elected and met,
within the remaining months of 1865; they were chosen on the old basis
of suffrage, conditioned by the exceptions to amnesty and by the oaths
of allegiance; these conventions based the new constitutions largely on
the old; they affirmed the ordinances of secession to be null and void;
they repudiated the Confederate debt, and they declared that slavery no
longer existed. Legislatures were duly elected, and proceeded to enact
laws. They all ratified the Thirteenth Amendment, though Mississippi and
Alabama affixed some qualifications to their assent, while Texas was
still unreconstructed and could not act; and Kentucky and Delaware gave
a negative. The President and Secretary of State, December 18, declared
the adoption of the amendment by the vote of 31 States out of 36.
Slavery was finally and forever abolished.

President Johnson used his influence to have the new constitutions open
the door to a qualified negro suffrage. He telegraphed to the
Mississippi convention, urging that the suffrage be extended to all
negroes who could read and write, or who possessed $250 worth of real
estate. Well would it have been if that appeal had been heeded.

Thus far, reconstruction had moved with singular swiftness and ease. Too
swift and easy was the recovery to be trusted--so thought some--where
the disease had been so desperate. But the Cabinet, including the grim
and jealous Stanton, held with the President. More, the autumn
Republican conventions throughout the North passed resolutions cordially
approving the President's course and its results--all, with the ominous
exceptions of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, controlled respectively by
Thaddeus Stevens and Sumner, the leader of the House and the foremost
man in the Senate.

Thus was initiated and begun the first of the three successive plans of
reconstruction. Before seeing its fate, it is opportune to consider the
general ideal of the situation, as presented by two of the greatest men
of the North, the two, we may say, who best comprehended the whole case;
the one standing in the Church and the other in the State, but alike in
breadth of mind and loftiness of spirit--Henry Ward Beecher and John A.
Andrew.

During the war, the Northern churches had been centers of inspiration to
the national cause, and Plymouth church among the foremost. Beecher had
made a series of speeches in England in 1862, which did much to turn the
tide of English opinion. The discl