Sec. 13. That if any person declared free by this act, or any law of the United States, or any proclamation of the President, be restrained of liberty, with intent to be held in or reduced to involuntary servitude or labor, the person convicted before a court of competent jurisdiction of such act shall be punished by fine of not less than $1,500, and be imprisoned not less than five, nor more than twenty years.
Sec. 14. That every person who shall hereafter hold or exercise any office, civil or military, except offices merely ministerial and military offices below the grade of colonel, in the rebel service, State or Confederate, is hereby declared not to be a citizen of the United States.
Lincoln’s Proclamation on Reconstruction
President Lincoln failed to sign the above bill because it reached him less than one hour before final adjournment, and thereupon issued a proclamation which closed as follows:
“Now, therefore, I, Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, do proclaim, declare, and make known, that, while I am (as I was in December last, when by proclamation I propounded a plan for restoration) unprepared, by a formal approval of this bill, to be inflexibly committed to any single plan of restoration; and, while I am also unprepared to declare that the free State constitutions and governments already adopted and installed in Arkansas and Louisiana shall be set aside and held for nought, thereby repelling and discouraging the loyal citizens who have set up the same as to further effort, or to declare a constitutional competency in Congress to abolish slavery in States, but am at the same time sincerely hoping and expecting that a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery throughout the nation may be adopted, nevertheless I am fully satisfied with the system for restoration contained in the bill as one very proper plan for the loyal people of any State choosing to adopt it, and that I am, and at all times shall be, prepared to give the Executive aid and assistance to any such people, so soon as the military resistance to the United States shall have been suppressed in any such State, and the people thereof shall have sufficiently returned to their obedience to the Constitution and laws of the United States, in which cases Military Governors will be appointed, with directions to proceed according to the bill.”
Admission of Arkansas.
On the 10th of June, 1864, introduced a joint resolution for the recognition of the free State government of Arkansas. A new State government had then been organized, with Isaac Murphy, Governor, who was reported to have received nearly 16,000 votes at a called election. The other State officers are:
Lieutenant-Governor, C. C. Bliss; Secretary of State, R. J. T. White; Auditor, J. B. Berry; Treasurer, E. D. Ayers; Attorney General, C. T. Jordan; Judges of the Supreme Court, T. D. W. Yowley, C. A. Harper, E. Baker.
The Legislature also elected Senators, but neither Senators nor Representatives obtained their seats. Trumbull, from the Senate Judiciary Committee, made a long report touching the admission of the Senators, which closed as follows:
“When the rebellion in Arkansas shall have been so far suppressed that the loyal inhabitants thereof shall be free to re-establish their State government upon a republican foundation, or to recognize the one already set up, and by the aid and not in subordination to the military to maintain the same, they will then, and not before, in the opinion of your committee, be entitled to a representation in Congress, and to participate in the administration of the Federal Government. Believing that such a state of things did not at the time the claimants were elected, and does not now, exist in the State of Arkansas, the committee recommend for adoption the following resolution: