John Harrison Wilson, The life of Charles Henry Dana

[391] be held in the old slave States as “indicating with precision” the drift of public opinion in the South on the subject of reconstruction. He pointed out that the congressional plan was sure to triumph; that the ten seceding States would all be restored to their old-time relations to the Union; would again resume the control of their political affairs under constitutions framed by themselves; would be represented in both branches of Congress, and would participate in the election of the next President of the United States. In a vein of philosophy he continued:

... Of course this plan of restoration is not entirely congenial to a large mass of those who took an active part in the Rebellion. This is not surprising. It is not in the nature of things that the conquered party in such a conflict as that through which the country has passed during the last seven years should submit without grievous repinings and a certain show of resistance to the terms imposed by the victors. The South were a proud, a gallant people. Their hopes of independence had been raised to the highest pitch. They had staked their property; they had pledged their honor; they had shed their best blood to achieve a triumph. Their defeat whelmed them in impoverishment and ruin, tarnished their fame, crushed their lofty aspirations, and exposed them to the penalties of treason. The consciousness that the terms of reconciliation have no parallel for magnanimity in the history of great civil wars does not replenish their exhausted finances, nor revive their drooping industry, nor heal their wounded honor, nor restore to life their slain sons. Nevertheless, in view of all the circumstances, the defeated class in the South have accepted their new and trying situation with as much equanimity as could have been reasonably anticipated. Their crime was great, and terribly have they expiated it. Their fall has put poor, proud human nature to one of its severest tests, and they have stood the cast of the die with as much self-control as any people in like circumstances in all history. When they shall realize