its invention was severely taxed, and its counsels greatly confused, by the number of raw and unsatisfactory measures which, from time to time, emanated from it before its final report was made. These measures were imperfect and conflicting; they were scarcely more than sops to the curiosity which clamoured at the door of the "star chamber" for information of its proceedings. First, Mr. Stevens reported from it an amendment to the Constitution, to the effect of excluding from the basis of representation all who were denied the elective franchise "on account of race or colour." The proposition was worried with amendments and substitutes, and at last went back to the Committee without instructions. Mr. Bingham came forward next, with another Constitutional amendment, proposing to give Congress the power to make certain laws for the government of all the States. It was recommitted, reported again, postponed in the House and never again called up; "laid over” in the Senate and not again considered. A remarkable hesitation was evident in Congress; a hesitation which scarcely belongs to the consultation of any plain public necessity and which is irresistibly suggestive of the embarrassed counsels of party expediency.

At last, on the 18th June, 1866, came the long-expected birth; and on that day there was submitted in both Houses of Congress the formal report of the Joint Committee on Reconstruction. It is not necessary, here, to review this formidable document and its long trains of argument; and it suffices for our narrative to place here its conclusion. It was startling enough that the Southern States had "forfeited all civil and political rights and privileges under the Constitution!" It is to be remarked that the report of the Committee recommended no distinct policy, that it proposed no definite means, imme

diate or prospective, for the re-admission to representation of the Southern States; but its importance was, that in the broad proposition with which it concluded—and which was accepted by a party vote in each branch of Congress-it furnished sufficient basis for almost any extent of revolutionary action with regard to the States so summarily and entirely condemned.

Congress had now put under its feet the ground of a dogma, but it yet hesitated as to the policy and form of measure it would construct upon it. A feeble minority had made no issue as to the power of Congress to take the subject of "Reconstruction" out of the hands of the President; there was no question of jurisdiction; and Mr. Reverdy Johnson who made the minority report in the House from the Joint Committee had "not thought it necessary to examine into the legality of the measures adopted, either by the late or present President," and had been satisfied to relieve their motives from censure in declaring that "the sole object of each was to effect a complete and early union of all the States. " The situation now was, that Congress had not only reclaimed control, complete and exclusive, of the subject of "Reconstruction," but had also, by accepting the report of its Committee, thrown off the restraints of the Constitution, with respect to ten States, and had taken a carte blanche for legislation!

The first distinct measure offered on this settlement of principles, and which, in point of time, preceded the formal report on "Reconstruction was Constitutional Amendment, No. 14. We give it in the words, in which, after an extraordinary jerplexity of verbal amendments, it finally passed Congress on the 13th June, 1866:

ARTICLE XIV

SECTION 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States, and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law, nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

SEC. 2. Representatives shall be apportioned among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed. But when the right to vote at any election for the choice of electors for President and Vice-President of the United States, representatives in Congress, the executive and judicial officers of a State, or the members of the Legislature thereof, is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age and citizens of the United States, or in any way abridged, except for participation in rebellion or other crime, the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens, twenty-one years of age, in such State.

SEC. 3. No person shall be a senator or representative in Congress, or elector of President or Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State Legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or giving aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may, by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.

SEC. 4. The validity of the public debt of the United States authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion,

shall not be questioned. But neither the United States nor any State shall assume to pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States, or any claim for the loss or emancipation of any slave; but all such debts, obligations, and claims shall be held illegal and void.

SEC. 5. The Congress shall have power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.

We shall presently see what designs lurked in this plausible law. Indeed, Mr. Thaddeus Stevens has recently exposed the fact that the first clause was designed to entrap Congress on the subject of Negro suffrage; claiming that the declaration of the citizenship of the Negro carried with it the right of suffrage as among those "privileges and immunities" which the State was prohibited from abridging. Whatever may be the merit of this claim (and we shall elsewhere recur to it in a legal argument with which we cannot now conveniently attend our narrative), it is certain that it was studiously concealed in recommending and perfecting the passage of the bill. It was well known to the country that the original Constitution of the United States did not define citizenship; questions in this respect had been raised on it; and the object of the Amendment No. 14, was apparently, in its first clause, to supply an omission in the original instrument, to terminate a controversy, and to determine a rule of citizenship in opposition to the decision of the Supreme Court in the Dred Scott case, that the descendant of an African, born within the United States, was not a citizen. It was never suspected at the time that the words of the Amendment had the meaning or intention which Mr. Stevens now ascribes to them; that they were designed thus readily to capture the sense of the country on a subject, which, so far from being an easy and foregone conclusion, we find in every form of public expression out

side the Amendment, occupied by the most eager and passionate controversy.

But there was another trick, another legislative device in this Amendment more remarkable. It went for ratification to all the States as an undivided proposition. But there is certain evidence that the Republican party in Congress, while making an effort at sincerity, had secretly determined to effect and to insure its rejection by the Southern States, with the view of using such rejection for its own political purposes, and making it the occasion and excuse for additional measures of severity towards the people of the South. Such a rejection could not have been better been insured than by the violent and impossible condition inserted in the third section, calling upon the people of the South to disfranchise and to dishonour all the men in whom they had ever placed any public confidence—all who had ever held any office, State or Federal. It was really no test of the loyal sentiment of the South; for men, however loyal to the Union, however converted to a political principle, could not but see the staring injustice, the cowardly cruelty of betraying those men especially whom they had trusted in the past, and of condemning them for simply doing what they themselves had done. In this light the proposition was viewed in the South with an unanimity, from which was excluded all debate as to mere political concerns. It was a sentimentalism above all questions of politics. The people were asked to strike the bosoms of their friends with a serpent's tooth; to give up all the tender and reverential memories of their dead; to put badges of dishonour on the maimed bodies of their heroes, men who, no matter that it was in a lost and mistaken cause, had bled and suffered and toiled for the mass of their countrymen; to make a vicarious sacrifice of their best and bravest; to pay the price