Delays having occurred in the course of procedure in Virginia, Mississippi, and Texas, there was opportunity to apply new conditions to their readmission and this chance was eagerly seized by the radicals. Trumbull, on the 13th of January, 1870, reported from the Judiciary Committee a simple resolution reciting that Virginia, having complied with all the requirements, was entitled to representation in Congress. This was amended on motion of Drake, of Missouri, by a proviso that it should never be lawful for the state to deprive any citizen of the United States, on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude, of the right to hold office. Trumbull said in the debate on this proposition that Congress had no authority to enact it and that it would not be binding on the state. Yet it was adopted by a majority of one vote, 30 to 29. Wilson then moved as an amendment that the state constitution should never be so changed as to deprive any citizen or class of citizens of school privileges, and this was adopted by 31 to 29, Trumbull in the negative. In addition to these a long section was added prescribing a new form of oath to be taken by all state officers and members of the legislature, which was adopted by 45 to 16, Trumbull voting no. In the final vote on the Bill, however, he voted in the affirmative. The same conditions were applied to Mississippi and Texas.
In the debate on the Virginia Bill there was a passage-at-arms between Trumbull and Sumner which came near to overstepping parliamentary rules on both sides and which caused widespread newspaper comment. It was generally believed that a rupture had taken place between them which would never be healed; yet a year later, when the decree went forth (presumably from the White House) that Sumner must be deposed from the chairmanship of the Committee on Foreign Relations, Trumbull was one of his strongest supporters in the fight which ensued.
Following close after the reconstruction of Virginia came the re-reconstruction of Georgia. That state ratified her post-bellum constitution on the 11th of May, 1868, and elected Rufus P. Bullock, governor. He represented the radicals, but the conservatives at the same time carried the state legislature. A few negroes had been elected as members, and these were expelled on the ground that the right to hold office had not been conferred upon them by the new constitution. The supreme court of the state a few months later decided that since the rights of citizenship and of voting had been conferred upon them, the right to hold office belonged to them also unless expressly denied. In addition to unseating the blacks, the conservatives had admitted certain members who could not take the oath prescribed in the Fourteenth Amendment of the Constitution. Governor Bullock needed a legislature different from the one which had been elected, in order to accomplish certain ends which he had in view, and he seized upon these irregularities as a means of overturning the majority. He then raised an outcry, which he knew would stir the north,—that the blacks in Georgia were still terrorized by the Ku-Klux Klans.
President Grant soon thereafter recommended that Congress take Georgia again in hand. This was done promptly. An act was passed directing Governor Bullock to call the legislature together and directing the legislature to reorganize itself in accordance with the oaths of office heretofore prescribed, including that of the Fourteenth Amendment; to exclude all persons who could not lawfully take those oaths and to admit all who had been expelled on account of color; also requiring Georgia to ratify the Fifteenth Amendment before her Representatives and Senators should be admitted to seats in Congress. The seventh section of the act authorized Governor Bullock to call for the services of the army and navy of the United States to enforce the provisions of the act. Under this authority, exercised by General Terry, twenty-four conservatives were expelled from the legislature and their places were filled by radicals, and the negroes formerly excluded were returned to their places. Even this did not satisfy Bullock. He went to Washington with a troop of carpet-baggers and a pocketful of money and railroad bonds and persuaded General Butler, who was chairman of the House Committee on Reconstruction, to bring in a bill for the restoration of Georgia similar to that of Virginia, with a proviso extending for two years the term of office of the present legislature, which would otherwise expire in November, 1870. Butler reported such a bill from his committee, but Bingham, of Ohio, offered an amendment to require a new election of the legislature at the time fixed in the state constitution, and this amendment was agreed to, in spite of Butler's opposition, by 115 to 71.
The Georgia Bill was the subject of an exciting battle in the Senate where Trumbull supported the Bingham proviso against the efforts of Morton, Howard, Drake, Stewart, Sumner, Wilson, and all of the new Senators from the South, two of whom (those of Texas) were hastily admitted in time to vote on the Georgia question. The first vote was on the motion of Williams, of Oregon, to prolong the life of the existing legislature till November, 1872. One effect of so doing would be to save a seat in the United States Senate for a man who had been elected unlawfully. The vacancy would occur on March 4, 1871, and could be lawfully filled only by the legislature chosen next preceding that date.
Williams's motion was voted down April 14, by a majority of one. On the 19th of the same month, Trumbull made one of the great speeches of his public career, filling twelve columns of the Congressional Globe, on the Georgia question, demolishing the Bullock case and stirring public opinion strongly. The struggle was protracted till July 8, when the bill passed, as Trumbull desired, with the Bingham proviso.
An editorial in the Nation of May 26, 1870, tells, in brief compass, what took place while the Georgia Bill was the matter of chief concern in the Senate:
Our readers may remember that when Mr. Trumbull, some weeks ago, made his severe summing up of the "Georgia difficulty," he hinted in very plain terms that the patriots of the Bullock faction had been guilty of both corruption and intimidation in trying to get their "Reconstruction" bill through, installing them in office for two years. By many people this charge was ascribed partly to Mr. Trumbull's hatred of the black man, and partly to his hostility to the pure and good of all colors, and doubtless some asked themselves, as they asked themselves when the Traitor Ross refused to give up his chair to Senator Revels, for the sake of the dramatic unities: "What else can we expect of a man who voted No on the Eleventh Article?"
[A committee of the Senate, appointed to look into the matter, had taken a mass of testimony and submitted a report.] Their finding is—and we blush to write it—that Bullock and his friends have been for a long time in Washington, complaining of the Ku-Klux Klan, and asking fresh guarantees for "the persecuted Unionists" of Georgia; that somehow or other, while there, they have had a great deal of money and railroad bonds, which they seemed to have no particular use for, themselves; that they tried unsuccessfully to purchase the votes of Senators Carpenter and Tipton against the Bingham amendments; that harrowing reports of "outrages" in Georgia were actually prepared to order, like boots or dinners, furnished to them and paid for; that the writing of threatening letters to Senators was procured in the same manner; that $4000 was paid to that good and great man, Colonel Forney, of the Washington Chronicle, for "advertising and printing speeches and documents," the Colonel's editorial denunciations of the opponents of the Georgia Bill, we suppose, being thrown into the bargain. The Washington correspondent of the Boston Advertiser—a wicked fellow—adds that some of the witnesses when first examined "were very loath to tell what they knew, and indulged in the tallest kind of lying." The report of the committee is unanimous.
The result of this exposé probably will be that the Georgia question will at last, after a year's delay, filled with this lying and intrigue and corruption, be settled at the outset, by handing the State Government back to the electors on the same terms as Virginia, and letting the "Bullock faction" go home and find some means of gaining an honest livelihood.... We cannot pass from this affair, however, without bearing hearty testimony to the services which Mr. Trumbull has, by his attitude in it from the very beginning, rendered to truth, justice, good government, and civilization. He has made every honest man, North and South, his debtor, not for being able, for this he cannot help, but for being bold, and hitting hard. "By Time," says Hosea Biglow, "I du like a man that ain't afeared!"