Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 7.djvu/665

 1869-vo] Reconstruction completed. 633 Congressional Reconstruction policy. This was avowed by Sumner, Stevens, Wade, and many others. The election of Grant as President, with a Congress still largely Republican in both branches, and the successful ratification of the Four- teenth Amendment, guaranteed the completion of both political and financial reconstruction. The triumphant party now fulfilled its task. In the first place, in order to render the negroes secure in their right of suffrage, the Republicans, abandoning the ground taken in their platform, immediately proposed a Fifteenth Amendment, prohibiting any denial of the suffrage on account of race, colour, or previous condition of servitude, and submitted it in 1869 to the States. In order to aid in securing its ratification, its acceptance was added as a further condition of read- mission in the case of the three States as yet unreconstructed, and also in that of Georgia, which now underwent a third reconstruction. In the case of Mississippi, Virginia, and Texas the difficulties as to the acceptance of new constitutions were solved by legislation submitting the drafts to popular vote, the objectionable clauses concerning disfranchisement being submitted separately in the first two States. These clauses were rejected ; and all three States then adopted the Constitutions, ratified the Fifteenth Amendment, and were restored by Congress in 1870. The case of Georgia was peculiar, in that the whites, getting control of the legislature elected in 1868, had declared negroes ineligible and their seats vacant. Congress now retorted by passing an Act whose effect was to place Georgia once more under military government and subject its legislature to a thorough purging by the so-called " iron-clad " oath, which turned out ex-Con- federates and admitted Republicans. Then after the much-reconstructed State had ratified the pending amendment it was finally restored to its privileges in the Union. The Fifteenth Amendment, having with some difficulty gained the requisite number of States, was declared in force on March 30, 1870. The process of reconstruction was now complete so far as legislation and constitutional amendment could make it. During this period Reconstruction was virtually sanctioned by the judicial department of the government, whose position had been regarded with distrust by Republicans, and with hope by the Southerners. The Supreme Court, under Chief Justice Chase, held at first an attitude distinctly ominous. In 1866, in the case ex parte Milligan, it declared military tribunals in a State not in insurrection to be unconstitutional ; and in two other suits, ex parte Garland and Cummings v. Missouri, it had pronounced test oaths, framed to punish ex-Confederates, to be invalid. But when two Southern States, in a desperate effort to prevent Congressional Reconstruction, applied for injunctions against the President and the Secretary of War, to prohibit their executing the Acts of 1867, the Court, in the cases of Mississippi v. Johnson and Georgia v. Stanton^ declined to interfere in matters political with another department of the Federal government. And a little later, in successive suits involving the CH. XX.