The Great Conspiracy, Volume 7 by John Alexander Logan
page 64 of 87 (73%)
page 64 of 87 (73%)
|
counting quite as much as the White man, instead of only three-fifths as
much; and it was decreed, that, except for crime, any denial to United States citizens, whether Black or White, of the right to vote at any election of Presidential electors, Congressional Representatives, State Governors, Judges, or Legislative members, "shall" work a reduction, proportioned to the extent of such denial, in the Congressional Representation of the State, or States, guilty of it. As a further safeguard, in the process of reconstruction, none of the insurgent States were rehabilitated in the Union except upon acceptance of those three Amendments as an integral part of the United States Constitution, to be binding upon it; and it was this Constitution as it is, and not the Constitution as it was, that all the Representatives, in both Houses of Congress, from those insurgent States--as well as all their State officers--swore to obey as the supreme law of the Land, when taking their respective oaths of office. Biding their time, and pretending to act in good faith, as the years rolled by, the distrust and suspicion with which the old Rebel-conspirators had naturally been regarded, gradually lessened in the public mind. With a glad heart, the Congress, year after year, removed the political disabilities from class after class of those who had incurred them, until at last all, so desiring, had been reinstated in the full privileges of citizenship, save the very few unrepentant instigators and leaders of the Rebellion, who, in the depths of that oblivion to which they seemingly had been consigned, continued to nurse the bitterness of their downfall into an implacable hatred of that Republic which had paralyzed the bloody hands of Rebellion, and shattered all their ambitious dreams of Oligarchic rule, if not of Empire. |
|