holders of their products, and many who had incurred pecuniary obligations in the expanded currency, took alarm at the rapidity with which the Treasury notes were withdrawn. The argument was urged that the heavy taxes could not be met if the withdrawal were so rapid, and that industry and trade would in consequence be paralyzed by the enforced fall in prices.

These opinions and apprehensions were developed in the debate which led to the passage of the Act of April 12, 1866. The subject was first introduced by Mr. Alley of Massachusetts. On the 18th of December (1865) he offered a resolution concurring in the views of the Secretary of the Treasury, in relation to the necessity for a contraction of the currency, with a view to as early a resumption of specie payment as the business interests of the country would permit. Under a suspension of the rules, without debate, 144 voted for the resolution, 6 against it, and 32 were not recorded. Two months later, on the 21st of February, 1866, Mr. Morrill, from the Committee on Ways and Means, reported a bill which, as he explained, would expand the authority provided by the Act of March 3, 1865, for funding interest-bearing obligations, so as to include non-interest-bearing obligations. The measure authorized the Secretary to exchange the bonds prescribed by the Act for notes or certificates, and power was given to negotiate them and make them payable either in the United States or elsewhere, but if beyond the sea at not over five per cent interest.

--Mr. Thaddeus Stevens declared that the bill put over sixteen hundred millions of Government paper under the absolute and uncontrolled discretion of the Secretary of the Treasury. "This is a tremendous bill," said he. "It proposes to confer more power upon Mr. McCulloch than was ever before conferred upon any one man in a government claiming to have a constitution."

--Mr. Hooper of Massachusetts magnified the financial achievements of the Government, urged the policy embodied in the bill, and insisted on the importance of restoring the currency to a sound condition at the earliest practicable moment. He controverted the suggestion which had been made to increase United-States notes to $1,000,000,000, on the ground that the value of that dollar would be constantly fluctuating. A minority of the commissioners appointed by the preceding Congress to inquire into the state of trade and commerce had presented a specious argument in favor of debasing the coinage, but Mr. Hooper dismissed the proposition summarily and argued strongly for a contraction of legal-tender notes.

--Mr. Hulburd of New York maintained that taxation could not be increased to meet the existing and maturing obligations of the Government. He held that under the Acts of June, 1864, and March, 1865, the Secretary had power to sell at home or abroad six per cent coin bonds in any amount to meet short obligations of the Government. "Under the proposed measure," he said, "authority is specifically asked to withdraw the fractional currency and legal-tender notes, in whole or in part, and to substitute bonds for them. The like power was never asked for Neckar or for Pitt. As a principle the proposition is dangerous." He protested vigorously against making any part of the public debt payable in foreign countries.

--Mr. John Wentworth of Illinois argued in favor of contraction, maintaining that the purpose of the pending bill was to make the Secretary of the Treasury master of the situation. "If we expect him to compete successfully with the most desperate body of men in the world we must confer upon him the necessary powers. The real question is, Shall our Government pay its pensions and all its employees and creditors in depreciated paper, when by borrowing a little money at six per cent it can bring its paper to par?" He charged that an immense lobby against the bill had thronged the hall, and was surprised to find importers among them. "But the importers have found," said he, "that a bloated currency bloats the fashions." He earnestly indorsed Mr. McCulloch as a cautious man, who would not be precipitate, no matter what power might be conferred upon him: "If we adopt his policy we shall wake up some morning and find the paper of our country at par."

--Mr. Pike of Maine doubted the necessity of enforced contraction; but if contraction was necessary, he was for taxing the circulation of national banks out of existence, and afterwards retiring greenbacks. "Once upon a specie basis," said he, "let the business of the country regulate itself." He proposed also to allow the States to tax the bonds of the United States.

--Mr. Price of Iowa asked: "Would any prudent and sensible business man who had given his note payable at his own option, without interest, be likely to give for it another note for the same amount payable at a certain time, with interest at six per cent semi-annually, in gold coin?"

--Mr. Scofield of Pennsylvania asked if the legal-tender notes were not, upon their face, payable on demand.

--Mr. Allison of Iowa insisted that "the Secretary of the Treasury does not propose to return to specie payments immediately, but he expresses the opinion that the reduction of greenbacks by the sum of one hundred million dollars will secure that result."

--Mr. Boutwell of Massachusetts was content to try the experiment of converting the interest-bearing obligations into long bonds, but was unwilling to go farther.

--Mr. Sloan of Wisconsin proposed an amendment to make "bonds and all other obligations of the United States hereafter issued payable in lawful money," but the suggestion met with no favor.

--Mr. Roscoe Conkling maintained that "in the first place, the Secretary of the Treasury has now the power, under the Act of March 3, 1865, to exchange any securities of the Government which bear interest for any other securities which bear interest. In the second place, he has the power to call in, to cancel, to annihilate, so that it shall never go out again, every particle of currency issued prior to June 30,1864; and the truth is, that substantially if not literally the whole of the currency was issued previous to that time." . . . "Only one power," said Mr. Conkling, "remains to be conferred upon him; and that is, the power to put his bonds upon the market when he pleases, where he pleases, as he pleases, sell them for money, and with that money purchase the outstanding obligations of the Government."

--Mr. Garfield argued that "under existing law, the Secretary can issue compound-interest notes and 7-30 bonds to meet current indebtedness; but these are the most expensive forms of government obligations, and therefore he ought not to use the power." He thought the proposed bill was necessary in the interest of the Government. He would "trust the Secretary to proceed cautiously in the path required by honor, to place our currency on a sound basis. . . . We have travelled one-third of the way since Congress met. Gold was then 148. It is now 130. Defeat this bill, and there will be a jubilee on Wall Street."

--Mr. Lawrence of Ohio opposed the bill, and presented a letter from Mr. Freeman Clarke, then Comptroller of the Currency, saying, "We have full power to fund every dollar of the floating debt without any legislation, and with no occasion for making any loan whatever."

--Mr. Morrill closed debate on the 16th of March; and the bill coming to a vote, was defeated,--ayes 65; noes 70. But on a motion to reconsider, it was again brought before the House on the 19th of March, and after brief debate was recommitted. When it re-appeared, four days later, it contained a proviso "that the Secretary of the Treasury shall not retire more than ten million dollars of legal-tender notes in the first six months after the passage of the Act, and not more than four million dollars a month afterwards; and shall make a report to Congress of his action under this provision." Mr. Morrill submitted a letter from Mr. McCulloch, expressing the opinion that "it will be a national calamity if Congress shall fail to grant additional powers to the Secretary." He added, that "the apprehension which exists, that if power is given to the Secretary to retire legal-tender notes the circulation will be ruinously contracted, is without any special foundation." The effect of the discussion was to strengthen the bill in the House where it was passed by ayes 83; noes 53.

The bill was favorably reported to the Senate from the Finance Committee, and came up for consideration on the 9th of April, under the charge of Mr. Fessenden.

--Mr. Sherman re-affirmed the objections made in the House, that the power conferred was greater than had ever been granted to any Secretary of the Treasury since the foundation of the Government. "The power," said he, "is absolute. The Secretary may sell securities of any form at any time and fund the whole debt. No present necessity exists for such grant of authority. The proviso for restricting contraction is not adequate for that purpose. By retaining a large balance in the Treasury, the Secretary can contract the currency without violating the proviso." He deemed it unwise "to place in the hands of any mortal man this absolute and extreme control over the currency."

--Mr. Fessenden said the true principle of this bill was, "that as soon as it can be done with safety, Congress means that we shall get back to the old system of specie payments. That is about all there is of it. The effect of rejecting the measure will be to say to everybody that the Government intends to keep depreciated paper in the financial market."

--Mr. Chandler of Michigan believed the measure "to be evil, and evil only; containing dangerous powers which should not be conferred, and which no man should be willing to accept." Mr. Howe of Wisconsin agreed with him.

--Mr. Guthrie of Kentucky (Secretary of the Treasury under President Pierce) pronounced it "necessary and proper to give this power to the Secretary." And Mr. Morgan of New York, agreeing with him, declared that he desired the bill "just as it is."

--An amendment to strike out the words authorizing the sale of the bonds elsewhere than in the United States was overwhelmingly defeated, ayes 7, noes 35. The bill was then passed by ayes 32, noes 7, and by the President's signature became a law on the 12th of April, 1866.

The discussion of this important financial measure illustrates the various phases of opinion prevailing both in Congress and in the country. The desire to return to a specie basis was general, and yet not a few clung to the legal-tender notes as a permanent and standard currency. While the argument in favor of contraction was prosecuted with great force, the possibility of going too fast, even in the right direction, was conceded by the wisest financiers. The natural disinclination of the American people to entrust unrestricted power to any officer was frequently and forcibly expressed. The policy of funding the obligations bearing interest was admitted on all hands, and for this purpose the sale as well as the direct exchange of bonds was approved. But the repugnance to accepting less than par, or allowing the possibility of such a rate, had its origin and support in the patriotic instincts and in the sound judgment of the people. The requirement of a report from the Secretary and the limitation of the extent of contraction, were the essential changes which made the measure acceptable.

The enactment of this bill presents in an instructive light the character of our financial legislation and the methods by which it is accomplished. As originally presented the bill had the approval of the Secretary of the Treasury and came before the House with the favorable report of the Committee on Ways and Means. Yet it had no such standing as in the British Parliament is given to a financial project of the Government. There, such a proposition would be definitely framed at the Treasury, and its details would be elaborated when first presented. The Chancellor of the Exchequer would state the full character of the measure and the reasons for asking its adoption. Opposition or question would be expected only from the benches of the rival party. Here, on the other hand, after the House, using its own judgment, had modified the bill, criticism and hostility came from the Treasury that had originally proposed it. Several prominent members of the dominant party were pronounced in opposition. Saved by parliamentary strategy when once defeated, the bill was started into new life by the adoption of restrictions upon the power and the action of the Secretary of the Treasury. These restrictions were shown to be necessary in the progress of the debate. Individual judgment asserted itself and the Act became the harmonious resultant of the conflicting opinions of the entire House.

Congress therefore did not enact anybody's theory. It put into the statute the prudent, cautious sense of the people. Recognizing the principle of funding the floating obligations, and of contraction as a means to resumption, Congress only responded to the common sense of its great constituency, in forbidding reckless haste, and in defining the rate of speed. The purpose of keeping in Congress the control of the rate of contraction was only a part of the general determination that the representatives of the people and of the States shall prescribe the methods of conduct as well as the principles and broad measures of administration. Every Government finds by practice the system of legislation and administration best adapted to its own wants. While ministerial power and a trained following, such as obtain in England, may possess advantages under the circumstances existing in the British Empire, it is the settled judgment of this country that a perfectly free discussion, enlightened but not restrained by departmental recommendation or by dictation of committees, is best adapted to the varied and conflicting wants of the whole people. And this was never better illustrated than in the financial bill whose important provisions have been under consideration.

The revenue laws received careful attention during this session. The chief measure was the Act of July 13, 1866. It came before the House with the assurance from the Ways and Means Committee that it would steadily and materially reduce internal taxes. The system of internal revenue which had been so elaborately and intelligently constructed for war purposes, yielded $310,906,984 for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1866. Reduction were now made in the taxes on several hundred articles of manufacture, on savings banks, on the gross receipts of certain corporations; and the income tax was in some degree mitigated. The total reductions were estimated at $75,684,000, but an increase was proposed on raw cotton amounting to nearly one-third of this sum. Prolonged discussion arose over this tax and resulted in a disagreement between the two Houses. The bill was finally perfected in a conference committee and ended by reducing the total internal revenue to $265,920,474 per annum--with all allowance made for the growth of the country and the elasticity of Government receipts.

Not satisfied with the large reduction of taxes made at the first session after the close of the war, Congress resumed the subject at the second session. Early in February, 1867, Mr. Morrill, from the Committee of Ways and Means, reported a bill for the further reduction of taxes, which became a law on the 2d of March. The taxes removed were returning a yearly revenue of more than $36,000,000 to the National Treasury. The principal reductions were $19,500,000 from the income tax; $4,000,000 from clothing; $3,500,000 from woolens; $3,250,000 from leather; $1,000,000 from engines; $600,000 from sugar-refiners; $600,000 from tinware; $500,000 from castings; $500,000 from doors, sashes and blinds; with many others yielding less sums. All these formed a part of what were termed war taxes, and the steady purpose of Congress was to remove them as rapidly as the obligations of the Treasury would permit. As matter of fact they were removed long before such action was expected by the people, and before the special interests subjected to the burden had time to petition for relief or even to complain of hardship.

During the winter of 1866-67 there was a prolonged discussion in Congress over an Act finally passed March 2, 1867, authorizing the Secretary of the Treasury to exchange three per cent certificates of indebtedness for compound-interest notes, and allowing these certificates to be counted as a part of the reserve of National Banks. The first proposition was to allow interest at 3-65/100 per cent. The exchange of notes not bearing interest for those bearing compound interest was proposed by Mr. Stevens, and at first supported by a majority, but on reconsideration it was defeated. Objections was made to the bill that it was a scheme for giving to the banks interest on their reserves, which they could not otherwise receive when the compound-interest notes should be retired. Of these notes the banks held $90,000,000 and the limit proposed for the certificates was $100,000,000. Congress finally limited the amount of certificates to $50,000,000 at three per cent, and allowed them to stand for two-fifths of the reserve of any bank.

While this arrangement was an obvious advantage to the National banks, no such motive inspired Congress in passing the bill. Quite another object was aimed at in its enactment. The influence of contraction, which had gone into operation by the Act of the preceding summer, was already felt in the business of the country. The real significance of the Act just passed was that to a certain degree it checked and even neutralized the operation of the statute which ordered contraction. The compound-interest notes served the National banks as a part of their reserve, and as rapidly as they were cancelled, legal-tender notes were to be held in their stead. Their withdrawal from circulation for this purpose led therefore to a direct and forcible contraction of the actual currency of the country. By substituting the certificates of indebtedness as available for reserve this contraction was prevented, and by the concession of interest, even at three per cent, the banks were induced to surrender the securities which cost the Government a higher rate. The limit of these certificates was subsequently raised to $75,000,000,--a limit which in fact was often reached,--but as legal-tenders were needed the certificates were surrendered to the Treasury.

This is substantially the history of contraction, or of attempts at contraction made by the Thirty-ninth Congress. The successful effort to parry its effect, as already described, shows how unwelcome it had proved to the business community, and how Congress, without resorting at once to an absolute repeal of the act, sought an indirect mode of neutralizing its effect. Mr. McCulloch, in trying to enforce the policy of contraction, represented an apparently consistent theory in finance; but the great host of debtors who did not wish their obligation to be made more onerous, and the great host of creditors who did not desire that their debtors should be embarrassed and possibly rendered unable to liquidate, united on the practical side of the question and aroused public opinion against the course of the Treasury Department. An individual, by an effort of will, can bring himself to endure present inconvenience and even suffering, for a great good that lies beyond, but it was difficult for forty millions of people to adopt this resolve. Nor were the cases quite similar in motive and influence, for although it might be admitted that the entire nation would be benefitted by the ultimate result, the people knew that the process would bring embarrassment to vast numbers and would reduce not a few to bankruptcy and ruin. It was easy to see, therefore, that as each month the degree of contraction was made public, the people more and more attributed their financial troubles to its operation. Perhaps, in large degree, this was the result of imagination, and of that common desire in human nature to ascribe one's faults and misfortunes to some superior power. The effect nevertheless was serious and lasting. In the end, outside of banking and financial centres, there was a strong and persistent demand for the repeal of the Contraction Act.

The process of funding and paying the National debt, and of contracting the currency, went on with vigor and persistency during the summer and autumn of 1867. The Treasury statements for the year showed that up to November 1, 1867, the long obligations of the Government had been increased to $1,781,462,050; while the short obligations, other than currency, had been reduced to $441,655,120.63, and the currency in greenbacks, fractional notes and certificates of deposit for gold, to $402,385,677.39. The Treasury held $133,998,398.02; so that the National debt, less this cash, stood at $2,491,504,450. It thus exhibited an average reduction of the debt from its maximum, August 31, 1865, to November 1, 1867, of more than $10,000,000 per month.

Gold was lower than it had been, but great disappointment was felt because the premium, which had ranged in January, 1867, at 32-1/8 @ 37-7/8, was in November 37½ @ 48-5/8, and the latter figure was higher than the quotation at the beginning of the first session of the Thirty-ninth Congress. The charge was current, and was believed by many, that the premium had been advanced by speculators to compel Congress to enforce the policy of contraction. On the other hand, it was declared to be demonstrably true that the reduction of the volume of paper did not lower the premium on gold. It only depressed production and placed the markets of every kind under the control of reckless operators. Surely, it was argued, the contraction had been severe enough to satisfy the advocates of the most stringent Procrustean policy. The short obligations had been cut down nearly one-half since January, 1866. If account were taken of compound-interest notes the reduction in currency ought to be reckoned at $100,000,000, and even at twice that sum, since the cash held by the Treasury had been taken from the circulation of the country.

The Secretary of the Treasury still adhered to the policy of contraction, and yet was charged with putting into circulation legal-tender notes that had been once withdrawn, in order to affect the market. Thus in August, 1866, between the 8th and the 23d inclusive, he had withdrawn and destroyed $12,530,111, and of the 31st of that month he issued $12,500,000. He had again in October, 1866, cancelled $500,000 on the 24th, and issued anew the same sum on the 25th. On the 31st of January, 1867, he had issued anew $4,000,000, May 31 $2,500,000, and during December, 1867, $1,842,400. In answer to remonstrance against this practice the Secretary maintained that the authority to contract and to cancel the legal-tender notes did not require him to do it, but left it within his discretion. This was unquestionably the law of the case.

Mr. McCulloch in his official report insisted on the funding or payment of the balance of interest-bearing notes, and upon a continued contraction of the currency, as the first measure for promoting the National prosperity; and he presented a strong argument in favor of permanent specie payment. He reported that he had not always retired notes in each month to the extent permitted, but he declared that the effect of the policy as carried out had been salutary and that its continuation would be obviously wise. Yet he feared that financial views were inculcated, which if not corrected might lead to its abandonment. The truth was that the Secretary's policy was counter to the popular wish, and evidence was accumulating that Congress would not sustain him in its continued enforcement. The Secretary had confidently relied upon the bankers and commercial men of the country; but the serious fact was now developed, that many of the most prudent financiers had concluded that the changes in the volume of the currency were causing mischief, and that the process of contraction had been carried as far as was desirable.

The Secretary argued bravely and wisely in his report, in favor of paying the principal and interest of the Government bonds in coin. His argument was designed to meet heresies which had found favor in unexpected quarters. The plea was urged by the new and short-lived school of finance that the notes of the National banks should be withdrawn and greenbacks substituted for them, that all payments by the Government on the principal of the bonds should be in its own paper. It was admitted by these novel theorists that the bonds on their face promised coin for interest; but they maintained that the bonds had been issued in large part when gold was at a heavy premium for paper, and could rightfully be liquidated in paper at its advanced value. Propositions were frequently presented to stop the issue of bonds and to pay out notes for any obligations of the Government offered at the Treasury on becoming due in any form. The pressure of rapid contraction secured a hearing for every extravagant proposition. Prejudice against speculators in gold, who during the war had grown rich on the disasters of the Union, was added to the discussion, especially while the premium was maintained and the National credit charged with odium on its account.

At the opening of the second session of the Fortieth Congress (December, 1867) numerous resolutions and bills demanding the stoppage of contraction were referred to the Committee on Ways and Means. Five days afterwards Mr. Schenck reported a bill of four lines, by which the "further reduction of the currency by retiring and cancelling United-States notes is prohibited." It had the unanimous approval of the Committee on Ways and Means, and was passed by the House,--ayes 127, noes 32. The minority included a goodly number of leading Republicans. In the Senate Mr. Sherman, in supporting the bill, stated the amount of contraction since August 1, 1866, at $140,122,168. He argued from these figures that "contraction should go no farther while industry is in a measure paralyzed, and that Congress ought to resume control of the currency, which should not be delegated to any single officer." He declared that the measure was entirely preliminary to other legislation, "which must include the banking system, the time and manner of resuming specie payments, the payment of the debt and the kind of money in which it may be paid, and the reduction of expenditures and taxes." Debate was somewhat prolonged, and a conference committee gave final form to the measure, which failed to receive the President's signature, but became a law without it. It is known as the "Act of February 4, 1868, prohibiting any further reduction of the currency, and authorizing the replacing of mutilated notes." By this Act the minimum limit of legal-tender notes was fixed at $356,000,00,--the volume then afloat after Mr. McCulloch's policy of contraction had done its work.

The actual legislation of the second session of the Fortieth Congress included also the repeal of the tax on raw cotton, and the further reduction of internal revenue, by the Acts of March 31 and July 20 (1868). Great relief was given to manufactures by the abolition of the five per cent tax on a variety of products. The surrender of revenue was estimated at $23,000,000 on cotton at $45,000,000 on manufactures. These concessions were much needed, for the producers of cotton were crippled by the condition of their States, and manufacturers found that prices did not justify the payment of these war charges.

In his annual message to Congress in December, 1868, President Johnson argued "that the holders of our securities have already received upon their bonds a larger amount than their original investments, measured by the gold standard. Upon this statement of fact it would seem but just and equitable that the six per cent interest now paid by the Government should be applied to the reduction of the principal, in semi-annual installments, which in sixteen years and eight months would liquidate the entire National debt." This bold and shameless advocacy of repudiation was less mischievous than it would have been if Mr. Johnson had held a longer lease of power, and if the people had not in the Presidential election pronounced so clear and positive a verdict in favor of the maintenance of the National credit. The Senate deemed it worth while to put on record a resolution condemning this part of Mr. Johnson's message. Mr. Hendricks of Indiana moved a substitute indorsing the statement in the message, and closing with the words of the Democratic National Convention in favor of paying the bonds in lawful money. Only seven senators supported his substitute, while forty-five opposed it; and President Johnson's proposal for repudiation was, by the action of the Senate, "utterly disapproved and condemned," --ayes 43, noes 6. In the House of Representatives a similar resolution was passed by a vote of 155 ayes to 6 noes, 60 not voting. No Democratic member in that body seemed willing to assume the objectionable position taken by Mr. Hendricks in the Senate, and a declaration "that all forms of repudiation are odious to the American people" was adopted without a division.

The financial achievement of the National Government herein reviewed, for the four years following the war, may be briefly summarized. The National debt was reduced by the sum of nearly $300,000,000, while at the same time the Government reduced its revenue to the amount of $140,000,000 per annum by the repeal of a long series of internal taxes. During this period more than $35,000,000 had been paid from the Treasury towards the construction of the Union and Central Pacific Railroads, and $7,200,000 was paid to the Russian Government on account of the purchase of the Territory of Alaska. It is also to be noted that within this period were embraced all the expenses incident to the disbandment of the Union army, and also a very large addition to the pension-list. Notwithstanding all these enormous expenditures the business interests of the country continued prosperous, and the fact that so large a reduction had been made in internal taxes gave promise that within a comparatively short period the Government would be able to remove all levies that were in any degree oppressive or even vexatious to private interests.

By reason of his official and personal connection with the President, Mr. McCulloch had failed to secure cordial support from Congress, and had moreover given offense by his obvious sympathy with the free-traders, who were already beginning to assault the protective tariff which the necessities of war had led the country to adopt. The Secretary had also gone far beyond the popular wish and the best business judgment of the country in regard to the rapid contraction of the currency. But while his politics and his policies were not acceptable to Congress or to the people, he is entitled to high credit for his direct, honest, intelligent administration of the Treasury Department. In the peculiar embarrassments to the administration of the Government, caused by the course of President Johnson, it was a matter of sincere congratulation that a Secretary of the Treasury, so competent and trustworthy as Mr. McCulloch had approved himself, was firmly in place before the serious political disturbances began--a congratulation in which his most ardent Republican opponents were ready to join, knowing how fatal it might prove if President Johnson had the opportunity to nominate his successor.

Throughout the more difficult period of his administration of the department, Mr. McCulloch was aided by two most intelligent and efficient officers. Mr. William E. Chandler, though only twenty-nine years of age, was appointed First Assistant Secretary in March, 1865, and exhibited great aptitude, discrimination, and ability in his position. He developed an admirable talent for details, a quick insight into the most difficult problems that came before the Department, and at all times an honorable devotion to public duty. The Bureau of Internal Revenue, the most important of the Treasury Department, was under the direction of another citizen of New Hampshire, Edward Ashton Rollins. The Bureau for a time collected more than half the revenue of the United States, and required in its Commissioner integrity, administrative talent, and singular skill in providing against every form of fraud. No department of the Government had to contend against so many corrupt combinations to rob the Government, and the slightest relaxation of vigilance on the part of the Commissioner might involve at any time a loss of millions to the National Treasury. In the complex and difficult duties of this station, Mr. Rollins proved himself equal to every requirement.

The purchase of Alaska was completed by the Act of July 27, 1868, which appropriated the amount agreed upon in the treaty of March 30, 1867,-- negotiated by Mr. Seward on behalf of the United States, and by Baron Stoeckl representing the Emperor of all the Russias. The Russian Government had initiated the matter, and desired to sell much more earnestly than the United States desired to buy. There is little doubt that a like offer from any other European government would have been rejected. The pressure of our financial troubles, the fact that gold was still at a high premium, suggested the absolute necessity of economy in every form in which it could be exercised; and in the general judgment of the people the last thing we needed was additional territory. There was, however, a feeling of marked kindliness towards Russia; and this, no doubt, had great weight with Mr. Seward when he assented to the obvious wishes of that government. But while there was no special difficulty in securing the ratification of the treaty by the Senate, a more serious question arose when the House was asked to appropriate the necessary amount to fulfill the obligation. Seven million two hundred thousand dollars in gold represented at that time more than ten million dollars in the currency of the Government; and many Republicans felt, on the eve, or rather in the midst, of a Presidential canvass, that it was a hazardous political step (deeply in debt as the Government was, and with its paper still at a heavy discount) to embark in the speculation of acquiring a vast area of "rocks and ice," as Alaska was termed in the popular and derisive description of Mr. Seward's purchase.

When the bill came before the House, General Banks, as Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, urged the appropriation with great earnestness, not merely because of the obligation imposed upon the Government by the treaty, which he ably presented; not merely by reason of the intrinsic value of the territory, which he abundantly demonstrated; but especially on account of the fact that Russia was the other party to the treaty, and had for nearly a century shown a most cordial disposition towards the United States. General Banks maintained that at every step of our history, from 1786 to the moment when he was speaking, Russia had been our friend. "In the darkest hour of our peril," said he, "during the Rebellion, when we were enacting a history which no man yet thoroughly comprehends, when France and England were contemplating the recognition of the Confederacy, the whole world was thrilled by the appearance in San Francisco of a fleet of Russian war vessels, and nearly at the same time, whether by accident or design, a second Russian fleet appeared in the harbor of New York. Who knew how many more there were on their voyage here? From that hour France, on the one hand, and England on the other, receded, and the American Government regained its position and its power. . . . Now, shall we flout the Russian Government in every court in Europe for her friendship? Whoever of the representatives of the American people in this House, on this question, turns his back, not only upon his duty, but upon the friends of his country, upon the Constitution of his Government, and the honor of his generation, cannot long remain in power."

Mr. Cadwalader C. Washburn answered the speech of General Banks on the succeeding day (July 1, 1868). He assumed the leadership of the opposition to the treaty. He proposed to demonstrate to the satisfaction of the House five distinct propositions: "First, that at the time the treaty for Alaska was negotiated, not a soul in the whole United States asked for it; second, that it was secretly negotiated, and in a manner to prevent the representatives of the people from being heard; third, that by existing treaties we possess every right that is of any value to us, without the responsibility and never-ending expense of governing a nation of savages; fourth, that the country ceded is absolutely without value; fifth, that it is the right and duty of the House to inquire into the treaty, and to vote or not vote the money, according to its best judgment." Mr. Washburn made an able speech in support of his radical propositions.

General Butler sustained Mr. Washburn's position in a characteristic speech, especially answering General Banks's argument that we should pay this amount from a spirit of friendship for Russia. "If," said General Butler, "we are to pay this price as usury on the friendship of Russia, we are paying for it very dear indeed. If we are to pay for her friendship, I desire to give her the seven million two hundred thousand dollars in cash, and let her keep Alaska, because I think it may be a small sum to give for the friendship if we could only get rid of the land, or rather the ice, which we are to get by paying for it." He maintained that it was in evidence before the House officially, "that for ten years the entire product of the whole country of Alaska did not exceed three million dollars."

--Mr. Peters of Maine pronounced the territory "intrinsically valueless; the conclusive proof of which is found in the fact that Russia is willing to sell it." He criticised the action of the Senate in negotiating the treaty. "If the treaty-making power can buy, they can sell. If they can buy land with money, they can buy money with land. If they can buy a part of a country, they can buy the whole of a country. If they can sell a part of our country, they can sell the whole of it!"

--Mr. Spalding of Ohio, on the other hand, maintained that "notwithstanding all the sneers that have been cast on Alaska, if it could be sold again, individuals would take it off our hand and pay us two or three millions for the bargain."

--General Schenck thought the purchase in itself highly objectionable, but was "willing to vote the money because the treaty has been made with a friendly power; one of those that stood by us,--almost the only one that stood by us when all the rest of the powers of the world seemed to be turning away from us in our recent troubles."

--Mr. Stevens supported the measure on the ground that it was a valuable acquisition to the wealth and power of the country. He argued also in favor of the right of the Senate to make the treaty.

--Mr. Leonard Myers was sure that if we did not acquire Alaska it would be transferred to Great Britain. "The nation," said he, "which struggled so hard for Vancouver and her present Pacific boundary, and which still insists on having the little island of San Juan, will never let such an opportunity slip. Canada, as matters now stand, would become ours some day could her people learn to be Americans; but never, if England secures Alaska."

--Mr. Higby of California answered the objections relating to climate. "I do not know," said he, "whether the people of the East yet believe what has been so often declared, that our winters on the Pacific are nearly as mild as our summers, and yet such is the fact. In my own little village, situated over fourteen hundred feet above the level of the ocean, I have seen a plant growing in the earth green through all the months from October to April."

--Mr. Shellabarger opposed the purchase. He said those nation which had been compact and solid had been the most enduring, while those which had the most extended territory lasted the least space of time.

--Mr. Price of Iowa thought that it was "far better to expend the $7,200,000 in improving the Mississippi River, in order that bread-stuffs may be transported cheaply from the West to the seaboard." He had no faith in the value of the territory proposed to be purchased.

--Mr. McCarthy of New York rejected the plea that we should purchase Alaska because Russia is a friendly power. "I ask this House," said he, "whence this friendship comes. It comes from self-interest. She is the absorbing power of the Eastern continent, and she recognizes us as the absorbing power of the western continent; and through friendship for us she desires to override and overbalance the governments of Europe which are between her and us."

--General Butler moved a proviso, that "the payment of $500,000 of said appropriation be withheld until the Imperial Government of Russia shall signify its willingness to refer to an impartial tribunal all such claims by American citizens against the Imperial Government as have been investigated by the State Department of the United States and declared to be just, and the amounts so awarded to be paid from said $500,000 so withheld."

--General Garfield, presiding at the time over the Committee of the Whole, ruled it out of order, and on an appeal being taken the decision was sustained by ayes 93, noes 27. After dilatory motions and the offer of various amendments, which were rejected, the bill was passed by ayes 113, noes 43.

--The House prefaced the bill by a preamble, asserting in effect that "the subjects embraced in the treaty are among those which by the Constitution are submitted to the power of Congress, and over which Congress has jurisdiction; and for these reasons, it is necessary that the consent of Congress should be given to the said stipulations before the same can have full force and effect." There was no mention of the Senate's ratification, merely a reference to the fact that "the President has entered into a treaty with the Emperor of Russia, and has agreed to pay him the sum of seven million two hundred thousand dollars in coin." The House by this preamble evidently claimed that its consent to the treaty was just as essential as the consent of the Senate,--that it was, in short, a subject for the consideration of Congress.

The Senate was unwilling to admit such a pretension, especially when put forth by the House in this bald form, and therefore rejected it unanimously. The matter was sent to a conference, and by changing the preamble a compromise was promptly effected, which preserved the rank and dignity of both branches. It declared that "whereas the President had entered into a treaty with the Emperor of Russia, and the Senate thereafter gave its advice and consent to said treaty, . . . and whereas said stipulations cannot be carried into full force and effect, except by legislation to which the consent of both Houses of Congress is necessary; therefore be it enacted that there be appropriated the sum of $7,200,000" for the purpose named. With this compromise the bill was readily passed, and became a law by the President's approval July 27, 1868.

The preamble finally agreed upon, though falling far short of the one first adopted by the House, was yet regarded as a victory for that branch. The issue between the Senate and the House, now adjusted by a compromise, is an old one, agitated at different periods ever since the controversy over the Jay treaty in 1794-95. It is simply whether the House is bound to vote for an appropriation to carry out a treaty Constitutionally made by the President and the Senate, without judging for itself whether, on the merits of the treaty, the appropriation should be made. After the appropriation required under the Jay treaty had been voted by the House, that body declared in a resolution which was adopted by ayes 57, noes 35, "that it is the Constitutional right and duty of the House of Representatives, in all such cases, to deliberate on the expediency or inexpediency of carrying such treaty into effect, and to determine and act thereon as in their judgment may be most conducive to the public good." But that was the declaration of the House only; whereas the preamble agreed to in the appropriation of money for the purchase of Alaska contained the assent of both branches.

Though the Constitutional principle involved may not be considered as one settled beyond a fair difference of opinion, there has undoubtedly been a great advance, since the controversy between the two branches in 1794, in favor of the rights of the House when an appropriation of money is asked to carry out a treaty. The change has been so great indeed that the House would not now in any case consider itself under a Constitutional obligation to appropriate money in support of a treaty, the provisions of which it did not approve. It is therefore practically true that all such treaties must pass under the judgment of the House as well as under that of the Senate and the President. Judge McLean of the Supreme Court delivered an opinion which is often referred to as embodying the doctrine upon which the House rests its claim of power.* "A treaty," said the learned Justice, "is the supreme law of the land only when the treaty-making power can carry it into effect. A treaty which stipulates for the payment of money undertakes to do that which the treaty-making power cannot do; therefore the treaty is not the supreme law of the land. To give it effect the action of Congress is necessary, and in this action the representatives and senators act on their own judgment and responsibility and not on the judgment and responsibility of the treaty-making power. A foreign government may be presumed to know that the power of appropriating money belongs to Congress. No act of any part of the Government can be held to be a law which has not all the sanctions to make it law."(2)

The territory which we thus acquired is of vast extent, exceeding in its entire area a half million square miles. Its extreme length is about eleven hundred miles; its extreme width about eight hundred. It stretches nearly to the seventy-second degree of north latitude, three hundred and fifty miles beyond Behring's Straits; and borders upon the Arctic Ocean for more than a thousand miles. The adjacent islands of the Aleutian group are included in the transfer, and reach two-thirds of the way across the North Pacific in the latitude of 60 degrees,--the westernmost island being within six hundred miles of the coast of Kamtchatka. The resources of the forests of Alaska are very great,--the trees growing to a good height on the mountain sides as far as two thousand feet above the tide level. The timber is of the character generally found in Northern climates: yellow cedar of durable quality, spruce, larch, fir of great size, and hemlock. In the world's rapid and wasteful consumption of wood, the forests of Alaska will prove not merely a substantial resource for the interests of the future, but a treasure-house in point of pecuniary value. To this source of wealth on land that of the water must be added, in the seal and food fish which are found in immeasurable quantities along the coast of the mainland and the islands.

From the time of the acquisition of Louisiana until the purchase of Alaska, the additions of territory to the United States had all been in the interest of slavery. Louisiana, stretching across the entire country from South to North, was of equal value to each section; but the acquisition of Florida, the annexation of Texas, the territory acquired from Mexico by the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, with the addition of Arizona under the Gadsden treaty, were all made under the lead of Southern statesmen to strengthen the political power and the material resources of the South. Meanwhile, by the inexcusable errors of the Democratic party, and especially of Democratic diplomacy, we lost that vast tract on the north known as British Columbia, the possession of which, after the acquisition of Alaska, would have given to the United States the continuous frontage on the Pacific Ocean from the south line of California to Behring's Straits. Looking northward for territory, instead of southward, was a radical change of policy in the conduct of the Government,--a policy which, happily and appropriately, it was the good fortune of Mr. Seward to initiate under impressive and significant circumstances.

[(1) Turner vs. The American Baptist Missionary Union, 5 McLean, 544.]

[(2) Mr. Jefferson, more promptly than other great statesmen of his generation, appreciated the degree of power residing in the House of Representatives. In a private letter discussing the subject he expressed views in harmony with Justice McLean's opinion, long before that opinion was delivered. He wrote to Mr. Monroe: "We conceive the Constitutional doctrine to be, that though the President and Senate have the general power of making treaties, yet whenever they include in a treaty matters confided by the Constitution to the three branches of the Legislature, an act of legislation will be necessary to confirm these articles, and that the House of Representatives, as one branch of the Legislature, are perfectly free to pass the act or to refuse it, governing themselves by their own judgment whether it is for the good of their constituents to let the treaty go into effect or not. On this depends whether the powers of legislation shall be transferred from the President, Senate, and House of Representatives, to the President, Senate, and Piamingo, or any other Indian, Algerine, or other chief."]

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