ndictive radicals, to subject the South to
the extreme of distress and humiliation. Nothing could be farther from
the truth. Admitting that there were people in the North who, before the
passions of the War had subsided, wished to see the rebels and their
sympathizers and abettors in some way punished for what they had done,
negro suffrage never was thought of as a punitive measure. I may say
that in all my intercourse with various classes of people--and my
opportunities were large--I have never heard it mentioned or suggested,
still less advocated, as a punitive measure. It never was in itself
popular with the masses--reason enough for the ordinary politicians to
be afraid of openly favoring it. There were only two classes of men who
at all thought of introducing it generally; those whom, without meaning
any disparagement, I would for the sake of convenience call the
doctrinaires,--men who, like Mr. Sumner, would insist as a general
principle that the negro, being a man, was as a matter of right as much
entitled to the suffrage as the white man; and those who, after a
faithful and somewhat perplexed wrestle with the complicated problem of
reconstruction, finally landed--or, it might almost be said, were
stranded--at the conclusion that to enable the negro to protect his own
rights as a free man by the exercise of the ballot was after all the
simplest way out of the tangle, and at the same time the most in
accordance with our democratic principles of government.

[Illustration: SENATOR ZACHARIAH CHANDLER

WHO WAS SENT, TOGETHER WITH CARL SCHURZ, TO THE PHILADELPHIA CONVENTION
OF 1866, BY THE REPUBLICANS OF MICHIGAN]

This view of the matter grew rapidly in popular appreciation as the
results of reconstruction on the Johnson plan became more and more
unsatisfactory. It gained very much in strength when it appeared that
the tremendous rebuke administered to the President's policy by the
Congressional elections of 1866 had not produced any effect upon Mr.
Johnson's mind, but that, as his annual message delivered on December
3rd showed, he was doggedly bent upon following his course. It was still
more strengthened when all the Southern legislatures set up under the
President's plan, save that of Tennessee, rejected the Fourteenth
Amendment to the Constitution,--some unanimously, or nearly so,--and
even with demonstrations of contemptuous defiance. Then the question was
asked at the North with great pertinency: Are we to u