had been the object of solicitous inquiry
throughout the war. It was indeed often a question of angry
disputation in Congress, in the press, and among the people. The
tentative and somewhat speculative efforts in this field, which had
been made or at least encouraged by Mr. Lincoln, had confused rather
than solved the problem, and yet his action could not fail to exert an
embarrassing and possibly a decisive influence upon the course of his
successor. Difficult as it might have proved to Mr. Lincoln himself to
go forward on the line he had marked out, it would obviously prove far
more difficult to Mr. Johnson to maintain the same policy with the
inevitable result of renewing the conflict with Congress which Mr.
Lincoln had only allayed and postponed--not removed. A brief review of
what Mr. Lincoln had done in the field of Reconstruction will give a
more accurate knowledge of President Johnson's policy, which afterwards
became the subject of prolonged and bitter controversy. Mr. Lincoln
had naturally been anxious from the beginning of the war to re-establish
civil government in any and every one of the Confederate States where
actual resistance should cease. A military autocracy controlling people
who were engaged in the ordinary avocations of life was altogether
contrary to his views of expediency, altogether repugnant to his
conceptions of right.

At the end of the first year of the war (April, 1862) the rebel
fortifications on the Lower Mississippi and the city of New Orleans
surrendered to the guns of Farragut, and not long afterwards a
movement was made to re-establish in Louisiana a civil government that
would be loyal to the Union. The first step was the election on the
third of December, 1862, of Benjamin F. Flanders and Michael Hahn, old
citizens of Louisiana, as Representatives in Congress.

On the 9th of February, 1863, when the Thirty-seventh Congress was
drawing to its close, Messrs. Flanders and Hahn were admitted to their
seats, though not without contention and misgiving. They had been
chosen at an election ordered by the military governor of Louisiana
(General George F. Shepley), and their credentials bore the signature
of that official. General Shepley had undoubtedly been permitted, if
not specifically authorized, by the National Administration to take
this step; though it was afterwards perceived by all friends of the
Union to be useless if not mischievous, and its repetition for the
ensui