n when it
rejected the Fourteenth Amendment in 1867. Under congressional direction
a negro-radical convention made a new constitution which was forced upon
the people in January, 1870. Texas, too, was in her final stage of
restoration in 1870, and like Virginia and Mississippi was readmitted
upon conditions that had become more onerous since the passage of the
Reconstruction Acts in 1867.

Eleven States, all the old Confederacy, had been restored by the spring
of 1870; but one, Georgia, was ejected after restoration, and thus
became the last item in congressional reconstruction. In 1868 Georgia
had ratified her new constitution and moved her capital from its
ante-bellum location at Milledgeville to the new town growing upon the
ashes of Atlanta. She had ratified the Fourteenth Amendment, but her
first legislature had so poorly read the meaning of Congress that it
expelled every negro whom the radicals had elected to membership.
Congress had thereupon declined to seat the Georgia delegation at
Washington, and had renewed the probationary period until the
legislature, humbled and browbeaten, had undone the expulsion, whereupon
Georgia received her final recognition.

The arbitrary acts of Congress, passed by the radicals over the
unvarying vetoes of Johnson, find little sanction in the Constitution,
but it is to be expected that the laws should suffer in a time of war.
Congress held off the day of restoration until it saw in the South what
its majority believed to be loyal governments. Its majority could not
believe that any party but its own was loyal, and was thus led to a
policy much more debatable than that of actual reconstruction. Step by
step it moved. The abolition of slavery, in the Thirteenth Amendment
(effective December 18, 1865), was expected by all and accepted without
a fight. The next amendment, inspired by a fear that the freedmen would
be oppressed and by a hope that they might be converted into a political
ally of the Republicans, was submitted to the States before the
Reconstruction Acts were passed, and was proclaimed as part of the
Constitution July 28, 1868. Only compulsion upon the Southern States
procured its ratification. It left negro suffrage optional with the
States, but threatened them with a reduction in representation in
Congress if they refrained from granting it. In the Southern States
Congress had already planted a negro electorate by law. The Fifteenth
Amendment forbade the denial of