Page:Confederate Military History - 1899 - Volume 12.djvu/315

Rh judge of the supreme court of the District of Columbia, all as Republicans."

Of all the people of Alabama who had gone into the war (a number over her arms-bearing population [white] by the census of 1860), the people who were to be investigated in that State, not a single witness was called. Every witness was a selfish, prejudiced one, anticipating a reward for the kind of testimony he had given, and which reward he duly received. This one-sided testimony is a sample of the testimony taken in all the States by this committee, having the lives and fortunes of a brave people in its power. The people on trial before this partisan court were allowed no witnesses, had no voice or testimony in the matter. The committees summoned only such witnesses as they desired, and who would be likely to give the testimony needed to carry out the purposes for which they were selected. They were pitiless in their work, for they saw and knew how prostrated and helpless the South was. But, seeing as they did, the poverty and destruction of the property of the South, it is strange that even a committee of politicians working for party supremacy could deliberately recommend so terrible an ordeal as was congressional reconstruction. The committee made its report June 18, 1866, near the close of the first session of Congress, a report "admirably adapted to serve as a manifesto and campaign document, for a new House of Representatives was to be elected before Congress should again convene. It declared that the governments of the States recently in secession were practically suspended by reason both of the irregular character of the governments which had been set up, and of the reluctant acquiescence of the Southern people in the results of the war; and that it was essential to the preservation of the Union that they should not be rein-