General Government, and bound by its judgment in any measures to
be instituted by it for their future restoration to their former
condition of co-equal States.

The now ex-slaves had been liberated, not with the consent of
their former owners, but by the power of the conqueror as a war
measure, who not unnaturally insisted upon the right to declare
absolutely the future status of these persons without
consultation with or in any way by the intervention of their late
owners. The majority of the gentlemen in Congress representing
the Northern States demanded the instant and complete
enfranchisement of these persons, as the natural and logical
sequence of their enfreedment. The people of the late slave
States, as was to have been foreseen, and not without reason,
objected--especially where, as was the case in many localities,
the late slaves largely out-numbered the people of the white
race: and it is apparent from subsequent developments that they
had the sympathy of President Lincoln, at least so far as to
refuse his sanction to the earlier action of Congress relative to
restoration.

To add to the gravity of the situation and of the problem of
reconstruction, the people of the States lately in rebellion were
disfranchised in a mass, regardless of the fact that many of them
refused to sanction the rebellion only so far as was necessary to
their personal safety.

It was insisted by the dominant element of the party in control
of Congress, that these States were dead as political entities,
having committed political suicide, and their people without