, and against the far more drastic proposal of Stevens and
Boutwell,--in opposing which Blaine himself seems to have done service
certainly as creditable as any in his checkered career. But the radical
character of the bill as passed, its great advance on all earlier
proposals, seems to have called forth hardly any challenge among the
Republicans.

In a word, the law put the whole unreconstructed South,--all of the old
Confederacy except Tennessee,--under temporary military government,
subject to the President; and the commanders were at once to initiate
measures for new State organizations. They were to enroll all adult
males, white and black, as voters, except only such as the Fourteenth
Amendment would shut out from office; these voters were then to elect
delegates in each State to a convention; this body was to frame a
constitution incorporating permanently the same conditions of suffrage;
this constitution was then to be submitted to popular vote; and if a
majority ratified it,--if Congress approved it,--if the Legislature
elected under it ratified the Fourteenth Amendment,--and if and when
that amendment received enough ratifications to enact it,--then, at
last, each State was to be fully restored to the Union.

On this plan the States were rapidly and finally reconstructed. Its
central feature was the enforcement of suffrage for the negroes
throughout the South. Of this tremendous measure, but small discussion
appears in the debate over the bill. But it seems to have had behind it
the prevailing sentiment of the North. A good witness on this point is
the Springfield _Republican_. That paper had strongly advocated the
adoption of the Massachusetts plan, a reading and writing qualification
for suffrage--the State's only good legacy from the Know-nothing period.
Of such a provision it said January 9: "It would be a most potent
stimulus to education, and once made the national rule there would be
such a studying of spelling books as never was seen before.... There can
be no sure reliance on the votes of blacks any more than of whites who
cannot read their ballots." But this plan found little popular favor.
The objection to it which we now recognize,--that the Southern States
might probably have forborne to educate the freedmen, and so left them
disfranchised,--was not then prominent. But there had not come to be a
general recognition at the North of the danger of ignorant suffrage. Of
the actual drift of opinion the