Reconstruction

by Brooks D. Simpson

  In opposition to these things, a portion of Congress seems to desire that the conquered belligerent shall, according to the law of nations, pay at least a part of the expenses and damages of the war; and that especially the loyal people who were plundered and impoverished by rebel raiders shall be fully indemnified. A majority of Congress desires that treason shall be made odious, not by bloody executions, but by other adequate punishments.

  Congress refuses to treat the States created by him as of any validity, and denies that the old rebel States have any existence which gives them any rights under the Constitution. Congress insists on changing the basis of representation so as to put white voters on an equality in both sections, and that such change shall precede the admission of any State. I deny that there is any understanding, expressed or implied, that upon the adoption of the amendment by any State, that such State may be admitted, (before the amendment becomes part of the Constitution.) Such a course would soon surrender the Government into the hands of rebels. Such a course would be senseless, inconsistent, and illogical. Congress denies that any State lately in rebellion has any government or constitution known to the Constitution of the United States, or which can be recognized as part of the Union. How, then, can such a State adopt the amendment? To allow it would be yielding the whole question and admitting the unimpaired rights of the seceded States. I know of no Republican who does not ridicule what Mr. Seward thought a cunning movement, in counting Virginia and other outlawed States among those which had adopted the constitutional amendment abolishing slavery.

  It is to be regretted that inconsiderate and incautious Republicans should ever have supposed that the slight amendments already proposed to the Constitution, even when incorporated into that instrument, would satisfy the reforms necessary for the security of the Government. Unless the rebel States, before admission, should be made republican in spirit, and placed under the guardianship of loyal men, all our blood and treasure will have been spent in vain. I waive now the question of punishment which, if we are wise, will still be inflicted by moderate confiscations, both as a reproof and example. Having these States, as we all agree, entirely within the power of Congress, it is our duty to take care that no injustice shall remain in their organic laws. Holding them “like clay in the hands of the potter,” we must see that no vessel is made for destruction. Having now no governments, they must have enabling acts. The law of last session with regard to Territories settled the principles of such acts. Impartial suffrage, both in electing the delegates and ratifying their proceedings, is now the fixed rule. There is more reason why colored voters should be admitted in the rebel States than in the Territories. In the States they form the great mass of the loyal men. Possibly with their aid loyal governments may be established in most of those States. Without it all are sure to be ruled by traitors; and loyal men, black and white, will be oppressed, exiled, or murdered. There are several good reasons for the passage of this bill. In the first place, it is just. I am now confining my arguments to negro suffrage in the rebel States. Have not loyal blacks quite as good a right to choose rulers and make laws as rebel whites? In the second place, it is a necessity in order to protect the loyal white men in the seceded States. The white Union men are in a great minority in each of those States. With them the blacks would act in a body; and it is believed that in each of said States, except one, the two united would form a majority, control the States, and protect themselves. Now they are the victims of daily murder. They must suffer constant persecution or be exiled. The convention of southern loyalists, lately held in Philadelphia, almost unanimously agreed to such a bill as an absolute necessity.

  Another good reason is, it would insure the ascendency of the Union party. Do you avow the party purpose? exclaims some horror-stricken demagogue. I do. For I believe, on my conscience, that on the continued ascendency of that party depends the safety of this great nation. If impartial suffrage is excluded in the rebel States then every one of them is sure to send a solid rebel representative delegation to Congress, and cast a solid rebel electoral vote. They, with their kindred Copperheads of the North, would always elect the President and control Congress. While slavery sat upon her defiant throne, and insulted and intimidated the trembling North, the South frequently divided on questions of policy between Whigs and Democrats, and gave victory alternately to the sections. Now, you must divide them between loyalists, without regard to color, and disloyalists, or you will be the perpetual vassals of the free-trade, irritated, revengeful South. For these, among other reasons, I am for negro suffrage in every rebel State. If it be just, it should not be denied; if it be necessary, it should be adopted; if it be a punishment to traitors, they deserve it.

  But it will be said, as it has been said, “This is negro equality!” What is negro equality, about which so much is said by knaves, and some of which is believed by men who are not fools? It means, as understood by honest Republicans, just this much, and no more: every man, no matter what his race or color; every earthly being who has an immortal soul, has an equal right to justice, honesty, and fair play with every other man; and the law should secure him these rights. The same law which condemns or acquits an African should condemn or acquit a white man. The same law which gives a verdict in a white man’s favor should give a verdict in a black man’s favor on the same state of facts. Such is the law of God and such ought to be the law of man. This doctrine does not mean that a negro shall sit on the same seat or eat at the same table with a white man. That is a matter of taste which every man must decide for himself. The law has nothing to do with it. If there be any who are afraid of the rivalry of the black man in office or in business, I have only to advise them to try and beat their competitor in knowledge and business capacity, and there is no danger that his white neighbors will prefer his African rival to himself. I know there is between those who are influenced by this cry of “negro equality” and the opinion that there is still danger that the negro will be the smartest, for I never saw even a contraband slave that had not more sense than such men.

  There are those who admit the justice and ultimate utility of granting impartial suffrage to all men, but they think it is impolitic. An ancient philosopher, whose antagonist admitted that what he required was just but deemed it impolitic, asked him: “Do you believe in Hades?” I would say to those above referred to, who admit the justice of human equality before the law but doubt its policy: “Do you believe in hell?”

  How do you answer the principle inscribed in our political scripture, “That to secure these rights governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed?” Without such consent government is a tyranny, and you exercising it are tyrants. Of course, this does not admit malefactors to power, or there would soon be no penal laws and society would become an anarchy. But this step forward is an assault upon ignorance and prejudice, and timid men shrink from it. Are such men fit to sit in the places of statesmen?

  There are periods in the history of nations when statesmen can make themselves names for posterity; but such occasions are never improved by cowards. In the acquisition of true fame courage is just as necessary in the civilian as in the military hero. In the Reformation there were men engaged as able and perhaps more learned than Martin Luther. Melancthon and others were ripe scholars and sincere reformers, but none of them had his courage. He alone was willing to go where duty called though “devils were as thick as the tiles on the houses.” And Luther is the great luminary of the Reformation, around whom the others revolve as satellites and shine by his light. We may not aspire to fame. But great events fix the eye of history on small objects and magnify their meanness. Let us at least escape that condition.

  January 3, 1867

  “SPURNING SELF-DEGRADATION”:

  ALABAMA, JANUARY 1867

  Mobile Daily Advertiser and Register:

  No Amendment—Stand Firm

  DESOLATE IN heart, broken in fortunes, isolated in politics, and enduring all the tri
als and mortifications of a people subjugated by arms, the South has yet solemn duties to perform. It has temptations to avoid, the wiles of politicians to resist, and a noble fortitude to foster and cherish, in order to bear affliction with patience and hope and thus safely pass through the present, last and not the least of its many crises. We see danger in this Radical Constitutional Amendment, and we should be false to public duty did we not warn our countrymen of it. It is a Trojan horse sought to be introduced into our gates, with the difference that its armed enemies are not even concealed in its belly. There never was a clearer proposition to men whose visions are not darkened by apprehension, than that the excluded State owe it to themselves, to their heroic leaders, like Davis and Lee, to their fellow-Americans in the other States of the former Union, and to the genius of Constitutional Freedom, resolutely to decline to become parties, by consent, to this degrading amendment. Nothing worse could befall us from the most vindictive action of the present Congress; for granting that we get back into the Union, “so-called,” at the price of this sacrifice of constitutional right, State character and honor, as a people, what do we gain but dead-sea fruit? We go back bound, hand and foot, and as much at the mercy of a Radical majority, whose sway will have been prolonged by our act, as we are now or could be under an act of territorialization. We go back with our heads hanging in shame, and our names blasted for all time to come, as a people who have sold their God-like Lee for thirty dirty pieces of silver. Do it not, men of the South! Let them not do the deed, women of the South! And as we have heretofore pleaded with you to count the cost of rashness before you leaped from the beetling verge into the dread abyss of civil war, and as when you had passed the Rubicon, we besought you by all your manhood and womanhood to make good, by sacrifice and valor, the step you had taken, we now implore you to stand firm in spurning self-degradation, to hold fast to the vantage ground of your present position, to be true to yourselves and the friends of liberty throughout this once free land, and show yourselves as faithful to principle and honor in defeat, as your dead and living soldiers were brave in war.

  We deeply regret that Alabama should have been the first State to show signs of flinching where steadiness and nerve are demanded by duty and statesmanship. And if there should be danger that in the coming session the project should be revived with any prospect of success, it becomes the duty of the people in their several counties, where their representatives are hesitating, to meet in primary assemblies and command their servants not through cowardly apprehensions to surrender them to the indignities and injustice of this amendment. The wavering at Montgomery has already stimulated Radical energy to threaten and frighten us into a measure which is so important to them. The crazy resolutions and projets of laws with which Congress is being deluged are the evidences of this purpose. Let us be true to ourselves, stand firm and fear not. Radicalism is travelling a road that must come to a speedy end. They are driving the car of revolution with electric speed and a smash-up is inevitable unless the teachings of human history are all false, and the everlasting laws of cause and effect are to be suspended for Radical benefit. Congress is striving to concentrate all the powers of the Government in its own hands—the President’s late message demonstrates this truth with unanswerable arguments. It remains to be seen whether the Executive and the Supreme Court will surrender the trusts and powers reposed in them as co-ordinate branches of the Government, and where the majority of the people of the country will be in such a struggle. Our policy is as clear as noon-day, to bide the time and wait and see. It certainly is not to help our enemies and the enemies of the Constitution of the United States.

  Mobile Daily Advertiser & Register, January 9, 1867

  “AN OLIGARCHY OR A REPUBLIC?”:

  NORTH CAROLINA, OCTOBER 1867

  Albion W. Tourgée:

  To the Voters of Guilford

  Fellow Citizens:

  Having been urgently solicited to become a candidate for the Constitutional Convention, and having consented to do so, I hereby offer for your suffrages, as the exponent of the following principles to the earnest and unflinching support of which, in the future as in the past, I am impelled by every incentive of justice, humanity and patriotism:

  1st.

  Equality of civil and political rights to all citizens.

  2nd.

  No property qualifications for jurymen.

  3rd.

  Every voter eligible for election to any office of trust or emolument.

  4th.

  All legislative, executive, and judicial officers of the state to be filled by the vote of the people.

  5th.

  A criminal code humane and Christian, without whip or stocks.

  6th.

  An ample system of public instruction reaching from the lowest primary school to the highest university course, free to the children of every citizen.

  7th.

  A uniform ad valorum system of taxation upon property.

  8th.

  The tax upon the poll (or more properly tax upon the value of labor) not to exceed three days’ work upon the public highway or its equivalent.

  9th.

  In addition to the provisions of Section 4th of the Constitutional Amendment, the assumption or payment by any county, city, or other political corporation, within the state of any debt, contracted in aid of rebellion, directly or indirectly, should be prohibited by Constitutional enactment.

  10th.

  The rights of citizenship to be extended to the present excluded classes whenever the Congress of the United States shall see fit to remove their disabilities and not before.

  These are the principles of equal and exact justice to all men, the marrow and essence of republican government. Incorporated in the Constitution they will order the new state a government of the people, by the people and for the people. Without them it will be government controlled and administered in the interests of the few.

  Voters of Guilford, two courses are open before you. Shall the new State have an Oligarchy or a Republic? An Aristocracy or a Democracy? Shall its fundamental law respect the rights of the hundred thousand voters who do not own land enough to give to each a burial place, or consider only the interests of the fifteen hundred men who own two-thirds of the lands of the state? Shall the poor man’s labor be taxed four or five percent and the rich man’s property but one-third of one percent? Shall poverty be taxed higher than wealth? Shall the honest and capable, though landless voter, be allowed to hold offices of trust and emolument, or shall that privilege be granted only to “the lord of barren acres”? Shall the poor man be allowed a seat upon the jury, or is “red clay” necessary to give judgment and integrity? Shall capacity, honesty, and your suffrages be sufficient to entitle the voter to a seat in the assembly or shall the clayey Juggernaut set up his altar in the State House?

  The aristocracy of slavery is dead. Shall we now build up an aristocracy of land? Shall we have a government of a few, by a few, and for a few? You have tried it once and the past seven years are its results—six hundred thousand dead are the glorious first fruits of aristocratic rule.

  Poor men of Guilford & laboring men of Guilford, now is your golden moment! The tide is at the flood! Old things are passing away. Slavery, that fed daintily upon your lives, has ceased to ask its yearly hecatomb of men and women. Aristocracy, which would let “a thousand paupers die that our oligarch might live,” is fighting its last battle with Democracy. Muscle is no longer bought and sold, nor brain made the subject of barter. Wealth is no longer the great I Am, nor manhood a political cipher. “The bone of contention” has become a constituent element of the Republic. “We, the people,” has a new signification. Do you choose to govern yourselves or be ruled by those who still crave the name of “master”? Will you be free men or serfs? Will the “new people” have a “new” state, or the old one patched up, with its whip and stocks, its oppressive system of taxation and its tyrannic landed aristocracy!

  Laborers of Guilford
are you not as capable of self-govern­-

  ment as those men who with the motto rule or ruin, did both rule and ruin all this glorious Southern land? Will you exercise and preserve the power which three hundred thousand martyrs died to place in your hands, or will you basely yield it into the hands of our enemies ! But the cry is “Property must be protected!” That was the rallying cry of ’61. “Our property! Our property! Great is Diana!” “The rich man’s war and the poor man’s fight” was the result. The contest which was meant to make every poor man a slave has made them free. Let then our battle cry be “Manhood, Equal Rights, Free Schools, Free Juries, Free Offices, Free Press, Free Speech, Free Men!”

  For the purpose of more fully discussing the great issues which are upon us, I shall be happy to meet the citizens of the county wherever and whenever they may desire until the day of election.

  Very Respectfully,

  Your Obdt. Servant,

  A. W. Tourgee.

  Oct. 21, 1867.

  “DOUBTFUL GROUNDS”:

  NEW YORK, DECEMBER 1867

  Harper’s Weekly:

  Impeachment

  THE REPORT of the majority of the Judiciary Committee recommending impeachment of the President has unquestionably surprised and disappointed the country; nor are the temper and reasoning of that part of the report which has been published likely to inspire general confidence. In alluding to the subject some two months since, we said that “technically and verbally up to the present moment the President has not violated the law.” We were reminded that he had issued an Amnesty Proclamation in defiance of the law which forbade him. But he held that his authority for such an act was derived from the Constitution, and that the law itself was in violation of that instrument. That is, his action was but another illustration of the difference of constitutional interpretation between himself and Congress. What we had in mind was that no law of undoubted constitutional sanction had been violated by him; and that however unwise, for example, his removal of SHERIDAN and SICKLES may have been, they were both acts strictly within the reconstruction law.