; it excluded from
office, unless relieved of the disability by a two-thirds vote of
Congress, the most influential class of those who had taken an active
part in the rebellion; and it safeguarded the public debt. With only one
of its provisions serious fault could be found;--not with that which
guaranteed to the freedmen the essential civil rights of free men, nor
with that which excluded the freedmen from the basis of
representation--so long as they were not permitted to vote. Only the
advocates of negro suffrage might logically have objected to this
clause; inasmuch as it by implication recognized the right of a State to
exclude the colored people from the suffrage if the State paid a certain
penalty for such exclusion. Neither could the clause safeguarding the
public debt and prohibiting the payment of debts incurred in aid of the
rebellion be objected to. The really exceptionable provision was that
which excluded so large a class of Southern men from public office, and
just that class with which a friendly understanding was most desirable.
The provision that their disqualification could be removed by a
two-thirds vote in each House of Congress mended the mischief thus done
a little, but not enough for the public good.

It was not expressly enacted, but it was generally understood, that
those of the States lately in rebellion, which ratified the Fourteenth
Amendment, would thereby qualify themselves for full restoration in the
Union. Tennessee, where a faction of the Union party hostile to
President Johnson had gained the ascendency, did so, and was accordingly
fully restored by the admission to their seats in Congress of its
Senators and Representatives. The full restoration of the other late
rebel States would probably have been expedited in the same way, had
they followed the example of Tennessee. But President Johnson, as became
publicly known in one or two instances, obstinately dissuaded them from
doing so, and the fight went on. He also vetoed a second Freedmen's
Bureau bill in which some of the provisions he had objected to in his
veto of the first were remedied. But things had now come to such a pass
between Congress and the President that his veto messages were hardly
considered worth listening to, but were promptly overruled almost
without debate by two-thirds votes in each House.

_A Campaign to Destroy a President_

Under such circumstances the Congressional election of 1866 came on. The
people wer