"We are willing," said they, "that the Southern States shall themselves come gradually to recognize the necessity and the expediency of admitting the negro to suffrage; we are content, for the present, to invest him with all the rights of citizenship, and to except him from the basis of representation, allowing the South to choose whether he shall remain, at the expense of their decrease in representation, outside the basis of enumeration." It was the belief of the North that as the passions of the civil contest should die out, the Southern States, if not inspired by a sense of abstract justice, would be induced by the highest considerations of self-interest to enfranchise the negro, and thus increase their power in Congress by thirty-five to forty members of the House.

It was the belief that when they should come to realize that the negro had brought to them this increased power and prestige in the National councils, they would treat him with justice and with fairness.

It was, therefore, not merely with surprise, but with profound regret, and even with mortification, that the North found the South in an utterly impracticable frame of mind.

They would do nothing: they would listen to nothing.

They had been inspired by the President with the same unreasoning tenacity and stubbornness that distinguished his own official conduct.