But for the impossibility of disowning or in any way discrediting the existing Government of Tennessee, it is probably that the plan by which provisional governments were established in seven of the rebellious States would have been uniformly applied to the entire eleven which formed the Confederacy.

The same executives would doubtless have been selected for provisional service, but there would have been evident advantage in treating all the States in precisely the same manner.
The scope and design of the President's reconstruction policy were thus made fully apparent.

The work was committed to the white men of the several States, who, outside of the excepted classes, were ready to take the oath of allegiance to the Government.

They were empowered to form the Convention which should shape the organic law of the State, and in that law they were authorized to establish the basis of suffrage,--a right which the President held to belong to the State, to be, indeed, inalienable from the State.

It was, therefore, evident that the white men who were allowed to regain all the rights of citizenship by a mere oath of fidelity would not, in framing an organic law for the State, exclude the classes whom the President had excepted from pardon.