be continually used against
the Northern States, against the loyalty which had saved the Union.
Only three-fifths of their number, in the day when the Southern States
were true to the Union, were admitted in the basis of representation.
Should the disloyalty of the South which had failed to destroy the
Government only by lack of power, be now rewarded by admitting the
whole number of negroes into the basis of representation, and at the
same time giving them no voice in the selection of representatives?
Surely, if this were conceded, it would offer such a premium upon
rebellion as no government guided by reason should confer; and,
therefore, the question came by the instinct of justice, and with the
precision of logic, to this point--the negro shall not be admitted
into the basis of representation until he is himself empowered to
participate in the choice of the representative. The North had hoped
that the South would cordially accept the justice of this principle,
but whether the South accepted it or not, the North resolved that it
should become part of the organic law of the Republic.

As matter of historical truth which has been ingeniously and
continuously, whether ignorantly or malignantly, perverted, this
point cannot be too fully elaborated nor too forcibly emphasized:--_The
Northern states or the Republican party which then wielded the
aggregate political power of the North, did not force negro suffrage
upon the South or exact it as a condition of re-admitting the Southern
States to the right and privilege of representation in Congress until
after other conditions had been rejected by the South_. The privilege
of representation in Congress had in effect been tendered to the
Southern States, upon the single condition that they would ratify the
Fourteenth Amendment, which provided among other safeguards for the
future, that so long as the negro was denied suffrage, he should not
be included in the basis of Federal enumeration,--in other words, that
the white men of the South should not be allowed to elect thirty-five
or forty representatives to Congress, based on the negro population,
in addition to the representatives duly apportioned to their own
numbers. When all the Southern States--with the exception of Tennessee
--declined to accept this basis of reconstruction by their rejection
of the Fourteenth Amendment, they ought to have measured the
consequences. The imperative question thenceforward was whether t