Twenty Years of Congress, Volume 2 / From Lincoln to Garfield, with a Review of the Events Which Led to the Political Revolution of 1860

by James Gillespie Blaine

On the part of the House.—Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, Elihu B. Washburne of Illinois, Justin S. Morrill of Vermont, John A. Bingham of Ohio, Roscoe Conkling of New York, George S. Boutwell of Massachusetts, Henry T. Blow of Missouri, A. J. Rogers of New Jersey, and Henry Grider of Kentucky.]

CHAPTER VII.

The debate on the direct question of Reconstruction did not begin at so early a date in the Senate as in the House, but kindred topics led to the same line of discussion as that in which the House found itself engaged. During the first week of the session Mr. Wilson of Massachusetts had submitted a bill for the protection of freedman, designed to overthrow and destroy the odious enactments which in many of the Southern States were rapidly reducing the entire negro race to a new form of slavery. Mr. Wilson's bill provided that "all laws, statutes, acts, ordinances, rules and regulations in any of the States lately in rebellion, which, by inequality of civil rights and immunities among the inhabitants of said States is established or maintained by reason of differences of color, race or descent, are hereby declared null and void." For the violation of this statute a punishment was provided by fine of not less than five hundred dollars nor more than ten thousand dollars, and by imprisonment not less than six months nor more than five years.

In debating his bill Mr. Wilson declared that he had "no desire to say harsh things of the South nor of the men who have been engaged in the Rebellion. I do not ask their property or their blood; I do not wish to disgrace or degrade them; but I do wish that they shall not be permitted to disgrace, degrade or oppress anybody else. I offer this bill as a measure of humanity, as a measure that the needs of that section of the country imperatively demand at our hands. I believe that if it should pass it will receive the sanction of nineteen-twentieths of the loyal people of the country. Men may differ about the power or the expediency of giving the right of suffrage to the negro; but how any humane, just and Christian man can for a moment permit the laws that are on the statute-books of the Southern States and the laws now pending before their Legislatures, to be executed upon men whom we have declared to be free, I cannot comprehend."

Mr. Reverdy Johnson replied to Mr. Wilson in a tone of apology for the laws complained of, but took occasion to give his views of the status of the States lately in rebellion. "I have now," said Mr. Johnson, "and I have had from the first, a very decided opinion that they are States in the Union and that they never could have been placed out of the Union without the consent of their sister States. The insurrection terminated, the authority of the Government was thereby re-instituted; eo instanti they were invested with all the rights belonging to them originally—I mean as States. . . In my judgment our sole authority for the acts which we have done during the last four years was the authority communicated to Congress by the Constitution to suppress insurrection. If the power can only be referred to that clause, in my opinion, speaking I repeat with great deference to the judgment of others, the moment the insurrection was terminated there was no power whatever left in the Congress of the United States over those States; and I am glad to see, if I understand his Message, that in the view I have just expressed I have the concurrence of the President of the United States."

Mr. Sumner sustained Mr. Wilson's bill in an elaborate argument delivered on the 20th of December. There was an obvious desire in both branches of Congress and in both parties—those opposed to the President's policy and those favoring it—to appeal to the popular judgment as promptly as possible, and this led to a prolonged and earnest debate prior to the holidays, an occurrence unusual and almost unprecedented. Mr. Sumner declared that Mr. Wilson's bill was simply to maintain and carry out the Proclamation of Emancipation. The pledge there given was that the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, would recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons. "This pledge," said Mr. Sumner, "is without limitation in space or time. It is as extended and as immortal as the Republic itself, to that pledge we are solemnly bound; wherever our flag floats, as long as time endures, we must see that it is sacredly observed. The performance of that pledge cannot be intrusted to another, least of all to the old slave-masters, embittered against their slaves. It must be performed by the National Government. The power that gives freedom must see that freedom is maintained."

"Three of England's greatest orators and statesmen," continued Mr. Sumner, "Burke, Canning and Brougham, at successive periods unite in declaring, from the experience of the British West Indies, that whatever the slave-masters undertook to do for their slaves was always arrant trifling; that whatever might be its plausible form it always wanted the executive principle. More recently the Emperor of Russia, in ordering the emancipation of the serfs, declared that all previous efforts had failed because they had been left to the spontaneous initiative of the proprietors." . . . "I assume that we shall not leave to the old slave-proprietors the maintenance of that freedom to which we are pledged, and thus break our own promise and sacrifice a race." In concluding his speech Mr. Sumner referred to the enormity of the wrongs against the freedmen as something that made the blood curdle. "In the name of God," said he, "let us protect them; insist upon guarantees; pass the bill under consideration; pass any bill, but do not let this crying injustice rage any longer. An avenging God cannot sleep while such things find countenance. If you are not ready to be the Moses of an oppressed people, do not become their Pharaoh."

Mr. Willard Saulsbury of Delaware made a brief reply to Mr. Sumner, not so much to argue the points put forward by the senator from Massachusetts, not so much to deny the facts related by him or to discuss the principles which he had presented, as to announce that "it can be no longer disguised that there is in the party which elected the President an opposition party to him. Nothing can be more antagonistic than the suggestions contained in his Message and the speeches already made in both Houses of Congress." He adjured the President to be true and faithful to the principles he had foreshadowed, and pledged him "the support of two million men in the States which have not been in revolt, and who did not support him for his high office."

Mr. Cowan of Pennsylvania, one of the Republican senators who had indicated a purpose to sustain the President, was evidently somewhat stunned by Mr. Sumner's speech. He treated the outrages of which Mr. Sumner complained as exceptional instances of bad conduct on the part of the Southern people. "One man out of ten thousand," said Mr. Cowan, "is brutal to a negro, and that is paraded here as a type of the whole people of the South; whereas nothing is said of the other nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine men who treat the negro well." Mr. Cowan's argument was altogether inapposite; for what Mr. Sumner and Mr. Wilson had complained of was not the action of individual men in the South, but of laws solemnly enacted by Legislatures whose right to act had been recognized by the Executive Department of the National Government, and which had indeed been organized in pursuance of the President's Reconstruction policy,—almost in fact by the personal patronage of the President. The situation was one very difficult to justify by a man with the record of Mr. Cowan. He had been not merely a Republican before his entrance into the Senate but a radical Republican, taking ground in the campaign of 1860 only less advanced than that maintained by Mr. Thaddeus Stevens himself.

These debates in both Senate and House, at so early a period of the session, give a full and fair indication of the temper which prevailed in the country and in Congress. The majority of the members had not, at the opening of the session, given up hope of some form of co-operation with the President. As partisans and party leaders they looked forward with something of dismay to the rending of all relations with the Executive, and to the surrender of the political advantage which comes to the party and to the partisan from a close alliance between the Executive and Legislative Departments. On the re-assembling of Congress after the holidays a great change was seen and realized by all. It was feared by many, even of the most conservative, that the policy of Congress and the policy of the President might come into irreconcilable conflict, and that the party which had successfully conducted the Government through the embarrassments, the trials and the perils of a long civil war, might now be wrecked by an angry controversy between two departments of the Government, each owing its existence to the same great constituency,—the loyal people of the North.