edged leader of the House, moved that a joint committee of the House and Senate be appointed to inquire into the condition of the seceded States, and until this committee make its report no member be received by either House from those States. All debate was shut off by the "previous question," and the resolution was carried even before the annual message had been received. This was the first step toward congressional reconstruction, and in taking it Congress utterly ignored the work of Johnson. Indeed, they proceeded just as if no such personage as the President of the United States existed. The Senate, led by Sumner, was equally decided in its action. Johnson, instead of bowing to the will of Congress, showed fight. He lost his temper, his dignity, his self-control, and as the contest grew more open and bitter he stooped to make personal attacks in public speeches on the leading legislators, naming Thaddeus Stevens, Charles Sumner, and Wendell Phillips as the leading disunionists of the North, and pretending to believe that these were desirous of having him assassinated. This a departure from ordinary presidential

was

dignity so radical as to produce a shock. It served to cement the President's opponents against him, and rendered all future reconciliation out of the question.

The Great Reconstruction Act

It is impossible in our brief chapter to follow minutely the great debates in Congress on this great subject of reconstruction. This debate was one of the longest and most exciting in the history of Congress. It began in the House on December 18, when Mr. Stevens made a radical speech in which he declared that the seceded States were nothing more than conquered territory; they were practically dead States,1 and must be readmitted as new territory or be held in subjection at the will of their conquerors. Stevens was answered a few days

1 Stevens was extremely radical. In a speech at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, he advocated confiscating the property of all rebels worth $10,000 or upward, or who owned two hundred acres of land or more the land to be divided among the negroes and the money to be used in paying the National debt. He also favored adopting the Thirteenth Amendment without counting the seceded States. But Congress was unwilling to follow him to such extremes.

later by Henry J. Raymond, the brilliant founder and editor of the New York Times. Raymond was the warm friend of Seward, and his object was to divide the Republican party in the House of Representatives, and to lead a portion of it to the support of the Administration. In this he was not successful.

In the Senate the winter was occupied with the same subject, the majority of the Republicans, led by the two Massachusetts senators, Charles Sumner and Henry Wilson, taking a decided stand against the President. The long session of Congress wore away and little was done. Congress had proposed the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution and had made its adoption by the southern States the condition of their restoration. This amendment forbade the payment of any debt contracted through rebellion against the Union by the United States or by any State; it defined citizenship, obliterating the color line; it held out a strong inducement to the States to enfranchise the negro by reducing the representation in Congress in accordance with any abridgment of the right to vote by a State of any class of

citizens; and on the whole it practically transferred the first allegiance of the citizen from his State to the United States.

One of the eleven wanderers, Tennessee, took advantage of this invitation to get back into the fold. The rest held aloof. The summer passed. The congressional elections in the autumn of 1866 produced a large majority against the Administration. But Andrew Johnson was not the man to listen to admonition from any source when his mind was set on anything. Had Johnson, on learning the result of the elections, bowed himself to the great master, the people, and said, Thy will be done, and then modified his policy in accordance with that will, his name in American history would now have a meaning that it can never have. But Johnson adhered tenaciously to his plans. The southern States took courage. They seemed to believe that the President would win in the end, and the entire ten, through their respective legislatures, deliberately rejected the Fourteenth Amendment.

Congress looked upon this as a defiance of its power, a declaration of war, and from this

time the battle became more desperate. Congress tightened its grip. The feeling against the South rose in parts of the North until it reached almost the pitch attained in 1861.

It was in February, 1867, that Thaddeus Stevens moved in the House House the great Reconstruction Act, which provided that the ten southern States be divided into five military districts, and that an officer with an army be sent into each district and entirely supplant the civil governments already there. This bill was debated in House and Senate for some weeks, amended, passed, sent to the President, vetoed, and repassed on March 2, and two days later the Thirty-ninth Congress expired. But instead of taking the usual vacation of nine months, it was resolved that the Fortieth Congress meet at the moment when the old Congress expired. This was done to head off the President, for it was believed that he would not carry out the late enactments satisfactorily, if left wholly in his hands.

Before the close of March a supplementary reconstruction bill was passed, as the first was incomplete. This second bill directed the mili