Lincoln's Plan of Reconstruction

by Charles H. McCarthy

Henry T. Blow, of Missouri, made an appeal for the admission of Arkansas and Louisiana to prevent destructive military raids into those States as well as his own. He would support any measure that would restore them and strengthen their loyal population. However, he did not favor negro suffrage. His remarks scarcely touched the measure before the House.[^[358]]

Joseph K. Edgerton, of Indiana, who followed in a lengthy speech in opposition, said:

The forerunner of this measure of legislation, so far as this House is concerned, may be found in the territorial bill reported by the gentleman from Ohio [Mr. Ashley] from the Committee on Territories in the Thirty-seventh Congress, in March, 1862. It was aptly termed at the time by the gentleman’s colleague from the Cincinnati district of Ohio [Mr. Pendleton] “A bill to dissolve the Union and abolish the Constitution of the United States.” The bill was summarily, if not indignantly, rejected by the House without a second reading. But, sir, men and events have since changed, if the Constitution of the United States has not changed, and the stone of revolutionary reconstruction then rejected by the master-builders in this House bids fair to become the head of the corner. Then the Constitution was not altogether repudiated as the foundation of our legislation; now revolutionary opinions and plans override it as a thing of the past. Not many are there in this Congress, and fewer there will be in the next, I fear, to do reverence to the Constitution and obey its commands.

The President’s proclamation of December 8, 1863, was then noticed, and his usurpation of authority denounced; the subject of the Louisiana government was also entered upon and fully discussed. He next referred to the introduction early in the preceding session of a resolution by Henry Winter Davis providing for the appointment of a special committee authorized to report a bill guaranteeing a republican form of government to the rebellious States. The fate of that bill, President Lincoln’s proclamation concerning it, and the protest of Wade and Davis were successively dwelt upon.

The question between the President and his two Congressional friends, Wade and Davis, was to Mr. Edgerton’s mind “one between two usurping powers, the Executive and the Legislative”; but, he continued, “I am free to say my sympathies were with the legislators and not with the President. Executive edicts have done more than acts of Congress during the last four years to sap the foundations and remove the landmarks of the Constitution.” The majority in Congress, he asserted, by consenting to recognize the governments of Louisiana and Arkansas, kissed the hand that smote them.

He opposed a recognition of the Louisiana government because of its unconstitutional origin; Arkansas, he said, differed from it in no material respect. After stating the provisions of the bill he gave the following summary of its effects:

1. To take from the people of the State all power to initiate proceedings to reorganize their own State government in harmony with the Constitution of the United States, or even to prescribe the qualifications of suffrage. The bill ignores the idea that there is any vital power in the people to restore their State government—not only taken from them by rebellion but kept from them by Federal power—....

2. The effect is to exclude from the reorganization the entire white population of the State who shall have held office or voluntarily borne arms against the United States, or who shall not take the oath of July 2, 1862.

3. To confine the right of suffrage and power of reorganization to enrolled men and Federal soldiers taking the oath; and the law affords no guaranty that even the enrollment shall embrace a majority of males over twenty-one years of age. The majority required as a basis of action is so many of enrolled persons taking the oath as, with the soldiers, shall constitute a majority of the persons enrolled; that majority, through defect or fraud in enrollment, may be not even one tenth of the males of the State over twenty-one years of age.

4. The effect is the absolute disfranchisement of eleven States and their continuance in a state of war until they accept “the abandonment of slavery,” as dictated to them by the United States, and until by organic law they declare that all persons shall have “equality of civil rights before the law” of the State; a well-seeming phrase of broad import; the precise meaning of which I do not understand. A woman is a person, a negro is a person, an alien is a person, and the right of suffrage is a civil right. Does this high-sounding phrase of the bill mean that women, negroes, and aliens shall have equal right to vote in a regenerated State with white male citizens? What does “equality of civil rights before the law for all persons” mean?