There would have been no further amendment to the Constitution, there would have been no conditions of reconstruction, there would have been such a neutralization of the anti-slavery amendment as would authorize and sustain all the State laws already passed for the practical re-enslavement of the negro, with such additional enactments as would have made them cruelly effective.

With the South re-admitted and all its representatives acting in cordial co-operation with the Northern Democrats, the result must have been a deplorable degradation of the National character and an ignoble surrender to the enemies of the Union, thenceforth to be invested with the supreme direction of its government.
There was an unmistakable manifestation throughout the whole political canvass of 1866, by the more advanced section of the Republican party, in favor of demanding impartial suffrage as the basis of reconstruction in the South.

It came from the people rather than from the political leaders.

The latter class, with few exceptions, shunned the issue, preferring to wait until public sentiment should become more pronounced in favor of so radical a movement.

But a large number of thinking people, who gave more heed to the absolute right of the question than to its political expediency, could not see how, with consistency, or even with good conscience and common sense, the Republican party could refrain from calling to its aid the only large mass of persons in the South whose loyalty could be implicitly trusted.
To their apprehension it seemed little less than an absurdity, to proceed with a plan of reconstruction which would practically leave the State governments of the South under the control of the same men that brought on the civil war.
They were embarrassed, however, in this step by the constantly recurring obstacle presented by the constitutions of a majority of the loyal States.