Lincoln's Plan of Reconstruction

by Charles H. McCarthy

Sec. 3. And be it further resolved, That, in determining the extent of this duty, and in the absence of any precise definition of the term “republican form of government,” we cannot err, if, when called to perform this guaranty under the Constitution, we adopt the self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence as an authoritative rule, and insist that in every reëstablished State the consent of the governed shall be the only just foundation of government, and all men shall be equal before the law.

Not less important is the declaration in the fourth section that “in the performance of this guaranty, there can be no power under the Constitution to disfranchise loyal people, or to recognize any such disfranchisement, especially when it may hand over the loyal majority to the government of the disloyal minority; nor can there be any power under the Constitution to discriminate in favor of the rebellion by admitting to the electoral franchise rebels who have forfeited all rights and by excluding loyal persons who have never forfeited any right.” To allow the reëstablishment of any State without proper safeguards for the rights of all the citizens, and especially without making it impossible for rebels to trample upon the rights of those who are now fighting the battles of the Union, would be, said the succeeding section, for the United States to fail in duty under the Constitution.

More directly in opposition to the resolution reported by the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, however, was the seventh section, which declared “That a government founded on military power, or having its origin in military orders, cannot be a ‘republican form of government’ according to the requirement of the Constitution; and that its recognition will be contrary not only to the Constitution, but also to that essential principle of our Government which, in the language of Jefferson, establishes ‘the supremacy of the civil over the military authority.’”

The resolutions further asserted that a government founded on an oligarchical class, even if erroneously recognized as a “republican form of government,” could not sustain itself without national support; that such an organization was not at that moment competent to discharge the duties and execute the powers of a State, and that its recognition would tend to enfeeble the Union, to postpone the day of reconciliation and to endanger the national tranquillity. The ninth section renders clear one ground of Sumner’s hostility to the recognition of Louisiana. It asserts that

Considerations of expediency are in harmony with the requirements of the Constitution, and the dictates of justice and reason, especially now, when colored soldiers have shown their military value; that as their muskets are needed for the national defence against rebels in the field, so are their ballots yet more needed against the subtle enemies of the Union at home; and that without their support at the ballot-box the cause of human rights and of the Union itself will be in constant peril.[^[408]]

It was agreed on motion of Mr. Sumner to have his amendment printed.

Senator Howard, of Michigan, entered at this point into the debate. Much of what he said has already been related in the preceding narration of events leading up to the reinauguration of a loyal government in Louisiana. While admitting that the President’s plan had been undertaken for patriotic ends, he could not, he said, recognize in the Executive, without the subsidiary aid of an act of Congress, any right to assure a community, composed of voters numbering one tenth of the electors who participated in the Presidential contest of 1860, that it would be recognized as a legitimate government and entitled to the constitutional guaranty. This, he said, was a stretch of authority beyond any previous attempt, and he thought it time that Congress, in whom, he believed, rested solely the authority of readmitting and reconstructing the rebellious States, “should lay hold of this subject, assert their power, and provide by some statute of uniform application for the reconstruction, as it is called, and readmission of the insurrectionary States. That is their right and their duty; that is not the right, it is not the duty of the President.”

A State he defined negatively as not “the geographical superficies,” the land, on which population resides, and positively as “a moral person, a political community, possessing the faculty of political government.” The land, he said, is the theatre on which the political community moves and acts, but is endowed with no thought, no right, no duty. The thinking beings residing upon it constitute the State.[^[409]]

“A State of the Union or a State in the Union is, therefore, a people yielding obedience to the laws of the Union, that is, the acts of Congress and the national treaties.... A people who have a State government which is republican in form; a people who were one of the original thirteen States which formed the United States, or a people who have, since the adoption of the Constitution, been, in the language of that Constitution, ‘admitted by the Congress into this Union’ as States upon an equal footing with the original States; for this equality of rights and powers as States is plainly implied by the language and the manifest intention of the instrument; and no other people except such original State or admitted State; none but a State which permits the laws of the Union to have full scope and force within its limits; none but a State which sends Senators and Representatives to Congress friendly to the Government itself, willing to vote men and money to support and uphold it, who believe that a person forcibly resisting its authority is a traitor and deserving of death; none but a State which is willing to bring to trial, to convict such a traitor, and to punish him for his treason; none but a State whose population is capable of furnishing both the grand jury to indict and the traverse jury to convict such a traitor; none but a State whose population and whose authorities are in favor not only of permitting the laws of the United States relating to civil rights to be executed, but who are willing that the punitive code of the nation, the code of vengeance against its enemies, shall be carried out; none but such are States of the Union....

“To be in fact a State of the Union and in the Union, this will or consent of the people must be in harmony with the Constitution, and its movements subsidiary to it. It must regard the Constitution as its highest political good; its injunctions as the highest human law, its commands as the infallible and final measure of civil duty. In short, to be in the Union is to be actively and willingly coöperating with other States in the performance of all those acts and things without which the Federal Government cannot act or move, cannot perform the functions required of it by the Constitution; it is to elect Senators and Representatives to the Congress of the United States; to permit the courts of the United States to be held within their limits, and its citizens to act as jurors and officers of the court; to permit the judgments and sentences of the court to be executed against its citizens; to permit the United States mail to be carried through the State and its contents distributed according to law; to permit the officers of the United States to collect the Federal revenue whether derived from foreign or domestic products; to permit the United States to manage and control their own property, whether consisting of forts, dockyards, arsenals, mints, or public lands; to make such elections of Senators and Representatives freely and as the means of maintaining itself as a State in the Union; and to permit all these things willingly and freely as rights belonging to the Federal Government with which neither the State government nor the people of the State have any right whatever to interfere. In short, to be a State in the Union is to use all those powers of the State which have a relation to the Federal Government in a manner friendly to that Government, friendly to its existence and continuance, in a manner promotive of the objects of that Government; and to permit without hindrance the exercise within the State of all the powers of the Federal Government.”