atives and the principles of a
restoration of the Union which their admission involved, was debated
with earnestness for several days, and finally decided, on the 17th of
February, in favor of admitting them, by a vote of ninety-two in the
affirmative to forty-four in the negative.

An analysis of this vote, in view of the proceedings, acts, and votes
of many of the same members a few years subsequently, after Mr.
Lincoln's death, presents some curious and interesting facts. It was not
a strictly party vote. Among those who then favored the Administration
policy of restoration were Colfax, Dawes, Delano, Fenton, Fisher of
Delaware, Wm, Kellogg, J. S. Morrill of Vermont, Governor A. H. Rice of
Massachusetts, Shellabarger, and others who opposed the restoration
policy of President Lincoln after his death and the accession of
President Johnson.

In the negative with Thaddeus Stevens were Ashley, Bingham, the two
Conklings, Kelley, McPherson, and a few others. But when reconstruction
or exclusion actually took place after the termination of the war, great
changes occurred among the members of Congress, and Stevens, the "Great
Commoner," who in 1863 had a following of less than one-third of the
representatives, rallied, four years later, more than two-thirds to his
standard against restoration and for subjugation and exclusion.

Mr. Stevens was no ordinary man. At the bar he was astute and eloquent
rather than profound, but in the Legislature of Pennsylvania and in the
management of the affairs of that State, where for a period he actively
participated and was a ruling mind, he was often rash and turbulent, and
had, not without cause, the reputation of being a not over scrupulous
politician. Personally my relations with him, though not intimate, were
pleasant and friendly. I was first introduced to him at Harrisburg in
1836, when he was a member of the convention that revised the
Constitution of Pennsylvania. We occasionally met in after years. He
expressed himself pleased with my appointment in Mr. Lincoln's Cabinet,
and, notwithstanding we disagreed on fundamental principles, he
complimented my administration of the Navy Department, and openly and
always sustained my positions, and particularly so on the subject of the
blockade, on which there were differences in the Administration. In the
Pennsylvania convention of 1836 he was probably the most eloquent
speaker, but his ideas were often visionary and radical. He ultimat