The power of the President upon the question of instituting governments in the Rebel States, is that which he possesses as Commander-in-chief of the army. This is provisional and temporary. Permanent civil government to last beyond the war, with the right of representation in Congress, and in the electoral college, cannot, Mr. Sumner contended, be initiated by the President. The National safety as well as the theory of our government requires that it should be exercised by the law making power of the republic.

What were Mr. Lincoln's views on the subject? He appointed military governors, and most earnestly desired the early restoration of the rebel States. But his proclamation by its very terms necessarily implied the action of Congress in the restoration of a State to the Union. Upon this question Mr. Sumner said:

"There is first the positive declaration that whether members sent to Congress from any State shall be admitted to seats rests constitutionally, exclusively with the respective Houses, and not to any extent with the Executive.' But the language of the proclamation and of the accompanying message plainly assumes that the rebel States have lost their original character as States of the Union.* Thus in one place the President says that loyal State Governments have for a long time been subverted.' But if subverted, they are no longer States. In another place he proposes to re-inaugurate loyal State Governments.' But a proposition to re-inaugurate, implies a new start. In another place he proposes to reestablish a State Government which shall be Republican.' But we do not reëstablish a Government which continues to exist. In another place he proposes to set up' a State Government in the mode prescribed. But whatever requires to be set up is evidently down. In another place he seeks to guarantee and protect a 'revived State Government.' But we revive only what is dead, or at least faint. There is still another place, where the President evidently looks to the possibility of a change of name, boundary, subdivision, constitution, and general code of laws in the restored State. These are his identical words: And it is suggested as not improper that in constructing a loyal State Government in a State, the name of the State, the boundary, the subdivisions, the constitution, and the general code of laws, as before the rebellion, be maintained.' Thus the President does not insist that even the name and boundary of a State shall be preserved. He contents

* Encyclopedia of 1864, p. 312–13.

himself with suggesting that it will not be improper' to preserve them in constructing a loyal State Government.'"*

The Senate finally adopted the following important resolution on the subject:

"Resolved, That a State pretending to secede from the Union, and battling against the National Government to maintain this pretension, must be regarded as a rebel State, subject to military occupation, and without title to representation on this floor until it has been re-admitted by a vote of both Houses of Congress; and the Senate will decline to entertain any application from any such rebel State until after such vote of both Houses of Congress." t

The condition of the Freedmen, those who had by the operations of the war, the various acts of Congress, and the Emancipation Proclamation been emancipated and made free, early attracted the attention of the humane and the patriotic. Having been bondmen, they had acquired no property. Education had been prohibited to them, the fruits of their industry had been appropriated by their masters, and thus a whole race hitherto incapable of holding property, homeless, and with little education, must, in the midst of civil war, and among a people exasperated against them, learn to take care of themselves. It was obvious that they needed kindly aid, guidance, assistance. The benevolent, religious and patriotic of the loyal states were ready to aid, and voluntary associations did aid them with food, clothing, schools, religious instruction and books. But as they were the wards of the Republic, and their able bodied men were largely in the army fighting its battles, it was felt that the Government itself should aid and protect them. Mr. Elliot of Massachusetts, in January, 1864, reported a bill providing for the establishment of a Bureau of Emancipation. He, and its other friends eloquently urged its passage. After full discussion the bill passed the House. Going to the Senate, it was amended and modified, and coming back again to the House, was postponed to the next session.

It was during the discussion in the House on this bill on the 19th of February, 1864, that James Brooks, a democratic

* Encyclodia of 1864, p. 314.

+ Congressional Globe, First Session Thirty-eighth Congress, p. 2898.

member of Congress from the city of New York, in a speech of great vigor and comprehensiveness, startled his demoratic brethren by announcing the death of salvery! The speech was remarkable, as showing the progress of events and of public sentiment on the slavery question. Mr. Brooks had long been the editor of the New York Express; he was a gentleman of fine culture, a conservative whig in the days of the whig party, and a bitter opponent of abolition. But he yielded to the logic of events.*

"Sir," said he, "the abolition of slavery is a fixed fact, a fact accomplished. I must accept it. I cannot close my eyes upon it, any more than upon the sun, or upon the sunshine, the tornado or the storm. What is written is written; and I must be blind if I did not see that slavery is abolished. I cannot help it, I cannot avoid it. Massachusetts has ordained it, and the country accepts."

The eloquent gentleman exaggerated the power and influence which Massachusetts had secured by her free schools and her cultivated intellect when he exclaimed, "Massachusetts is the leading power in this land. Whatever she decrees is in all probability to be law. She exercises the same control over this vast country which stretches from the Passamaquady to the Rio Grande, and from the Rio Grande to the Pacific, that was exercised by imperial Rome on the little Tiber, from the Pillars of IIercules to the Euphrates and the Tigris. Boston, her Capital, is well called the "hub" of our universe: * * * and emancipation is a Massachusetts thunderbolt. "And I know the spirit of Massachusetts. I know her inexorable, unappeasable, demoniac energy. I know that what she decrees, she will execute." But although Mr. Brooks announced the death of slavery, it still lived in Kentucky, and elsewhere, although it was in a dying condi tion. Mr. Brooks was admonished by a member from the West, "that in the days of Cromwell, it was supposed that monarchy was dead in England, yet but a few years passed, and Charles II, sat upon the throne of his ancestors, and monarchy was in full sway. "God save the country," said he, "from the return of the slave Kings. Therefore let us

* Congressional Globe, First Session Thirty-eighth Congress, Part I, p. 761.

take security for the future by amending the Constitution, abolishing slavery, and prohibiting it forever."

One of the most interesting debates of this eventful session arose on the motion made by Schuyler Colfax, the Speaker of the House, for the expulsion of Alexander Long, a member of Congress from Ohio, for words spoken in debate. Long was a red faced, portly gentleman, of violent secession sympathies, and a disciple of Vallandigham. He made a speech disapproving the war, prophesying disaster and defeat, and despotism, and declaring himself in favor of recognizing the Confederates as a Nation! General Garfield, his impulsive, generous, patriotic colleague, the same, who, although a Baptist preacher, had volunteered in the war and served with courage, and ability in the field, and had distinguished himself particularly as Chief of General Rosecrans' staff at Chickamauga, immediately on Long's taking his seat, rose and, asked "that a white flag might be placed between his colleague and himself." He then recalled an incident of the war occurring on the field, in which under the folds. of a white flag he had approached a party of Confederates, and extending his hand to one, said to him that he respected him as a brave man, though disloyal, and a traitor. "I beheld," said he, "a brave and honest soul." "So of my colleague; I honor his bravery, his candor and his frankness." "But now," he continued, "take away the flag of truce, and I will go back within the Union lines and speak of what he has done." Then in a voice of eloquence which thrilled the galleries and the Hall, he exclaimed:

"Now, when hundreds of thousands of brave souls have have gone up to God under the shadow of the flag, and when thousands more, maimed and shattered in the contest, are sadly awaiting the deliverance of death; now, when three years of terrific warfare have raged over us, when our armies have pushed the rebellion back over mountains and rivers and crowded it into narrow limits, until a wall of fire girds it; now, when the uplifted hand of a majestic people is about to let fall the lightning of its conquering power upon the rebellion; now, in the quiet of this Hall, hatched in the lowest depths of a similar dark treason, there rises a Benedict Arnold and proposes to surrender us all up, body and spirit, the nation and the flag, its genius and its honor, now and forever, to

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the accursed traitors to our country. And that proposition comes-God forgive and pity my beloved State!-it comes from a citizen of the honored and loyal Commonwealth of Ohio.

"I implore you, brethren in this House, not to believe that many births ever gave pangs to my mother State, such as she suffered when that traitor was born. I beg you not to believe that on the soil of that State another such growth has ever deformed the face of nature and darkened the light of God's day. [An audible whisper, Vallandigham.']

"But ah, I am reminded that there are other such. My zeal and love for Ohio have carried me too far. I retract. I remember that only a few days since a political convention met at the capital of my State, and almost decided to select from just such material a Representative for the democratic party in the coming contest; and to-day, what claim to be a majority of the democracy of that State, declare that they were cheated, or they would have made that choice. I therefore sadly take back the boast I first uttered in behalf of my native State. * * "For the first time in the history of this contest, it is proposed in this Hall, to give up the struggle, to abandon the war, and let treason run riot through the land! I will, if I can, dismiss feeling from my heart, and try to consider only the logic of the speech to which we have just listened.

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"Suppose the policy of the gentleman were adopted to-day. Let the order go forth; sound the recall' on your bugles, and let it ring from Texas to the far Atlantic, and tell the armies to come back. Call the victorious legions back over the battle-fields of blood, forever now disgraced. Call them back over the territory they have conquered and redeemed. Call them back, and let the minions of secession chase them with derision and jeers as they come. And then tell them that that man across the aisle, from the free State of Ohio, gave birth to the monstrous proposition. "Almost in the moment of final victory the recall is sounded by a craven people. Every man who would sanction such a sentiment deserves to be a slave."

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On the following day, the Speaker, Mr. Colfax, calling Mr. Dawes of Massachusetts to the Chair, introduced a resolution for the expulsion of Long, for the reason that he had "declared himself in favor of recognizing the independence and the nationality of the so-called confederacy, now in arms against the United States, thereby giving aid,