lly different. There
would have been no further amendment to the Constitution, there would
have been no conditions of reconstruction, there would have been such
a neutralization of the anti-slavery amendment as would authorize and
sustain all the State laws already passed for the practical re-enslavement
of the negro, with such additional enactments as would have made
them cruelly effective. With the South re-admitted and all its
representatives acting in cordial co-operation with the Northern
Democrats, the result must have been a deplorable degradation of the
National character and an ignoble surrender to the enemies of the
Union, thenceforth to be invested with the supreme direction of its
government.

There was an unmistakable manifestation throughout the whole political
canvass of 1866, by the more advanced section of the Republican party,
in favor of demanding impartial suffrage as the basis of reconstruction
in the South. It came from the people rather than from the political
leaders. The latter class, with few exceptions, shunned the issue,
preferring to wait until public sentiment should become more
pronounced in favor of so radical a movement. But a large number of
thinking people, who gave more heed to the absolute right of the
question than to its political expediency, could not see how, with
consistency, or even with good conscience and common sense, the
Republican party could refrain from calling to its aid the only large
mass of persons in the South whose loyalty could be implicitly trusted.
To their apprehension it seemed little less than an absurdity, to
proceed with a plan of reconstruction which would practically leave the
State governments of the South under the control of the same men that
brought on the civil war.

They were embarrassed, however, in this step by the constantly
recurring obstacle presented by the constitutions of a majority of the
loyal States. In five New-England States suffrage to the colored man
was conceded, but in Connecticut only those negroes were allowed to
vote who were admitted freedmen prior to 1818. New York permitted a
negro to vote after he had been three years a citizen of the State and
had been for one year the owner of a freehold worth two hundred and
fifty dollars, free of all incumbrances. In every other Northern
State none but "white men" were permitted to vote. Even Kansas, which
entered the Union under the shadow of the civil war, after a prolonged