ong and cruelty to which I have referred. The
first step taken was to submit the Fourteenth Amendment, giving
citizenship and civil rights to the Negro and forbidding that
he be counted in the basis of representation unless he should
be reckoned among the voters. The Southern States could have
been readily readmitted to all their power and privileges in
the Union by accepting the Fourteenth Amendment, and Negro
suffrage would not have been forced upon them. The gradual and
conservative method of training the Negro for franchise, as
suggested and approved by Governor Hampton, had many advocates
among the Republicans in the North; and though in my judgment
it would have proved delusive and impracticable, it was quite
within the power of the South to secure its adoption or at
least its trial.

"But the States lately in insurrection rejected the Fourteenth
Amendment with apparent scorn and defiance. In the legislatures
of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Florida it did not receive a
single vote; in South Carolina, only one vote; in Virginia,
only one; in Texas, five votes; in Arkansas, two votes; in
Alabama, ten; in North Carolina, eleven, and in Georgia, where
Mr. Stephens boasts that they gave the Negro suffrage in
advance of the Fifteenth Amendment, only two votes could be
found in favor of making the Negro even a citizen. It would
have been more candid in Mr. Stephens if he had stated that it
was the legislature assembled under the reconstruction act that
gave suffrage to the Negro in Georgia, and that the
unreconstructed legislature, which has his endorsement and
sympathies and which elected him to the United States Senate,
not only refused suffrage to the Negro but loaded him with
grievous disabilities and passed a criminal code of barbarous
severity for his punishment.

"It is necessary to a clear apprehension of the needful facts
in this discussion to remember events in the proper order of
time. The Fourteenth Amendment was submitted to the States June
13, 1866. In the autumn of that year, or very early in 1867,
the legislatures of all the insurrectionary States, except
Tennessee, had rejected it. Thus and then the question was
forced upon us, whether the Congress of the United States,
composed wholly of men who had been loyal to t