“It is very clear to my mind,” he asserted, “that no bill providing for the reorganization of loyal State governments in the rebel States can pass this Congress. I am pretty sure that this bill and all the amendments and substitutes offered will fail to command a majority of this House.”
The course of debate had shown on the Republican side, he said, so strong an individuality that no compromise could bring them together on the great question of reconstruction. Many on his side were capital leaders in the minority; they were good at pulling down, but not so good at leading majorities and building up. He admitted their utter inability to agree on the subject, and had consented to a conditional recognition of certain State governments because he knew they could be upheld by military power until the rebellion should be crushed. Republicans were so nearly unanimous at the preceding session, he said, that he felt the concessions embodied in his substitute would enable them to agree without much discussion or without consuming the valuable time of the House so late in the session. His remarks not only showed disappointment at the attitude of his party, but clearly revealed the existence of a schism in its ranks.[[360]]
Henry Winter Davis then rose to state the case for the House. The bill, he said, to which amendments were pending was the same as that which at the preceding session received the assent of both Houses of Congress, with some modifications to suit the tender susceptibilities of gentlemen from Massachusetts: “first, the sixth section, declaring rebel officers not citizens of the United States, has been stricken out; second, the taxation clause has been stricken out; third, the word ‘government’ has been inserted before ‘trial and punishment,’ to meet the refined criticisms of the two gentlemen from Massachusetts who suppose that penal laws would be in force and operative when the penalties were forbidden to be enforced; that discriminating laws could survive the declaration that there should be no discrimination between different persons in trial or punishment. There has been one section added to meet the present aspect of public affairs; that section authorizes the President, instead of pursuing the method prescribed in the bill in reference to the States where military resistance shall have been suppressed, in the event of the legislative authority under the rebellion in any rebel State taking the oath to support the Constitution of the United States, annulling their confiscation laws and ratifying the amendment proposed by this Congress to the Constitution of the United States, before military resistance shall be suppressed in such State, to recognize them as constituting the legal authority of the State, and directing him to report those facts to Congress for its assent and ratification. With these modifications, the bill which is now the test for amendment is the bill which was adopted by this House at the last session.”
He need not be at the trouble, he said, to answer the arguments of gentlemen who at the preceding session voted for the bill, and who, in the repose of the intervening period, had criticised in detail the language and, not stopping there, had found in its substance that it violated the principles of republican government and sanctioned the enormities of those laws with which slavery had covered and defiled the statutes of every Southern State.
With increasing severity Mr. Davis proceeded:
That these discoveries should have been made since the vote of last session is quite as remarkable as that they should have been overlooked before that vote. But they were neither overlooked before nor discovered since. The vote was before a pending election. It is the will of the President which has been discovered since.
It is not at all surprising, Mr. Speaker, that the President, having failed to sign the bill passed by the whole body of his supporters by both Houses at the last session of Congress, and having assigned, under pressure of events, but without the authority of law, reasons, good or bad, first for refusing to allow the bill to become a law, and therefore usurping power to execute parts of it as law, while he discarded other parts which interfered with possible electoral votes, those arguments should be found satisfactory to some minds prone to act upon the winking of authority.
The weight of that species of argument I am not able to estimate. It bids defiance to every species of reply. It is that subtle, pervading epidemic of the time that penetrates the closest argument as spirit penetrates matter that diffuses itself with the atmosphere of authority, relaxing the energy of the strong, bending down the upright, diverting just men from the path of rectitude, and substituting the will and favor of power for the will and interest of the people as the rule of legislative action.
All I desire now to do is to state the case and predict results from one course or the other. The course of military events seems to indicate that possibly by the 4th of next July, probably by next December, organized, armed rebellion will cease to lift its brazen front in the land. Disasters may intervene; errors or weaknesses may prolong the conflict; the proverbial chances of war may interpose their caprices to defer the national triumph; but events now point to the near approach of the end. But whether sooner or later, whenever it comes, there is one thing that will assuredly accompany it. If this bill do not become a law, when Congress again meets, at our doors, clamorous and dictatorial, will be sixty-five Representatives from the States now in rebellion, and twenty-two Senators, claiming admission, and, upon the theory of the honorable gentleman, entitled to admission beyond the power of argument to resist it; for peace will have been restored, there will be no armed power but that of the United States; there will be quiet, and votes will be polled under the existing laws of the State, in the gentleman’s view. Are you ready to accept that consequence? For if they come to the door of the House they will cross the threshold of the House, and any gentleman who does not know that, or who is so weak or so wild as to suppose that any declaratory resolution adopted by both Houses as a condition precedent can stop that flood, had better put his puny hands across the flood of the flowing Mississippi and say that it shall not enter the Gulf of Mexico.