Belief 1 - Reading 1 of 10, The Reconstruction Convention

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Belief 1 - Reading 1 of 10

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THE PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE

Harper's Weekly, December 26, 1863, page 818 (Editorial)

The Message of this year is the most important document ever submitted by the Executive to Congress and the country. Elsewhere in our columns we give an abstract of its important points, and in the President’s own words, because a conciser and clearer statement is not possible. There has been occasionally some sharp criticism of his "style," but there are few state papers more direct and incisive than his. He knows exactly what he means to say, and exactly how to say it. And when his Messages and letters are compared with those of our Chief Magistrates for many a year, their true American ring, their manly faith in human rights and the people, are as unprecedented as they are inspiring.

The President’s plan of reconstruction is familiar to all our readers. It is simple and radical; it is also inevitable. For either the rebels must be left to determine when to throw down their arms and rush back to the Union to secure political power, or they must understand that their chiefs are excepted from pardon, and that the system for which they took up arms having ceased legally to exist, all hope of its restoration must be abandoned. The former is the Copperhead plan. It proposes that whenever a rebel chooses to say that he returns to his allegiance he may resume all his political rights. The President’s plan proposes that he shall resume his political rights, not when he says that he is sorry, but when he says that he is sorry in such a manner that he can reasonable be believed.

That something more than an oath to the Constitution is necessary to secure the peace of the Union is clear enough from the fact that Jefferson Davis himself does not allow that he has violated his oath. In his view secession is consistent with the Constitution. Resistance to coercion is not, according to him and the State Rights school, rebellion. Simple repetition of such an oath, therefore, would be merely the first step to another conspiracy, because it leaves the object of the conspiracy untouched. Now the paramount duty of the Government is not merely to subdue, but to prevent rebellion. But it is clear that when the rebel guns are silenced the Union is not necessarily restored. The initiative of political action in the States which rebellion will leave sullen and passive must proceed from the National Government. And how more simply and wisely than as the Message suggests?

The President has been often accused of tardily following instead of leading public opinion. But it is his great merit that he early saw this to be a war in which the people must save themselves. If they were unequal to the task, a popular government was a failure. And therefore he has sought only to be the executive magistrate of their will, which he has divined with more sagacity than any public man in our history. It is that sagacity which now admonishes him to put into clear and simple form the settlement to which the national common-sense irresistibly tends. He has done it. Not as an advocate, or partisan, or fanatic, but with the same wisdom and passionless equity which has marked his official career from the moment he commended himself to the prayers of his old friends and neighbors at Springfield, and set forth to undertake as vast a duty as was ever committed to man.

Harper's Weekly, December 26, 1863, page 818 (Editorial)

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