The result of the vote on the constitution was the same as in Virginia.
The restoration of
Mississippi to her
Federal relations.
The Act of April 10th, 1869, also invested the President with the power of ordering the submission of the constitution framed and adopted by the convention at Austin, Texas, in June of 1868, to the voters for ratification. By virtue of this authority, the President ordered a vote to be taken upon this instrument on the 30th day of November, 1869. This proposed constitution did not contain any such disfranchising and disqualifying clauses as those which rendered the Virginia and Mississippi instruments obnoxious to the intelligence of these
Ratification of the
Texas Constitution.
Restoration of
Texas to her
Federal relations.
Thus while the new President did not, as his predecessor had done, dispute the power of Congress to direct and control the reconstruction of the disrupted Southern communities as "States" of the Union, he appealed to Congress for the authority to relieve some of them still suffering under military rule from the hard alternative of negro domination, and when Congress gave him the power requested, he used it for the amelioration of the situation. This was true statesmanship. If President Johnson had done this instead of insisting upon his constitutional power to reconstruct, independently of Congress, these communities, and repeating continually his unsound, though specious, arguments in support of his view, it is quite possible that he might have maintained his influence, in some degree at least, with the Republican majority, and at the same time, and in consequence thereof, might have accomplished something in the interest of a true conservatism in Reconstruction. This is not, however, certain. Johnson had none of Grant's vast popularity with the people of the North whereby to overawe Congress, and there is no doubt, deny it as we may to conscious reflection, that down below consciousness there was a sort of distrust of a Southern Union man on the part of a large portion of the people of the North. Mr. Johnson had to suffer under the influence of this feeling, like all others of his class, and whenever he suggested any moderate course in the treatment of former rebels, he fell under the suspicion of masking sympathy with their sentiments under a pretence of Unionism. He was, thus, rather an object of Congressional distrust from the first, and could probably never have done so much as Grant succeeded in doing for conservatism in Virginia and Mississippi, even though he had recognized the power of Congress in the work of reconstruction, and had preferred respectful requests, instead of asserting presidential prerogatives.
Likewise the new President found, as soon as he began the work of administration, that the Tenure-of-Office Act was an unendurable
Grant and the
Tenure-of-Office Act.