THE PRESIDENT A DICTATOR.

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He had sustained interference by force of arms in these states with the same readiness which he had exhibited in Arkansas and Louisiana, and the alarmed imagination of senators and representatives pictured him absolute military dictator of the whole country south of Mason and Dixon's line; while in the North, the closed newspaper offices and the prisons crowded with political prisoners, against numbers of whom there had been no charges, showed what they might expect of one so powerful, and of whose readiness to exert unconstitutional power there now could be no doubt. In the three years and a quarter in which he had been President, his course had been strewn with unconstitutional acts; he had left few precedents lacking for a future usurper; the people not only had ratified these acts and these precedents by an immense majority, as the people in all times and places have done when they have had the opportunity, but they had given him four years more in which to complete his work; and worse than all, he had not only usurped the powers of the people and of the states, but he had shown his contempt of Congress in a manner not to be mistaken. Already, they saw him at the head of his troops before the Speaker's chair, and heard him cry, "Take away that bauble!"

Such were the imaginings of the President's own party members in Congress. The radicals mistrusted him because he had not gone far enough and had not enfranchised, as well as liberated, the Louisiana negro; the conservatives, if such a term can be applied to those of the Republican party who were not radical abolitionists, opposed him because he had taken to himself the exercise of power which properly belonged

to them. The third faction, the President's own following in Congress, had been greatly strengthened in spirit and number by the result of the election and the consequent new lease of power, and by the obvious wane of the rebellion: this faction included those who were known as War Democrats. The President, therefore, had no mean support in the Senate and in the House, particularly when it is considered that the radicals were always ready to sustain any of his measures which affected the South and were not repugnant to their views of the slave question.

The reconstruction of Louisiana continued - Debate in the Senate upon the recognition of Louisiana as a state.

On the eighteenth of February, 1865, the Committee on the Judiciary, to whom were referred the credentials of two persons claiming seats as senators from the state of Louisiana, made a report on the subject to the Senate, accompanied by a joint resolution which recognized the new government of that state as the legitimate government,1 and on the twenty-third of the same month, this resolution was considered as in committee of the whole.2

The debate lasted several days, and before it terminated, many of the leading members of the Senate had taken part in a discussion which was not confined to the conditions of the state of Louisiana, but which embraced even the general question, What is a state? In this discussion the line was drawn sharply between the presidential faction, on one side, and the allied congressional and radical factions on the other; the former being led by Trumbull, Henderson, Pomeroy, and Doolittle, and the latter by Sumner, Howard, and Wade.

In answer to a question why Arkansas was excluded Cong. Globe, 1011.

1 Cong. Globe, 903.

2

from the resolution, Trumbull, the chairman of the committee reporting, said that the facts were not precisely the same in the two states, but that the principle upon which the committee acted, if adopted, would be applicable to any other state. Sumner at once moved to strike out all of the resolution after the enacting clause, and to insert a resolution that neither the people nor the legislature of a state proclaimed to be in insurrection should elect representatives or senators to Congress until the President should have proclaimed that armed hostility had ceased in that state, nor until its people had adopted a constitution not repugnant to the Constitution and laws of the United States; nor until, by a law of Congress, such state should have been declared to be entitled to representation in Congress. Trumbull objected to this, because, being prospective, it would not apply to the case in hand, and because it would put it in the power of the President to keep out a state forever by refusing to issue his proclamation. The Senate thought so, too, and rejected Sumner's amendment by an emphatic majority.

On the day following, Powell continued the debate1 by saying that the object in recognizing Louisiana at that time was to allow the state to vote for the proposed amendment to the Constitution of the United States.2 The admission of senators and representatives from Louisiana would be an immediate result of the passage of the resolution.

1 Cong. Globe, 2d Sess. 38th Cong., 1061.

2 "Article XIII. Sec. I. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

SENATE DEBATE ON LOUISIANA.

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Powell, in a forcible address, objected to the recognition on the grounds that the state had never been out of the Union, and therefore it needed no recognition; for whenever the facts were established that the people of the state had ceased resistance to the federal government, and had determined to be loyal, and a majority of them had elected their senators and representatives, Congress should then admit these senators and representatives. But he was going to show that beyond the possibility of a doubt the people of Louisiana who formed this state government had not asked of their own free volition, but that they had been coerced to do what they did, and that the constitution presented as the fundamental law was not a constitution made by the free suffrages of the people of that state.

This he proceeded to do at length by taking up the test oath prescribed by the President and exposing its "degrading" character and its unconstitutionality. Its unconstitutionality spoke for itself; the oath was a condition precedent to becoming a qualified voter, and one feature of it was that a man swore to support all the proclamations of the President already issued on the subject of slavery, and all the proclamations that he might make on that subject in the future. No one who was a free man, and who understood his civil and political rights, would so prostitute himself as to take that oath; there was a large class of loyal men in Louisiana who refused to take it; all such were excluded from voting. No senator ever had defended that odious feature. He then discussed the one tenth minimum of loyalty which the President had laid down as a fundamental principle of reconstruction,