The Joint Committee
of the two houses
of Congress on
Reconstruction.
This Committee sat for about six months before making its final report. During this period, however, several propositions issued from it, and
The activity of Congress
in the interim between the
appointment of the Committee
on Reconstruction and the
Report of the Committee.
Mr. Stevens opened this debate in the House on the 18th of December (1865). In a powerful speech, he developed anew his doctrine that the
Thaddeus Stevens's
ideas on
Reconstruction.
This was the extreme doctrine on the one side. It was in blunt contradiction to the doctrine upon which the Administration was acting,
Contradiction between
Stevens's view and
the view of the
Administration.
But while the Republicans of the House repudiated entirely Mr. Raymond's principles, the great mass of them were not able to accept Mr. Stevens's view of the temporary validity of secession, and the temporary existence of the Southern Confederacy as a foreign power. Their feelings and instincts required a principle of reconstruction which, at the same time that it did not recognize secession as having any validity for the shortest moment, yet regarded the "States" in which it was attempted, as having thereby become something other than "States" of the Union, and as requiring the assent of Congress to the rightful resumption of that status.