Edward Alfred Pollard, The lost cause; a new Southern history of the War of the Confederates ... Drawn from official sources and approved by the most distinguished Confederate leaders.

[567] overrun and subdued by the Federal power, and to subject these States to extra Constitutional conditions before readmission into the Union, the vote in the House was 66; in the Senate, 14.

These examples are sufficient to show how a small Constitutional party in the North held to their principles throughout the dark period of usurpation and despotism. As the conservative party became less awed by terrourism, they became less restrained in speech and action. In the progress of time, divisions began to arise in the Black Republican party, and protests to proceed from Black Republican politicians. Democrats, who, absorbed in military operations in the distant fields of campaign, had for some time given no attention to internal and domestic concerns, having the indisputable right of soldiers to speak their sentiments, began to give expression to the disgust and alarm which the arbitrary proceedings of the Administration had naturally excited. Thus the opposition grew formidable as the term of Mr. Lincoln drew towards a close; and parties for and against the Administration began to be organized, and issues of principle to be evolved and defined, for the approaching Presidential canvass.

The party issues for 1864 turned in a measure upon the conditions of reconstruction; and three sets of opinion on this subject were developed in the course of the canvass. The Constitutional party held to the ground that the sole rightful object of the war had been the suppression of the rebellion; and that, so soon as the power of the rebel authorities in any State was crushed, the State was by that fact already restored to the Union, from which it had never been legally separated; and nothing remained to be done but the restoration of the lawful State Government. This position was afterwards compendiously expressed by their candidate, Gen. McClellan, in the declaration: “The Union is the sole condition of peace-we ask no more.”

As will be seen in the sequel, the Administration or Government party went into the canvass on the issue of simple coercion; proposing indeed to bring the insurgent States into the Union divested of slavery; but divested by the expedient of an amendment of the Constitution. But the pressure of the contest forced them into the necessity of adding to their platform a requirement, upon States returning to the Union, that they should themselves abolish slavery as a condition precedent to readmission. They were, in other words, forced to abandon a Constitutional measure, and to substitute an extra-constitutional one in its stead.

The programme of the radical branch of the Black Republican party had been developed, some short time before, in the bill which passed Congress on the 3d of July, 1864, but which the President failed to sign, prescribing these three conditions as necessary preliminaries to the restoration of a seceded State to the Union: to wit, the disfranchisement by the

States of the guilty leaders of the rebellion as to State officers; the abolition