and who for
more than four years levied public war against the United States;
it allows Union men in the South, who have risked all--and many of
whom have lost all but life in upholding the Union cause--to be
excluded from every office, State and National, and in many
instances to be banished from the States they so faithfully
laboured to save; it abandons the four millions of colored people
to such treatment as the ruffian class of the South, educated in
the barbarism of slavery and the atrocities of the rebellion, may
choose to give them; it leaves the obligations of the Nation to her
creditors and to the maimed soldiers and to the widows and orphans
of the war, to be fulfilled by men who hate the cause in which
those obligations were incurred; it claims to be a plan which
restores the Union without requiring conditions; but, in conceding
to the conquered rebels the repeal of laws important to the
Nation's welfare, it grants conditions which they demand, while it
denies to the loyal victors conditions which they deem of priceless
value.

In the meantime, President Johnson having declared that "the
rebellion, in its revolutionary progress, had deprived the people
of the rebel States of all civil government," proceeded by military
power to set up provisional State governments in those States, and
to require them to declare void all ordinances of secession, to
repudiate the rebel debt, and to adopt the thirteenth amendment of
the constitution, proposed by the Union party, abolishing slavery
throughout the United States. The Peace Democracy opposed all
conditions, and, instinctively unsound upon human rights, opposed
the amendment abolishing slavery. The elections of 1865 settled
that question against them, and deprived them of New Jersey, the
last free State which adhered to their fallen fortunes.

At the session of Congress of 1865-66, the president, finding that
his co-called State governments in the rebel States--created by
military power alone and without the sanction of the legislative
power of the government--had accepted his conditions; insisted that
those States were fully restored to their former proper relations
with the general government, and that they were again entitled to
representation in the same manner with the loyal States.