he order of the district commander, or else
Congress must make a special appropriation for that purpose. I
declined to sanction the use of the people's money for any such
purpose, refused to order an election for ratification or rejection
of the obnoxious Constitution, and referred the matter to Congress,
with a recommendation that the people be authorized to vote separately
on the disqualifying clause--a privilege which the Convention had
denied.

HOW ITS WORST FEATURE WAS NULLIFIED

The radicals in Congress were so glad, apparently, of this mode of
escape from a result so obnoxious to the better sense of the Union
people at that time, that not a voice was raised in favor of the
"carpet-bag" Constitution or in disapprobation of my action in
regard to it. The instrument was permitted to rest quietly in the
pigeonhole of the district commander's desk until the next year.
Then an act was passed providing for submitting that Constitution
to the people of Virginia, with the privilege of voting separately
on the disfranchising clause, which clause they, of course, rejected.
Thus Virginia was saved from the vile government and spoilation
which cursed the other Southern States, and which the same radical
Congress and its successors sustained until the decent public
sentiment of the North would endure them no longer.

It is, perhaps, not too much to say that if the other district
commanders had in like manner refused to make themselves parties
to the spoilation of the people placed under their charge, Congress
would have shrunk from the direct act of imposing upon them such
obnoxious governments, and the country might have been saved the
disgrace of the eight years of carpet-bag rule in the South. At
least it is certain that a large proportion of the more moderate
among the Republican majority in Congress at that time indulged
the hope that respectable governments might be organized under the
acts of Congress. But they made this difficult, if not impossible,
when they gave their assent to the amendment of those acts, prepared
by the extremest radicals, depriving the Southern whites of any
active part in the organization of their governments. Impartial
justice, as expressed in "impartial suffrage," might have led to
tolerable results even in those States where the blacks were in
the majority. But under a law which gave universal suffrage to
the blacks and disfranchised the influe