the government in a dangerous increase of the public debt. After mature deliberation the Military Committee of the House brought in a bill which provided that every soldier who had received no bounty should be paid eight and one third dollars for every month of honorable service, which would be one hundred dollars for each full year. If he had received a bounty, but less than that amount, the government should pay him the deficit; so that every soldier in the Union army should receive a bounty of at least one hundred dollars for each year of honorable service. This bill passed the House by the unanimous vote of the Union members, but the Senate took no action upon it. Near the close of the session the Senate added to an appropriation bill a section increasing the pay of members of Congress. The House refused to concur, but added in place of that section the House Bounty Bill. The Senate refused to concur, but after several conferences between the two houses, a section was agreed upon which gives a bounty of one hundred dollars to every soldier who enlisted and served three years, and who has not already received more than one hundred dollars bounty, and a bounty of fifty dollars to every soldier who enlisted and served for the term of two years, and who has not already received a bounty of more than one hundred dollars. The operation of this section is confined exclusively to these two classes; it gives no more for four years' service than for three, and gives nothing to those soldiers who enlisted for a less term than two years. It is much less just than the House bill, and, since it was coupled with a section which increases the pay of members of Congress, I voted against both sections. They passed the House, however, by a majority of one, and became law. It is hoped and believed that the original House bill, or some equivalent measure, will become a law at the next session.

Although measures of financial and military legislation are worthy of the earnest attention of every citizen, I fear I have already dwelt too long upon them. I therefore invite your attention to the questions that so nearly concern our future peace, that form the great issues which must be settled by the ballots of the people at the coming election.

Thirdly, the restoration of the late Rebel States. For a clear understanding of the issues, let us consider the character of the contest through which we have passed.

The Rebellion had its origin in two causes; first, the political

theory of State Sovereignty, and second, the historical accident of American slavery. The doctrine of State Sovereignty, or State Rights as it has been more mildly designated, was first publicly announced in the Virginia Resolutions of 1798, but was more fully elaborated and enforced by Calhoun in 1830 and 1833. Since that time it has been acknowledged as a fundamental principle in the creed of the Democratic party, and has been affirmed and reaffirmed in some form in nearly all its State and national platforms for the last thirty years. That doctrine, as stated by Calhoun in 1833, is in substance this: "The Constitution of the United States is a compact to which the people of each State acceded as a separate and sovereign community; therefore it has an equal right to judge for itself as well of the infraction as of the mode and measure of redress." The same party identified itself with the interests of American slavery, and, lifting from it the great weight of odium which the fathers of the republic had laid upon it, became its champion and advocate.

When the party of freedom had awakened the conscience of the nation, and had gained such strength as to show the Democracy that slavery was forever checked in its progress, and that its ultimate extinction by legislative authority was foredoomed, the Democratic leaders of the South joined in a mad conspiracy to save and perpetuate slavery by destroying the Union. In the name of State Sovereignty they declared that secession was a constitutional right, and they resolved to enforce it by arms. They declared that, as the Constitution to which each State in its sovereign capacity acceded created no common judge to which a matter of difference could be referred, each State might also in its sovereign capacity secede from the compact, might dissolve the Union, might annihilate the republic. The Democracy of eleven slave States undertook the work. As far as possible, they severed every tie that bound them to the Union. They withdrew their representatives from every department of the Federal government; they seized all the Federal property within the limits of their States; they abolished all the Federal courts and every other vestige of Federal authority within their reach; they changed all their State constitutions, transferring their allegiance to a government of their own creation, styled the "Confederate States of America"; they assumed sovereign power, and, gathering up every possible element of force, assailed the Union in the most savage and

merciless war known to civilized nations. It was not, as some maintain, merely a lawless insurrection of individual traitors; it was "a civil territorial war," waged by eight millions of traitors, acting through eleven traitor States consolidated into a gigantic despotism of treason, a government de facto, to which the laws of nations accorded belligerent rights. The Confederacy was acknowledged as a belligerent by all the leading nations of Europe, and at last by every department of the government of the United States; by the Supreme Court in the celebrated prize cases of 1862, and by repeated acts of both the executive and legislative departments.

Never was an issue more clearly made up or more desperately contested. The Confederates fought for slavery and the right of secession, for the destruction of the Union and the establishment of a government based on slavery; the loyal millions fought to destroy the Rebellion and its causes. They fought to save slavery by means of disunion; we fought to establish both liberty and union, and to make them one and inseparable now and forever. It was a life and death struggle between ideas that could no longer dwell together in the same political society. There could be no compromise, there could be no peace, while both were left alive. The one must perish if the other triumphed.

There was no compromise. The struggle was continued to the bitter end. In the larger meaning of the word, there was no surrender. The Rebels did not lay down their arms, for the soldiers of the Union wrenched them from their grasp. They did not strike their traitor flag; it was shot down by loyal bullets. The Rebel army never was disbanded; its regiments and brigades were mustered out by the shot and shell of our victorious armies. They never pulled down the Confederate government, but its blazing rafters fell amidst the conflagration of war, and its ashes were scattered by the whirlwind of battle.

And now, fellow-citizens, after the completest victory ever won by human valor, — a victory for the Union which was all victory and no concession, after a defeat of the Rebels, which was all defeat and no surrender, we are asked to listen to the astonishing proposition that this war had no results beyond the mere fact of victory. A great political party is asking the suffrages of the people in support of the unutterably atrocious assertion that these red-handed and vanquished traitors have

lost no rights or privileges by their defeat, and the victors have acquired no rights over traitors and treason as the fruit of their victory! These antediluvian philosophers seem to have turned down a leaf in the record of the life of the republic in April, 1861, and they propose now, in the year of grace 1866, to begin again where they ceased reading five years ago, as if there had been no crime, no treason, no deluge of blood, no overthrow of rebellion, no triumph of liberty. Fellow-citizens, who are the men that advocate this monstrous doctrine? I cannot answer this question without discussing freely the public conduct of the President of the United States.

For the first eight months after the collapse of the Rebellion, I did not hear that any man making the smallest claim to loyalty presumed to deny the right of the government to impose conditions upon the States and people lately in rebellion. Certainly the President did not. Both in his executive acts and in repeated declarations, he affirmed again and again the right of the government to demand security for the future, to require the performance of certain acts on the part of the Rebel States as preliminary to restoration.

You will remember, fellow-citizens, that when I addressed you in the spring of 1865, shortly after the assassination of President Lincoln, I expressed the belief that Andrew Johnson would treat traitors with the severity their crimes demanded. There was a general apprehension that he might be too severe, and demand conditions so hard as to make the restoration of the Rebel States a work of great difficulty. It was said that he knew from personal experience what the Rebellion was, and what treatment treason deserved. The American people remembered his repeated declarations on this whole subject. They remembered his bold speech at Nashville, on the 9th of June, 1864, when he accepted the nomination for the VicePresidency, and used the following language:

"Why all this carnage and devastation? It was that treason might be put down and traitors punished. Therefore, I say that traitors should take a back seat in the work of restoration. If there be but five thousand men in Tennessee loyal to the Constitution, loyal to freedom, loyal to justice, these true and faithful men should control the work of reorganization and reformation absolutely. I say that the traitor has ceased to be a citizen, and in joining the Rebellion has become a public enemy. He forfeited his right to vote with loyal men when he renounced his citizen

ship and sought to destroy our government.

My judgment is that he should be subjected to a severe ordeal before he is restored to citizenship. . . . . Ah! these Rebel leaders have a strong personal reason for holding out to save their necks from the halter; and these leaders must feel the power of the government. Treason must be made odious, and traitors must be punished and impoverished. Their great plantations must be seized and divided into small farms, and sold to honest, industrious men. The day for protecting the lands and negroes of these authors of the Rebellion is past.”

"1

They remembered his speeches at Washington after his inauguration, in which the same sentiments were repeated. They remembered that in his address to Governor Morton and the Indiana delegation, on the 21st of April, 1865, six days after the pistol of Booth made him President of the United States, he said:

"It is not promulgating anything that I have not heretofore said, to say that traitors must be made odious, that treason must be made odious, that traitors must be punished and impoverished. They must not only be punished, but their social power must be destroyed. If not, they will still maintain an ascendency, and may again become numerous and powerful; for, in the words of a former Senator of the United States, 'when traitors become numerous enough, treason becomes respectable.' And I say that, after making treason odious, every Union man and the government should be remunerated out of the pockets of those who have inflicted this great suffering upon the country. . . . . Some time the rebellion may go on increasing in numbers till the State machinery is overturned, and the country becomes like a man that is paralyzed on one side. But we find in the Constitution a great panacea provided. It provides that the United States (that is, the great integer) shall guarantee to each State (the integers composing the whole) in this Union a republican form of government. Yes, if rebellion had been rampant, and set aside the machinery of a State for a time, there stands the great law to remove the paralysis, and revitalize it, and put it on its feet again.” 2

It is true, however, that there were even then those who expressed doubts of his sincerity, and feared he would betray his trust. When, during the months of May, June, and July, 1865, they saw him appointing Provisional Governors for seven of the Rebel States, and ordering the assembling of conventions to form new constitutions and rebuild their State governments, many thought he should have called upon Congress to assemble and perform the duty enjoined upon it in the Constitution of 1 McPherson's History of Reconstruction, pp. 46, 47, note. 2 Ibid., pp. 45, 46.