Every good citizen most cordially desired the earliest practicable
reëstablishment of the constitutional relations of the late "rebel
States" to the national government; but, before restoring those States
to all the functions of self-government within the Union, the national
government was in conscience bound to keep in mind certain debts of
honor. One was due to the Union men of the South who had stood true to
the republic in the days of trial and danger; and the other was due to
the colored people who had furnished 200,000 soldiers to our army at
the time when enlistments were running slack, and to whom we had given
the solemn promise of freedom at a time when that promise gave a
distinct moral character to our war for the Union, fatally
discouraging the inclination of foreign governments to interfere in
our civil conflict. Not only imperative reasons of statesmanship, but
the very honor of the republic seemed to forbid that the fate of the
emancipated slaves be turned over to State governments ruled by the
former master class without the simplest possible guaranty of the
genuineness of their freedom. But, as every fair-minded observer would
admit, nothing could have been more certain than that the political
restoration of the "late rebel States" as self-governing bodies on the
North Carolina plan would, at that time, have put the whole
legislative and executive power of those States into the hands of men
ignorant of the ways of free labor society, who sincerely believed
that the negro would not work without physical compulsion and was
generally unfit for freedom, and who were then pressed by the dire
necessities of their impoverished condition to force out of the
negroes all the agricultural labor they could with the least possible
regard for their new rights. The consequences of all this were
witnessed in the actual experiences of every day.
[Illustration: MAJOR-GENERAL E. R. S. CANBY