John William Burgess

“ There is no doubt that many of the more radical members of Congress had been long considering the question of creating an entirely new electorate in the South as the only proper basis for reconstruction, and that some of the conservatives, from being opponents of this idea at the beginning of the year, had, by the middle of it, begun, at least, to waver. To those who could read the signs of the times correctly, it was manifest that a rejection of the proposed Fourteenth Amendment by these communities would lead Congress forward upon that line. ”

“ Real civil liberty is always national. Its concepts and principles spring out of the national consciousness of rights and wrongs. And civil equality is the first principle of modern justice, the most pressing behest of the public morality of the age. Moreover, this measure did not militate against the President's plan of Reconstruction. He could have accepted it without compromising that plan in the slightest, and it was a monumental blunder on his part that he did not do so.
On the 27th of March, he sent his veto of the bill into the Senate. ”

“ It is to some the pleasing, though to others startling, fact, that the Republican party, in its work of imposing the sovereignty of the United States upon eight millions of Asiatics, has changed its views in regard to the political relation of races and has at last virtually accepted the ideas of the South upon that subject. The white men of the South need now have no further fear that the Republican party, or Republican Administrations, will ever again give themselves over to the vain imagination of the political equality of man. ”

“ We know that no constitutional convention has, or then had, any such powers in our system. It was nothing more or less than a palpable usurpation of constituent power when the convention in Arkansas presumed to add this qualification to those prescribed by Congress for voting upon the ratification of the constitution itself. ”

“ And, again, when by the Reconstruction Acts and the restoration of martial law in the South under them, Congress turned the tables upon the Southern white people, and placed the ignorant barbarians in political control of them, and made every open attempt to resist this control a penal offence, it was also rather natural, though not praiseworthy, that men should have bound themselves together by secret oaths to do anything and everything in their power to defeat this blunder-crime against civilization. ”

“ Broken in health and fortune, sick at heart, conscious of the terrible degradation which had been imposed upon them, and politically ostracized, the better part of the white population of the South had staggered and groped through the hideous experiences of this period, and such of them as had not perished during the awful passage had now at last been relieved of the frightful scourge, and half dazed, as if just recovering from a terrible nightmare, found themselves again in the places of power and responsibility. ”

“ The Constitution makes the President the Commander-in-Chief of the army and navy, and gives Congress no power whatsoever over the methods or channels by, and through, which he may issue his military commands. Neither does the Constitution give Congress any power to assign any of the officers or troops of the army to any particular position. These are all functions of the commandership-in-chief, and, unless expressly granted by the Constitution to some other department of the Government, belong to the President. ”

“ What we have, therefore, in the theory and history of Reconstruction is the case of existing "State" organizations forcibly resisting the execution of the supreme law of the land, and stricken down by the executive power of the central Government in the attempt, that power being exercised at its own motion and in its own way. ”

“ It was fairly within the power of Congress to pass such a measure, by interpreting broadly the Thirteenth Amendment, without having any recourse to the idea of war powers. Slavery was nothing but extreme inequality in civil rights between master and servant. The prohibition of slavery and involuntary servitude could, therefore, most certainly be held to be the prohibition of all of these incidents. ”

“ But it was utter self-stultification for Congress to take the ground that the Johnson "State" governments were unrepublican because they did not enfranchise all adult males of whatever race, color, or condition of mind or estate and overthrow them on that ground, and then proceed to create new "State" governments in their places upon the basis of a minority of the already duly qualified and registered voters. ”

“ The gentlemen and political leaders of the old school, and the old political class, of the South looked on aghast, with mingled feelings of bitter degradation and anger, and the hotspurs and desperadoes were stirred to deeds of intimidation and violence. There is little doubt that some negroes were terrified out of exercising the suffrage in the election of 1870. Not yet, however, had enough of the disqualified whites been amnestied, or enough intimidation been exercised, or sufficient unity among the whites been attained, to work the overthrow of "carpet-bag," negro rule. ”

“ The President can constitutionally defend his prerogatives with the veto power, a power which nothing short of a two-thirds majority of both Houses of Congress can overcome, and he has no other power of defence confided to him by the Constitution. ”

“ But Mississippi was one of the three Southern communities in which the negro population far outnumbered the white. Mississippi was not, for this reason chiefly, so fortunate as Virginia, Texas and Georgia. She was obliged, with South Carolina and Louisiana, to pass through the fiery furnace in order to fuse the respectable white elements in her population into a single political party with a well-understood and a well-determined purpose. ”

“ There is something natural in the subordination of an inferior race to a superior race, even to the point of the enslavement of the inferior race, but there is nothing natural in the opposite. It is entirely unnatural, ruinous, and utterly demoralizing and barbarizing to both races. It is difficult to believe that the creation of such a relation between the blacks and whites of the South was at all within the intentions of the framers of the Reconstruction Acts. ”

“ Ordinarily men will not exchange the high and life-long office of a Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States for a seat in the Senate. Unless he had his eye upon the Presidency of the United States, it would be very hard to explain his action in exchanging his high judicial position for the senatorship on any other ground than his desire to escape the terrible responsibility of deciding whether Tilden or Hayes should be President. ”

“ In the first place, Congress claimed Reconstruction as a legislative problem. This was undoubtedly the true theory upon that point. In the second place, Congress required the loyalty to the United States of at least a majority of the white adult males as the basis of "State" government, local self-government. That also was undoubtedly true political theory as has been already explained. In the third place, Congress asserted the power to abolish slavery within the limits of those "States" whose legislatures or conventions had passed the ordinances of secession. ”

“ The policy of Mr. Hayes's administration, and of all the administrations since his, can be explained and justified only upon this assumption. And now that the United States has embarked in imperial enterprises, under the direction of the Republican party, the great Northern party, the North is learning every day by valuable experiences that there are vast differences in political capacity between the races, and that it is the white man's mission, his duty and his right, to hold the reins of political power in his own hands for the civilization of the world and the welfare of mankind. ”

“ It could, therefore, be held by the Republicans with a great show of truth that the public authorities of the reconstructed "State" government of Louisiana not only would not extend the equal protection of the laws to all persons, but would themselves deprive persons even of life without due process of law. ”

“ Americas, and the poor little Dominican Republic, which was incapable of self-government, still exists and seems to be bettering its condition by its own efforts, while the great European city in the Bay of Samana, to which the United States was to become tributary, has not even the substance of a mirage in the waters upon which the vast marines of the world were to ride in approaching its docks and landings. ”

“ But in this bill which became law on the 31st of May, 1870, Congress enacted penalties not only against "State" officers and agents for the violation of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, but severe penalties against any person within the "States," as well as the Territories, who should undertake to deprive by unlawful means any other person of his right to qualify and vote at any election, and against any person who under color of any law, statute or ordinance, regulation or custom, should undertake to deprive any other person of his civil rights and civil equality. ”

“ It may be looked upon as a conspiracy with the Republican majority in Congress to rob the President of his constitutional prerogatives, to change the form of government from the presidential system to the parliamentary system of administration. It is difficult to find any sufficient defence for Mr. Stanton's course. It is impossible to clear him of the appearance of great egotism or of great greed of office, in not resigning along with his dissatisfied colleagues. ”

“ A sensitive people, conscious of their power, are more at ease under a great wrong wholly unatoned than under the restraint of a settlement which satisfies neither their ideas of justice nor their grave sense of the grievance they have sustained. The rejection of the treaty was followed by a state of public feeling on both sides which I thought not favorable to an immediate attempt at renewed negotiations. I accordingly so instructed the Minister of the United States to Great Britain, and found that my views in this regard were shared by Her Majesty's Ministers. ”

“ The voting upon the question of ratification came off first in Alabama. General Pope had issued orders that the votes of persons registered in one precinct might be received in another, and that "State" officers and legislative members should be elected at the same election with the vote on ratification, and by the same voters. There is no doubt that the General only desired to secure the freedmen, who were then moving about restlessly, in their right of suffrage under the Reconstruction Acts, and to expedite the process of reconstruction so far as possible. ”

“ He was a Republican of the Seward school, and sympathized entirely with his patron upon this subject. It was a great embarrassment to him that the Democrats immediately gave in their adherence to this view. It helped to prevent him from gaining any following at all for it among the Republicans.
But while the Republicans of the House repudiated entirely Mr. Raymond's principles, the great mass of them were not able to accept Mr. Stevens's view of the temporary validity of secession, and the temporary existence of the Southern Confederacy as a foreign power. ”

“ There is certainly none in the character of the men whom the President asked to take the War Office, Grant, Sherman and Ewing; and it must be remembered that through Mr. Stanbery, in the case of Mississippi vs. Johnson, he had long before announced to the Southerners that his opposition to the Reconstruction Acts ceased with his unsuccessful veto of them, and that he should execute them both in letter and in spirit. It was Republican Senators who suggested to the President's counsel the nomination of General Schofield, a man entirely friendly with the President and acceptable to him. ”

“ No sane mind can wonder at "the solid South," or at the Democratic South. Life, property, happiness, honor, civilization, everything which makes existence endurable demanded that the decent white men of the South should stand shoulder to shoulder in defending their families, their homes and their communities from any return of the vile plague under which they had suffered so long and so cruelly ”

“ The doctrines put forward at this meeting were simply those of the President's Reconstruction policy, the doctrines that the "States" in our Federal system are indestructible and immaculate, and under submission to national authority always possessed of the rights of local self-government and of representation in the National Government. ”