from an act of amnesty. Far
from any discrimination being made between loyal and disloyal, the great
body of both classes are compelled to submit to Federal terms of
citizenship or be disfranchised; and they are called upon, not to revive
the old State, but to make a new one, within the old State lines. And
all this would result from the necessity of the case, even if it were
not made justifiable by the essential sovereignty of the United States,
of which the war-power is but an incident. But if the Federal government
can thus give the white inhabitants, or any portion of them, the right
of suffrage, cannot it confer that right upon the black freedmen? It
will not do, at this stage, to say that the Federal government has no
right to prescribe the qualifications of voters in the States: because,
in the case of the whites, it does and must prescribe them; and
President Johnson has just the same right to say that negroes shall
vote as to say that pardoned Rebels shall vote. The right of States to
decide on the qualifications of its electors applies only to loyal
States; it cannot apply to political communities which have lost by
Rebellion the Federal character of "States," which notoriously have no
legitimate State authority to decide the question of qualification, and
which are now taking the preparatory steps of forming themselves into
States through the agency of provisional Federal governors, directing
voters, constituted such by Federal authority, to elect delegates to a
convention of the people. It is a misuse of constitutional language to
Call North Carolina and Mississippi "States," in the same sense in which
we use the term in speaking of Ohio and Massachusetts. When their
conventions have framed State constitutions, when their State
governments are organized, and when their senators and representatives
have been admitted into the Congress of the United States, then, indeed,
they will be States, entitled to all the privileges of Ohio and
Massachusetts; and woe be to us, if they are reconstructed on wrong
principles!

It is often said, that, although the Federal government may have the
right and power to decide who shall be considered "the people" of the
Rebel States, in so important a matter as the conversion of them into
States of the Federal Union, it is still politic and just to make the
qualifications of voters as nearly as possible what they were before the
Rebellion. Conceding this, we still have to face the