to the language of the law felo de se, ceases to exist."
Congress should punish the "rebels" by abolishing slavery, by giving
civil and political rights to Negroes, and by educating them with the
whites.

Not essentially different, but harsher, was Thaddeus Stevens's plans
for treating the South as a conquered foreign province. Let the victors
treat the seceded States "as conquered provinces and settle them with
new men and exterminate or drive out the present rebels as exiles."
Congress in dealing with these provinces was not bound even by the
Constitution, "a bit of worthless parchment," but might legislate as it
pleased in regard to slavery, the ballot, and confiscation. With
regard to the white population, he said: "I have never desired bloody
punishments to any great extent. But there are punishments quite as
appalling, and longer remembered, than death. They are more advisable,
because they would reach a greater number. Strip a proud nobility of
their bloated estates; reduce them to a level with plain republicans;
send them forth to labor, and teach their children to enter the
workshops or handle a plow, and you will thus humble the proud
traitors." Stevens and Sumner agreed in reducing the Southern States
to a territorial status. Sumner would then take the principles of the
Declaration of Independence as a guide for Congress, while Stevens would
leave Congress absolute. Neither considered the Constitution as of any
validity in this crisis.

As a rule the former abolitionists were in 1865 advocates of votes and
lands for the Negro, in whose capacity for self-rule they had complete
confidence. The view of Gerrit Smith may be regarded as typical of the
abolitionist position:

"Let the first condition of peace with them be that no people in the
rebel States shall ever lose or gain civil or political rights by reason
of their race or origin. The next condition of peace be that our black
allies in the South--those saviours of our nation--shall share with
their poor white neighbors in the subdivisions of the large landed
estates of the South. Let the only other condition be that the rebel
masses shall not, for say, a dozen years, be allowed access to the
ballot-box, or be eligible to office; and that the like restrictions be
for life on their political and military leaders.. .. The mass of the
Southern blacks fall, in point of intelligence, but little, if
any, behind the mass of the Southern whites.... In reference