e of personal numbers--the Black man now
counting quite as much as the White man, instead of only three-fifths as
much; and it was decreed, that, except for crime, any denial to United
States citizens, whether Black or White, of the right to vote at any
election of Presidential electors, Congressional Representatives, State
Governors, Judges, or Legislative members, "shall" work a reduction,
proportioned to the extent of such denial, in the Congressional
Representation of the State, or States, guilty of it. As a further
safeguard, in the process of reconstruction, none of the insurgent
States were rehabilitated in the Union except upon acceptance of those
three Amendments as an integral part of the United States Constitution,
to be binding upon it; and it was this Constitution as it is, and not
the Constitution as it was, that all the Representatives, in both Houses
of Congress, from those insurgent States--as well as all their State
officers--swore to obey as the supreme law of the Land, when taking
their respective oaths of office.

Biding their time, and pretending to act in good faith, as the
years rolled by, the distrust and suspicion with which the old
Rebel-conspirators had naturally been regarded, gradually lessened in
the public mind. With a glad heart, the Congress, year after year,
removed the political disabilities from class after class of those who
had incurred them, until at last all, so desiring, had been reinstated
in the full privileges of citizenship, save the very few unrepentant
instigators and leaders of the Rebellion, who, in the depths of that
oblivion to which they seemingly had been consigned, continued to nurse
the bitterness of their downfall into an implacable hatred of that
Republic which had paralyzed the bloody hands of Rebellion, and
shattered all their ambitious dreams of Oligarchic rule, if not of
Empire.

But, while the chieftains of the great Conspiracy--and of the armed
Rebellion itself--remained at their homes unpunished, through the
clemency of the American People; the active and malignant minds of some
of them were plotting a future triumph for the "Lost Cause," in the
overthrow, in consecutive detail, of the Loyal governments of the
Southern States, by any and all means which might be by them considered
most desirable, judicious, expedient, and effectual; the solidifying of
these Southern States into a new Confederation, or league, in fact--with
an unwritten but well underst