The negro was left to raise the crops that supplied the Confederate armies with bread, when a policy of cruelty, no worse than that of Andersonville and Belle Isle, might have made him a terror to the Southern population.

The humane policy thus pursued would have been scorned by European warriors who have become the heroes of the world, but there is not a Northern man who does not look back with profound satisfaction upon the philanthropic determination that forbade the encouragement of a single insurrection, or the destruction of a single Southern life, except under the recognized and restricted laws of war.
Peace had now come, and the question was, whether the power of these four and a half millions of men should be continually used against the Northern States, against the loyalty which had saved the Union.
Only three-fifths of their number, in the day when the Southern States were true to the Union, were admitted in the basis of representation.
Should the disloyalty of the South which had failed to destroy the Government only by lack of power, be now rewarded by admitting the whole number of negroes into the basis of representation, and at the same time giving them no voice in the selection of representatives?
Surely, if this were conceded, it would offer such a premium upon rebellion as no government guided by reason should confer; and, therefore, the question came by the instinct of justice, and with the precision of logic, to this point--the negro shall not be admitted into the basis of representation until he is himself empowered to participate in the choice of the representative.

The North had hoped that the South would cordially accept the justice of this principle, but whether the South accepted it or not, the North resolved that it should become part of the organic law of the Republic.
As matter of historical truth which has been ingeniously and continuously, whether ignorantly or malignantly, perverted, this point cannot be too fully elaborated nor too forcibly emphasized:--_The Northern states or the Republican party which then wielded the aggregate political power of the North, did not force negro suffrage upon the South or exact it as a condition of re-admitting the Southern States to the right and privilege of representation in Congress until after other conditions had been rejected by the South_.

The privilege of representation in Congress had in effect been tendered to the Southern States, upon the single condition that they would ratify the Fourteenth Amendment, which provided among other safeguards for the future, that so long as the negro was denied suffrage, he should not be included in the basis of Federal enumeration,--in other words, that the white men of the South should not be allowed to elect thirty-five or forty representatives to Congress, based on the negro population, in addition to the representatives duly apportioned to their own numbers.

When all the Southern States--with the exception of Tennessee -- declined to accept this basis of reconstruction by their rejection of the Fourteenth Amendment, they ought to have measured the consequences.