Lincoln's Plan of Reconstruction

by Charles H. McCarthy

[494]. President Johnson and Reconstruction, pp. 33–34.

[495]. In this connection his repudiation of the Sherman-Johnston agreement will occur to the reader.

[496]. Strait’s Roster of Regimental Surgeons and Assistant Surgeons, p. 314. This estimate includes all the troops furnished by the new State of West Virginia.

[497]. The author believes himself fortunate in being able to place before his readers a letter from the pen of Hon. J. B. Henderson, the only surviving Senator who participated in the debates summarized in chapter X., and, so far as the writer is informed, the only living member who served in the United States Senate during that eventful period. Coming, as it does, from one who supported many of Mr. Lincoln’s most cherished measures, the letter will be welcomed as a valuable historical document. It contrasts forcibly the Presidential plan with the theory of Senator Sumner, and though written on August 21, 1901, more than a generation after the occurrence of the principal events discussed in this book, it is characterized by the clearness and the energy of expression which marked even the unpremeditated addresses of the Senator’s Congressional career. On the subject of reunion he writes as follows:

“Time, in my judgment, has stamped its approval on Mr. Lincoln’s views touching the questions of reconstruction during the Civil War. He was always calm and judicial. He was philosophical in periods of the most intense excitement. He never lost his head, but under all circumstances preserved his temper and his judgment. He was not the buffoon described by his enemies. On the contrary, he was a wise statesman, a learned lawyer, and a conscientious patriot; and, better than all, an honest man.

“The infirmity in Mr. Sumner’s theories of reconstruction came from the great exuberance of his learning. He ransacked history, ancient and modern, for precedents growing out of civil wars. But these precedents all antedated the American Constitution. They grew out of monarchical systems of government, and had no relation to the republican forms created by our Constitution. Under our system there can be no suicide of a State. Individual citizens by rebellion and disloyalty may forfeit their political rights, but the State as an entity commits no treason and forfeits no rights to existence. Under our Constitution the State cannot die. It is the duty of the Federal Government to see that it does not die—that it shall never cease to exist. If the State be invaded from without, the duty of the General Government is to protect and defend it. If domestic violence threatens the subversion of the local government, the nation’s duty is to intervene and uphold the hands of those who maintain the laws. The trustee of an express trust cannot excuse himself to a minority of the beneficiaries because the majority repudiate his agency.

“‘The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a republican form of government.’ No State government is republican in form that does not acknowledge the supremacy of the Federal Constitution. This is the essential test of republicanism. No State can enter the Union without conforming its Constitution to this supreme organic law. And whenever by force or violence, a majority of its citizens undertake to withdraw the State from its obedience to Federal law and to repudiate the sovereignty of the Federal Government, it at once becomes the duty of Congress to act.

“This duty of Congress is not to destroy the State or to declare it a suicide, and proceed to administer on its effects. On the contrary, the duty clearly is to preserve the State, to restore it to its old republican forms. Its duty is not to territorialize the State and proceed to govern it as a conquered colony. The duty is not one of demolition, but one of restoration. It is not to make a Constitution, but to guarantee that the old Constitution or one equally republican in form, and made by the loyal citizens of the State, shall be upheld and sustained.

“If a majority of the people of a State conspire to subvert its republican forms, that majority may be, and should be, put down by the Federal power, while the minority, however few, sustaining republican forms may be constitutionally installed as the political power of the State.

“These, as I understand, were the views of Mr. Lincoln; and they were not the views of Mr. Sumner, as enunciated in his resolutions of 1862 and advocated by him in his subsequent career in the Senate.