justly laid upon Northern
sentiment or upon the Republican party. It is true, and was not
denied, that the vast mass of the negroes thus admitted to suffrage
were without property and without education, and that it might have
been advantageous, if just treatment could have been assured them, that
they should tarry for a season in a preparatory state. While it was
maintained as an abstract proposition that the right of the negro to
vote was well grounded, many thought it desirable, as Mr. Lincoln
suggested, that at first only those who were educated and those who
had served in the Union Army should be enfranchised. But the North
believed, and believed wisely, that a poor man, an ignorant man, and
a black man, who was thoroughly loyal, was a safer and a better voter
than a rich man, an educated man, and a white man, who, in his heart,
was disloyal to the Union. This sentiment prevailed, not without
hesitation, not without deep and anxious deliberation; but in the end
it prevailed with the same courage and with the same determination
with which the party had drawn the sword and fought through a long war
in aid of the same cause, for which the negro was now admitted to
suffrage.

During the civil war the negro had, so far as he was able, helped the
Union cause--his race contributing nearly a quarter of a million troops
to the National service. If the Government had been influenced by a
spirit of inhumanity, it could have made him terribly effective by
encouraging insurrection and resistance on his part against his master.
But no such policy was ever entertained in counsels controlled in the
Cabinet by Seward and Chase and Stanton, or in operations in the field
directed by Grant and Sherman and Sheridan. The negro was left to
raise the crops that supplied the Confederate armies with bread, when
a policy of cruelty, no worse than that of Andersonville and Belle
Isle, might have made him a terror to the Southern population. The
humane policy thus pursued would have been scorned by European warriors
who have become the heroes of the world, but there is not a Northern
man who does not look back with profound satisfaction upon the
philanthropic determination that forbade the encouragement of a single
insurrection, or the destruction of a single Southern life, except
under the recognized and restricted laws of war.

Peace had now come, and the question was, whether the power of these
four and a half millions of men should