Twenty Years of Congress Volume Ii Part 7

"What is before Congress?" asked Mr. Sh.e.l.labarger. "I at once define and affirm it in a single sentence. It is, under our Const.i.tution, possible to, and the late Rebellion did in fact, so overthrow and usurp, in the insurrectionary States, the loyal State Governments, as that during such usurpation such States and their people ceased to have any of the rights or powers of Government as States of the Union, and this loss of the rights and powers of Government was such that the United States may, and ought to, a.s.sume and exercise local powers of the lost State Governments, and may control the re-admission of such States to their powers of Government in this Union, subject to, and in accordance with, the obligation to guarantee to each State a republican form of Government."

Upon the broad proposition thus laid down by Mr. Sh.e.l.labarger, he proceeded to submit an argument which, for closeness, compactness, consistency and strength had rarely, if ever, been surpa.s.sed in the Congress of the United States. Other speeches have gained greater celebrity, but it may well be doubted whether any speech in the House of Representatives ever made a more enduring impression, or exerted greater convincing power, upon the minds of those to whom it was addressed. It was a far more valuable exposition of the Reconstruction question than that given by Mr. Stevens. It was absolutely without acrimony, it contained no harsh word, it made no personal reflection; but the whole duty of the United States, and the whole power of the United States to do its duty, were set forth with absolute precision of logic. The Reconstruction debate continued for a long time and many able speeches were contributed to it. While much of value was added to that which Mr. Sh.e.l.labarger had stated, no position taken by him was ever shaken.

Mr. Raymond had asked repeatedly and with great emphasis _what specific act_ had deprived these rebellious States of their rights as States of the Union. Mr. Sh.e.l.labarger gave an answer to that question, which, as a caustic summary, is worthy to be quoted in full. "I answer him,"

said the member from Ohio, "in the words of the Supreme Court, 'The causeless waging against their own Government of a war which all the world acknowledge to have been the greatest civil war known in the history of the human race.' That war was waged by these people as States, and it went through long, dreary years. In it they threw off and defied the authority of your Const.i.tution, your laws, and your Government. They obliterated from their State const.i.tutions and laws every vestige of recognition of your Government. They discarded all their official oaths, and took, in their places, oaths to support your enemies' government. They seized, in their States, all the Nation's property. Their senators and representatives in your Congress insulted, bantered, defied and then left you. They expelled from their land or a.s.sa.s.sinated every inhabitant of known loyalty. They betrayed and surrendered your arms. They pa.s.sed sequestration and other Acts in flagitious violation of the law of nations, making every citizen of the United States an alien enemy, and placing in the treasury of their rebellion all money and property due such citizens.

They framed iniquity and universal murder into law. For years they besieged your Capital and sent your bleeding armies in rout back here upon the very sanctuaries of your national power. Their pirates burned your unarmed commerce upon every sea. They carved the bones of your unburied heroes into ornaments and drank from goblets made out of their skulls. They poisoned your fountains, put mines under your soldiers' prisons, organized bands whose leaders were concealed in your homes, and whose commissions ordered the torch to be carried to your cities, and the yellow-fever to your wives and children.

They planned one universal bonfire of the North, from Lake Ontario to the Missouri. They murdered, by systems of starvation and exposure, sixty thousand of your sons as brave and heroic as ever martyrs were. They destroyed, in the four years of horrid war, another army so large that it would reach almost around the globe in marching-column. And then to give to the infernal drama a fitting close, and to concentrate into one crime all that is criminal in crime and all that is detestable in barbarism, they murdered the President of the United States."

"I allude to these horrid events," continued Mr. Sh.e.l.labarger, "not to revive frightful memories, or to bring back the impulses towards the perpetual severance of this people which they provoke. I allude to them to remind us how utter was the overthrow and the obliteration of all government, divine and human, how total was the wreck of all const.i.tutions and laws, political, civil and international. I allude to them to condense their monstrous enormities of guilt into one crime, and to point the gentleman from New York to it and tell him that that was the _specific act_."

Mr. Voorhees of Indiana followed on the day succeeding Mr.

Sh.e.l.labarger's speech, in support of a series of resolutions which he had offered on the same day that Mr. Raymond addressed the House, and further embarra.s.sing Mr. Raymond by the proffer of Democratic support, and proportionately discouraging the Republicans from coming forward in aid of the Administration. The resolutions of Mr. Voorhees declared in effect that "the President's message is regarded by the House as an able, judicious and patriotic State paper;" that "the principles therein advocated are the safest and most practicable that can be applied to our disordered domestic affairs;" that "no State or number of States confederated together can in any manner sunder their connection with the Federal Union;" and that "the President is ent.i.tled to the thanks of Congress and the country for his faithful, wise and successful efforts to restore civil government, law and order to the States lately in rebellion." Mr. Voorhees made an exhaustive speech in support of these resolutions, indicating very plainly the purpose of the Democratic party to combine in support of the President. He was answered promptly and eloquently, though not without some display of temper, by Mr. Bingham of Ohio, who at the close of his speech moved a subst.i.tute for the series of propositions made by Mr. Voorhees--simply declaring that "this House has an abiding confidence in the President, and that in the future as in the past, he will co-operate with Congress in restoring to equal position and rights with the other States in the Union, the States lately in insurrection."

Up to this period there had been no outbreak of the Republican party against the President. There had been coolness and general distrust, with resentment and anger on the part of many, but the hope of his co-operation with the party had not yet been entirely abandoned. Mr.

Bingham's resolution represented this hope, if not expectation, but the Republican members of the House were not willing to make so emphatic a declaration of their confidence as that resolution would imply; and when Mr. Bingham demanded the previous question he was interrupted by Mr. Stevens, who suggested that the whole subject be referred to the Joint Committee on Reconstruction. Mr. Bingham changed his motion accordingly; and the roll being called, the series of resolutions offered by Mr. Voorhees, with the subst.i.tute of Mr.

Bingham, were sent to the Committee on Reconstruction by 107 _ayes_ against 32 _noes_. Mr. Raymond and his colleague, Mr. William A.

Darling, were the only Republicans who voted with the Democrats. The act was simple in a parliamentary sense, but its significance was unmistakable. A House, four-fifths of whose members were Republicans, had refused to pa.s.s a resolution expressing confidence in the President who, fourteen months before, had received the vote of every Republican in the Nation. From that day, January 9th, 1866, the relation of the dominant party in Congress to the President was changed. It may not be said that all hope of reconciliation was abandoned, but friendly co-operation to any common end became extremely difficult.

Mr. Raymond was bitterly disappointed. Few members had ever entered the House with greater personal _prestige_ or with stronger a.s.surance of success. He had come with a high ambition--an ambition justified by his talent and training. He had come with the expectation of a Congressional career as successful as that already achieved in his editorial life. But he met a defeat which hardly fell short of a disaster. He had made a good reply to Mr. Stevens, had indeed gained much credit by it, and when he returned home for the holidays he had reason to believe that he had made a brilliant beginning in the parliamentary field. But the speech of Mr. Sh.e.l.labarger had destroyed his argument, and had given a rallying-point for the Republicans, so incontestably strong as to hold the entire party in allegiance to principle rather than in allegiance to the Administration. If any thing had been needed to complete Mr. Raymond's discomfiture after the speech of Mr. Sh.e.l.labarger, it was supplied in the speech of Mr.

Voorhees. He had been ranked among the most virulent opponents of Mr. Lincoln's Administration, had been bitterly denunciatory of the war policy of the Government, and was regarded as a leader of that section of the Democratic party to which the most odious epithets of disloyalty had been popularly applied. Mr. Raymond, in speaking of the defeat, always said that he could have effected a serious division in the ranks of Republican members if he could have had the benefit of the hostility of Mr. Voorhees and other anti-war Democrats.

Three weeks after Mr. Sh.e.l.labarger's reply Mr. Raymond made a rejoinder. He struggled hard to recover the ground which he had obviously lost, but he did not succeed in changing his _status_ in the House, or in securing recruits for the Administration from the ranks of his fellow Republicans. To fail in that was to fail in every thing.

That he made a clever speech was not denied, for every intellectual effort of Mr. Raymond exhibited cleverness. That he made the most of a weak cause, and to some extent influenced public opinion, must also be freely conceded. But his most partial friends were compelled to admit that he had absolutely failed to influence Republican action in Congress, and had only succeeded in making himself an apparent ally of the Democratic party--a position in every way unwelcome and distasteful to Mr. Raymond. His closing speech was marked by many pointed interruptions from Mr. Sh.e.l.labarger and was answered at some length by Mr. Stevens. But nothing, beyond a few keen thrusts and parries and some sharp wit at Mr. Raymond's expense, was added to the debate.

Mr. Raymond never rallied from the defeat of January 9th. His talents were acknowledged; his courteous manners, his wide intelligence, his generous hospitality, gave him a large popularity; but his alliance with President Johnson was fatal to his political fortunes. He had placed himself in a position from which he could not with grace retreat, and to go forward in which was still further to blight his hopes of promotion in his party. It was an extremely mortifying fact to Mr. Raymond that with the power of the Administration behind him he could on a test question secure the support of only one Republican member, and he a colleague who was bound to him by ties of personal friendship.

The fate which befell Mr. Raymond, apart from the essential weakness of the issue on which he staked his success, is not uncommon to men who enter Congress with great reputation already attained. So much is expected of them that their efforts on the floor are almost sure to fall below the standard set up for them by their hearers. By natural re-action the receive, in consequence, less credit than is their due.

Except in a few marked instances the House has always been led by men whose reputation has been acquired in its service. Entering unheralded, free from the requirements which expectation imposes, a clever man is sure to receive more credit than is really his due when his is so fortunate as to arrest the attention of members in his first speech. Thenceforward, if he be discreet enough to move slowly and modestly, he acquires a secure standing and may reach the highest honors with the House can confer.

If, ambitious of a career, Mr. Raymond had been elected to Congress when he was chosen to the New-York Legislature at twenty-nine years of age, or five years later when he was made Lieutenant-governor of his State, he might have attained a great parliamentary fame. It has long been a tradition of the House that no man becomes its leader who does not enter it before he is forty. Like most sweeping affirmations this has its exceptions, but the list of young men who have been advanced to prominent positions in the body is so large that it may well be a.s.sumed as the rule of promotion. Mr. Raymond was nearly forty-six when he made his first speech in the House. While he still exhibited the intellectual acuteness and alertness which had always been his characteristics, there was apparent in his face the mental weariness which had come from the prolonged and exacting labor of his profession.

His parliamentary failure was a keen disappointment to him, and was not improbably one among many causes which cut short a brilliant and useful life. He died in 1869, in the forty-ninth year of his age.

This first debate on reconstruction developed the fact that the Democrats in Congress would endeavor to regain the ground they had lost by their hostility to Mr. Lincoln's Administration during the war. The extreme members of that party, while the war was flagrant, adhered to many dogmas which were considered unpatriotic and in none more so than the declaration that even in the case of secession "there is no power in the Const.i.tution to coerce a State." They now united in the declaration, as embodied in the resolution of Mr. Voorhees, that "no State or number of States confederated together can in any manner sunder their connection with the Federal Union." This was intended as a direct and defiant answer to the heretical creed of Mr. Stevens, that the States by their attempted secession were really no longer members of the Union and could not become so until regularly re-admitted by Congress. By antagonizing this declaration the Democrats strove to convince the country that it was the accepted doctrine of their political opponents, and that they were themselves the true and tried friends of the Union.

The great majority of the Republican leaders, however, did not at all agree with the theory of Mr. Stevens and the ma.s.s of the party were steadily against him. The one signal proof of their dissent from the extreme doctrine was their absolute unwillingness to attempt an amendment to the Const.i.tution by the ratification of three-fourths of the Loyal States only, and their insisting that it must be three-fourths of all the States, North and South. Mr. Stevens deemed this a fatal step for the party, and his extreme opinion had the indors.e.m.e.nt of Mr. Sumner; but against both these radical leaders the party was governed by its own conservative instincts. They believed with Mr.

Lincoln that the Stevens plan of amendment would always be questioned, and that in so grave a matter as a change to the organic law of the Nation, the process should be unquestionable--one that could stand every test and resist every a.s.sault.

The Republicans, as might well have been expected, did not stand on the defensive in such a controversy with their opponents. They became confidently aggressive. They alleged that when the Union was in danger from secession the Northern Democrats did all in their power to inflame the trouble, urged the Southern leaders to persevere and not yield to the Abolitionists, and even when war was imminent did nothing to allay the danger, but every thing to encourage its authors. Now that war was over, the Democrats insisted on the offending States being instantly re-invested with all the rights of loyalty, without promise and without condition. At the beginning of the war and after its close, therefore, they had been hand in hand with the offending rebels, practically working at both periods to bring about the result desired by the South. Their policy, in short, seemed to have the interests of the guilty authors of the Rebellion more at heart than the safety of the Union. Their efforts now to clothe the Southern conspirators with fresh power and to take no note of the crimes which had for four years drenched the land in blood, const.i.tuted an offense only less grave in the eyes of the Republicans than the aid and comfort given to the Rebellion in the hour of its inception.

These were the accusations and criminations which were exchanged between the political parties. They lent acrimony to the impending canva.s.s and increased the mutual hostility of those engaged in the exciting controversy. The Republicans were resolved that their action should neither be misinterpreted by opposing partisans nor misunderstood by the people. They were confident that when their position should be correctly apprehended it would still more strongly confirm their claim to be the special and jealous guardians of the Union of the States--of a Union so strongly based that future rebellion would be rendered impossible, the safety and glory of the Republic made perpetual.

[(1)NOTE.--The members of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction were as follows:--

_On the part of the Senate_.--William P. Fessenden of Maine, James W.

Grimes of Iowa, Ira Harris of New York, Jacob M. Howard of Michigan, George H. Williams of Oregon, and _Reverdy Johnson_ of Maryland.

_On the part of the House_.--Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, Elihu B. Washburne of Illinois, Justin S. Morrill of Vermont, John A. Bingham of Ohio, Roscoe Conkling of New York, George S. Boutwell of Ma.s.sachusetts, Henry T. Blow of Missouri, _A. J. Rogers_ of New Jersey, and _Henry Grider_ of Kentucky.]

CHAPTER VII.

The debate on the direct question of Reconstruction did not begin at so early a date in the Senate as in the House, but kindred topics led to the same line of discussion as that in which the House found itself engaged. During the first week of the session Mr. Wilson of Ma.s.sachusetts had submitted a bill for the protection of freedman, designed to overthrow and destroy the odious enactments which in many of the Southern States were rapidly reducing the entire negro race to a new form of slavery. Mr. Wilson's bill provided that "all laws, statutes, acts, ordinances, rules and regulations in any of the States lately in rebellion, which, by inequality of civil rights and immunities among the inhabitants of said States is established or maintained by reason of differences of color, race or descent, are hereby declared null and void." For the violation of this statute a punishment was provided by fine of not less than five hundred dollars nor more than ten thousand dollars, and by imprisonment not less than six months nor more than five years.

In debating his bill Mr. Wilson declared that he had "no desire to say harsh things of the South nor of the men who have been engaged in the Rebellion. I do not ask their property or their blood; I do not wish to disgrace or degrade them; but I do wish that they shall not be permitted to disgrace, degrade or oppress anybody else. I offer this bill as a measure of humanity, as a measure that the needs of that section of the country imperatively demand at our hands. I believe that if it should pa.s.s it will receive the sanction of nineteen-twentieths of the loyal people of the country. Men may differ about the power or the expediency of giving the right of suffrage to the negro; but how any humane, just and Christian man can for a moment permit the laws that are on the statute-books of the Southern States and the laws now pending before their Legislatures, to be executed upon men whom we have declared to be free, I cannot comprehend."

Mr. Reverdy Johnson replied to Mr. Wilson in a tone of apology for the laws complained of, but took occasion to give his views of the status of the States lately in rebellion. "I have now," said Mr. Johnson, "and I have had from the first, a very decided opinion that they are States in the Union and that they never could have been placed out of the Union without the consent of their sister States. The insurrection terminated, the authority of the Government was thereby re-inst.i.tuted; _eo instanti_ they were invested with all the rights belonging to them originally--I mean as States. . . In my judgment our sole authority for the acts which we have done during the last four years was the authority communicated to Congress by the Const.i.tution to suppress insurrection. If the power can only be referred to that clause, in my opinion, speaking I repeat with great deference to the judgment of others, the moment the insurrection was terminated there was no power whatever left in the Congress of the United States over those States; and I am glad to see, if I understand his Message, that in the view I have just expressed I have the concurrence of the President of the United States."

Mr. Sumner sustained Mr. Wilson's bill in an elaborate argument delivered on the 20th of December. There was an obvious desire in both branches of Congress and in both parties--those opposed to the President's policy and those favoring it--to appeal to the popular judgment as promptly as possible, and this led to a prolonged and earnest debate prior to the holidays, an occurrence unusual and almost unprecedented. Mr. Sumner declared that Mr. Wilson's bill was simply to maintain and carry out the Proclamation of Emanc.i.p.ation. The pledge there given was that the Executive Government of the United States, including the military and naval authority thereof, would recognize and maintain the freedom of such persons. "This pledge," said Mr.

Sumner, "is without limitation in s.p.a.ce or time. It is as extended and as immortal as the Republic itself, to that pledge we are solemnly bound; wherever our flag floats, as long as time endures, we must see that it is sacredly observed. The performance of that pledge cannot be intrusted to another, least of all to the old slave-masters, embittered against their slaves. It must be performed by the National Government. The power that gives freedom must see that freedom is maintained."

"Three of England's greatest orators and statesmen," continued Mr.

Sumner, "Burke, Canning and Brougham, at successive periods unite in declaring, from the experience of the British West Indies, that whatever the slave-masters undertook to do for their slaves was always arrant trifling; that whatever might be its plausible form it always wanted the executive principle. More recently the Emperor of Russia, in ordering the emanc.i.p.ation of the serfs, declared that all previous efforts had failed because they had been left to the spontaneous initiative of the proprietors." . . . "I a.s.sume that we shall not leave to the old slave-proprietors the maintenance of that freedom to which we are pledged, and thus break our own promise and sacrifice a race."

In concluding his speech Mr. Sumner referred to the enormity of the wrongs against the freedmen as something that made the blood curdle.

"In the name of G.o.d," said he, "let us protect them; insist upon guarantees; pa.s.s the bill under consideration; pa.s.s any bill, but do not let this crying injustice rage any longer. An avenging G.o.d cannot sleep while such things find countenance. If you are not ready to be the Moses of an oppressed people, do not become their Pharaoh."

Mr. Willard Saulsbury of Delaware made a brief reply to Mr. Sumner, not so much to argue the points put forward by the senator from Ma.s.sachusetts, not so much to deny the facts related by him or to discuss the principles which he had presented, as to announce that "it can be no longer disguised that there is in the party which elected the President an opposition party to him. Nothing can be more antagonistic than the suggestions contained in his Message and the speeches already made in both Houses of Congress." He adjured the President to be true and faithful to the principles he had foreshadowed, and pledged him "the support of two million men in the States which have not been in revolt, and who did not support him for his high office."

Mr. Cowan of Pennsylvania, one of the Republican senators who had indicated a purpose to sustain the President, was evidently somewhat stunned by Mr. Sumner's speech. He treated the outrages of which Mr.

Sumner complained as exceptional instances of bad conduct on the part of the Southern people. "One man out of ten thousand," said Mr. Cowan, "is brutal to a negro, and that is paraded here as a type of the whole people of the South; whereas nothing is said of the other nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine men who treat the negro well." Mr.

Cowan's argument was altogether inapposite; for what Mr. Sumner and Mr.

Wilson had complained of was not the action of individual men in the South, but of laws solemnly enacted by Legislatures whose right to act had been recognized by the Executive Department of the National Government, and which had indeed been organized in pursuance of the President's Reconstruction policy,--almost in fact by the personal patronage of the President. The situation was one very difficult to justify by a man with the record of Mr. Cowan. He had been not merely a Republican before his entrance into the Senate but a radical Republican, taking ground in the campaign of 1860 only less advanced than that maintained by Mr. Thaddeus Stevens himself.

These debates in both Senate and House, at so early a period of the session, give a full and fair indication of the temper which prevailed in the country and in Congress. The majority of the members had not, at the opening of the session, given up hope of some form of co-operation with the President. As partisans and party leaders they looked forward with something of dismay to the rending of all relations with the Executive, and to the surrender of the political advantage which comes to the party and to the partisan from a close alliance between the Executive and Legislative Departments. On the re-a.s.sembling of Congress after the holidays a great change was seen and realized by all. It was feared by many, even of the most conservative, that the policy of Congress and the policy of the President might come into irreconcilable conflict, and that the party which had successfully conducted the Government through the embarra.s.sments, the trials and the perils of a long civil war, might now be wrecked by an angry controversy between two departments of the Government, each owing its existence to the same great const.i.tuency,--the loyal people of the North.

Circ.u.mstances suggested the impossibility of a successful contest against the President and the Democratic party united. Even those elections which result, in the exuberant language of the press, in an overwhelming victory on the one side and an overwhelming defeat, on the other, are often found, upon a.n.a.lysis, to be based on very narrow margins in the popular result, the reversal of which requires only the change of a few thousand votes. This was demonstrated in many of the great States, even in the second election of Mr. Lincoln, when to the general apprehension he was almost unanimously sustained.

From this fact it was well argued by Republicans in Congress that great danger to the party was involved in the impending dissension.

Even the most sanguine feared defeat, and the naturally despondent already counted it as certain. Never before had so stringent a test of principle been applied to the members of both Houses. The situation was indeed peculiar. The great statesman who had been honored as the founder of the Republican party was now closely allied with the Administration. His colleague who had sat next him in the Cabinet of Mr. Lincoln, and who, in the judgment of his partial friends, was the peer of Mr. Seward both in ability and in merit, did not hesitate to show from the exalted seat of the Chief Justice his strong sympathy with the President.

The leading commercial men, who had become weary of war, contemplated with positive dread the re-opening of a controversy which might prove as disturbing to the business of the country as the struggle of arms had been, and without the quickening impulses to trade which active war always imparts. The bankers of the great cities, whose capital and whose deposits all rested upon the credit of the country and were invested in its paper, believed that the speedy settlement of all dissension and the harmonious co-operation of all departments of the Government were needed to maintain the financial honor of the nation and to re-instate confidence among the people. Against obstacles so menacing, against resistance so ominous, against an array of power so imposing, it seemed to be an act of boundless temerity to challenge the President to a contest, to array public opinion against him, to denounce him, to deride him, to defy him.

It is to the eminent credit of the Republican members of Congress that they stood in a crisis of this magnitude true to principle, firm against all the power and all the patronage of the Administration. No unmanly efforts to compromise, no weak shirking from duty, sullied the fame of the great body of senators and representatives. Even the Whig party in 1841, with Mr. Clay for a leader, did not stand so solidly against John Tyler as the Republican party, under the lead of Fessenden and Sumner in the Senate and of Thaddeus Stevens in the House, now stood against the Administration of President Johnson. The Whigs of the country, in the former crisis, lost many of their leading and most brilliant men,--a sufficient number indeed to compa.s.s the defeat of Mr.

Clay three years later. The loss to the Republican party now was so small as to be unfelt and almost invisible in the political contests into which the party was soon precipitated. The Whigs of 1841 were contending only for systems of finance, and they broke finally with the President because of his veto of a bill establishing a fiscal agency for the use of the Government,--merely a National Bank disguised under another name. The Republicans of 1866 were contending for a vastly greater stake,--for the sacredness of human rights, for the secure foundation of free government. Their constancy was greater than that of the Whigs because the rights of person transcend the rights of property.

On the 12th of December Mr. Cowan had submitted a resolution requesting the President to furnish to the Senate information of "the condition of that portion of the United States lately in rebellion; whether the rebellion has been suppressed and the United States again put in possession of the States in which it existed; whether the United-States post-offices are re-established and the revenues collected therefrom; and also, whether the people of those States have re-organized their State governments; and whether they are yielding obedience to the laws and Government of the United States." Mr. Sumner moved an amendment, directing the President to furnish to the Senate at the same time "copies of such reports as he may have received from the officers or agents appointed to visit this portion of the Union, including especially any reports from the Honorable John Covode and Major-General Carl Schurz." The President's message, sent to the Senate a week later, in response to this resolution, was brief, being simply a statement of what had been accomplished by his Reconstruction policy, with an expression of his belief that "sectional animosity is surely and rapidly merging itself into a spirit of nationality; that representation, connected with a properly adjusted system of taxation, will result in a harmonious restoration of the relations of the States to the National Union." He transmitted the report of Mr. Schurz and also invited the attention of the Senate to a report of Lieutenant-General Grant, who had recently made a tour of the inspection through several of the States lately in rebellion.

The President evidently desired that General Grant's opinions concerning the South should be spread before the public. From the high character of the General-in-Chief and his known relations with the prominent Republicans in Congress, the Administration hoped that great influence would be exerted by the communication of his views. His report was short and very positive. He declared his belief that "the ma.s.s of thinking men of the South accept the present situation of affairs in good faith." At the same time he thought that "four years of war have left the people possibly in a condition not ready to yield that obedience to civil authority which the American people have been in the habit of yielding, thus rendering the presence of small garrisons throughout these States necessary until such time as labor returns to its proper channels and civil authority is fully established."

It was General Grant's opinion however that acquiescence in the authority of the General Government was so universal throughout the portions of the country he visited, that "the mere presence of a military force, without regard to numbers, is sufficient to maintain order." He urged that only white troops be employed in the South.

The presence of black troops, he said, "demoralizes labor" and "furnishes in their camps a resort for freedmen." He thought there was danger of collision from the presence of black troops. His observations led him to the conclusion that "the citizens of the Southern States are anxious to return to self-government within the Union as soon as possible;" that "during the process of reconstruction they want and require protection from the Government;" that "they are in earnest, and wishing to do what they think is required by the Government, not humiliating to them as citizens;" and that "if such a course were pointed out they would pursue it in good faith." "The questions," continued General Grant, "heretofore dividing the people of the two sections--slavery and the right of secession--the Southern men regard as having been settled forever by the tribunal of arms. I was pleased to learn from the leading men whom I met that they not only accepted the decision as final, but now that the smoke of battle has cleared away and time has been given for reflection, that this decision has been a fortunate one for the whole country." He suggested that the Freedmen's Bureau be put under command of military officers in the respective departments, thus saving the expense of a separate organization. This would create a responsibility that would secure uniformity of action throughout the South. His general characterization of the Bureau was, that it tended to impress the freedman with the idea that he would not be compelled to work, and that in some way the lands of his former master were to be divided among the colored persons.

The supporters of the Administration considered General Grant's report a strong justification of their position towards the South, and they used it with some effect throughout the country. The popularity of the Lieutenant-General was boundless, and of course there was strong temptation to make the most of whatever might be said by him. Mr.

Sumner immediately demanded the reading of the report of Mr. Schurz.

He likened the message of the President to the "whitewashing" message of President Pierce with regard to the enormities in Kansas. "That,"

said he, "is its parallel." Mr. Doolittle criticized the use of the word "whitewashing," and asked Mr. Sumner to qualify it, but the Ma.s.sachusetts senator declared that he had "nothing to modify, nothing to qualify, nothing to retract. In former days there was one Kansas that suffered under a local power. There are now eleven Kansases suffering as one: therefore, as eleven is more than one so is the enormity of the present time more than the enormity of the days of President Pierce." Later in the debate, Mr. Sumner indirectly qualified his harsh words, saying that he had no reflection to make on the patriotism or the truth of the President of the United States.

"Never in public or in private," said he, "have I made such reflection and I do not begin now. When I spoke I spoke of the doc.u.ment that had been read at the desk. I characterized it as I though I ought to characterize it." The distinction he sought to make was not clearly apparent, the only importance attaching to it being that Mr. Sumner had not yet concluded that a bitter political war was to be made upon the President of the United States.

The character of Mr. Schurz's report at once disclosed the reason of Mr. Sumner's anxiety to have it printed with the report of General Grant. It was made after a somewhat prolonged investigation in the States of South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and the Department of the Gulf. Mr. Schurz's conclusions were that the loyalty of the ma.s.ses and of most of the leaders in the South "consists of submission to necessity." Except in individual instances, he found "an entire absence of that national spirit which forms the basis of true loyalty and patriotism." He found that "the emanc.i.p.ation of the slaves is submitted to only in so far as chattel-slavery in the old form could not be kept up; and although the freeman is no longer considered the property of the individual master he is considered the slave of society, and all independent State legislation will share the tendency to make him such. The ordinances abolishing slavery, pa.s.sed by the conventions under the pressure of circ.u.mstances, will not be looked upon as barring the establishment of a new form of servitude."

"Practical attempts," Mr. Schurz continued, "on the part of the Southern people to deprive the negro of his rights as a freedman may result in b.l.o.o.d.y collision, and will certainly plunge Southern society into resistless fluctuations and anarchical confusion."