Speeches in the Senate, on the Bill to provide for the more Efficient Government of the Rebel States, February 14, 19, and 20, 1867.
The subject of Reconstruction was uppermost during the present session, sometimes in Constitutional Amendments and sometimes in measures of legislation.
February 13th, the Senate received from the House of Representatives a bill “to provide for the more efficient government of the Insurrectionary States,” which, after various changes, was finally passed under the title of “An Act to provide for the more efficient government of the Rebel States,” being the most important measure of legislation in the history of Reconstruction. As this bill came from the House it was a military bill, creating five military districts in the South, without any requirement with regard to suffrage, and with no exclusion of Rebels. Mr. Bingham, of Ohio, and Mr. Blaine, of Maine, announced in the House amendments requiring in the new constitutions “that the elective franchise shall be enjoyed by all male citizens of the United States twenty-one years old and upward, without regard to race, color, or previous condition of servitude, except such as may be disfranchised for participating in the late Rebellion or for felony at Common Law.” But they had not been able to obtain a direct vote; nor was there any exclusion of Rebels in their propositions. Mr. Stevens, of Pennsylvania, said:—
“The amendment of the gentleman from Maine [Mr. Blaine] lets in a vast number of Rebels and shuts out nobody. All I ask is, that, when the House comes to vote upon that amendment, it shall understand that the adoption of it would be an entire surrender of those States into the hands of the Rebels.”
About this time the House passed what was known as the Louisiana Bill, being a bill providing for the reconstruction of that State, with all necessary machinery, not unlike the bill introduced on the first day of the preceding session, “to enforce the guaranty of a republican form of government in certain States whose governments have been usurped or overthrown.”[83] The two bills together would have made a complete system of Protection, and the second, when extended to all the States, a complete system of Reconstruction.
February 14th, Mr. Sumner said:—