Belief 8 - Reading 5 of 14, The Reconstruction Convention

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Belief 8 - Reading 5 of 14

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THE PRESIDENT’S POLICY

Harper's Weekly, September 2, 1865, page 546 (Editorial)

There is a great deal said about the President’s policy of reconstruction; and in some quarters there is a very liberal and ludicrous denunciation of those who oppose it. One paper especially, which was very anxious in the early spring of 1861 that the Montgomery Constitution should be accepted by the loyal citizens of the country, now lustily exhorts the President to strike out right and left and crush Jacobins and disorganizers, and all who withstand his policy. Who these terrible Jacobin fellows are, neither the virtuous patriot who calls for their destruction nor any body else knows. Neither do they know the President’s policy. And that for the very simple reason that it is not, and can not be, determined. It must, from the necessity of the case, depend upon circumstances.

The President has announced that in his opinion no State has seceded, but that every one which attempted secession is now to be reorganized. For that purpose he has named Provisional Governors, has authorized them to call Conventions, and has prescribed the conditions upon which those who were formerly voters in those States may vote. He has also stated certain changes which must be made in the State Constitutions, and has invited the Conventions to submit their work to Congress when it is done.

This is his policy as far as it can be at present known, either to himself or to any one else. Who resists it? Who opposes it? Nobody—and that again for the simple reason that if it is to be opposed it has not yet advanced to a point at which opposition is practicable. It is thus far preliminary, experimental.

Suppose, now, that the Convention of Mississippi cleanses the State Constitution of slavery, but provides that the colored freemen shall neither bear arms, nor testify in courts of justice, nor marry except under peculiar conditions—shall, in fact, while they cease to be chattel slaves, become a purely pariah class—and having done this, the Convention should appoint an election at which notorious secessionists like Howell Cobb or Wade Hampton, or their tools, should be elected to Congress—does the President’s policy require the necessary assent of the United States to these performances?

If the elections in the late rebel States should result in the manner that we have supposed, and such representatives should be received by Congress, their effort would be, of course, to prevent their constituents being taxed to pay the expenses of their own subjugation—in other words, to repudiate the national debt. Does the President’s policy require that the national credit shall be endangered?

These are questions that the most truculent rodomontade about Jacobins and disorganizers does not answer. Yet it is only when these questions become practical that party divisions can take place. If, when they arise, the Untied States should be summoned to recognize such States as fully reorganized, a powerful and formidable opposition would undoubtedly at once arise, taking the ground that a nation which has just subdued a fierce and prolonged rebellion of a part of its citizens, is not bound by any written law or abstract theory of right or justice to admit those citizens to a share in its government, except upon conditions which seem to it compatible with the existence of the government.

There is nothing in the acts or words of the President to justify the insinuation that he wishes to intrust the political power of the late rebel States exclusively to the class to which for his whole life he has been bitterly opposed. If that be Jacobinism—make the most of it.

Harper's Weekly, September 2, 1865, page 546 (Editorial)

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