al, all
orders and regulations of the military, naval, and other
departments of the government, creating disabilities on account of
participation in the rebellion, were to be repealed, revoked, or
abolished. The rebellious States were to be represented in Congress
by the rebels without hindrance from any test oath. All
appointments in the army, in the navy, and in the civil service,
were to be made from men who were rebels, on the same terms as from
men who were loyal. The people and governments in the rebellious
States were to be subjected to no other interference or control
from the military or other departments of the general government
than exists in the States which remained loyal. Loyal white men and
loyal colored men were to be protected alone in those States by
State laws, executed by State authorities, as if they were in the
loyal States.

There were to be no amendments to the constitution, not even an
amendment abolishing slavery. In short, the great rebellion was to
be ignored or forgotten, or, in the words of one of their orators,
"to be generously forgiven." The war, whose burdens, cost, and
carnage they had been so fond of exaggerating, suddenly sank into
what the Rev. Petroleum V. Nasby calls "the late unpleasantness,"
for which nobody but the abolitionists were to blame. Under this
plan the States could soon re-establish slavery where it had been
disturbed by the war. Jefferson Davis, Toombs, Slidell, and Mason
could be re-elected to their old places in the Senate of the United
States; Lee could be re-appointed in the army, and Semmes and Maury
could be restored to the navy. Of course this plan of the Peace
Democracy was acceptable to the rebels of the South.

But the loyal people, who under the name of the Union party fought
successfully through the war of the rebellion, objected to this
plan as wrong in principle, wrong in its details, and fatally wrong
as an example for the future. It treats treason as no crime and
loyalty as no virtue; it contains no guarantees, irreversible or
otherwise, against another rebellion by the same parties and on the
same grounds. It restores to political honor and power in the
government of the Nation men who have spent the best part of their
lives in plotting the overthrow of that government,