in the history of the world. In return for our leniency we receive only
an insulting denial of our authority. In return for our kind desire for
the resumption of fraternal relations we receive only an insolent
assumption of rights and privileges long since forfeited. The crime we
have punished is paraded as a virtue, and the principles of republican
government which we have vindicated at so terrible a cost are denounced
as unjust and oppressive.

"If we add to this evidence the fact that, although peace has been
declared by the President, he has not, to this day, deemed it safe to
restore the writ of _habeas corpus_, to relieve the insurrectionary
States of martial law, nor to withdraw the troops from many localities,
and that the commanding general deems an increase of the army
indispensable to the preservation of order and the protection of loyal
and well-disposed people in the South, the proof of a condition of
feeling hostile to the Union and dangerous to the Government throughout
the insurrectionary States would seem to be overwhelming."

This Committee recommended a series of coercive measures, the first of
which was the adoption of the fourteenth amendment to the Constitution,
which disqualified for all office, either under the United States or
under any State, any person who having in any capacity taken an oath of
allegiance to the United States afterwards engaged in rebellion or gave
aid and comfort to the rebels. This denied the _jus honorum_ to all the
leading men at the South who had survived the war. In addition to it, an
Act was passed in March, 1867, which put all the rebel States under
military rule until a constitution should have been framed by a
Convention elected by all males over twenty-one, except such as would be
excluded from office by the above-named constitutional amendment if it
were adopted, which at that time it had not been. Another Act was passed