allegiance to the Government. They were empowered
to form the Convention which should shape the organic law of the
State, and in that law they were authorized to establish the basis of
suffrage,--a right which the President held to belong to the State, to
be, indeed, inalienable from the State. It was, therefore, evident
that the white men who were allowed to regain all the rights of
citizenship by a mere oath of fidelity would not, in framing an organic
law for the State, exclude the classes whom the President had excepted
from pardon. The excluded classes had been the leaders, the
commanders, the men of position, the friends and the patrons of those
who, only less guilty because less influential and powerful, were now
intrusted with the initial work in the re-establishment of civil
Government in their respective States.

It was not a possible supposition that these men, when they assembled
in convention, would exclude the entire leading class of the South, or
even one member of it, from the full constitutional privileges and
benefits of the civil Government they were about to re-organize. The
suffrage conferred on others would, in like manner, be conferred on
them: the offices of rank and emolument in the new Government would
likewise be open to them, and it would thus be made evident that the
President's exclusion of these classes was merely an inhibition from
doing a preliminary work which others would do equally well for them.
Unless, therefore, some other form of denial or exclusion should be
announced,--and none other apparently was intended,--the President's
policy would end in promptly handing over to the authors and designers
of the Rebellion the complete control of the States whose civil power
they had willfully perverted and turned against the National authority.
Mr. Seward's magnanimity, his boundless confidence in human nature, had
led him to believe that this was wise policy. He believed it so firmly
that he had persuaded the President--against his own will and purpose
--to adopt it, and to attempt its enforcement.

It soon became evident that President Johnson realized how completely
he had excluded men of the colored race from any share of political
power in the Southern States by his process of reconstruction. It is
true that he stood loyally by the Thirteenth Amendment to the
Constitution, which had been submitted to Congress before his accession
to the Presidency but had not yet been ratified