necine war. It had stained every hearth-stone in the land with brothers' blood. That the animosities engendered by this struggle did not soon disappear, is no more than could reasonably be expected. There was a natural aversion in the North to any immediate settlement of Federal relations that would admit into the direction of national affairs men who had exhausted the whole power of the South in that long and desperate contest. It was impracticable to indict or punish, by process of law, a whole people for engaging in that struggle. Whether the United States Government was or was not estopped from such a mode of punishment by having conducted the war as against a belligerent power, it was impossible, under our judicial system, to bring the offenders to trial in any judicial district where the juries themselves were not equally amenable before the law. The Southern people did not feel that they had committed any crime. They regarded their resistance to the Federal authority as a rightful act. They held it to be patriotism and self-defense. So feeling, and if allowed to exercise their constitutional right to be represented in the national Congress the moment their armed resistance had ceased, how would their Senators and Representatives have acted? Would their course have tended to reconcile the lately warring sections? Would it have had the effect of defeating the results of the war? These questions suggest the gravity of the situation at that time. That gravity consisted more in the fact that the people of the South, almost in mass, still believed that their cause was just. It is now, and was then, the belief of the writer that our government was pledged, in its conduct of the war, to that course which would, on the moment the hostilities terminated, take immediate steps for the complete extension of the Federal relations to all parts of the Union, under conditions of generous and not grudging amnesty. It was these relations that were destroyed, and not the existence of sovereign states. It was these relations which were involved in the insurrection. The Crittenden resolutions, adopted in the House of Representatives on July 22, 1861, with but two dissenting votes, and afterwards in the Senate by a vote of thirty to five, pledged the national faith to this course in these words: "That this war is not prosecuted upon our part in any spirit of oppression, nor for any purpose of conquest or subjugation, nor purpose of overthrowing or interfering with the rights and established institutions of those states, but to defend and maintain the supremacy of the Constitution and all laws made in pursuance thereof, and to preserve the Union, with all the dignity, equality, and rights of the several states unimpaired; that as soon as these objects are accomplished the war ought to cease." Mr. Howe had voted for this resolution. Did it admit the doctrine of valid secession or state felo-de-se? The object "to defend and maintain the supremacy of the Constitution and all laws in pursuance thereof, and to preserve the Union," could not be effected while the dominant political party of PRESIDENT LINCOLN'S THEORY OF THE WAR. 363 the country was refusing to recognize as unimpaired the dignity, equality, and rights of the late insurrectionary states. The Democratic party was loyal to this resolution throughout the war. The hand-writing of Mr. Crittenden in that historic document is as familiar to the eye of the writer as if it were the face of an old friend. He was elected upon its principles in 1862, in the midst of the war and by a Republican district. Its principles were understood to be Mr. Lincoln's cautious shibboleth. It was because of its essential loyalty to the Union and Constitution that the Democratic party was anxious at all times during the war to propose or accept terms of compromise looking to the restoration of the Union. But it never did nor would consent to a disruption of the Union. The Democratic party did not support the war for the purpose of destroying slavery, nor with a view to obtain and retain control of the government. It would at any time have embraced the "Union as it was," and let slavery disappear, as it must necessarily have done, in the peaceful mode by which the advance of liberal ideas would have brought about emancipation. Many good men, in and out of Congress, feared to trust the South with its rightful constitutional power when the Civil War terminated. It was feared that its power would be exercised to defeat, as far as possible, the results of the war. It might bring ruin to our financial system. It might lead to the repudiation of the national debts and the just claims, of those who had given up their blood and treasure for the maintenance of the Union. This apprehension gave great strength to the Republican party during the protracted period of reconstruction. It was easy for the selfishness of partisanship to exaggerate the dangers that would ensue if a period of probation, or purgation, was not passed through by those who had "sought to destroy the Union." But there were men of undoubted loyalty who had no fear of any evil results from the immediate restoration of Federal relations. Suppose the South had been at once admitted to representation in Congress? Would that section have been able to destroy any legitimate object for which the national government had contended in the struggle? Certainly not. In such case, if the South had not accepted amnesty as freely and in as good faith as it was offered by the President of the United States, she would soon have found herself in a minority so small as to leave her nothing else to do than to honestly accept the results of the war. There would, if the South remained sullen, soon be, as practically there was during the early part of the war, but one party in the North. Extreme partisanship always defeats itself. It ruled during the period of reconstruction following the close of armed hostilities. Had not the dominant party an overweening, and many of them a malicious desire to perpetuate their power, no such chaos would have come to mark that period.. It is this partisanship that deserves to be pilloried by patriotic rebuke. It is not the sincere fears that gave it strength. There was indeed some apparent reason for these fears in the course pursued in the South against the colored people. The emancipation of the slaves was one of the legitimate results of the war. What was the legitimate result of emancipation? Had not that great Southerner, John C. Calhoun, always said that with emancipation must come equality before the law-civil and even political rights? Was not the latter result hastened by the unwisdom of extremes? It was extremes on both sides that hastened the grant of the franchise to a class who were unprepared to exercise it. But it was only hastened, for eventually the South herself would concede the franchise when it would be more intelligently exercised. One of the main difficulties of intelligent discussion in respect to the constitutional questions involved in secession and reconstruction, is the misuse of terms. Secession was not "war"; it was "insurrection." The effort for its suppression had to be made in the mode of civilized warfare, because of the force and extent of the resistance to be overcome; and because foreign governments recognized the South as a belligerent power. But these facts could not affect the true relation of the national government to the question, which was simply one of insurrection and the constitutional requirement for its suppression. Before closing this chapter, the writer takes a patriotic pride in being able to say that throughout the whole period of civil war and reconstruction, in every debate in the National Legislature, in every act of the Executive, and in every decision of the Judicial branch of the government, there was ever an earnest protestation of submission to the Constitution of the United States. The worst excesses of partisanship did not dare to openly evade its mandates. Even the South, which had tried to dissever its Federal relations, again appealed, as it had the right to do, to the protection of that palladium of their government-THE CONSTITUTION. CHAPTER XX. RECONSTRUCTION IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES. DIALECTICS AND SOPHISTRIES OF THE RADICALS THADDEUS STEVENS AS A - CONSTITU Τ HE author was not at first impressed with the genius and ability of Thaddeus Stevens. In the Thirty-sixth Congress, when Governor Pennington was elected Speaker after a prolonged struggle, this Pennsylvanian of Vermont birth did not appear to advantage. His only effort in that struggle was a motion of immaterial consequence about the deadlock. He then subsided into a seeming stolid mediocrity. But he was far removed from mediocrity. He had a will of audacious and intolerant quality. His humor was not like that of "Ben" Harden or "Tom" Corwin,- iridescent and genial. It smacked of Voltaire. It had lurid lights. The intensity of his hatred was only next to infernal; but he seldom indulged it. He never hated a fair opponent. He did hate, bitterly, some of his own party who would not follow his doctrine, and obliterate states in order to territorialize and terrorize them. He had Pluto's iron countenance; but he could unbend and be kindly. His neighbors of all classes and colors and of both sexes, in and about Lancaster County, remember him as almost genial, notwithstanding the inflexibility of his countenance and the determination of his character. He was, more even than Judge Howe or Mr. Sumner, the constructionist of the new order and the obstructionist to the rebuilding of the older order. In the House of Representatives, early in the first session of the Thirty-eighth Congress, on the 5th of December, 1865, he arose to dictatorship. He commanded universal party obedience. That Congress had great parliamentary ability. It had its Washburnes, its Wilsons, its Binghams, its Shellabargers, and its Blaines. It had but one Thaddeus Stevens. This man was not superficial. He was profound. He knew that the times called either for retrogression from his war policies, or else organic and risky forwardness. He would not ask to carry out the Constitution. He would, at least, first amend it. How? Thus, for example: "Neither the United States, nor any state in the Union, shall ever assume or pay any part of the debt of the so-called Confederate States of America, or of any state, contracted to carry on war with the United States." On the same day that he offered this he proposed the following amendment to the Constitution: "Amend the ninth section of the first article by expunging so much thereof as says: No tax or duty shall be laid on articles exported from any state."" This was a cunning, tentative tender to his party. It was to be followed by almost inconceivable audacities of policy; for, on the same day, he moved another amendment to the Constitution. It was this: "Representatives shall be apportioned among the states which may be within the Union, according to their respective legal voters, and for this purpose none shall be named as legal voters who are not either native-born citizens or naturalized foreigners. Congress shall provide for ascertaining the number of said voters. A true census of the legal voters shall be taken at the same time with the regular census." Would he stop herc? By no means. On the same day he introduced the following amendment: "Article XIII. All national and state laws shall be equally applicable to every citizen, and no discrimination shall be made on account of race and color." All of these proposed amendments, except that which was intended to authorize the taxation of exports, have been incorporated into the Constitution, substantially, though in more guarded language. The failure to adopt the proposed amendment allowing a tax on exports did not prevent Congress, however, from imposing a tax on cotton, a product mostly raised for exportation. Sixty-seven millions of dollars of cotton taxes were collected. The right to govern the insurgent states as territories, Mr. Stevens asserted as necessary. Many curious logical difficulties arose from the admission of that right. To deny the right of secession and to assert the right to suppress a rebellion in which the authorities in the states are involved, and at the same time to concede to the people of such states, upon surrendering their arms, the right to resume their position as citizens, with all the privileges of citizens, would seem to some minds to be at least impolitic. But, admitting that the United States Government has the right to maintain its authority against the authorities of a state, or a combination of state authorities, does it follow that the right to govern these states as territories must be conceded to the United States when no insurrection exists? The idea of holding, for a generation perhaps, any people, whether they |