Belief 3 - Reading 15 of 31, The Reconstruction Convention

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Belief 3 - Reading 15 of 31

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A CONDITION OF PARDON

Harper's Weekly, July 1, 1865, page 403 (Editorial)

The form of the pardon granted by the President to repentant rebels is published. It takes effect from the day upon which the oath is taken prescribed in the proclamation of May 29, and is void if at any time thereafter the pardoned person acquires any property in slaves, or makes any use of slave labor.

There is no mistaking that condition. No wonder that Beriah M’Goffin, of Kentucky, pronounces for the emancipation amendment. Henceforth the colored population of the late rebel States are personally free. That they are citizens has been already held by Attorney-General Bates. There are probably more than four millions of them—about a seventh of the entire population of the country—and they can never again be reduced to personal bondage.

Fortunately for the rest of us they are a mild and docile people; but, as a class, they are undoubtedly shrewder and more intelligent than the lower class of the whites—"the white trash" of the Southern States. In many of those States the colored population is in very large proportion to the whole—in some sections, indeed, it is more than half. With their new condition of freedom their character will inevitably change. Conscious of rights, they will naturally assert them. Free speech and a free press being secured throughout the country, they will hear their claims as American citizens discussed and proclaimed. Leaders among themselves, like Frederick Douglass, will incite their ambition, and direct their efforts to obtain that equality before the laws to which every American freeman may justly aspire. They are henceforth an important political element in the country, and until they obtain that political position from which nothing but a prejudice debars them the attempt to attain it will constantly agitate both the States in which they live and the country at large.

We say nothing but a prejudice debars them. We shall gladly own our error if the people who are to re-form the Constitutions of North Carolina and Mississippi limit the suffrage to all who satisfy a test of education. If they do otherwise—if they allow ignorant persons to vote merely because they are white—our conviction will be confirmed. But such an exclusion, even if approved by Congress, settles nothing. The moment it becomes lawful, the moment the subject passes from the immediate control of the country at large, the agitation begins in every State for a constitutional amendment forbidding any State to impose an unjust or whimsical disability, while in the States where the disabled population is large a party will instantly pronounce for an impartial rule of suffrage. And that party agitating for the political equality of nearly half the population will at last and inevitably prevail.

This unquestionable truth, and the fact that the President plainly informs the people whom he invites to begin the work of reorganization that the State, as a State, will be entitled to the guaranty of the United States against "invasion, insurrection, and domestic violence" only upon the presentation of a proper republican form of State government, must certainly have great influence upon truly sensible men in the Southern States. If they are wise they will accept the situation. They will ask whether Congress can fairly be expected to guarantee against domestic violence a State which arbitrarily disfranchises half of its loyal and industrial population; whether, indeed, such a guaranty would not be very sure to perpetuate internal convulsion and trouble? Wise citizens will propose a qualification for suffrage which is really republican. They will save the prolonged trouble, excitement, and uncertainty of the Territorial condition in which their blindness to facts will surely retain them.

Harper's Weekly, July 1, 1865, page 403 (Editorial)

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