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

Other subjects had entered into the public apprehension and were brought prominently to the attention of Congress, and by Congress referred to the Reconstruction Committee. There was a fear that if, by a political convulsion, the Confederates of the South should unite with the Democratic opponents of the war in the North and thus obtain control of the Government, they might, at least by some indirect process if not directly, impair the public obligations of the United States incurred in suppressing the Rebellion. They feared that the large bounties already paid to Union soldiers, and the generous pensions already provided or which might afterwards be provided, for those who had been maimed or for the orphan and the widow of those who had fallen, might, in the advent of the same adverse political power in the Government, be objected to, unless at the same time a similar concession should be granted to the misled and deceived masses of the South, who had with reckless daring been forced into the service of the ill-starred Confederacy. It was therefore expected that Congress would, so far as organic law could attain that end, guard the sacredness of the public debt and the equal sacredness of the National pensions, and that to do this effectively it should be provided that no recognition should ever be made, either by the National Government or by any State Governments, of debts incurred in aid of the Rebellion.

Still another subject was considered to be of grave consequence. Preventive measures of the most stringent character were demanded against a threatened danger to the National credit. With the single exception of land, which is the basis of all property, the South had lost the largest aggregate investment held in one form in the entire country. The money value of Southern slaves, reckoned at current prices, was larger when the war broke out than the money value of railroads or of manufacturing establishments in the United States. For the defense of this great interest the war had been avowedly undertaken. Perhaps it would be more truthful to say that the ambitions and conspiring politicians of the South had assumed the danger to this vast investment as the pretext for destroying the Government; and they had met with the fate so solemnly foretold in Sacred Writ,—they had drawn the sword and perished by the sword. As the one grand consummation of the struggle, the institution of slavery had disappeared. It was probably, nay, it was certainly to be expected, that in the destruction of so large an investment great suffering would come to many who had not participated in the Rebellion; to many indeed who had opposed it. That remuneration for losses should be asked was apparently inevitable.

Men of financial skill and experience saw that if such a contingent liability should overhang the National Treasury the public credit might be fatally impaired. The acknowledged and imperative indebtedness of the Government was already enormous; contingencies yet to be encountered would undoubtedly increase it, and its weight would press heavily upon the people until a firmly re-established credit should enable the Government to lower the rate of interest upon its bonds. So long as the Government was compelled to pay its interest in coin, while the business of the country was conducted upon the basis of suspended paper, the burden upon the people would be great. It would be vastly increased in imagination (and imagination is rapidly transformed to reality in the tremulous balance which decides the standard of public credit) if the Nation should not be able to define with absolute precision the metes and bounds of its aggregate obligation. Hence the imperious necessity of excluding all possibility of the payment of from two to three thousand millions of dollars to the slave-holders of the South. If that were not accomplished, the burden would be so great that the Nation which had survived the shock of arms might be engulfed in the manifold calamities of bankruptcy.

The magnitude of the reforms for which the popular desire was unmistakable, may in some degree be measured by the fact that they involved the necessity of radical changes in, and important additions to, the Federal Constitution. It was frankly acknowledged that if the President's plan of Reconstruction should be followed, involving the instant admission of senators and representatives from the revolted States, these Constitutional changes could not be effected, because the party desiring them would no longer control two-thirds of both Senate and House. Mr. Seward, in his persuasive mode of presenting his views, had urged as a matter of justice that legislation affecting the Southern States should be open to the participation of representatives from those States; but Mr. Thaddeus Stevens, who had as keen an intellect as Mr. Seward and a more trenchant style, declared that view to involve an absurdity. He avowed his belief that there was no greater propriety in admitting Southern senators and representatives to take part in considering the financial adjustments and legislative safeguards rendered necessary by their crime, than it would have been to admit the Confederate generals to the camp of the Union Army, when measures were under consideration for the overthrow of the Rebellion.

The great mass of Republicans in Congress maintained that it was not only common justice but common sense to define, without interposition or advice from the South, the conditions upon which the insurrectionary States should be re-clothed with the panoply of National power. "In no body of English laws," said Mr. Stevens, in an animated conversation in the House, "have I ever found a provision which authorizes the criminal to sit in judgment when the extent of his crime and its proper punishment were under consideration." The argument, therefore, which Mr. Seward had made with such strength for the President was, in the judgment of the great majority of Norther people, altogether ill-founded. By the caustic sentence of Mr. Stevens it had been totally overthrown. The average judgement approved the sharply defined and stringent policy of Congress as set forth by Mr. Stevens, rather than the policy so comprehensively embodied and so skilfully advocated by Mr. Seward on behalf of the Administration. Whatever may have been the temptations presented by the apparent magnanimity and broad charity of Mr. Seward's line of procedure, they were more than answered by the instincts of justice and by the sense of safety embodied in the plan of Reconstruction announced and about to be pursued by Congress.

The Joint Special Committee on Reconstruction, appointed at the opening of the Thirty-ninth Congress in December, did not meet for organization until the 6th of January, 1866. As an indication of the respectful manner in which they desired to treat the President, and the care with which they would proceed in their important duties, they appointed a sub-committee to wait on Mr. Johnson and advise him that the committee desired to avoid all possible collision or misconstruction between the Executive and Congress in regard to their relative positions. They informed the President that in their judgment it was exceedingly desirable that while this subject was under consideration by the joint committee no further action in regard to Reconstruction should be taken by him unless it should become imperatively necessary. The committee plainly declared that mutual respect would seem to require mutual forbearance on the part of the President and Congress. Mr. Johnson replied in effect that, while desiring the question of Reconstruction to be advanced as rapidly as would be consistent with the public interest, he earnestly sought for harmony of action, and to that end he would take no further steps without advising Congress. This promise of each branch of the Government to wait patiently on the other was no doubt sincere, but it soon proved difficult, if not impossible, to maintain the compact. When two co-ordinate departments were holding antagonistic views on the vital question at issue, collisions between them could not be averted. As matter of fact the resolution, as has been seen by events already narrated, so far from proving itself to be an adjustment did not serve even as a truce between the President and Congress. It was found impracticable to secure repression and the contest went forward with constantly accelerating speed.

The first question on the subject of Reconstruction which engaged the attention of Congress, was the re-adjustment of the basis of representation; and for a time it absorbed all others. The first proposition to amend the Constitution in this respect had been made by Mr. Stevens on the 5th of December, providing "that representatives shall be apportioned among the States which may be within the Union according to their respective legal voters, and for this purpose none shall be named as legal voters who are not either natural born citizens of the United States or naturalized foreigners." During the month of December the question of representation was discussed, partly in public debate, but more in conference among members; and the plan of placing the basis upon legal voters, at first warmly urged, was quickly abandoned as its probable results were scrutinized. When Congress convened after the holidays, on Friday the 5th of January, Mr. Spalding of Ohio, in a speech already referred to, proposed an amendment to the Constitution in regard to representation in Congress, directing that "people of color shall not be counted with the population in making up the ratio of representation, except it be in States where they are permitted to exercise the elective franchise," and this was probably the earliest foreshadowing of the real change in the basis of representation that was made by the Fourteenth Amendment.

On the ensuing Monday Mr. Blaine of Maine proposed the following, in lieu of the Constitutional provision then existing: "Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which shall be included within this Union according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by taking the whole number of persons, except those whose political rights or privileges are denied or abridged by the constitution of any State on account of race or color." Mr. Blaine objected to taking voters as the basis of representation. "If," said he, "voters instead of population shall be made the basis of representation, certain results will follow, not fully appreciated perhaps by some who are now urgent for the change. I shall confine my examination of these results to the nineteen free States, whose statistics are presented in the census of 1860, and the very radical change which the new basis of apportionment would produce among those States forms the ground of my opposition to it. The ratio of voters to population differs very widely in different sections, varying, in the States referred to, from a minimum of nineteen per cent to a maximum of fifty-eight per cent; and some of the changes which its effect would work in the relative representation of certain States would be monstrous. For example, California has a population of 358,110 and Vermont a population of 314,369, and each has three representatives on this floor to-day. But California has 207,000 voters and Vermont had only 87,000. Assuming voters as the basis of apportionment and allowing to Vermont three representatives, California would be entitled to eight. The great State of Ohio, with nearly seven times the population of California, would have but little more than two and a half times the number of representatives; and New York, with quite eleven times the population of California, would have, in the proposed method of apportionment, less than five times as many members of this House."

Mr. Blaine adduced some other examples less extreme than those quoted, but the generalization was no doubt too broad and presented in some respects an erroneous conclusion. The only mode of getting at the number of voters was by the ballots cast at the general elections, and the relative ratio was varied by so many considerations that it did not correctly represent the actual number of voters in each State. But the facts presented by Mr. Blaine and elaborated by other speakers turned the attention of the House away from an apportionment based on voters.

Mr. Conkling, a few days later, in referring to Mr. Blaine's argument, maintained that "the ratio, in dividing the whole population of the United States into two hundred and forty-one representative districts, leaving out such extreme cases as California, would not be seriously affected by assuming the white male voters as the basis of apportionment." On the 15th of January Mr. Conkling submitted a Constitutional amendment on the subject, in two forms; making the proviso in one case that "whenever in any one State the political rights or privileges of any man shall be denied or abridged on account of race or color, all persons of such race or color shall be excluded from the basis of representation," and the other providing that "when the elective franchise in any State shall be denied or abridged on account of race or color, all persons of such race or color so denied shall be excluded from the basis of representation."