They did not even stop to submit these changes to the popular vote, but assumed for their own assemblages of oligarches the full power to modify the organic laws of their States--an assumption without precedent and without repetition in the history of State constitutions in this country, and utterly subversive of the fundamental idea of Republican Government.
With these incomplete and ill-digested changes in the organic laws of their respective States, the Reconstruction conventions usurped legislative power, and hastily proceeded to order the election of representatives in Congress.

The Congressional elections proved to be little else than partisan assemblages under the dictatorial direction of rebel authorities--just as the Reconstruction Conventions were, in their membership and their organization, little else than consulting bodies of Confederate officers under the rank of brigadier-general, actually sitting throughout their deliberations in the uniform of the rebel service, and apparently dictating to the Government of the Union the grounds on which they would consent to resume representation in the National Congress.

A joint committee of Congress subsequently commented with appropriate directness upon this offensive phase of the Southern Conventions.

"Hardly is the war closed," said the committee, "before the people of the insurrectionary States come forward and haughtily claim, as a right, the privilege of participating at once in that Government which they have for four years been fighting to overthrow.

Allowed and encouraged by the Executive to organize State Governments, they at once placed in power leading rebels, unrepentant and unpardoned, excluding with contempt those who had manifested an attachment to the Union, and preferring in many instances those who had rendered themselves peculiarly obnoxious.