Reconstruction

The assembling of the Second Session of the Thirty-ninth Congress
may very properly be made the occasion of a few earnest words on
the already much-worn topic of reconstruction.

Seldom has any legislative body been the subject of a solicitude
more intense, or of aspirations more sincere and ardent. There
are the best of reasons for this profound interest. Questions of
vast moment, left undecided by the last session of Congress, must
be manfully grappled with by this. No political skirmishing will
avail. The occasion demands statesmanship.

Whether the tremendous war so heroically fought and so
victoriously ended shall pass into history a miserable failure,
barren of permanent results,--a scandalous and shocking waste of
blood and treasure,--a strife for empire, as Earl Russell
characterized it, of no value to liberty or civilization,--an
attempt to re-establish a Union by force, which must be the merest
mockery of a Union,--an effort to bring under Federal authority
States into which no loyal man from the North may safely enter,
and to bring men into the national councils who deliberate with
daggers and vote with revolvers, and who do not even conceal their
deadly hate of the country that conquered them; or whether, on the
other hand, we shall, as the rightful reward of victory over
treason, have a solid nation, entirely delivered from all
contradictions and social antagonisms, based upon loyalty,
liberty, and equality, must be determined one way or the other by
the present session of Congress. The last session really did
nothing which can be considered final as to these questions. The
Civil Rights Bill and the Freedmen's Bureau Bill and the proposed
constitutional amendments, with the amendment already adopted and
recognized as the law of the land, do not reach the difficulty,
and cannot, unless the whole structure of the government is
changed from a government by States to something like a despotic
central government, with power to control even the municipal
regulations of States, and to make them conform to its own
despotic will. While there remains such an idea as the right of
each State to control its own local affairs,--an idea, by the way,
more deeply rooted in the minds of men of all sections of the
country than perhaps any one other political idea,--no general
assertion of human rights can be of any practical value. To
change the character of the government at this point is neither
possible nor desirable. All that is necessary to be done is to
make the government consistent with itself, and render the rights
of the States compatible with the sacred rights of human nature.

The arm of the Federal government is long, but it is far too short
to protect the rights of