The Life, Public Services and Select Speeches of Rutherford B. Hayes

by J. Q. Howard

There were to be no amendments to the constitution, not even an amendment abolishing slavery. In short, the great rebellion was to be ignored or forgotten, or, in the words of one of their orators, "to be generously forgiven." The war, whose burdens, cost, and carnage they had been so fond of exaggerating, suddenly sank into what the Rev. Petroleum V. Nasby calls "the late unpleasantness," for which nobody but the abolitionists were to blame. Under this plan the States could soon re-establish slavery where it had been disturbed by the war. Jefferson Davis, Toombs, Slidell, and Mason could be re-elected to their old places in the Senate of the United States; Lee could be re-appointed in the army, and Semmes and Maury could be restored to the navy. Of course this plan of the Peace Democracy was acceptable to the rebels of the South.

But the loyal people, who under the name of the Union party fought successfully through the war of the rebellion, objected to this plan as wrong in principle, wrong in its details, and fatally wrong as an example for the future. It treats treason as no crime and loyalty as no virtue; it contains no guarantees, irreversible or otherwise, against another rebellion by the same parties and on the same grounds. It restores to political honor and power in the government of the Nation men who have spent the best part of their lives in plotting the overthrow of that government, and who for more than four years levied public war against the United States; it allows Union men in the South, who have risked all—and many of whom have lost all but life in upholding the Union cause—to be excluded from every office, State and National, and in many instances to be banished from the States they so faithfully laboured to save; it abandons the four millions of colored people to such treatment as the ruffian class of the South, educated in the barbarism of slavery and the atrocities of the rebellion, may choose to give them; it leaves the obligations of the Nation to her creditors and to the maimed soldiers and to the widows and orphans of the war, to be fulfilled by men who hate the cause in which those obligations were incurred; it claims to be a plan which restores the Union without requiring conditions; but, in conceding to the conquered rebels the repeal of laws important to the Nation's welfare, it grants conditions which they demand, while it denies to the loyal victors conditions which they deem of priceless value.

In the meantime, President Johnson having declared that "the rebellion, in its revolutionary progress, had deprived the people of the rebel States of all civil government," proceeded by military power to set up provisional State governments in those States, and to require them to declare void all ordinances of secession, to repudiate the rebel debt, and to adopt the thirteenth amendment of the constitution, proposed by the Union party, abolishing slavery throughout the United States. The Peace Democracy opposed all conditions, and, instinctively unsound upon human rights, opposed the amendment abolishing slavery. The elections of 1865 settled that question against them, and deprived them of New Jersey, the last free State which adhered to their fallen fortunes.

At the session of Congress of 1865-66, the president, finding that his co-called State governments in the rebel States—created by military power alone and without the sanction of the legislative power of the government—had accepted his conditions; insisted that those States were fully restored to their former proper relations with the general government, and that they were again entitled to representation in the same manner with the loyal States. This plan accorded with the wishes of all unrepentant rebels, and as a matter of course received the support of their allies of the Peace Democracy.

The Union party, at the sacrifice of all of the power and patronage of the administration they had elected, firmly opposed and finally defeated this project. They required, before the complete restoration of the rebel States, that the fourteenth amendment of the constitution should be adopted, which was framed to secure civil rights to the colored people, equal representation between the free States and the former slave States, the disqualification for office of leading rebels, the payment of the loyal obligations to creditors, to maimed soldiers, and to widows and orphans, and the repudiation of the rebel debt, and of claims to payment for slaves. On the adoption of this amendment turned the elections of 1866. After the amplest debates before the people the Union party carried the country in favor of the amendment, electing more than three-fourths of the members of the House of Representatives. They also secured the adoption of the amendment in twenty-one out of the twenty-four States now represented, which have acted upon it by an average vote in the State legislature of more than four to one.

In striking contrast with this was the action of the rebel States. Tennessee alone ratified the amendment. The other ten promptly and defiantly rejected it by an average majority in their State legislatures of more than fifty to one. When, therefore, the Thirty-ninth Congress met in the session of 1866-67 they found the work of reconstruction in those ten States still unaccomplished.

Now, in what condition were those ten rebel States? In the first place all political power in those States was in the hands of rebels, and for the most part of leading and unrepentant rebels. Their governors, their members of legislature, their judges, their county and city officers, and their members of Congress, with rare exceptions, were rebels. Such was their political condition.

What was their condition with respect to the preservation of order, the suppression of crime, and the redress of private grievances? After the suppression of the rebellion the next plain duty of the National government was to see that the lives, liberty, and property of all classes of citizens were secure, and especially to see that the loyal white and colored citizens who resided or might sojourn in those States did not suffer injustice, oppression, or outrage because of their loyalty. Loyal men, without distinction of race or color, were clearly entitled to the full measure of protection usually found in civilized countries, if in the nature of things it was possible for the Nation to furnish it.

Inquiring as to the condition of things in the South, I waive the uniform current of information derived from the press and other unofficial sources from all parts of the South, and rely exclusively on the official reports of army officers like Grant, Thomas, Sheridan, and Howard—officers of clear heads, of strong sense, and of spotless integrity, whose business it is to know the facts, and who all united in warning the Nation that Union men, either white or colored, were not safe in the South.

General Grant says that the class at the South who "will acknowledge no law but force" is sufficiently formidable to justify the military occupation of that territory.