ill place the rebels over
Union men."

"Now, what has the Senate done?" Mr. Stevens asked. "Sent back to us
an amendment which contains every thing else but protection. It has
sent us back a bill which raises the whole question in dispute as to
the best mode of reconstructing these States by distant and future
pledges which this Congress has no authority to make and no power to
execute. What power has this Congress to say to a future Congress,
When the Southern States have done certain things, you shall admit
them, and receive their members into this House?"

"Our friends," said he, in another part of his remarks, "who love this
bill, love it now because the President is to execute it, as he has
executed every law for the last two years, by the murder of Union men,
and by despising Congress and flinging into our teeth all that we seek
to have done."

Mr. Stevens thought that in two hours a Committee of Conference could
frame a bill and report it to the House free from all these
difficulties--free from all this extraneous matter--which would
protect every loyal man in the Southern States, and do no injustice to
the disloyal.

Mr. Blaine supported the bill as it came from the Senate. "Congress,"
said he, "no more guarantees, under this bill, the right of any rebel
in any State to vote than did Congress guarantee to the rebels in
Tennessee the right to vote."

"Although this bill," said Mr. Wilson of Iowa, "does not attain all I
desire to accomplish, it does embrace much upon which I have insisted.
It reaches far beyond any thing which the most sanguine of us hoped
for a year ago. It secures equal suffrage to all loyal men; it sets
aside the pretended governments which now abuse power in the rebel
States; it insists on the ratification of the Constitutional
Amendment, under the operation of which all the rebels who now occupy
official position in the States affected by this bill will be rendered
ineligible to office, State or national; it presents an affirmative
policy, on the part of Congress, hostile to that of the President; it
demonstrates the ability of Congress to agree upon a given line of
future action; and, finally, it reserves to Congress jurisdiction over
the whole case when the people of any Southern disorganized State may
present a Constitution and ask for admission to this body as a part of
the governing power of the nation. There is too much of good in this
to be rejected. I will vote to concur in the