Lincoln's Plan of Reconstruction

by Charles H. McCarthy

There are things, gentlemen, that are possible at one time and not possible at another. You can now prevent the rise of the flood, but when it is up you can not stop it. If gentlemen are in favor of meeting that state of things, then do as has been already so distinctly intimated in the course of this debate, vote against this bill in all its aspects; leave the door wide open; let “our brethren of the South,” whose bayonets are now pointed at our brothers’ hearts, drop their arms, put on the seemly garb of peace, go through the forms of an election, and assert the triumph of their beaten faction under the forms of political authority after the sword has decided against them. I am no prophet, but that is the history of next December if this bill be defeated; and I expect it not to become a law.

But suppose the other course to be pursued; suppose the President sees fit to do what there is not the least reason to suppose that he desires to do; suppose that after he has destroyed the armies in the field he should go further, and do, as I think he ought to do, what the judgment of this country dictates, treat those who hold power in the South as rebels and not as governors or legislators; disperse them from the halls of legislation; expel them from executive mansions, strip them of the emblems of authority, and set to work to hunt out the pliant and supple “Union men,” so-called, who have cringed before the storm, but who will be willing to govern their fellow-citizens under the protection of United States bayonets; suppose that the fruitful example of Louisiana shall spread like a mist over all the rest of the southern country, and that Representatives like what Louisiana has sent here, with such a backing of votes as she has given, shall appear here at the doors of this Hall; whose representatives are they? I do not mean to speak of the gentlemen now here from Louisiana in their individual character, but in their political relations to their constituency. Whose representatives are they? In Louisiana they are the representatives of the bayonets of General Banks and the will of the President, as expressed in his secret letter to General Banks. If you admit such representatives, you must admit, on the same basis and under the same influences, Representatives from every State from Texas to Virginia; the common council at Alexandria—which has just sent two Senators to the other House and has ratified the amendment to the Constitution abolishing slavery in all the rest of Virginia, where none of them dare put his portly person—would be entitled to send ten Representatives here and two Senators to speak for the indomitable “Old Dominion.” If the rebel Representatives are not here in December next you will have here servile tools of the Executive who will embarrass your legislation, humble your Congress, degrade the name of republican government for two years, and then the natural majority of the South, rising indignantly against that humiliating insult, will swamp you here with rebel Representatives and be your masters. These are their alternatives and there is no middle ground.

To Mr. Eliot’s objection the Maryland member replied that provisional governors “are appointed now without law, and all we propose is that they shall be under the responsibility of law and subject to the control and confirmation of the Senate.” Having in mind this condition and the Executive appointments to judicial places in Louisiana, Mr. Davis added:

Sir, when I came into Congress ten years ago, this was a Government of law. I have lived to see it a Government of personal will. Congress has dwindled from a power to dictate law and the policy of the Government to a commission to audit accounts and to appropriate moneys to enable the Executive to execute his will and not ours. I would stop at the boundaries of law. When I look around for them I seem to be in a waste; they are as clean gone as the division fences of Virginia estates from here to the Rapidan.

After explaining the efforts of Mr. Ashley and himself to remove the objectionable features of the bill as pointed out by the two members from Massachusetts [Messrs. Dawes and Eliot] he again criticised both with some severity, and continued:

Sir, my successor may vote as he pleases. But when I leave this Hall there shall be no vote from the third congressional district of Maryland that recognizes anything but the body and mass of the people of any State as entitled to govern them, and to govern the people that I represent. And they who may wish to substitute one tenth, or any other fractional minority, for that great power of the people to govern, may take, and shall take, the odium. Ay! I shall brand it upon them that in the middle of the nineteenth century, in the only free Republic that the world knows, where alone the principles of popular government are the rules of authority, they have gone to the dark ages for their models, reviving the wretched examples of the most odious governments that the world has ever seen, and propose to stain the national triumph by creating a wretched, low, vulgar, corrupt, and cowardly oligarchy to govern the freemen of the United States—the national arms to guaranty and enforce their oppressions. Not by my vote, sir; not by my vote!

If the majority of the people will not recognize the authority of the Constitution of the United States, what does the gentleman say who proposes these declaratory resolutions? That they shall come here without it? No, sir; but I would govern them for a thousand years first by the supreme authority of the Constitution which they have defied and will not acknowledge. And govern them how? Not by the uncontrolled will of this or any other President that ever lived, George Washington included. I would govern them by the laws that in the hours of their sanity they enacted, unaltered excepting so far as the progress of events require that they should be altered; to the extent that we have proposed to alter them in our bill, and no further. I leave their own rules for their government, make the President appoint, under his official and public responsibility, the officers who are to execute them; and if they do not like to be governed in that way, let us trust that the prodigal will come one day to his senses, and humbly kneeling before the Constitution that he has vainly defied, swear before Almighty God that he will again be true to it.

That is my remedy for the grievance. That is what we propose....[^[361]]

Though not his last word on the subject of reconstruction, this was the last great speech of Mr. Davis in Congress on the question of restoring political power to the rebellious States. His alliance with Stevens, a somewhat unnatural union, had brought him only disaster. As noticed in the preceding chapter, he had been defeated for renomination in his district. It is thought that disappointment hastened somewhat his early death, which occurred toward the close of the year, December 30, 1865. Though a touch of pathos may be discerned in his concluding remarks, his was not the craven spirit that was ready, in the words of Edgerton, to kiss the hand that smote him.

Representative Mallory, of Kentucky, on his motion to lay the bill and amendments on the table, called for the yeas and nays. The question being taken was decided in the affirmative; 91 voting to lay the bill and amendments on the table; 64 were opposed, and 27 did not vote.[^[362]] The Democratic members were a unit against the measure, and in a body voted to lay it on the table.