Page:The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18.djvu/386

378 constitutional principles by the eminent jurists who supply ideas for the National Union Party.

The doctrine of the unconditional right of the Rebel States to representation being thus a demonstrated absurdity, the only question relates to the conditions which Congress proposes to impose. Certainly these conditions, as embodied in the constitutional amendment which has passed both houses by such overwhelming majorities, are the mildest ever exacted of defeated enemies by a victorious nation. There is not a distinctly "radical" idea in the whole amendment,—nothing that President Johnson has not himself, within a comparatively recent period, stamped with his high approbation. Does it ordain universal suffrage? No. Does it ordain impartial suffrage? No. Does it proscribe, disfranchise, or expatriate the recent armed enemies of the country, or confiscate their property? No. It simply ordains that the national debt shall be paid and the Rebel debt repudiated; that the civil rights of all persons shall be maintained; that Rebels who have added perjury to treason shall be disqualified for office; and that the Rebel States shall not have their political power in the Union increased by the presence on their soil of persons to whom they deny political rights, but that representation shall be based throughout the Republic on voters, and not on population. The pith of the whole amendment is in the last clause; and is there anything in that to which reasonable objection can be made? Would it not be a curious result of the war against Rebellion, that it should end in conferring on a Rebel voter in South Carolina a power equal, in national affairs, to that of two loyal voters in New York? Can any Democrat have the face to assert that the South should have, through its disfranchised negro freemen alone, a power in the Electoral College and in the national House of Representatives equal to that of the States of Ohio and Indiana combined?

Yet these conditions, so conciliatory, moderate, lenient, almost timid, and which, by the omission of impartial suffrage, fall very far below the requirements of the average sentiment of the loyal nation, are still denounced by the new party of "Union" as the work of furious radicals, bent on destroying the rights of the States. Thus Governor James L. Orr of South Carolina, a leading Rebel, pardoned into a Johnsonian Union man, implores the people of that region to send delegates to the Philadelphia Convention, on the ground that its purpose is to organize "conservative" men of all sections and parties, "to drive from power that radical party who are daily trampling under foot the Constitution, and fast converting a constitutional Republic into a consolidated despotism." The terms to which South Carolina is asked to submit, before she can be made the equal of Ohio or New York in the Union, are stated to be "too degrading and humiliating to be entertained by a freeman for a single instant." When we consider that this "radical party" constitutes nearly four fifths of the legal legislature of the nation, that it was the party which saved the country from dismemberment while Mr. Orr and his friends were notoriously engaged in "trampling the Constitution under foot," and that the man who denounces it owes his forfeited life to its clemency, the astounding insolence of the impeachment touches the sublime. Here is confessed treason inveighing against tried loyalty, in the name of the Constitution it has violated and the law it has broken! But why does Mr. Orr think the terms of South Carolina's restored relations to the Union "too degrading and humiliating to be entertained by a freeman for a single instant"? Is it because he wishes to have the Rebel debt paid? Is it because he desires to have the Federal debt repudiated? Is it because he thinks it intolerable that a negro should have civil rights? Is it because he resents the idea that breakers of oaths, like himself, should be disqualified from having another opportunity of