was exacted in New Orleans only. But this registration was to have no reference to old laws: it was to be upon a new system requiring an oath of allegiance, and it was to extend into the country parishes. The governor kept his word and ordered the registration, which was suspended, however, by a power the Executive had not consulted, the enemy.

66

The principle at issue between the two parties, the planters" or conservatives, and the Free State men or radicals, can easily be guessed: It was whether the ancient state government was the true and present government, or no. If it were, then the constitution of 1852 was still in force, because the ordinance of secession and the constitution of 1861, presented by the confederate convention, were void: if it were not, then the constitution of 1852, with its amendments of 1861, had been overthrown by the rebellion of the people of the state, and the subsequent "conquest had not restored the ancient political institutions. The war "has converted into dust and ashes all the constitutions which Louisiana has ever made,” said a radical editor, who expressed the feelings of his party by declaring that the war was nothing but a conflict of the ideas of liberty and slavery, that there would be neither progress nor regress until this conflict was settled, and that a convention should be called as soon as possible, to declare that Louisiana then was and forever would be a free state.

The validity of the steps taken has been greatly disputed, and many of them are clouded with doubt. There was much crimination and recrimination. The

THE PRESIDENT RECONSTRUCTS.

333

Free State men fell out with the President. They asserted that when General Shepley took their plan to Washington, it had been approved in a cabinet meeting, accepted as the plan upon which the Executive was to act, and that an order had actually issued from the War Department to the General, as Military Governor, to carry the scheme into effect. This they declared had occurred in August, and that not only toward the end of this month the President had written to General Banks approving of the registration and expressing the hope that the work of the convention would be finished in time to hold the elections before the next session of Congress, but that in October he had complained that matters were going too slow, and that, in view of the military situation in Louisiana, he would recognize a state government organized by any part of the population under federal control. Nothing, however, was done; no general election was held, though it was asserted that a few parishes had voted, and persons claiming to have been elected members of Congress actually appeared at Washington but they were rejected.

The registration had proceeded from time to time, when, to the consternation of the Free State party, the President suddenly took the matter of reconstruction in Louisiana entirely into his own hands. The affiliation of these radicals with the radical faction in Congress, whose alienation from the President had now become a matter of notoriety, would have been reason sufficient for the President's action; there was, however, an all-controlling one in the fact that he had recently issued the Amnesty Proclamation, and by this Proclamation had taken upon himself the work of reconstruction wherever practicable.

CHAPTER XVII.

ENFORCEMENT OF THE PRESIDENTIAL PLAN OF

RECONSTRUCTION

CONTINUED.

The reconstruction of Louisiana continued.

ON the eighth of January, 1864, General Banks, commander of this department, announced that he should issue a proclamation ordering an election of state officers; and in spite of appeals to him to permit the Free State men to go on with their convention, he did so, on the eleventh of the same month. This proclamation, which has been applauded and excoriated by Congress, was addressed to the people of Louisiana, and set forth that, in pursuance of authority vested in him, the commander of the department, by the President of the United States, and being assured that more than one tenth of the voters had taken the oath of allegiance, he invited the loyal citizens of the state qualified to vote, to assemble on the twenty-second of February and elect a governor and other state officers, who, for the time being, should constitute the civil government of the state, under the constitution and laws of Louisiana, except so much as relate to slavery, "which being inconsistent with the present condition of public affairs, and plainly inapplicable to any class of persons now existing within its limits, must be suspended, and they are thereupon and hereby declared to be inoperative and void." The oath of allegiance prescribed by the President's Am

LAW MEANS MARTIAL LAW.

335

nesty Proclamation, with the condition affixed to the election franchise by the constitution of Louisiana (that is to say, that those entitled to this franchise. should be white), would constitute the qualifications. of voters. The registration, so far as it was not inconsistent with the proclamations or other orders of the President, was confirmed, and an election of delegates to a convention for the revision of the constitution, to be held on the first Monday of April, 1864, was announced, and it was stated that arrangements would be made for the early election of members of Congress for the state. An assertion then followed, which, however true the fact it contained might be, shocked the conservative sentiment of the North, and which, when the radicals in Congress espoused the cause of the Free State men, served as a text for many a radical denunciation. Why this assertion should have stirred the feeling of the people so much can be accounted for only by the well-known quality in human nature, which causes men to be shocked by the expression of a truth, though they have become perfectly reconciled to the truth itself. Everybody, north and south, knew perfectly well that the federal possession of any part of Louisiana was purely a military one; they knew that any attempt to organize a government must be absolutely dependent upon federal bayonets for support. In those days it took the people very little while to become familiar with the fact that when the federal government obtained a footing on southern territory, it kept it at the cost of military vigilance and military law; yet when General Banks abrogated so much of the constitution and laws of a sovereign state as seemed good to him, and

except at the White House, and among the adherents of the President. To say, however, that this indignation was general is to say too much. Outside of the Democratic party, Mr. Lincoln had the confidence of the middle and lower classes: there was his strength, and from these classes little or nothing was heard in protestation. The fact is, that these classes hardly knew what was going on in such a far-away place as a gulf state, and if they did, they had no appreciation of an event so significant as the subversion of a state government and the erection of another on its ruins by military force: throughout the Republican party, on the contrary, the avowal that the fundamental law of the state was martial law was accepted without cavil. The radical faction in Congress had no popular following outside of their scattered districts, the Democrats were not hearkened to, and thus the mass of the people comprised those whose knowledge of constitutional procedure was indicated by the expression, "Lincoln will do what is right." But it was quite different in Congress. There the conservative Republican redoubled his efforts to wrest the power of reconstruction from the President's grasp there the Radical sunk the fact that the acts of the conqueror were in consonance with his own teachings, in the exasperating one that the negro was not made a citizen, and reviled the President and there the Democrat pointed to this order of Banks as a realization of his oft-told prophecies.