party for the nomination of General Grant for a third term of the presidency. He was rewarded by President Arthur with the office of postmaster-general. The debate adverted to by Mr. Cox was over the reconstruction policy, with which the admission of Nebraska was involved. Lincoln and Seward held that the seceding states did not succeed in getting out of the Union, therefore all that was necessary for them to do toward rehabilitation was to change their constitutions in conformity with the conditions made by the war and choose members of Congress. Andrew Johnson adopted this theory when he became president. Their radical opponents held that the former states had been resolved into quasi territories and could be made states only on the terms prescribed by Congress. James Rood Doolittle, the other Wisconsin senator, also played a very important part in this great political game. Though recognized as an able lawyer, his mind was not as alert as his colleague's. His style of speaking was ponderous but engagingly relieved by a rich bass voice. In 1871 he had reëntered the Democratic fold, from which he withdrew to become a "Democratic Republican" upon the issues resulting from secession and war, and in that year he was the Democratic candidate for the office of governor of Wisconsin. The generous critic of Johnson and Howe said that Wade "was of rugged, fierce and vindictive feeling."48 Wade's implacability and singleness of purpose impelled him to oppose Lincoln's reëlection because the president had opposed his policy of reconstruction. Under the leadership of the extreme radical coterie, Stevens, Chandler, and Wade, seats were denied to members of Con- 48 ibid., page 88. |
gress from seceding states--notably Arkansas and Louisiana--which had adopted Lincoln's liberal method of reconstruction; and under the same leadership a bill was passed prescribing the method of reconstruction, especially designed to balk Lincoln's plan. The great president's last important public act was the veto of that bill, and he died in this foretaste of defeat. In this aspect of his career, his taking off may well have been timely, and even merciful. The passage of the bill in the House
was as stormy as it had been in the Senate, but much
briefer. On January 10, Mr. Ashley announced that the
committee on the territories had unanimously directed him to
move that the bill be put upon its passage; whereupon James
A. Garfield interposed that he was "unwilling to pass,
without debate or examination, a bill containing a provision
which, if it have any legal effect at all, may become a very
troublesome precedent hereafter." The distinguished member
referred, of course, to the fundamental condition. 49 Congressional Globe, second session thirty-ninth Congress, page 399. This act became a law January 25, 1867, without the approval of President Johnson who witheld it beyond the time provided by the constitution for its return. (U. S. Statutes at Large, volume XIV, page 379.) |
Mr. Dawes, of Massachusetts, asked Wilson to address himself to the question, "whether upon the refusal to perform this condition subsequent Nebraska is any longer a State" and "whether a condition subsequent can be attached at all to the admission." Mr. Wilson promptly replied: "I have no doubt that this provision would have no effect whatever." The intimation by Mr. Dawes that the refusal of the state to accept the condition might resolve it again into a territory was perhaps based upon the positive opinion of Senator Edmunds expressed in the Senate. On January 14 the debate was continued with great vigor. James G. Blaine opposed the condition with characteristic force: Now, for myself, there is one thing I have a great prejudice against, and that is being duped and humbugged. If gentlemen wish to admit Nebraska here without any condition at all, just as States have been admitted heretofore, leaving the question of suffrage to be settled by that State in its own legislative or constitutional convention, I can understand it. That is a fair, square, and manly proposition. If, on the other hand, you mean to say that Nebraska shall be admitted on this condition only, and that you will exact her concession to it, I can understand it. But to dodge between the two positions, to say, upon the one side, that this provision effects the object, and then turn round and say to the other side that it does no harm because it is a mere placebo to certain prejudices here, I confess I think it disgraceful legislation; and I have not heard any gentleman here say that he has any confidence that this amendment will amount to anything as a legal and binding condition on the people of Nebraska... John A. Bingham, of Ohio, declared that the prescribed condition was "repugnant, in every sense of the word, to the first section of the bill and the preamble." The preamble recited that "the people of Nebraska have adopted a constitution . . ." and the first section declared "the constitution and State government which the people of Nebraska have formed for themselves . . . is |
hereby accepted, ratified, and confirmed. . ." The proposed condition, he said, "has no more validity than so much blank paper"; it was "void and an attempted usurpation . . . Mr. Dawes strenuously opposed the condition and asked Ashley for permission to amend the act so as to allow the people to accept or reject; but Ashley denied the request. Morrill, of Vermont, opposed the act for the same reason and also because the population of the proposed state was insufficient. He believed that it was not over 40,000.50 The best available data show that it was about 50,000 at the time of admission, rather less than more than that number. The next day, January 15, George S. Boutwell, of Massachusetts, offered a substitute for the Edmunds amendment which had been accepted by the Senate, and, with a slight change of verbiage, it became a part of the act as it was finally passed. Mr. Boutwell's preference for his substitute was rather deviously expressed, but it was apparently predicated upon the assumption that there would be less fuss made about the halfway concession of the right of the people to make their constitution than would be made about the Edmunds flat denial of it. Robert S. Hale, Republican, of New York, savagely attacked Boutwell's position: But it seems to me preposterous to claim that a State of this Union, which limits or restricts the right of suffrage in the manner and to the extent which the almost universal and unbroken practice of the States and of the Federal Government from the adoption of the Constitution has sanctioned, is not a 50 Congressional Globe, second session thirty-ninth Congress, pages 449-454. |
republican form of government within the meaning of the Constitution ... Is that a republican form of government, according to his theory, in which one hundred male citizens of full age may vote, and one hundred female citizens of equal intelligence and equal qualification in every other respect cannot vote? ... this whole question ought to remain where the Constitution puts it, in the control of the States themselves and not of the Federal Government. The present spectacle of woman suffrage in twelve states gives greatly increased force to this last illustration. Columbus Delano, of Ohio, argued along the same lines against the fundamental condition. William B. Allison, of Iowa, departed from his characteristic egg-shell course positively to defend the measure, and Garfield reluctantly came to its support. Indeed these two were the only eminent Republicans in the House, unless we include the erratic Thaddeus Stevens, who did approve it. The amendment was adopted, 87 to 70, and then the bill was passed, 103 to 55. Bingham was the only Republican of marked prominence who held out against it. Blaine, Dawes, Garfield and Wilson were apparently appeased by the Boutwell compromise.51 On the next day, January 16, the amendment was accepted by the Senate, 28 to 14. Five Republicans--Dixon, of Connecticut, Doolittle, Edmunds, Foster, and Harris, and two near-Republicans, Cowan and Reverdy Johnson, voted nay. Senator Johnson had warmly supported Lincoln's administration and especially his reconstruction policy. Grimes, Howard, Kirkwood, Morgan and Sumner fell into the party line on the general question.52 President Johnson vetoed the bill January 29, on the ground that the fundamental condition was unconstitutional, and he 51 Ibid., pages 472-481. 52 Ibid., page 487. |
suggested that it ought to be submitted to a vote of the people--the Sumner doctrine. The veto was couched in admirable temper. On the eighth of February the Senate passed the bill over the veto, 31 to 9. Its opponents were Charles R. Buckalew, of Pennsylvania; Garrett Davis, of Kentucky; James R. Doolittle, of Wisconsin; Lafayette S. Foster, of Connecticut; Thomas A. Hendricks, of Indiana; Edwin D. Morgan, of New York; Daniel S. Norton, of Minnesota; David T. Patterson, of Tennessee; and Willard Saulsbury, of Delaware. Four of these--Doolittle, Foster, Morgan and Norton--were Republicans, though Norton was a waverer. Foster was president of the Senate. All the rest of the restive Republicans and near-Republicans, except Cowan, Dixon, Edmunds, and Johnson, who were absent, voted aye.53 The next day the bill passed the House, 120 to 43. None of the eminent Republican members voted against it, but Bingham, Conkling, Hale, and Elihu B. Wasbburne are recorded as not voting.54 So Sumner had his way. Consideration of Sumner's entire political career recalls Robertson's famous eulogy of Pitt: The Secretary stood alone. Modern degeneracy had not reached him. Original and unaccommodating, the features of his character had the hardihood of antiquity. No state chicanery, no narrow system of vicious politics, no idle contest for ministerial victories sunk him to the vulgar level of the great ... Soon after the assault on Sumner James Freeman Clarke and John Brown, the anti-slavery revolutionist, happened to visit the senator together in his bedroom. Sumner informed Brown that the coat he wore at the 53 Ibid., page 1096. 54 Ibid., page 1121. |
time of the tragedy was hanging in an adjoining closet. Brown brought it out for inspection and found that the collar was stiffened with blood. Mr. Clarke, in relating the incident, said that Brown touched the garment with the greatest reverence, "as a Roman Catholic might do homage to the relic of a saint." Senator Sumner was one of the first eminent Republicans to resent the party despotism which prevailed for a long time after the Civil War. Meeting Mr. Clarke soon after he uttered his daring declaration of the "divine right to bolt," Sumner said to him: "You have in those words cleared the air from Maine to Georgia." But the inexorable verity of public opinion ultimately shapes our ends rough hew them how we will; and judged by its verdict it is not severe to say that Sumner's insistence on negro suffrage was fanatical. In an address to the Union League Club, of New York city, in the spring of 1903, Elihu Root, commonly conceded to be the preëminent statesman among present Republicans, pronounced the fifteenth amendment to the constitution a failure. On April 22, of the same year, in a lecture at Yale University, President Hadley said that the North had made a great mistake in giving the ballot to the negro before he was fitted for it: It was not the fault of the negro; it was the fault of those who gave him the ballot without previous preparation. The North did not recognize this at the close of the war. It had recognized the dictum that all men are born free and equal. When the North recognized the conditions which prevailed in the South it acquiesced in the suppression of the negro vote. Mr. Henry Watterson, editor of the Louisville Courier-Journal, doubtless understands the status of the negroes in the South more clearly and acutely than anyone else. Soon after the opinions adverted to had been ex- |
pressed, the Hamilton Club, the conservative Republican organization of Chicago, heard without dissent a discussion of this vexatious question by the eminent editor in part as follows: After thirty years of observation, experience and reflection--always directed from a sympathetic point of view--I am forced to agree with the secretary of war that negro suffrage is a failure. It is a failure because the southern blacks are not equal to it. It is a failure because the southern whites will not have it. Common public opinion, both North and South, regards any change of this condition, however deplorable, as impracticable, and so this drifting policy must needs be continued for an indefinite time. The state legislature which had been elected in the fall of 1866 convened in special session, February 20, 1867, in response to the proclamation of Governor Saunders issued on the fourteenth of that month, for the purpose of complying with the conditions imposed by the act of Congress. The Senate was composed of eight Republicans and five Democrats, and the House of Representatives of thirty Republicans and nine Democrats. Each of the houses at once introduced a bill accepting the conditions for admission prescribed by the act of Congress. In the Senate the bill was referred after the second reading to a special committee consisting of Doom of Cass county, Hascall of Douglas, and Reeves of Otoe. Doom and Hascall reported, after a recess of ten minutes, in favor of the passage of the bill. Reeves moved to adjourn for a day so that he might have time to make a minority report; but the motion was defeated by a vote of 3 to 7. The bill then passed by a like vote, Freeman of Kearney county and Reeves and Wardell of Otoe county voting in the negative. When the Senate bill was sent to the House it was at once read the requisite three times under suspension of the rules and passed by a vote of 20 to 6. Those voting in the negative were Crawford and Trumble of Sarpy county, Dunham of Douglas, and Graves, Harvey, and Rolfe of Otoe. On the twenty-first the houses agreed on a joint resolution to send a copy of the act to the president and also one to |
John M. Thayer, who had been elected United States senator, and then adjourned.55 On the first of March President Johnson, as directed by the enabling act, issued a proclamation declaring that Nebraska had become a state. Shortly before his death General John M. Thayer informed me that he presented to the president a certified copy of the act of the legislature accepting the fundamental condition, and he added: He issued his proclamation, in accordance with the directions of the law, declaring Nebraska a state of the Union. This last act on his part was performed without hesitation, though reluctantly, for he was threatened with impeachment, and he did not want any more senators admitted to the Senate who would sit upon his trial.56 The original territory of Nebraska comprised 351,558 square miles. Out of this vast domain there has been carved the great state of Nebraska now comprising 76,808 square miles; 16,035 of the 104,500 square miles contained in Colorado; 68,972 of the 150,932 square miles contained in the states of South Dakota and North Dakota-all west of the Missouri River; 74,287 of the 97,883 square miles contained in the state of Wyoming; and 116,269 of the 143,776 square miles comprising the state of Montana. Dakota territory, organized by act of March 2, 1861, took all that part of Nebraska territory north of the forty-third parallel, except the strip between the Keya Paha and the Niobrara rivers, which was added to the state of Nebraska in 1882. When Idaho territory was organized in 1863 it took all the part of the original territory of Nebraska lying west of the twenty-seventh 55 History of Nebraska, volume I, page 570. 56 Ibid., page 568, footnote 2. |
meridian, now the western boundary of the state, and north of the forty-first parallel, the present boundary line between Colorado and Wyoming.. That part lying north of the forty-third parallel was taken from Dakota. But before Idaho became a state it relinquished all the territory lying east of the Rocky mountains to Dakota and Montana. So Idaho was only a temporary cismontane trespasser. |
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