The President. Would you consent that Massachusetts, on this account, should be excluded from Congress?
Mr. Sumner. No, Mr. President, I would not.
And here I stopped, without remarking on the entire irrelevancy of the inquiry. I left the President that night with the painful conviction that his whole soul was set as flint against the good cause, and that by the assassination of Abraham Lincoln the Rebellion had vaulted into the Presidential chair. Jefferson Davis was then in the casemates at Fortress Monroe, but Andrew Johnson was doing his work.
“Ah! what avails it, …
If the gulled conqueror receives the chain,
And flattery subdues, when arms are vain?”
From this time forward I was not in doubt as to his “policy,” which asserted a condition of things in the Rebel region inconsistent with the terrible truth. It was, therefore, natural that I should characterize one of his messages, covering over the enormities there, as “whitewashing.” This mild term was thought by some too strong. Subsequent events have shown that it was too weak. The whole Rebel region is little better than a “whited sepulchre.” It is that saddest of all sepulchres, the sepulchre of Human Rights. The dead men’s bones are the remains of faithful Union soldiers, dead on innumerable fields, or stifled in the pens of Andersonville and Belle Isle,—also of constant Unionists, white and black, whom we are sacredly bound to protect, now murdered on highways and by-ways, or slaughtered at Memphis and New Orleans. The uncleanness is injustice, wrong, and outrage, having a loathsome stench; and the President is engaged in “whiting” over these things, so that they shall not be seen by the American people. To do this, he garbles a despatch of Sheridan, and abuses the hospitality of the country by a travelling speech, where every word, not foolish, vulgar, and vindictive, is a vain attempt at “whitewashing.”
Meanwhile the Presidential madness is more than ever manifest. It has shown itself in frantic effort to defeat the Constitutional Amendment proposed by Congress for adoption by the people. By this Amendment certain safeguards are established. Citizenship is defined, and protection is assured at least in what are called civil rights. The basis of representation is fixed on the number of voters, so that, if colored citizens are not allowed to vote, they will not by their numbers contribute to representative power, and one voter in South Carolina will not be able to neutralize two voters in Massachusetts or Illinois. Ex-Rebels who had taken an oath to support the Constitution are excluded from office, National or State. The National debt is guarantied, while the Rebel debt and all claim for slaves are annulled. All these essential safeguards are rudely rejected by the President.