and being in a state of armed rebellion on the 8th of November, 1864 (the day of the Presidential election,) therefore, resolved, that the States named were not entitled to representation in the electoral college for the choice of President and Vice President of the United States." This joint resolution was presented to the President, and signed by him; but, on the 8th of February, he sent to Congress a message, stating that the resolution had been signed by the Executive, in deference to the views of Congress, implied in its passage and presentation to him. presentation to him. He added, however, this statement especially important as expressive of his views upon the subject of reconstruction: "The two Houses of Congress, convened under the twelfth article of the constitution, have complete power to exclude from counting all electoral votes deemed by them to be illegal, and it is not competent for the Executive to defeat or obstruct that power by a veto, as would be the case if his action were at all essential in the matter. He disclaimed all right of the Executive to interfere in any way, in the matter of canvassing or counting electoral votes, &c." *

On the 8th of February, 1865, both Houses of Congress convened in the Hall of the House of Representatives, the President of the Senate presiding, for the purpose of opening and counting the votes for President and Vice President. The whole number of votes given was two hundred and twenty-three, of which Abraham Lincoln received two hundred and twelve, and George B. McClellan received twenty-one, for the office of President; and Andrew Johnson and George H. Pendleton, respectively, received the same number for Vice President, and, thereupon, Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson, having received the majority of the whole number of the electoral votes for President and Vice President, were declared duly elected.

The subject of reconstruction came again before Congress, in various forms, at this session. The "Bill to guarantee to certain States whose governments have been usurped or overthrown, a republican form of government," was again considered, January 16th, 1865.

*McPherson's History. p. 579.

Mr. Elliot moved a substitute for the bill, providing that the States declared to be in rebellion shall not be permitted to resume their political relations with the Government of the United States, until they shall have adopted a State constitution, forever prohibiting involuntary servitude, and guaranteeing to all persons, freedom and equality of rights before the law.*

Mr. Wilson of Iowa, proposed to amend by providing that Senators and Representatives should not be received from the rebellious States, until by act, or joint resolution of Congress, approved by the President, or passed, notwithstanding his objections, such State shall have been first declared to have organized a just local government, republican in form.

Mr. Arnold of Illinois, offered an amenduent, which was accepted, abolishing and prohibiting slavery in all the territory in rebellion against the United States.†

Mr. Kelley of Pennsylvania, proposed to amend the bill by providing that all colored male citizens in the rebellious States, who could read the Constitution of the United States should be enrolled as voters. In support of this amendment he said:

"The organized war power of the rebellion is on the eve of overthrow. It belongs to us to govern the territory we have conquered, and the question of reconstruction presses itself upon our attention: and our legislation in this behalf will, though it comprises no specific provisions on the subject, determine whether guerrilla war shall harrass communities for long years, or be suppressed in a brief time by punishment administered through courts and law, to marauders for the crimes they may commit under the name of partisan warfare. At the close of an international war, the wronged but victorious party may justly make two claims; indemnity for the past, and security for the future; indemnity for the past in money or in territory; security for the future by new treaties, the establishment of new boundaries, or the cession of military power and the territory upon which it dwells. Indemnity for the past we cannot hope to obtain. When we shall have punished the conspirators who involved the country in this sanguinary war, and pardoned the dupes and victims who have arrayed themselves or been forced to do battle under their flag, we shall but have repossessed our ancient territory, reestablished the boundaries of our country, restored to our flag and Constitution their supremacy over territory which was ours but which the insurgents meant to dismember and possess. The other demand we may and must successfully make. Security for the future is accessible to us, and we must demand it; and to obtain it with amplest guaranties requires the adoption of no new idea, the making of no experiment, the entering upon no sea of political speculation.

* Congressional Globe, 2d session, 38th Congress, page 281. † Congressional Globe, 2d session, 38th Congress, page 284.

Congressional Globe, 2d session, 38th Congress, page 281-288.

"Let us meet the question fairly. Do our institutions rest on complexional differences? Can we cement and perpetuate them by surrendering the patriots of the insurgent district, shorn of all political power, into the hands of the traitors whom we propose to propitiate by such a sacrifice of faith and honor? Did God ordain our country for a single race of men? Is there reason why the intelligent, wealthy, loyal man of color shall stand apart abased, on election day, while his ignorant, intemperate, vicious, and disloyal white neighbor par cipates in making laws for his government? What is the logic that denies to a son the right to vote with or against his father, because it has pleased Heaven that he should partake more largely of his mother's than of the father s complexion? And is it not known to all of us that well nigh forty per cent. of the colored people of the south are children of white fathers, who, after we subjugate them, will, with professions of loyalty only lip deep, enjoy the right of suffrage in the reconstructed States? Shall he, though black as ebony be his skin, who, by patient industry, obedience to the laws, and unvarying good habits, has accumulated property on which he cheerfully pays taxes, be denied the right of a voice in the government of a State to whose support and welfare he thus contributes; while the idle, reckless, thriftless man of fairer complexion shall vote away his earnings and trifle with his life or interests as a juror? Shall the brave man who has periled life, and mayhap lost limb, who has endured the dangers of the march, the camp, and the bivouac in defense of our Constitution and laws, be denied their protection, while the traitors in the conquest of whom he assisted, enjoy those rights, and use them as instruments for his oppression and degradation."

He makes the following quotations from the testimony of Colonel Hanks:

"I knew a family of five who were freed by the voluntary enlistment of one of the boys. He entered the ranks for the avowed purpose of freeing his family. His name was Moore; he was owned by the Messrs. Leeds, iron founders; they resided within one of the parishes excepted in the Proclamation of Emancipation. He was the first man to fall at Pascagoula. Upon starting he said to his family, I know I shall fall, but you will be free.'

"A negro soldier demanded his children at my hands. I wanted to test his affection. I said 'they had a good home.' He said, 'Lieutenant, I want to send my children to school; my wife is not allowed to see them; I am in your service; I wear military clothes; I have been in three battles; I was in the assault at Port Hudson; I want my children; they are my flesh and blood.'

"The grave, long years hence, will close over those who to the last day of their life would, were it in their power, overthrow the Government or revenge their supposed wrongs upon those who aided in sustaining it. The truly loyal white men of the insurrectionary districts need the sympathy and political support of all the loyal people among whom they dwell, and unless we give it to them, we place them as abjectly at the feet of those who are now in arms against us, as we do the negro whom their oppressors so despise. I cannot conceive how the American Congress could write a page of history that would so disgrace it in the eyes of all posterity as by consenting to close this war by surrendering to the unbridled lust and power of the conquered traitors of the South, those who, through blood, terror, and anguish, have been our friends, true to our principles and our welfare. To purchase peace by such heartless meanness and so gigantic a barter of principle, would be unparalleled in baseness in the history of mankind.

"We are to shape the future. We cannot escape the duty. And 'conciliation, compromise, and concession,' are not the methods we are to use. These alas! have been abundantly tried, and their result has been agitation, strife, war, and desolation. No man has the right to compromise justice; it is immutable; and He whose law it is never fails to avenge its compromise or violation. Ours is not the work of construction, it is that of reconstruction; not that of creation, but of regeneration; and, as 1 have shown the principle of the life we are to shape glares on us

lighting our pathway, from every page of history written by our Revolutionary Fathers. Would we see the issue of 'compromise, concession, and conciliation? Sir, we behold it in the blazing home, the charred roof-tree; the desolate hearthside, the surging tide of fratricidal war, and the green mounds beneath which sleep half a million of the bravest and best loved of our men."

Winter Davis made the following prediction of the results which would follow a failure to pass the bill:*

"If this bill do not become a law, when Congress again meets, at our doors, clamorous and dictatorial, will be sixty-five Representatives from the States now in rebellion, and twenty-two Senators claiming admission, and, upon the theory of the honorable gentleman, entitled to admission beyond the power of argument to resist it; for peace will have been restored, there will be no armed power but that of the United States; there will be quiet, and votes will be polled under the existing laws of the State, in the gentleman's view. Are you ready to accept that consequence? For if they come to the door of the House they will cross the threshold of the House, and any gentleman who does not know that, or who is so weak or so wild as to suppose that any declaratory resolution adopted by both Houses as a condition precedent can stop that flood, had better put his puny hands across the flood of the flowing Mississippi and say that it shall not enter the Gulf of Mexico."

Mr. Dawes of Massachusetts, said:†

"My only purpose is to impress upon this House the very conclusion which finds sanction in the last section of this bill, namely, that no form can be prescribed, no law laid down here, no unbending iron rule fixed by the central Government, for the governing of that people, or prescribing the method in which they shall make their organic law. Each of them shall work out that problem for itself and in its own way. That form and system which is best adapted to Louisiana and Arkansas is quite different from that which is ultimately to be adopted in South Carolina and Georgia. These are a people unlike in their habits and pursuits, in their notions, in their loyalty or disloyalty, whichever it may be. In each one of these States the condition of things and feelings is unique, and finds no counterpart in any other. In the States more particularly under consideration, the people are struggling to rise from chaos into the form of Republican organic law. The others to which I have alluded, are still wandering in the wilderness of treason and rebellion, and rolling as a sweet morsel under their tongue the sin which has brought all this calamity upon us."

The bill was finally laid upon the table by ayes 80, noes 65.‡

The question of the admission of Senators and members from Louisiana, Arkansas, and Virginia, was much discussed in both Houses of Congress at this session, but no final vote was taken.

The public mind had been painfully impressed with the statements of the barbarities inflicted upon Union prisoners by the Confederate authorities. The exchange of prisoners

Congressional Globe, Second Session, Thirty-eighth Congress, p. 969.

† Congressional Globe, Second Session, Thirty-eighth Congress, p. 937. Congressional Globe, Second Session, Thirty-eighth Congress, page 1002.

had been interrupted, really and mainly because the rebel authorities refused to exchange colored Union soldiers, and refused to treat them as prisoners of war. The story of the treatment of Union prisoners at Libby prison and Belle Isle at Richmond, at Andersonville, Selma, and other places, and the massacre at Fort Pillow, filled the whole land with horror. The Committee on the Conduct of the war, were directed by Congress, to investigate, and their report confirmed the conviction that the most unparalleled cruelties had been inflicted upon the Union prisoners. It was established that at Andersonville, in 1864, there were 35,000 Union prisoners confined in a field of some thirty acres, and that 30,000 of them were without shelter, or even shade; crowded together, sleeping upon the ground without blankets, and many of them partially naked. Their rations scarcely adequate to sustain life, and of a quality that approaching starvation, alone, could induce men to eat. Added to inadequacy and unwholesomeness of food, resulting in a condition nearly approaching starvation, want of shelter, and clothing, and the crowding of vast numbers into a small space, was the most brutal and inhuman treatment by the guard; often shooting down unarmed men apparently for amusement.* In the Senate, on the 16th of January, 1865, Senator Wade offered a resolution, that all Confederate prisoners, both officers and men, should receive the same rations, the same clothing, and be subject to the same treatment in every respect, as Federal prisoners of war in the power of the rebels.

Senator Lane, of Indiana, urging the adoption of the resolution, stated that there were about 45,000 Union prisoners in rebel prisons, and that the Government held about double that number of rebel prisoners. He stated in substance, that most of these 45,000 had been reduced by starvation to utter helplessness. Those of them who escape the slow torture of death by starvation, return emaciated and feeble, and unfit for service. We, as christians, feed, clothe, and provide for the rebel prisoners in our hands. Those we return to them,

* See testimony on the trial of Wertz. Report of the Committee on Conduct of the war. See appeal to the President by officers confined at Charleston, dated August 1864; also Report of Sanitary Commission.