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Thaddeus Stevens, Henry Winter Davis, and Wade1 took a cheerless view of the political prospect, and saw small chance of success against Executive influence and patronage on a question where there was so much popular indifference and opposition among Republicans.
Howard and Davis were averse to any direct issue with the President on negro suffrage, confident that the public mind was not ready for it, and thinking it wiser to make it on the right of Congress to control the reconstruction.
B. Gratz Brown alone responded without qualification to Sumner's appeal.
Of the members of the House, Boutwell2 of Massachusetts, Julian3 of Indiana, and Garfield of Ohio,4 each addressed the people of his State in favor of admitting freedmen to the suffrage.5 But on the other hand Dawes of Massachusetts, already a leader in that body, in an address to his neighbors, which was widely read, came earnestly to the support of the President's action, and contested as unconstitutional any attempt of Congress to make suffrage for the colored people a condition precedent in the restoration of the rebel States.6
Among public men not in Congress, journalists and other leaders of public opinion, Sumner's cause found little support.
Governor Morton of Indiana denounced it before the people, and took issue directly with the senator.7 Governor Andrew of Massachusetts felt assured of the President's honesty of purpose, and advised co-operation with him.8 The editors of the New York Evening Post, Bryant and Godwin, usually radical in their views, contended against compulsory action by Congress in the matter of suffrage, treating it as ‘a prodigious and overwhelming ’
1 Howard and Wade ascribed the present difficulty to President Lincoln's course on the reconstruction bill in 1864, and thought that his action was in substance the same as his successor's.
3 Julian's ‘Political Recollections,’ p. 268.
4 At Ravenna, O., July 4. Works of J. A. Garfield, vol. i. p. 85.
5 Sherman, speaking at Circleville, O., June 10, showed himself friendly to negro suffrage (New York Tribune, June 14), and Morrill of Vermont spoke in favor of it before the Republican convention of that State.
6 July 4, at Pittsfield. (Springfield Republican, July 19.) This journal agreed fully with Mr. Dawes's view, and sustained President Johnson, June 12. Mr. Dawes had taken the same position in a speech in the House, Feb 20, 1865.
7 Julian's ‘Political Recollections,’ pp. 260-268. George W. Julian at once replied to Morton in the Indiana ‘True Republican,’ and also in speeches.
8 Letter to Sumner, November 21. At the Union Club in Boston, November 7, the Governor and Henry Ward Beecher had a spirited encounter with Sumner when Governor Parsons of Alabama was present to solicit a loan for that State. (Boston Commonwealth, November 25.) Governor Andrew, as his valedictory message in January, 1866, shows, was not in entire accord with Republican methods of reconstruction.
Cambridge, MA. Press of John Wilson and Son. 1877.
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