Congress, while refusing admission to senators elected by the legislatures of the reconstructed States, was permitting these very bodies to pass on amendments to the Federal Constitution; and such votes were counted. Congress now proposed the Fourteenth Amendment, Section III of which provided that no person should hold office under the United States who, having taken an oath, as a Federal or State officer, to support the Constitution, had subsequently engaged in the war against the Union. The Southerners would not vote for a provision that would disfranchise their leaders; they refused to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, and this helped further to inflame the radicals of the North.
After the Committee of Fifteen had been appointed, Congress proceeded to put the reconstructed States under military control. In the debate on the measure, February 18, 1867, James A. Garfield, who was, at a later date, to become generous and conservative, said exultingly: "This bill sets out by laying its hands on the rebel governments and taking the very breath of life out of them; in the next place, it puts the bayonet at the breast of every rebel in the South; in the next place, it leaves in the hands of Congress utterly and absolutely the work of Reconstruction."
And Congress did its work. Lincoln was in his grave, and Johnson, even with his vetoes, was powerless. By the acts of March 2 and March 23, 1867, the reconstructed governments were swept away. Universal suffrage was given to the negro and most of the prominent whites were disfranchised.
The first suffrage bill was for the District of Columbia, during the debate on which Senator Sumner said: "Now, to my mind, nothing is clearer than the absolute necessity of suffrage for all colored persons in the disorganized States. It will not be enough, if you give it to those who can read and write; you will not in this way acquire the voting force you need there for the protection of Unionists, whether white or black. You will not acquire the new allies who are essential to the national cause."
In the forty-first Congress, beginning March 4, 1871, the twelve reconstructed States, including West Virginia, were represented by twenty-two Republicans and two Democrats in the Senate, and forty-eight Republicans and twelve Democrats in the House of Representatives.
Mr. Sumner's "new allies" were ready to answer to the roll-call.
When Congress had convened in December, 1865, its radical leaders were already bent on universal suffrage for the negro, but the Northern mind was not yet prepared for so radical a measure. The "Committee of Fifteen" was the first step in the programme, which was to hold the Southern States out of the Union and make an appeal to the passions and prejudices of Northern voters in the congressional elections of November, 1866. Valuable material for the coming campaign was already being furnished by the agents of the Freedmen's Bureau. These "adventurers, broken down preachers, and politicians," as Senator Fessenden, of Maine, called them, were, and had been for some time, reporting "outrages," swearing negroes into midnight leagues, and selecting the offices they hoped to fill.
But the chief source of the material relied upon in the congressional campaign of 1866 to exasperate the North, and prod voters to the point of sanctioning negro suffrage in the South, was the official information from the Committee of Fifteen. Its subcommittee of three, to take testimony as to Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas, were all Republicans. The doings of this subcommittee in Alabama illustrate their methods. Only five persons, who claimed to be citizens, were examined. These were all Republican politicians. The testimony of each was bitterly partisan. "Under the government of the State as it then existed, no one of these witnesses could hope for official preferment. When this Reconstruction plan had been completed the first of these five witnesses became governor of his State; the second became a senator in Congress; the third secured a life position in one of the departments in Washington; the fourth became a circuit judge in Alabama, and the fifth a judge of the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia—all as Republicans. There was no Democrat in the subcommittee which examined these gentlemen, to cross-examine them; and not a citizen of Alabama was called before that subcommittee to confute or explain their evidence."[93]
With the material gathered by these means and from these sources, the honest voters of the North were deluded into the election of a Congress that went to Washington, in December, 1866, armed with authority to pass the Reconstruction laws of March, 1867.