The submission of the Rebel armies and the occupation of the Rebel
territory by the forces of the United States are successes which have
been purchased at the cost of the lives of half a million of loyal men
and a debt of nearly three thousand millions of dollars; but, according
to theories of State Rights now springing anew to life, victory has
smitten us with impotence. The war, it seems, was waged for the purpose
of forcing the sword out of the Rebel's hands, and forcing into them the
ballot. At an enormous waste of treasure and blood, we have acquired the
territory for which we fought; and lo! it is not ours, but belongs to
the people we have been engaged in fighting, in virtue of the
constitution we have been fighting for. The Federal government is now,
it appears, what Wigfall elegantly styled it four years ago,--nothing
but "the one-horse concern at Washington": the real power is in the
States it has subdued. We are therefore expected to act like the savage,
who, after thrashing his Fetich for disappointing his prayers, falls
down again and worships it. Our Fetich is State Rights, as perversely
misunderstood. The Rebellion would have been soon put down, had it been
merely an insurrectionary outbreak of masses of people without any
political organization. Its tremendous force came from its being a
revolt of States, with the capacity to employ those powers of taxation
and conscription which place the persons and property of all residing in
political communities at the service of their governments. And now that
characteristic which gave strength to the Rebel communities in war is
invoked to shield them from Federal regulation in defeat. We are
required to substitute technicalities for facts; to consider the
Rebellion--what it notoriously was not--a mere revolt of loose
aggregations of men owing allegiance to the United States; and to hold
the States, which endowed them with such a perfect organization and
poisonous vitality, as innocent of the crime. The verbal dilemma in
which this reasoning places us is this: that the Rebel States could not
do what they did, and therefore we cannot do what we must. Among other
things which it is said we cannot do, the prescribing of the
qualifications of voters in the States occupies the most important
place; and it is necessary to inquire whether the Rebel communities now
held by our military power are States, in the sense that word bears in
the Federal Constitution. If they are, we have not only no right to say
that negroes shall enjoy in them the privilege of voting, but no right
to prescribe any qualifications for white voters.
In the American system, the process by which constitutions are made and
governments instituted is by conventions of the people. The State
constitutions were ordained by conventions of the people of the several
States; the constitution of the United States was made the supreme law
of the land by conventions of the people of all the States; and the only
method by which a State could be released, with any show of legality,
from its obligations to the United States, would be the assent of the
same power which created the Federal constitution,--namely, conventions
of the people of _all_ the States. The course adopted by the so-called
"seceding" States was separate State action by popular conventions in
the States seceding. This was an appeal to the original authority from
which State governments and constitutions derived their powers, but a
violation of solemn faith towards the government and constitution
decreed by the people of all the States, and which, by the assent of
each State, formed a vital part of each State constitution. No State
convention could be called for the purpose of separating from the
Union,--of destroying what the officers calling it had sworn to
support,--without making official perjury the preliminary condition of
State sovereignty. Looked at from the point of view of the State
seceding, the act was an assertion of State independence; looked at from
the point of view of the constitution of the United States, it was an
act of State suicide. The State so acting through a convention of its
people was no longer a State, in the meaning that word bears in the
Federal constitution; for, whatever it may have been before it was one
of the United States, it was transformed into a different political
society by making the Federal constitution a part of its own organic
law. In cutting that bond, it bled to death as a State, as far as the
Federal constitution knows a State, to rise again as a Rebel community,
holding a portion of the Federal territory by force of arms. A State, in
the meaning of the Federal constitution, is a political community
forbidden to exercise sovereign powers, and at once a part of the
Federal government and owing allegiance to it. Is South Carolina, which
has exercised sovereign powers, which has broken its allegiance to the
Federal government, and which at present is certainly not a part of it,
such a political society?
It is, we know, contended by some reasoners on the subject, that the
Rebel States _could not_ do what they palpably _did_. This course of
argument is sustained only by confounding duties with powers. By the
constitution a State cannot (that is, has no right to) secede, only as,
by the moral law, a man cannot (that is, has no right to) commit murder;
nevertheless, States have broken away from their obligations to the
Union, as murderers have broken away from their obligations to the moral
law. It is folly to claim that criminal acts are impossible because they
are unjustifiable. The real question relates to the condition in which
the criminal acts of the Rebel States left them as political societies.
They cannot claim, as some of their Northern champions do for them, that
being _in_ the Union in our view, and _out_ of it in their own, the only
result of defeating them as Rebels is to restore them as citizens. This
would be playing a political game of "Heads I win, tails you lose,"
which they must know can hardly succeed with a nation which has made
such enormous sacrifices of treasure and blood in putting them down.
After having, by a solemn act of their own, through conventions of the
people, forsworn their duties to the constitution, they by that act
forfeited its privileges. In our view they became Rebel enemies, against
whom we had both the rights of sovereignty and the rights of war; in
their own view, they became foreigners; and from that moment they had no
more "constitutional" control of the area they occupied, were no more
"States," than if they had transferred their allegiance to a European
power, and the war had been prosecuted to wrest the territory they
occupied, and the people they ruled, from the clutch of England or
France. Even if we consider the Union a mere partnership of States, the
same principle will apply; for partnership implies mutual obligations,
and no partner can steal the property of his firm, and abscond with it,
and then, after he has been hunted down and arrested, claim the rights
in the business he enjoyed before he turned rogue.
But it is sometimes asserted that the small minority of citizens in the
Rebel States claiming to be, and to have been, loyal, constitute the
States in the constitutional meaning of the term. Now without insisting
on the fact that it is so plainly impossible to accurately distinguish
these from the disloyal, that an oath, not required by State
constitutions, has, in the recent attempt at reconstruction, been
imposed by Federal authority on all voters alike, it is plain that no
minority in a political society can claim exemption from political evils
it had not power to prevent. Had we gone to war with Great Britain, the
property of Cobden and Bright on the high seas would have been as liable
to capture as that of Lindsay or Laird. No loyal citizens at the South
could have been more bitterly opposed to Secession than some of our
Northern Copperheads were to the war for the Union; and yet the persons
of the Copperheads were as liable to conscription, and their property to
taxation, as those of the most enthusiastic Republicans. There would be
an end to political societies, if men should refuse to be held
responsible for all public acts except those they personally approved. A
member of a community whose people, in a convention, broke faith with
the United States, and made war against it, the Southern Unionist was
forced into complicity with the crime. By the pressure of a power he
could not resist he was compelled to pay Confederate taxes, serve in
Confederate armies, and become a portion of the Confederate strength.
More than this: the property in human beings, which he held by local
law, was confiscated by the Federal government's edict of emancipation,
equally with the same kind of property held by the most disloyal. And
now that the war is over, he and those who sympathized with him are not
the State, which was extinguished by its own act when it rebelled. He
and his friends may be the objects of sympathy, of honor, of reward; but
in the work of reconstruction the interest and safety of the great body
of loyal citizens of the United States, of the persons who have bought
the territory at such a terrible price, are to be primarily consulted.
And not simply because such a course is expedient, but because the
Southern Unionists can advance no valid claim to be the political
societies which were recognized by the Federal constitution as States
before the Rebellion. If they were, they might proceed at once to assume
the powers of the States, without any authority from Washington, and
without calling any convention to form a _new_ constitution. If, on the
breaking out of the Rebellion, they had rallied in defence of the old
constitutions within State limits, preserved the organization of the
States in all departments, raised and equipped armies, and conducted a
war against the Confederates as traitors to their respective States as
well as to the United States, they might present some claims to be
considered the States; but this they did not do, and they were not
powerful enough to do it. The large proportion of them were compelled to
form a part of the Rebel power.
And this brings us directly to the heart of the matter. It is asserted
that the Acts of Secession, being unconstitutional, were inoperative and
void. But they were passed by the people of the several States which
seceded, and the persons and property of the whole people were
indiscriminately employed in making them effective. The States held by
Rebel armies were Rebel States. All the population were necessarily, in
the view of the Federal government, Rebel enemies. Consequently the
territory of the States was as "void" of citizens of the United States
as the Acts of Secession were "void." The only things left, then, were
the inoperative ideas of States.
Again, to put the argument in another form, it is asserted, that, though
the people of a State may commit treason, the State itself remains
unaffected by the crime. A distinction is here made between a State and
the people who constitute it,--between the State and the persons who
create its constitution and organize its government. The State
constitution which existed while it was a State, in the Federal meaning
of the word, was destroyed in an essential part by the same authority
which created it, namely, a convention of the people of the State; and
yet it is said that the State remained unaffected by the deed. By this
course of reasoning, a State is defined an abstract essence which can
comfortably exist in all its rights and privileges, _in potentia_, apart
from all visible embodiment; a State which is the possibility of a State
and not the actuality of one; a State which can be brought into the line
of real vision only by some such contrivance as that employed by the
German playwright, who, in a drama on the subject of the Creation,
represented Adam crossing the stage _going_ to be created.
There is, it is true, one method of getting a kind of body to this
abstract State, but it is a method which may well frighten the hardiest
American reasoner. It was employed by Burke in one of the audacities of
his logic directed against the governments established after the French
Revolution of 1789. He took the ground, that France was not in the
French territory or in the French people, but in the persons who
represented its old polity, and who had escaped into England and
Germany. These constituted what he called "Moral France," in distinction
from "Geographical France"; and Moral France, he said, had emigrated.
But as few or none will be inclined to take the ground that South
Carolina and Georgia exist in the persons who left their soil on the
breaking out of the Rebellion, we are forced back to the conception of
an invisible spiritual soul and essence of a State, surviving its bodily
destruction. But even this abstraction must still, from the point of
view of the Federal constitution, be conceived of as owing allegiance to
the Federal government; and it can confessedly get a new body only by
the exercise of Federal authority. Its leading institution has been
destroyed by Federal power. Its old legislature and governor, who alone,
on State principles, could call a convention of the people, are spotted
all over with treason, and might be hanged as traitors, by the law of
the United States, while engaged in measures to repair the broken unity
of the State life,--a fact which is of itself sufficient to show that
the old State is dead beyond all bodily resurrection. The white
inhabitants who occupy its old geographical limits are defeated Rebels,
and not one can exercise the privilege of voting without taking an oath
which no real "State" prescribes. They are all born again into citizens
by a Federal fiat; they are "pardoned" into voters; they derive their
rights, not from their old charters, but from an act of amnesty. Far
from any discrimination being made between loyal and disloyal, the great
body of both classes are compelled to submit to Federal terms of
citizenship or be disfranchised; and they are called upon, not to revive
the old State, but to make a new one, within the old State lines. And
all this would result from the necessity of the case, even if it were
not made justifiable by the essential sovereignty of the United States,
of which the war-power is but an incident. But if the Federal government
can thus give the white inhabitants, or any portion of them, the right
of suffrage, cannot it confer that right upon the black freedmen? It
will not do, at this stage, to say that the Federal government has no
right to prescribe the qualifications of voters in the States: because,
in the case of the whites, it does and must prescribe them; and
President Johnson has just the same right to say that negroes shall
vote as to say that pardoned Rebels shall vote. The right of States to
decide on the qualifications of its electors applies only to loyal
States; it cannot apply to political communities which have lost by
Rebellion the Federal character of "States," which notoriously have no
legitimate State authority to decide the question of qualification, and
which are now taking the preparatory steps of forming themselves into
States through the agency of provisional Federal governors, directing
voters, constituted such by Federal authority, to elect delegates to a
convention of the people. It is a misuse of constitutional language to
Call North Carolina and Mississippi "States," in the same sense in which
we use the term in speaking of Ohio and Massachusetts. When their
conventions have framed State constitutions, when their State
governments are organized, and when their senators and representatives
have been admitted into the Congress of the United States, then, indeed,
they will be States, entitled to all the privileges of Ohio and
Massachusetts; and woe be to us, if they are reconstructed on wrong
principles!
It is often said, that, although the Federal government may have the
right and power to decide who shall be considered "the people" of the
Rebel States, in so important a matter as the conversion of them into
States of the Federal Union, it is still politic and just to make the
qualifications of voters as nearly as possible what they were before the
Rebellion. Conceding this, we still have to face the fact, that a large
body of men, held before the war as slaves, have been emancipated, and
added to the body of the people. They are now as free as the white men.
The old constitutions of the Slave States could have no application to
the new condition of affairs. The change in the circumstances, by which
four years have done the ordinary work of a century, demands a
corresponding change in the application of old rules, even admitting
that we should take them as a guide. Having converted the loyal blacks
from slaves into the condition of citizens of the United States, there
can be no reason or justice or policy in allowing them to be made, in
localities recently Rebel, the subjects of whites who have but just
purged themselves from the guilt of treason.
The question of negro suffrage being thus reduced to a question of
expediency, to be decided on its own merits, the first argument brought
against it is based on the proposition, that it is inexpedient to give
the privilege of voting to the ignorant and unintelligent. This sounds
well; but a moment's reflection shows us that the objection is directed
simply against deficiencies of education and intelligence which happen
to be accompanied with a black skin. Three fifths or three fourths of
the poor whites of the South cannot read or write; and they are cruelly
belied, if they do not add to their ignorance that more important
disqualification for good citizenship,--indisposition or incapacity for
work. In general, the American system proceeds on the idea that the best
way of qualifying men to vote is voting, as the best way of teaching
boys to swim is to let them go into the water. "Our national
experience," says Chief-Justice Chase, in a letter to the New Orleans
freedmen, "has demonstrated that public order reposes most securely on
the broad base of Universal Suffrage. It has proved, also, that
universal suffrage is the surest guaranty and most powerful stimulus of
individual, social, and political progress." But even if we take the
ground, that education and suffrage, though not actually, should
properly be, identical, the argument would not apply to the case of the
freedmen. What we need primarily at the South is loyal citizens of the
United States, and treason there is in inverse proportion to ignorance.
If, in reconstructing the Rebel communities, we make suffrage depend on
education, we inevitably put the local governments into the hands of a
small minority of prominent Confederates whom we have recently defeated;
of men physically subdued, but morally rebellious; of men who have used
their education simply to destroy the prosperity created by the industry
of the ignorant and enslaved, and who, however skilful they may be as
"architects of ruin," have shown no capacity for the nobler art which
repairs and rebuilds. If, on the other hand, we make suffrage depend on
color, we disfranchise the only portion of the population on whose
allegiance we can thoroughly rely, and give the States over to white
ignorance and idleness led by white intrigue and disloyalty. We are
placed by events in that strange condition in which the safety of that
"republican form of government" we desire to insure the Southern States
has more safeguards in the instincts of the ignorant than in the
intelligence of the educated. The right of the freedmen, not merely to
the common privileges of citizens, but to _own themselves_, depends on
the connection of the States in which they live with the United States
being preserved. They must know that Secession and State Independence
mean their reenslavement. Saulsbury of Delaware, and Willey of West
Virginia, declared in the Senate, in 1862, that the Rebel States, when
they came back into the Union, would have the legal power to reenslave
any blacks whom the National government might emancipate; and it is only
the plighted faith of the United States to the freedmen, which such a
proceeding would violate, which can prevent the crime from being
perpetrated. It is as citizens of the United States, and not as
inhabitants of North Carolina or Mississippi, that their freedom is
secure. Their instincts, their interests, and their position will thus
be their teachers in the duties of citizenship. They are as sure to vote
in accordance with the most advanced ideas of the time as most of the
embittered aristocracy are to vote for the most retrograde. They will,
though at first ignorant, necessarily be in political sympathy with the
most educated voters of New York, Ohio, and Massachusetts; if they were
as low in the scale of being as their bitterest revilers assert, they
would still be forced by their instincts into intuitions of their
interests; and their interests are identical with those of civilization
and progress. We suppose that those who think them most degraded would
be willing to concede to them the possession of a little selfish
cunning; and a little selfish cunning is enough to bring them into
harmony with the purposes, if not the spirit, of the largest-minded
philanthropy and statesmanship of the North.
It is claimed, we know, by some of the hardiest dealers in assertion,
that the freedmen will vote as their former masters shall direct; but as
this argument is generally put forward by those whose sympathies are
with the former masters rather than with the emancipated bondmen, one
finds it difficult to understand why they should object to a policy
which will increase the power of those whom they wish to be dominant.
The circumstances, however, under which credulous ignorance becomes the
prey of unscrupulous intelligence are familiar to all who have observed
our elections. An ignorant Irish Catholic may be the victim of a
pro-slavery demagogue, because the latter flatters his prejudices; but
can he be deceived by a bigoted Know-Nothing, who is the object of them?
The only demagogue who could control the negro would be an abolition
demagogue, and he could control him to his harm only when the negro was
deprived of his rights. The slave-masters were wont to pay considerable
attention to zoology,--not because they were interested in science, but
because in that science they thought they could obtain arguments for
expelling blacks from the human species. In their zoological studies,
did they ever learn that mice instinctively seek the protection of the
cat, or that the deer speeds to, instead of from, the hunter? The
persons whose votes the late masters would be most likely to control
would palpably be those whose votes they always have controlled, namely,
the poor whites; for, in the late Slave States, white aristocrat is
still bound to white democrat by the strong tie of a common contempt of
"the nigger." Meanwhile it is not difficult to believe, that, among four
millions of black people, there are enough plantation Hampdens and
Adamses to give political organization to their brethren, and make their
votes efficient for the protection of their interests.
We think, then, it may be taken for granted, that, while ignorant, the
freedmen will vote right by the force of their instincts, and that the
education they require will be the result of their possessing the
political power to demand it. Free schools are not the creations of
private benevolence, but of public taxation; it is useless to expect a
system of universal education in a community which does not rest on
universal suffrage; and the children of the poor freeman are educated at
the public expense, not so much by the pleading of the children's needs
as by the power of the father's ballot. To take the ground, that the
"superior" race will educate the "inferior" race it has but just held in
bondage, that it will humanely set to work to prepare and qualify the
"niggers" to be voters, only escapes from being considered the artifice
of the knave by charitably referring it to the credulity of the
simpleton. We do not send, as Mr. Sumner has happily said, "the child to
be nursed by the wolf"; and he might have added, that the only precedent
for such a proceeding, the case of Romulus and Remus, has lost all the
little force it may once have had by the criticism of Niebuhr.
If the negroes do not get the power of political self-protection in the
conventions of the people which are now to be called, it is not
reasonable to expect they will ever get it by the consent of the whites.
Legal State conventions are called by previous law. There is no previous
State law applicable to the Rebel communities, because, revolutionized
by rebellion, the very persons who are qualified by the old State laws
to call conventions are disqualified by the laws of the United States.
The result is, that the people are an unorganized mass, to be
reorganized under the lead of the Federal government; and of this mass
of people--literally, in this case, "the masses"--the free blacks are as
much a part as the free whites. As soon, however, as the machinery of
State governments is set in motion by these conventions,--as soon as
these governments are recognized by the President and Congress,--no
conventions to alter the constitutions agreed upon can be called, except
by previous State laws. If negro suffrage is not granted in the election
of members to the present conventions, the power will pass permanently
into the hands of the whites, and the only opportunity for a peaceful
settlement of the question will be lost. At the very time when,
abstractly, no party has legal rights, and only one party has claims, we
propose to deliberately sacrifice the party that has claims to the party
which will soon acquire legal rights to oppress the claimants. For,
disguise it as we may, the United States government really holds and
exercises the power which gives vitality to the preliminaries of
reconstruction, and it is therefore responsible for all evils in the
future which shall spring from its neglect or injustice in the present.
The addition, too, of four millions of persons to the people of the
South, without any corresponding addition of voters, will increase the
political power of the ruling whites to an alarming extent, while it
will remove all checks on its mischievous exercise. The constitution
declares that "representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned
among the several States, which may be included in this Union, according
to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the
whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a
term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all
other persons." The unanswerable argument presented at the time against
the clause relating to the slaves did not prevent its adoption. "If," it
was said, "the negroes are property, why is other property not
represented? if men, why three fifths?" Still the South has always
enjoyed the double privilege of treating the negro as an article of
merchandise and of using three fifths of him as political capital. He
has thus added to the power by which he was enslaved, and has been
represented in Congress by persons who regarded him either as a beast or
as "a descendant of Ham." In 1860, when the ratio of representation was
about one hundred and twenty-seven thousand, the South had, by the
three-fifths rule, the right to eighteen more representatives in
Congress, and eighteen more electoral votes, than it would have had, if
only free persons had been counted. The emancipation of the slaves will
give it twelve more; for the blacks will now no longer be constitutional
fractions, but constitutional units. The three-fifths arrangement was a
monstrous anomaly; but the five-fifths will be worse, if negro suffrage
be denied. Four millions of free people will, by the mere fact of being
inhabitants of Southern territory, confer a political power equal to
thirty members of Congress, and yet have no voice in their election. It
has been computed by the Hon. Robert Dale Owen, in a paper on the
subject, published in the New York "Tribune," that in some States, where
the blacks and whites are about equal in number, and where two thirds of
the whites shall "qualify" as voters, this new condition of things will
give the Southern white voter, in a Presidential or Congressional
election, three times as much political influence as a Northern voter.
And on whom shall we, in many localities, confer this immense privilege?
Here is Mr. Owen's description of a specimen of the class of Southern
"poor whites" we propose thus to exalt.
"I have often encountered this class. I saw many of them last year,
while visiting, as member of a Government commission, some of the
Southern States. Labor degraded before their eyes has extinguished
within them all respect for industry, all ambition, all honorable
exertion to improve their condition. When last I had the pleasure of
seeing you at Nashville, I met there, in the office of a gentleman
charged with the duty of issuing transportation and rations to indigent
persons, black and white, a notable example of this strange class. He
was a Rebel deserter,--a rough, dirty, uncouth specimen of
humanity,--tall, stout, and wiry-looking, rude and abrupt in speech and
bearing, and clothed in tattered homespun. In no civil tone, he demanded
rations. When informed that all rations applicable to such a purpose
were exhausted, he broke forth,--
"What am I to do, then? How am I to get home?'
"'You can have no difficulty,' was the reply. 'It is but fifteen or
eighteen hours down the river' (the Cumberland) 'by steamboat to where
you live. I furnished you transportation; you can work your way.'
"'Work my way!' (with a scowl of angry contempt.) 'I never did a stroke
of work since I was born; and I never expect to, till my dying day.'
"The agent replied, quietly,--
"'They will give you all you want to eat on board, if you help them to
wood.'
"'Carry wood!' he retorted, with an oath. 'Whenever they ask me to carry
wood, I'll tell them they may set me on shore; I'd rather starve for a
week than work for an hour; I don't want to live in a world that I can't
make a living out of without work.'
"Is it for men like that, ignorant, illiterate, vicious, fit for no
decent employment on earth except manual labor, and spurning _all_ labor
as degradation,--is it in favor of such insolent swaggerers that we are
to disfranchise the humble, quiet, hard-working negro? Are the votes of
three such men as Stanton or Seward, Sumner or Garrison, Grant or
Sherman, to be neutralized by the ballot of one such worthless;
barbarian?"
But this great power, wielded by a population imperfectly qualified to
vote, in the name of a population which do not vote at all,--a power
equivalent to thirty members of Congress and thirty electoral
votes,--will be directed as much against Northern interests as against
negro interests. Added to the power which the South will derive from its
voting population, it will enable that section to control one third of
all the votes in the House of Representatives; and, says Professor
Parsons, "if they stand together, and vote as a unit, they will need
only about one sixth more to get and hold control of our national
legislation and all our foreign and domestic policy." Our political
experience has unfortunately not been such as to justify us in believing
it to be impossible for any party, under a resolute Southern lead, to
obtain one sixth of the Northern strength in Congress. What would be the
result of such a combination? Why, the National government would be
substantially in the hands of those who have been engaged in a desperate
struggle to overthrow it; and it would be a government converted into a
great military and naval power by the war which resulted in their
defeat, and fully competent to enforce its decisions at home and abroad
by the strong hand. Nothing is purchased at such a frightful price as
the indulgence of a prejudice; the cry against "nigger equality" is a
prejudice of the most mischievous kind; and it may be we shall hereafter
find cause to deplore, that, when we had to choose between "nigger
equality" and Southern predominance, our choice was to keep the "nigger"
down, even if we failed to keep ourselves up.
One result of Southern predominance everybody can appreciate. The
national debt is so interwoven with every form of the business and
industry of the loyal States that its repudiation would be the most
appalling of evils. A tax to pay it at once would not produce half the
financial derangement and moral disorder which repudiation would cause;
for repudiation, as Mirabeau well observed, is nothing but taxation in
its most cruel, unequal, iniquitous, and calamitous form. But what
reason have we to think that a reconstructed South, dominant in the
Federal government, would regard the debt with feelings similar to ours?
The negroes would associate it with their freedom, of which it was the
price; their late masters would view it as the symbol of their
humiliation, which it was incurred to effect. We must remember that the
South loses the whole cost of Rebellion, and is at the same time
required to pay its share of the cost of suppressing Rebellion. The cost
of Rebellion is, in addition to the devastation of property caused by
invasion, the whole Southern debt of some two or three thousand millions
of dollars, and the market value of the slaves, which, estimating the
slaves at five hundred dollars each, is two thousand millions of dollars
more. The portion of the cost of suppressing Rebellion which the South
will have to pay can be approximately reached by taking a recent
calculation made in the Census Office of the Department of the Interior.
Estimating the national debt at twenty-five hundred millions of dollars,
and apportioning it according to the number of the white male adults
over twenty years of age in the different sections of the country, it
has been found that the proportion of the New England States is
$308,689,352.07; of the Middle States, $740,195,342.32; of the Western
States, $893,288,781.01; of the Southern States, $461,929,846.85; and of
the Pacific States, $95,896,677.75. This calculation makes the South
responsible for over four hundred and sixty millions of the debt. What
amount have the Southerners invested in it? Where both interest and
passion furiously impel men to repudiation, can they be trusted with the
care of the public credit? "But," the Northern people may exclaim, "in
case of such an execrable violation of justice, we would revolt,--we
would"----Ah! but in whose hands would then be "the war power"?
From every point of view, then, in which we can survey the subject,
negro suffrage is, unless we are destitute of the commonest practical
reason, the logical sequence of negro emancipation. It is not more
necessary for the protection of the freedmen than for the safety and
honor of the nation. Our interests are inextricably bound up with their
rights. The highest requirements of abstract justice coincide with the
lowest requirements of political prudence. And the largest justice to
the loyal blacks is the real condition of the widest clemency to the
Rebel whites. If the Southern communities are to be reorganized into
Federal States, it is of the first importance that they should be States
whose power rests on the proscription or degradation of no class of
their population. It would be a great evil, if they were absolutely
governed by a faction, even if that faction were a minority of the
"loyal" people, whose loyalty consisted in merely taking an oath which
the most unscrupulous would be the readiest to take, because the
readiest to break. We are bound either to give them a republican form of
government, or to hold them in the grasp of the military power of the
nation; and we cannot safely give them anything which approaches a
republican form of government, unless we allow the great mass of the
free people the right to vote. And least of all should we think of
proscribing that particular class of the free people who most thoroughly
represent in their localities the interests of the United States, and
whose ballots would at once do the work and save the expense of an army
of occupation.