Northern representatives in Congress, under the leadership of Thaddeus Stevens and Henry Winter Davis, were not hospitable to the Southern claims for immediate and unconditional representation in Congress. In substance they said: The alleged “right” of secession has been trampled under the feet of the Union armies; the Confederate claims of exemption from the consequences of their action is not allowed. The North does not demand punishment of Confederates, nor indemnity for the past, but it will have security for the future. Taxation is a consequence of war which the South must bear with the North. Representation—participation in public rule—is a privilege which, except under satisfactory conditions and guarantees, will not be extended to the people of the cotton States.
THE MILITARY STATE GOVERNMENTS
A LAW of Congress was enacted authorizing an officer not below the rank of brigadier-general of the United States army to make a list of all the voters in a State which might be under his command as a military district. In making this list, residence and manhood were the only qualifications.[3] The general was authorized and directed to issue a proclamation inviting the listed voters to assemble at the polls and elect delegates to a convention to draft a State constitution to be submitted to a vote of the people, and if ratified and approved by Congress, the State to be placed at once in practical political relations with the other States, and accorded her proper representation in Congress. The only persons excluded from participation in reconstruction were those who before the war had taken an official oath to support the Government and Constitution of the United States, and who had afterward violated that oath by voluntarily bearing arms against the Government of the United States. The class thus excluded from suffrage was perhaps 30,000 in number. The conventions were required to perpetuate the basis of suffrage set forth in the Reconstruction Act and to ratify the Fourteenth Amendment. That amendment provided that Federal indebtedness should be paid, and that Confederate indebtedness should not be paid; that those who were under disabilities should not be eligible to office until Congress should remove their disabilities; that representation in Congress and in the Electoral College should not be accorded to those to whom the right of suffrage had been or might be denied, and that all persons should be protected in their rights of liberty and property.
The Fourteenth Amendment was opposed both South and North by those who asserted that the Union armies had fought to establish the doctrine that no State could secede from the Union; that the Union victories had established such doctrine; that as no State could secede, therefore no State did secede, and, so being in the Union, every Southern State was entitled to representation without conditions.
To such reasoning it was answered that no statesman and no party had ever claimed that a State might not destroy herself, even as a city might disincorporate, or a county merge itself with another. No State could absolve its citizens from their allegiance to the United States or release them from their obligation to obey Federal laws and their liability for Federal taxes, or deprive them of their right to Federal protection. No State could withdraw her territory or her people from the dominant jurisdiction of the United States. But, nevertheless, a State might destroy her internal government, repeal her local laws, and discontinue her political relations with the other States. She might commit state suicide. If she sent no senators or representatives to the Federal Congress; if through her officers she emptied her treasury, abrogated her courts, disrobed herself of sovereignty, dissolved her legislature, smote her constitution to pieces with anarchic blows, and submitted to military rule or to the sway of a revolutionary central power, she did not take her territory or her people out of the Union, but she took herself out of existence as a State, leaving only her territorial boundaries to mark her place on the map. In such circumstances it became the duty of the Government of the United States to treat such disorganized Federal territory as it would treat unorganized Federal territory acquired by purchase or by conquest.
LINCOLN’S RECONSTRUCTION POLICY IN WAR AND JOHNSON’S IN PEACE
BETWEEN the assassination of President Lincoln and the meeting of Congress in December, 1865, an interval of over seven months, there was no authoritative Republican declaration of the party policy as to reconstruction. The murder of Lincoln, hastily and unjustly charged by some Union men against the entire South, was received with an outburst of rage that encouraged Thaddeus Stevens and other leading Radicals to propose that the South should be reconstructed by treating the eleven late Confederate States as conquered territory, wiping out State lines, and organizing the Territory of Grant, the Territory of Lincoln, the Territory of Sherman, the Territory of Sheridan, and other territories to be named after Union officers, which should be governed like the Territories of Idaho, Montana, and Colorado, and in due time admitted to the Union on a satisfactory showing in each case.
President Johnson opposed the program of Thad. Stevens. He called attention to the fact that before the surrender of Lee at Appomattox the white men of Tennessee elected two United States senators and a full complement of congressmen, made Brownlow governor, and gave a majority for Lincoln and Johnson. He reasoned that if Tennessee was in the Union sufficiently to provide a Vice-President who had become President, she was in the Union absolutely, and entitled to have her senators and representatives admitted to seats in Congress. Johnson’s policy was to ignore everything in the past; to readmit senators and representatives from the late Confederate States without guarantees and without delay; to withdraw our armies, and permit the Confederates to reëstablish their local governments to suit themselves. He proposed, in effect, that the Confederates, after four years of fighting, having surrendered to the Union, Union men in turn should, after four weeks of rejoicing, surrender to the Confederacy.
In assuming this position, Johnson claimed that he was carrying out Lincoln’s plan of reconstruction, for Lincoln had said long before the surrender of Lee that his purpose was to save the Union, whether such saving was accomplished by abolishing slavery or by preserving it. But Lincoln was a progressive and constructive statesman, and a policy which he might have favored to obtain peace conditioned on the disbandment of the Confederate armies, while they were still in the field as a mighty force, might not have been his policy after the enforced surrender of Lee and Johnston.
There was no time between the collapse of the Confederacy and the assassination of Lincoln for him to formulate any policy. It may be said, however, that he was not in favor of the plan of Thad. Stevens and Ben. Wade to blot out lines and names in eleven States, and deal with them as conquered territory. Lincoln’s plan was not to destroy the Southern States as existing entities, but to recognize the fact that, as far as government in those entities was concerned, “chaos had come again,” and it was the duty of Congress to provide for a reëstablishment of government there, and to prescribe the conditions on which the people of those States should be accorded national representation.