Dec. 4. 1865. |
1866. |
August and September. |
This text is part of:
Table of Contents:
[615]
Congress had a right to judge of the qualifications of its members, and with the belief that disloyal men would not be allowed to enter that body over the bar of a test oath prescribed by law.1
When Congress assembled,
the subject of reorganization was among the first business of the session, and by a joint resolution a committee of fifteen was appointed2 to make inquiries and report.
This was known as the “Reconstruction Committee.”
This action offended the President.
It was an interference of the representatives of the people with his chosen policy of reorganization, and hostility to Congress was soon openly manifested by him. This was vehemently declared by the President in a speech to the populace in front of the Presidential Mansion on the 22d of February,
--a speech which Americans would gladly blot from the record of their country — in which, forgetting the dignity of his position and the gravity of the questions at issue, he denounced, by name, leading members of Congress, and the party which had given him their confidence.
The American people felt humiliated by this act, but it was a small matter when compared with what occurred later in the year,
when the President and a part of his Cabinet, with the pretext of honoring the deceased Senator Douglas by being present at the dedication of a monument to his memory at Chicago, on the 6th of September, made a journey to that city and beyond.
He harangued the people in language utterly unbecoming the chief magistrate of a nation, and attempted to sow the dangerous seeds of sedition by denouncing Congress as an illegal body, deserving of no respect from the people, and the majority of its members as traitors, “trying to break up the Government.”
That journey of the President, so disgraceful in all its features-its low partisan object, its immoral performances, and its pitiful results-forms a dark paragraph in the history of the Republic.3
1 By an act passed on the 22d of July, 1862, Congress prescribed that every member should make oath that he had not “voluntarily borne arms against the United States since he had been a citizen thereof,” or “voluntarily given aid, countenance, counsel, or encouragement to persons engaged in hostility thereto,” and had never “yielded voluntary support to any pretended government, authority, power, or constitution within the United States, hostile or inimical thereto.”
2 On the first day of the session, the House of Representatives, by a vote of 188 against 86, proposed and agreed to a joint resolution to appoint a joint committee, to be composed of nine members of the House and six of the Senate, to “inquire into the condition of the States which formed the socalled Confederate States of America, and report whether they, or any of them, are entitled to be represented in either House of Congress, with leave to report at any time, by bill or otherwise; and until such report shall have been made and finally acted upon by Congress, no member shall be received in either House from any of the so-called Confederate States; and all papers relating to the representatives of the said States, shall be referred to the said committee.” The resolution was adopted by the Senate on the 14th. The House appointed Messrs. Stevens, Washburne, Morrill, Grider, Bingham, Conkling, Boutwell, Blow, and Rogers, as its representatives in the committee, and the Senate appointed Messrs. Fessenden, Grimes, Harris, Howland, Johnson, and Williams.
3 A convention had just been held
Aug. 14. |
Scanned printed text.
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States License.
An XML version of this text is available for download, with the additional restriction that you offer Perseus any modifications you make. Perseus provides credit for all accepted changes, storing new additions in a versioning system.