nderstand that the
white people of the States lately in rebellion will not agree that all
persons born or naturalized in the United States shall be
constitutionally recognized as citizens entitled in their civil rights
to the equal protection of the laws? That those States insist, not only
that the colored people shall not have the right of suffrage, but that
those people so excluded from the franchise shall even serve to increase
the basis of representation in favor of the whites--or in other words,
that the white people of the South shall come out of the rebellion
politically stronger than they were when they went into it? That all
those who engaged in the rebellion and fought to destroy the Union shall
be entitled to participate on even more favorable terms than ourselves
in the government of the same Union which but yesterday they sought to
destroy? That they refuse to safeguard the public debt incurred for
saving the Union and wish to keep open the possibility of an assumption
of the debts incurred by the rebel States for destroying the Union?

The fact was not overlooked that the great mass of the Southern negroes
were grossly ignorant and in other respects ill-fitted for the exercise
of political privileges. Many who then favored negro suffrage would have
greatly preferred its gradual introduction, first limiting it, as Mr.
Lincoln suggested to Governor Hahn of Louisiana, to those who had served
as soldiers in the Union army and those who were best fitted for it by
intelligence and education. But this would have reduced the negro vote
to so small a figure as to render it insufficient to counteract or
neutralize the power of the reactionary element. To that end the whole
vote was required; and for that reason it was demanded, in spite of the
imperfections it was known to possess and of the troubles it
threatened--which, however, at that period were much underestimated, as
is apt to be the case under similar circumstances.

_Reconstruction Under Military Control_

When the session of Congress opened on the 3rd of December, it was
virtually certain that unrestricted negro suffrage would come and that
President Johnson's reconstruction policy would be swept out of the way.
The Republican majority without delay passed a bill extending the
suffrage to the negroes in the District of Columbia, which then had a
municipal government of its own. The President put his veto on the bill,
but the veto was promptly overruled